Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Serenity (Firefly) You like to live your own way and don't enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you. Serenity (Firefly) 81% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 81% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 63% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 56% SG-1 (Stargate) 50% Moya (Farscape) 50% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 44% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 44% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 31% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 31% Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) 25% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 25% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 19%

Another piece, one that I'll play around with a little more, from my gallery space on DeviantArt. Let's call this one of the gifts of poverty. Maybe.



What I would really like, among so many other things many of which I would like even more, is access to a darkroom, but I can't afford that, so I have to rely on Osco, which means assembly line service. For example, I brought in a shot I took along Broadway of a neo-baroque building whose ornamentation was brought out by the shadows cast by the setting sun and they developed it as if I had shot it at noon, "compensating" by lightening the image until they had washed almost all of the color out of it. One might imagine that the sight of a clearly shining street lamp in the picture would have tipped off the developer that this image had obviously been shot later in the day, but she was probably too rushed to notice. The image was ruined.



Further, as is so often the case, my handicap gets in the way. I can't drive, which means that even if I could afford a tripod, I would have trouble taking it everywhere I went - try carrying even a small object in your hands for a few miles and see how heavy it gets. You'll be surprised. This becomes a nuisance, because low light conditions are common in Chicago. That doesn't always keep me from getting a shot - if one finds something to brace oneself against, sometimes one can steady oneself enough to compensate for long exposures - but again, a lot of blurring occurs. These factors have left me with a wealth of ruined pictures which I'm loath to just throw out.



But the good news is that with the scanner comes an earlier release of Photoshop, and what would have been wasted shots proved, very often, to be a good starting point for image manipulation. Had I the money for my own darkroom, if I had motorized transportation to help me get around - then I'd probably have had lots and lots of nice, clean, crisp, well developed shots and no urge to repair them with software that in some ways, proved unsatisfactory, leading me in simple frustration to acknowledge the unreality of the whole process in the final result, pushing the images in the direction of surrealism or outright abstraction. Had I a little more money, I suppose that I might have gotten a later, better release, ... and so it goes.



Not that I wouldn't rather be gainfully employed, of course, but it is always a pleasant surprise when one is blessed by one's bad luck.

In case anybody should later find himself wondering what a 360 blog used to look like, since they seem to be on their way out right now, clicking onto the following screen shots of my old place (Joseph Dunphy's Soapbox at its original location on Yahoo 360) might help satisfy a little curiosity.

Screenshots - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

If you'd like to see those slices assembled into a whole of sorts, I have a page where I do that. I'll probably post some more pages over on one of my Googlegroups, just for ... old times' sake? Something like that.

Note inserted: October 27. As good as my word, and I'm sure you were in suspense over that, right? I'll add these as they come in

Pages from my old blog- 2 3 4 5 6 7

If you popped over here from the Oct.22 post on Joseph Dunphy's Soapbox, now is the time to go back.

In case you were tuning in late and wondered about this ...



A long time ago, during a time when I had become very tired of the petty repression that had come to be taken for granted in life in Chicago, I suppose in preperation for the greater repression to come during the era that we are now living through, I used to go an Arts Festival called "Around the Coyote", a pleasant island of quirky and spontaneous festiveness in the midst of a sea of psychotically intolerant staidness during the weekend of its existence each year. I find myself starting to write a story to illustrate just what life was like, about the man who boarded the El when I and some of my fellow students were on board, and started playing charades with us. We're not sure what he had enjoyed in the way of refreshments, because he'd start acting out one word and by the end of the round couldn't remember what that word had been, which all involved found very funny, the man himself included, but that was the thing. We were laughing, not at him but with him, and far from getting hurt, we were getting a little lightness in a day that certainly needed it.

I want to write "can you imagine our surprise" ... our surprise as members of the Chicago Police, untroubled by the absence of any laws which had been broken, goosestepped, literally goose-stepped, onto that El car, marched all of us (the man included) out onto the platform, and started searching us all in response to no discernable threat, and no unlawful act, unless one wants to count soft laughter and a little nonobscene gesturing on somebody's part as being "disturbing the peace" - but I think that I know the answer to that question. Something was already missing from our urban experience, missing without good reason, and when something is missing, sooner or later one does go looking for it, even if one doesn't always know at the time that one is doing so. A few years passed, and I found myself at an art festival - yes, Around the Coyote.













