aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Merry Christmas
From my family to yours…
TJ (my nephew), me (holding Jake) & Doug (holding Baci)
Monday, December 24, 2007
Christmas Eve @ our house
Friday, December 07, 2007
My Blogiversary!
I almost forgot. Today is 3 years and over 4,400 posts (4,464 but I’ve had some 
guest bloggers) since I started blogging.
Here’s my first post. And the original why I blog post. Three years later and I plan to replace it with this one.
I am working to address the technical challenges the site has presented to visitors (and me!) this year. I have contracted with E. Webscapes to tweak the design, optimize the engineering, upgrade the blog software and move back to my old host, ICDSoft.
I’m looking forward to a banner blog year in 2008! I hope you’ll all stay with me.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
On writing
In Catholic grade-school I got an A in “penmanship.” I wonder if students today would even know what the word means!
A decade ago I got the gift of a personality test from a popular handwriting analyst in Manhattan. 
He asked for my signature, took one look and, appalled, declared, “you’re trying to obliterate yourself!!!”
Golly, I thought it showed I had an artistic creative flair with the right-leaning swoop meaning I had a futurist bent and the left-leaning “J” and “W” implying that futurist bent was one informed by the past.
He took my hundred dollar gift certificate and sent me on my way. Dissatisfied.
Still, I note that I can barely write with a pen any longer. It’s chicken-scratch that I can hardly read myself. So I just don’t do it.
I never considered myself a writer. I went to engineering school and hated writing. I think my dislike of writing came from my severe inability to write as a kid. I can’t hold a pen or pencil very well, I hold it way too tightly, my handwriting is terrible, hard to read, messy, and often illegible. Typewriters made life easier for me, but the big breakthrough came when I started writing on a computer. For years it was just memos, email, business stuff.
But blogging has changed all of that. Now I write every day. I feel incomplete until I write something. Often it’s hardly worth hitting the “save” button. Sometimes it’s good. Once in a while it’s great. But it’s a routine and one I cherish.
I was 30 before I made my way to an undergraduate education. My performance in grade-school nosedived with the puberty and the realization that I was gay.
When I contemplated going back to school I was petrified that I would not be able to write papers. The first course I took was in writing and rhetoric. I got an A+.
Now as a blogger I have neither the influence nor the audience that Fred does. But I, too, cherish the routine:
Hardly anyone writes letters anymore. The rare book dealer told me that emails between writers and famous people are rarely well written or as interesting as the letters he sells. I was thinking that it’s a shame that letter writing is done as an art form. But then I realized that it’s evolution at work. We lose something, letters, and gain something, blogging.
I hope blogging will inspire people to compose their thoughts as eloquently as letters have done over the years. It sure has inspired me.
For me blogging is both a practice and a process. It’s not motivated money or a wish for fame (though influence has its attractions). Instead it’s motivated by the wish to be engaged in the community of ideas and interests that exists only on the web. It is a mash-up of my mind’s thoughts, interests and ideas.
And, just like it does Fred, it inspires me.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Hacking my life
Speaking of the web as mind, my own is too often filled with cob webs and clutter and would benefit from some optimization. 
At 53, I’ve developed my tech habits over decades and they’re rusty. It’s time to change but there’s so much to change to that it’s hard to keep up.
Oh to be young again!
To wit, I’ve been tweaking my inputs and workflows over the last few months. I have successfully adopted the InBox Zero methodology of email processing and it’s changed my life. I’m a free man; I feel the love!
I started by watching this presentation Merlin Mann did at Google:
I’ve also set up an I Want Sandy account, but have yet to get my Jott accont synched with it and all of the speed dials and email shortcuts set to effectively use it. And, finally, I’ve set up one GrandCentral phone number so far. (If you need an invite drop me a line; I’ve got a few left.)
The way I’m using it is to give friends a single number that will ring my cell, 
Doug’s cell and our home. It might be handy to get a second for work to allow the Dean and other VIPs to have single number access to me wherever I am but I’ve yet to set that up. And I’m not sure those folks want yet another number for me, even if it is a master number that can reach me anywhere.