This was back during the event's height in the 1990s, before real estate speculation drove out the very people whose activity had been driving up property values in that neighborhood (the artists), greatly diminishing the event, which I doubt will be worth attending in another five years at its current rate of decline. Before one gets any images of a 60s like outpouring of creativity and mind blowing excess, I should point out that by the standards of the civilized world, the rebellion was mostly very mild stuff; just the fact that the attendees were starting to spontaneously interact with each other was considered to be a sign of just how wild things were getting over in Wicker Park, which should tell one just how wild they really aren't in Chicago. One of those mild bits of nonrebellion was a very nice film program, held in the Chopin theatre I believe. At it, I saw something entitled "Burning Man: Just Add Couches" following another film simply called "Burning Man", and I couldn't help but be intrigued.



Imagine the contrast between a world in which the Chicago Police were in the habit of making sure that nobody was allowed to "loiter" (ie. relax outdoors) in one place long enough to meet anybody - yes, that's how far we take Social Conservatism in the Midwestern United States - and the one in pieces of real life footage in which we get to see a group of people setting up a "drive by shooting range" - just like a regular shooting range, only one had to do at least 45 while aiming at the target, out in the middle of the flat and empty desert. The "just add couches" part of the title of the second film, in which Joe Winston (the producer) and his friends, as they prepared for their second visit to Burning Man, decided that what the Black Rock Desert of Northern Nevada (where Burning Man occurs) needed was a living room, and so they did. Inside their tent, they set up a Midwestern US living room, complete with refigerator, recliners and working cable hookup, in a place called "Couch Potato Camp" - raising a question that I'm sure you've already asked yourself. Wouldn't the participants have to get up out of the recliners to get their beers, and is that something that a real couch potato would feel happy about?



If so, they had that covered. The furniture was motorized. In theory, one could have ridden one's recliner up to the refrigerator, reducing the chore to one of sitting up as one opened the door. They hadn't motorized that yet, but this was the first year, after all, so we should cut them a little slack on that. At about this point, somebody must have notice just how very flat that part of the desert really was - Burning Man takes place in a part of the Black Rock desert called "the Playa", which is the dried bed of the old Lake Lahontan. Where the event is held, during the last ice age, was under a few hundred feet of ice cold water, and to this day is periodically flooded to the depth of a few inches during the Winter. The land, during the bone dry sunshine of a late Nevada summer afternoon, in which dripping wet skin becomes dry to the touch within 90 seconds, becomes a bleached white, table top flat expanse of gypsum and gypsum powder, perfect for racing by vehicles with very low frames, like, say ... they started holding furniture races in the middle of the desert, and yes, I have witnessed at least one lounger topping 10 mph on the straightaway, with my own eyes. No, they weren't making this up.



The contrast with Chicago's habit of treating its own citizenry as cattle to be herded, already anticipating the attitudes of the current era, couldn't have been greater. I had to go. The problem was that I couldn't seem to get there. A few details:

1. I have a mild case of cerebral palsy, courtesy of a physician who decided to rush my delivery with foreceps.



With a great deal of practice, I've managed to mostly make it invisible - mostly. Keep in mind that what I learned to do was build a rhythm as I consciously fired muscles that an undamaged motor center should be firing for me. Periodically, blessedly rarely, something throws off the sequence and the illusion breaks as I stumble over my own feet. Let's say that as I do those mountain hikes, I avoid the cliff edges for a reason.



This is enough to rule out driving a car for me and yes, I have tried to learn. The motor skills just aren't there.









2. While I can certainly offer other services (eg. cooking) to make up for not being able to take a turn behind the wheel, when I would go to the lists and look for somebody to hook up with to get out to Burning Man, nobody was open to discussing the possibility. "You know, I actually am an electrical engineer, and you guys keep talking about how you can't find anybody to set anything up for you" ... and all I got was a determined stonewalling. Not that I'm not used to that.













3. Ableism is alive and well in the United States, and offered with a lot less of an attempt to disguise it as something other than what it is, than one usually sees accompanying the antisemitism which is never so far beneath the surface in our area. In part, I suspect, this is where a lot of the raw, unreasoning hatred I found directed toward me came from, online.



The official line is the disabled would be given a chance to prosper in our fairly run land if only they would apply themselves and achieve in school. I worked overtime before studies to put myself through school, ended up with a high dean's list average in a PhD program from a top 20 school in one of the fields that supposedly goes crying for qualified labor (Mathematics), and years later, am still looking for my first "real job", one that pays more than the $6000/year that TAs were graciously paid in my department for work weeks that occasionally topped 60 hours, and certainly never dropped down to the 18 hours that were the polite fiction written into our contracts.