The key to adoption for me in all of this is to enlist students and friends to use these services. Then they can show me how to better use them myself!
Monday, November 26, 2007
Email me form not working. (LATER: fixed.)
I just found that the “email me” form on this site is not working! I will try to fix it tomorrow. In the meantime, if you are trying to email me please use joe AT atypicaljoe DOT com. Sorry for the inconvenience.
While on the topic, I am aware of some of the technical challenges this site presents to visitors and I am about to do something about it. I have contracted with E. Webscapes to tweak my design, optimize the engineering, upgrade the blog software and move back to my old host, ICDSoft.
So help is on the horizon! I’ll keep you posted as we progress.
LATER: The form is back!
Friday, November 23, 2007
Sinking ship & an ordeal at sea
CNN:
All passengers and crew aboard a ship touring the Antarctic were safe Friday after the vessel apparently hit an iceberg and started sinking, officials said. No injuries were reported.
The Norwegian cruise ship MS Nord Norge took the stranded passengers and crew on board, a spokesman for Gap Adventures, which owns the sinking vessel, said.
A happy outcome. But I’m not eager to go cruising in polar waters. A couple years ago a friend was teaching in a Semester at Sea program. While cruising in icy waters in the North Pacific the ship was hit by a rogue wave.
Her first-hand account of the ordeal gives a real flavor of what it’s like to be in an accident at sea:
At about 1:30 am I was awoken by the violence of the ship’s movement — though it may have been going on for a little while before I noticed it. Once again (like previous nights with bad seas), my drawers were slamming open and shut very violently, my bed was sliding around (with the other furniture), and I was struggling to stay in the bed and out of the melee. This went on for a long time and seemed to get worse and worse as the hours crept by. Virtually everything in my room except the permanently attached things (like walls and shelves) was moved or thrown about. The beds slid around, the nightstands were knocked off their supports and fell over (previously I had not been able to budge these even when I tried), the heavy, round glass table kept falling (I righted it a few times) and rolling about. The chairs (2) were sliding and tipping all over. The metal, round garbage can and its lid rolled madly, and the drawers and refrigerator never stopping slamming open and shut. Every time it seemed a bit calmer, I would get up and try to right things, push the beds back into place and jam things together so they might not fall again. But this was futile and dangerous because I was being thrown about too, and banged myself up a couple of times on furniture (never seriously). So then I tried to stay in my bed, with the light on, and just held on to the ledge/half wall in front of my window. Sometimes I had to hold with all my might to keep from getting thrown from my bed or with my bed. Even holding tight with both hands, I was once or twice pulled away and slid with my bed across the room, being jammed up under the attached desk faster than I knew it was happening. The scariest thing was when the TV - normally on a high shelf across from the beds - came flying off its stand toward me. Luckily the second bed had already slid into the center of the room and made a perfect landing place for the TV, which then bounced from there to the floor and was one more thing rolling around. I tried to secure it too, but without much success. [...]
About 5 or 5:30 am we seemed to finally be slightly more stable. We were told to clean up our rooms and stay put. The crew and some staff then came around to every room to check to see if anyone was injured or overly traumatized. I think I must have dozed until they knocked on my door about 6:15 am. I straightened up my room yet again - we were still rocking, but not quite so violently and I was hoping this meant the storm had abated. A little before 7 am the captain again came on the PA system to tell us we were going to turn back into the wind to stay on course for Japan. He talked us calmly through the turn and assured us that from then on we’d be okay, and it would not be so bad, that the ship could take it. But it was still rocking pretty crazily in my room. Although I had straightened up most of it, the TV was still on the floor. I was trying to hold that while we continued rocking and rolling. Then I thought I smelled smoke (I later learned this was probably the exhaust from our turn), and about that time the foghorn sounded, and didn’t stop. That’s when I started feeling concerned. So I began to get dressed, NOT an easy task in the again violently rolling condition of the ship. In fact as I was trying to get dressed, I was thrown pretty violently all the way across the cabin. My shin got bruised on the bed corner, but the bed kind of broke my fall and I landed on it. I later learned that at about the time the foghorn blew is when the wave hit that smashed in the bridge window and shorted out the equipment that controls the engines. Without engines in those still violent seas, we were being tossed about... [READ ON]
LATER: The WaPo has passenger accounts of the M/S Explorer ordeal.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Migraine sufferers share their stories
Judith Warner has a post at the NYTimes Domestic Disturbances on migraines. She’s been trying to follow the advice of “Heal Your Headache,” by the Johns Hopkins University neurologist David Buchholz:
In Dr. Buchholz’s view, chronic migraine sufferers like me - I average around seven to twelve headaches a month - are, very often, victims of their own past treatment successes. Triptans, the new-ish class of drugs that bind to serotonin receptors and can work wonders when taken early in migraine attacks, cause rebound headaches, he says, if you take them more than two days a month. So do over-the-counter painkillers and stronger stuff like codeine and oxycodone.
Step 1 in his plan, then, involves removing such “quick fix” drugs from your life. Step 2 is about recognizing your migraine “triggers” and removing the ones - like certain foods, alcohol and caffeine - that you can do something about. (As opposed to the ones - like changes in barometric pressure, work deadlines and mothers-in-law - that you can’t do anything about.) Step 3 is daily preventive medicine - but the idea, in Buchholz’s book, is that if you do well enough at Steps 1 and 2, you might not have to go to Step 3.
I have been down that road. In comments I wrote:
My Greenwich Village doctor agreed with Dr. Buchholz’s theory but took it one step further, he believes migraines are a habit. Break the habit - do whatever it takes to go 6 months or more without one - and then quit all drugs and you will be headache free.
I liked the theory but it didn’t work for me. I tried everything, including Topamax. We never made the 6 months.
I left my Upper East Side doctor before him because we would sit in his office overlooking Central Park and talk about his latest book and his golf tours, not my headaches. A renowned expert in the field, he did nothing more for me than charge and arm and a leg for the same old prescription.
I respond well to the classic Imitrex (100 mg tablet), the only Triptan my insurance will cover. I take it at onset and the headache leaves. I just went through a period of reducing treatment out of a concern that I was stuck in a rebound cycle. I gave up on that. I treat myself at the slightest hint of a headache.
I do believe that my Village doctor was right in some way. My headaches may be a habit, and I have a pavlovian pain response. At even the suggestion of a headache I crumble. But until there is the research that Mary Jo hopes for, I will take my Triptan treatment.
And my take away from the comments of all the migraine sufferers here is, whatever works for you, do it!
If you suffer too, the comments on her post are a cornucopia of headache strategies.
LATER: When I posted my comment, there were 14. Now there are 179 and comments are closed. Mine’s not among them. I’m left to wonder why I didn’t make it through the moderator?
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Chris Bliss Diss
You’ll recall I posted this juggling video to find out what was happening with my friend Jason’s campus juggling. Turns out, I picked the wrong juggler:
If you think he’s a good juggler, you are wrong. I taped a 5 ball version because...well because my friend Penn asked me to. It is a parody and nothing more.
That’s Jason Garfield and, uh, it sounds more like a rant to me. This whole ruckus was apparently going on in May of 2006. I missed it then (a student brought me up to speed) so here’s the Chris Bliss diss video:
Monday, October 22, 2007
Viagra & sudden hearing loss
My friends are eagerly pointing me to the news:
Men taking any of three erectile dysfunction drugs—Viagra, Levitra or Cialis—may be at increased risk for sudden hearing loss, prompting Food and Drug Administration officials to require label changes for the medications.
The FDA said manufacturers must change the labels “to display more prominently the potential risk of sudden hearing loss,” according to the agency’s Web site. [...]
Men taking any of the ED drugs and experiencing hearing loss should immediately stop taking the drug and see their physician, the FDA said.
I hear there’s talk of lawsuits. Fortunately or no, I won’t be eligible, much to Doug’s chagrin.
As to the status of my hearing loss, by now I’m as adjusted as can be. I have very tolerant friends and I’ve become proficient at faking conversation in noisy crowds.
I count my blessings; it could be so much worse!
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Jekyll Island, GA
I’m at a conference on Jekyll Island for the next few days…
Friday, October 12, 2007
Jason, what’s up with the juggling club?