I've applied to over 40,000 companies with the first graduate degree in hand, and another few thousand with the engineering coursework added on, so certainly I haven't just been waiting for the jobs to come to me, and so we are left with the message that our neocon friends can't live with and remain neocons; the official line is a load of fertilizer. That success in this country is as much a roll of the dice as anything else, and that the disabled can not improve an employment rate that is on the order of 30% (yes, that's 70% unemployment) simply by applying themselves in school; education is no remedy when the problem is one of discrimination, as this one can easily be seen to be on examination.



I've worked as a tutor, training the semiliterate children of real privilege in their corner offices as they worked at careers in which the use of statistics was included in the job description. I've found that many of them couldn't even understand algebraic notation on an 8th grade level; imagine somebody trying to do experimental design without understanding what a variable was or why that mattered. I have strained to teach such people, before they went back to their six figure jobs, and I went back to being thankful for the fact that I came from a cultural background that taught me so many different ways of cooking beans, because meat was just not going to be happening that day.



Which some have pointed to as a problem; the name "Dunphy" was imposed on my family as a joke by an immigration official. Our actual background includes a blending of Southern European and apparently (ahem!) other things as well, which I'd just as soon not go into specifics about until people get a little less trigger happy in this country; let's just say that I get spoken to in both Spanish and Arabic a lot by people who seem to think that I'm going to understand them (which I don't), and that this is no blessing where I live; some would say, not elsewhere in this country, either. Maybe so. While I wouldn't care to guess whether or not the open bigotry directed toward anybody whose ancestry derives from countries where Romance and Semitic languages are spoken in this area is as widespread elsewhere in the United States, one does notice just how quickly the phrase "freedom fries" caught on. One also can't help but notice just how much professional workspaces tend to look like gatherings of the Mayflower Society in places where the local demographic really doesn't run that way, even on the university campuses. Some have argued that this, as much as the disability, would have been a problem in any job search.



Maybe yes, maybe no. I've heard a lot of screaming about the question, but either way, we're left with the really that some of us just have to live with - that for some of us poverty is a given and we just have to build our plans around it. The "reasonable alternative" that one person offered involved hiring a charter flight to take me out to that desert. I can only imagine what being able to afford such extravagances would be like.













4. Like a lot of people, I have some allergies and food sensitivities that I'd better not ignore. Consuming uncooked, uncultured milk products, for example, would do some pretty ugly things to me as it would to most adults on most of the planet. One of the things that I shouldn't consume is a protein found in wheat and a few other grains called "gluten"; I have something called Celiac Disease, which I'm told is fairly common in the Jewish population.

In regard to that last one, the fact that it, like Lactose Intolerance, is called a disease at all says something about today's America and the way in which it seems to exclude the bulk of its own population in the ways in which it defines normality. There are fermented vegetable pastes used by a variety of cuisines which arose in warm climates, which we've learned to not give to those of Anglo-Saxon descent, because if we do - bottoms out. What for most of us is a nice seasoning for a stew is, for them, an evening spent riding the porcelain bus. But note that we don't speak of the Aryan fermentation byproduct digestion disorder; we simply refer to those food products as being "relatively indigestable" even though, for the vast bulk of the world's population, they are nothing of the sort.



Celiac is a lot like that. If you avoid consuming wheat and a few other grains, thus leaving it alone, it will leave you alone. To my way of thinking, the word "disease" is best reserved for things that will hurt you even when respected, like, say, leukemia. (Miss you, mom). We are all different, and this is just a difference, albeit one that needs to be noticed. I did indeed notice it, and one those rare occasions when I've scrimped and saved enough money to travel, make sure to bring it up with those with whom I will be travelling. On only one occasion has that ever proved to be a problem - and yes, we're getting to that and to where the title of this blog comes from, in however roundabout a fashion.



How does one get to where one is going, when one couldn't sit safely behind the wheel of a car? Picture going off the curb of a road, as I did at 7 mph, while doing 65 - very bad. Sometimes I've done so by travelling with family, but my family is a bit too conservative to go to something like Burning Man. Sometimes I've flown to where I was going and used public transportation - you haven't really flown until you've been in a Cessna at a few thousand feet in a thunderstorm, by the way, watching the thing sway along all three axes in the winds that, lacking a pressurized cabin, it can not rise above. But that limits me to a limited set of major cities, and the Black Rock Desert is two hours outside of Reno. How, then?

















I was given what I later found to be the no-effort answer of recommending the service linked to from the Burning Man homepage. "Take the Green Tortoise to Burning Man". As I always did and always should, I called ahead, months in advance, explained the Celiac situation in detail, and asked them if this was something that would pose a problem for them. Could they provide me with food that wouldn't make me violently ill. They said that they could and would accommodate my needs in this area during the trip. They lied, about this and so much else, with results that I described in a journal of experiences I had during the trip.





Burning Man : Bad Times on the Green Tortoise





One might reasonably think that, in reading a story like this, that there wouldn't be a lot of room for controversy. Surely, one would have to agree that lying to a customer in order to get his business under false pretenses is an unacceptable practice? Yet, one can see apologists for that profit making company trying to talk their way around that very issue, and finding public support as they did so. The game plan, when one defend that which, by its nature, is indefensible is to try to confuse the reader about exactly what it is that is under discussion. The remedy is to keep one's cool and make precise what others would make vague and I do.





Deconstructing a Rationalization

An Open Letter to "Mike Tattoo" (aka Mike Bolger)







To repeat what I fear may be starting to become a mantra for me - one may be entitled to entitled to one's own opinions, but one is not entitled to one's own facts. What I found astounding in the case that gave this blog its name is not just that so many people were so eager to do so on behalf of a company's crooked business practices, or even that Ask.com suddenly seemed willing to go along with that company's clearly expressed wishes to bury all accounts of this affair. (Take a good look in the archived discussion section of the Green Tortoise article on Wikipedia, which once linked to the aforementioned journal, and to this archived comment on GTWebmaster's Wikipedia profile). What I find incredible is the number of people who will argue in favor of an attitude that would have been reportedly thought of as being more than a little backward during the 1950s and think of it as being "progressive" during the early 21st century, fifty years later. Where, indeed, have people's heads gone and yes, will they wash their hair afterwards?



In its blatant, indefensible absurdity, the incident, for me, became the perfect symbol of my experiences during an era in which basic honesty has been held in as little regard as it has been during this one. Watching people lining up for the opportunity to spread disinformation at my expense, simply for writing a truthful consumer report about a business that provided poor service and failed to live up to its commitments has been a remarkable experience; one never imagines, even after years of witnessing trolls in action, how fluid and effortless their dishonesty will be. Consider, for example, the way in which a complaint that after two hours of my providing the company that had charged me a few hundred dollars for a trip out into the desert with uncompensated labor at a work station preparing food for other customers, making me late to see somebody I had arranged to meet, I asked to simply be allowed to prepare some food for myself and was refused - and then my account of the abusive behavior on the part of a Green Tortoise staff member that followed was spun by somebody on another site as a complaint that I was being expected to work at all. To lie on behalf of authority, any authority at all, for them is like swimming for a fish - so much a reflex as to require no thought on their part at all, and no motivation.



Why do they lie? Because that's what they do. What is messed up is how the rest of us are called on to respond to these pathological liars who have shut the process of rational discussion down - gently, as if we didn't hear the tone in their voice, and as if a mild tone on their part, even were it present, should get one past the fact that honesty is a fundamental part of civility, and that when such is absent, one might well have good reason to be angry. The "you're not entitled to your own facts" line comes to me from Stephen Colbert, who I'm told uttered them while he was out of character. "Truthiness is tearing our nation apart", I'm told he said, and I don't doubt it. The whole premise of civilized society, of living in a place where, when we have serious disputes we don't resolve them by cracking each other's skulls open or otherwise resorting to violence, as human beings probably have throughout most of their time on this world, is that we can talk matters out. But how does one discuss matters with somebody who has assigned himself the right to create his own facts, refuse to accept the reasonability of any point that doesn't fit in with his preconceived opinions, in general responds to any attempt to reason with him by refusing to really listen, by using threats, deceit and whatever else might work to keep others from listening as well? In the absence of a general recognition of a duty to be fair minded and reasonable, civilization itself becomes the greatest non sequitir of all, one which almost everybody will see through, eventually.



I could write of the road to ruin a supposedly democratic society puts itself on when it asks so little of its own people as they exercise the duties of citizenship. I probably could make a very good case that this is exactly the road America is on, right now, as I made this blog a lot more political than it is likely to become, but at some point I just, in some sense, ran out of steam. I'd just rather do my math, my cooking, my photography, and looking over the head butting matches I had been in over the years, as I opposed this idiot or that as he tried to persuade reader to embrace some horrific social change of another, I've come to the conclusion that I had more than done my part in this area years ago. Think of the current drama over the unemployment problem in the United States, how many times the official unemployment rate has been cited, how many times that statistic has been discredited, and how many times those trying to pretend that all is well have responded by acting as if the debunking had never occured and simply repeating themselves over and over and over ...