I’ll bring the posse…
And, Ryan, congrats on the new baby!
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Doug digs “Timeframe” at Telfair. Again.
Another repeat....
We thoroughly enjoyed the three interactive video works by Daniel Shiffman at Savannah’s Jepson Center for the Arts. Shiffman describes Timeframe:
In the late 19th century, Englishman Eadweard Muybridge photographed progressions of animal and human movements, capturing the beauty of motion imperceptible to the human eye. Timeframe takes inspiration from Muybridge’s work, unlocking the frozen frames of his motion studies with live video. The viewer is invited to witness him or herself inside a grid of one thousand and twenty four frames of video, his or her movements rippling across and around the screen.
Friday, September 28, 2007
We’re in Savannah. Again.
And having dinner at Bistro Savannah again. Blogging will be light.
Saturday, September 08, 2007
The Shadow Behind the Flame: The Anjette Lyles Story
It’s my birthday weekend (for the human being, not the blog). To celebrate we’re heading to Macon
to see The Shadow Behind the Flame: The Anjette Lyles Story:
In 1958, and for years afterward, the Anjette Lyles murder case was the talk of the town.
Five decades later, Lyles can still create a buzz.
The story of the popular Macon restaurateur convicted of poisoning her daughter and implicated in the deaths of two husbands came to the Macon Little Theatre stage last November in “The Shadow Behind the Flame: The Anjette Lyles Story,” a play written by Maconite Denver Pickard. [...]
The case had all the makings of good theater: Murder, ambition, even voodoo. There are poignant moments, but it’s not a heavy courtroom drama. Pickard breaks up the horror with humor, much of it from the three cooks who grow suspicious of their boss.
Denver’s a pal of ours; more on Anjette after the jump.
Read the rest of "The Shadow Behind the Flame: The Anjette Lyles Story" in the extended entry.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Nancy Littlefield
A friend sent word that a colleague of many years had died. May she rest in peace:
Nancy Littlefield, who as the director of the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting in the late 1970s and early ‘80s presided over a major renaissance in film production in New York City, died on Thursday in Delray Beach, Fla. She was 77 and had homes in Delray Beach, Manhattan and Fire Island, N.Y. [...]
Among the movies shot entirely or partly in New York City during Ms. Littlefield’s tenure were “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979), “All That Jazz” (1979), “Fame” (1980), “Prince of the City” (1981), “Fort Apache, the Bronx” (1981), “Annie” (1982) and “The World According to Garp” (1982). [...]
Before joining the mayor’s film office, she ran her own production company in Los Angeles; after leaving the mayor’s film office, she spent two decades as the executive director of Queens Public Television.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
There ought to be a law…
Remember I bought a 32” flat panel for under $500? That price included a $50 rebate. Look at the date (for those who don’t want to bother with the clickthrough, May 27, 2007). Here’s the status right now:
The laws I’d like… How about a time limit. 90 days? With a penalty. On 91 days I get 150%, on 120 days I get 200%. If not that, then how about that vendors must publish a promised by date?
To those of you who say these obligations are heavy-handed government intrusion that will kill the practice of rebates I answer: SO BE IT!
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Driving home
So I’m not likely to be blogging today…
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Doug digs “Timeframe” at Telfair
We thoroughly enjoyed the three interactive video works by Daniel Shiffman at Savannah’s Jepson Center for the Arts. Shiffman describes Timeframe:
In the late 19th century, Englishman Eadweard Muybridge photographed progressions of animal and human movements, capturing the beauty of motion imperceptible to the human eye. Timeframe takes inspiration from Muybridge’s work, unlocking the frozen frames of his motion studies with live video. The viewer is invited to witness him or herself inside a grid of one thousand and twenty four frames of video, his or her movements rippling across and around the screen.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
9¢
I am sitting in Gallery Espresso off Chippewa Square in Savannah. I’ve spent a good amount of time in the Metro Coffee House on MLK. And last night we went to a live PBR radio play (PBR = “Peanut Butter Radio") by The Savannah Actors Theatre at the Sentient Bean.
I am a great big fan of independently owned local coffee shops. Unfortunately, the best coffee I’ve had here in town is from Starbucks. I’ll happily pay the 9¢ increase:
Next week, caffeine addicts will pay an average 9 cents more for a cup of coffee at Starbucks, partly because of the rising price of the milk and whipped cream.
The increase was unexpected, given how infrequently the Seattle chain has raised prices. The last increase, which averaged a nickel, came less than 10 months ago.
Before that, Starbucks hadn’t raised prices since an 11-cent increase in 2004. [...]
Starbucks’ price increase goes into effect next Tuesday. While some customers shrugged at it, others bristled.
“If they raise it, I’m not going to go there, even if it’s only 9 cents,” said Mindy Albert of Wallingford.
It’s not the money so much as the idea of two price increases in a row, she said. With Starbucks’ buying power, “you’d think they’d be able to keep costs down.”
The price increases will vary by region and drink. They apply only to brewed coffee and other beverages that baristas make behind the counter, and not to drinks sold in bottles.
Starbucks coffee continues to be cheaper than that of many independent coffee chains. A 12-ounce latte at Seattle’s Espresso Vivace costs $2.95, compared with $2.45 at a downtown Seattle Starbucks.
Monday, July 23, 2007
Bistro Savannah
Dinner was heavenly. And followed by a cool walk along the river. It’s an unusual dry 71 degrees.
A self portrait of me by Daniel Shiffman
Me at Swarm by Daniel Shiffman at The Telfair Museum’s Jepson Center for the Arts this afternoon. See it in motion and check out Shiffman’s Savannah photostream.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
We’re in Savannah
We’re heading to my nephew’s wedding in Harrisburg, PA; spending a few days in Savannah first. Blogging may be spotty.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Hairspray, the movie, no Little Shop
The movie version of the hit Broadway musical “Hairspray” is perfectly pleasant-I smiled to myself all the way through it-bu it’s not as exhilarating as the show. For subject like this-old dance crazes and po styles-what matters is not so much the actual past but how we feel about it, an onstage David Rockwell’s sets and William Ivey Long’s costumes distilled ou nostalgia for the candied years between Elvis’s early work and the arrival of th Beatles. Set in 1962, “Hairspray,” whose first incarnation was John Waters’ deadpan camp movie from 1988, celebrates a time when teen-agers, as a distinc consumer group with their own culture, were a fairly recent invention. The stag musical crystallized the euphoria of that period as naïvely eager commerce an irony-free fantasy; when the chubby young heroine, Tracy Turnblad, awoke i bed and sang “Good Morning, Baltimore,” she was surrounded by a pink sha carpet dotted with hair-spray cans and 45s, and the bouffant-and-beehive nuttines of her world was buoyed by affection. The movie is a lovefest, too, but, this time when Tracy (Nikki Blonsky) awakes, she jumps onto the streets of Baltimore an passes vermin, a drunk, and a creep. Later, she joins a civil-rights march that ha a confrontation with the police. Many people love movies because they mak sensuous contact with the surfaces of the world, but this material hardly cries ou for realism. “Hairspray” doesn’t need to be “opened up”; it needs to be freshly stylized for the screen.
The return of Xanadu to the Broadway stage - also reviewed in this week’s New Yorker, “so ridiculously brilliant, so lavish and sublime a confection that any set of adjectives you might come up with after a single viewing will more than likely be replaced by another set of ineffectual adjectives once you’ve seen the show a second or third time” (I wholeheartedly agree) - has a laugh line declaring 1980 the year that creativity and imagination fled the arts. In fact, the original Newton-John megabomb was so bad as to effectively kill off the movie musical for two decades.
Too bad, too, because 1986 saw the screen adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors. The last show to go from B-movie to stage-musical to movie-musical, Little Shop was a truly wonderful under appreciated gem. And a box office flop. That movie actually had some of what David Denby says he’d like to see in the new film release of Hairspray.
Here’s Ellen Greene singing Somewhere That’s Green from the movie:
SEE ALSO: Ellen sings the same song on stage.
Monday, July 02, 2007
Homeward bound
My visit has been rich and wonderful, the weather these past few days spectacular! I go home today. Blogging will be light until I get there.