I don't usually write about big things in my blogs for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the rationale for caring enough to bother to do so is long gone. What I offer you, instead, is the individual perspective of somebody who, knowing that he can't really think of himself as being an American any more, regardless of where he happens to be from, is trying to find out who and what he is, as identities redefine themselves in this deservedly fading and clearly deranged society that we have to deal with. The aggravations, the fun, the experiences as they are for better and worse, and yes, some of them will in one way or another, touch on the subject of the title experience, even if most might not. You can expect to see some wheatfree recipes on this blog and one the sites associated with it. I do have a flickr group for past customers of the Green Tortoise and a googlegroup for those who wish to discuss low budget alternatives to using the Green Tortoise, not to mention sharing their own tales of woe, which seem to get buried in the search engines under a tidal wave of something that reads suspiciously like professionally written ad copy. But for the most part, this is just the personal journal of somebody who is best known online over a drama that he is amazed ever happened before.



"No sir, we don't handle special dinner requests, so you might want to do business with another company" - really, seriously - how difficult could just saying that before any of this ever happened have been? Would it maybe have been easier than having Mike Waggoner ("user:here") trying to corrupt the Wikipedia editorial process over what the records say is a matter of months? Would it have been cheaper than, say, bribing Ask.com to remove the url from their search engine results, if such was the case - as appears to be, judging from the sudden disappearance of that specific url from their records, at a time when a search would still turn up pages that a spider could only reach by passing through the no longer indexed pages, pretty clear implying the presence of human intervention in the results. Today, try doing an ask.com or lycos search under the term "commonsense666atlast.tripod.com", and note that the pages missing from the results in that subdomain are precisely the high profile pages that a human being would first notice, but the side pages remain; how could software do that on its own? Short of somebody at ask.com taking a bribe to fix the results, or somebody breaking into their site and doing the job himself, one is left with the question of how this could occur, and more to the point, how could it occur in such a way as to make scamming me out of my meal ticket a paying proposition for the Green Tortoise? Bribes aren't cheap, especially as questions sooner or later do get asked. On the other hand, sending a customer whose needs you have no desire to meet can be very cheap, indeed - what are the odds the customer will care enough to remember the next month, much less a few years later?



Sometimes the right thing to do is also the smart thing to do. What a shame that more people don't get that.

What this blog almost certainly won't be about, for reasons that should be clear if you go through Burning Man pages, is Burning Man itself. For all of the aggravation, expense and missed opportunities, I am glad that I went. It was an escape. But I don't think that it would be any more; in its own way, Burning Man turned even more repressive and conformist than the city I live in, and at least in Chicago I get to bathe - and staying home is a lot cheaper. I can't really convey what it was like; I can tell you what Draka was, but you would have had to be there in the belly of the metal beast to really get why that was as cool as it was, and these days, one doesn't get fire breathing dragons on wheels and late night discussions of comparative theology inside giant glowing mushrooms and all of the other happy strangeness that made a festival into all that word used to mean, all that people hardly remember that they used to know. Now, the kids wrap blinky lights around their go-carts and we wonder how long it will be before somebody draws a bead on them because he thinks that the go carts must be bombs. "Gosh durn muslim hippy terrorists, show them a thing or two I will!" All seems to be going downhill, with no potential turnaround in sight.

Part of the reason for this, perhaps, is that America has been getting steadily poorer ever since 9-11, and the money isn't there for big projects, but I don't think that's the whole problem. That which caught the eye or imagination at Burning Man was given much out of the goodness of people's hearts, but the administration and the community it guided never really seemed to appreciate those who gave. It never celebrated or even greatly tolerated the intellectual, unless he was of the poseur variety seen in such numbers in coffeehouses of the sort that suited San Francisco's temperament, and what was deeply strange was that many of us were finding that a city could have a temperament; there seemed to be no real diversity of thought there. At an event whose look and feel was practically defined by blinking light devices, one can find people who, on the official forum for the event, can now be heard saying that an innocent 19 year old girl would have deserved to die for wearing just such a blinky device, and getting a far friendlier reception than those who have disputed the rightness of such an act. One quickly comes to see just how little genuine love there is to be found for the tinkerer there, or for the artist who turns what the tinkerer makes into things of beauty.



No, there's no need to travel thousands of miles and spend hundreds of dollars just to encounter substance abuse, hatred, anger, and petty jealous spite; all fell apart in the end. The party is over at Burning Man, and perhaps for America as well, but there are always other parties to be had. Maybe some of them will be worth mentioning here.