doubting thom

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The news I dreaded, but had begun to believe we’d be spared, for at least another year, has been announced: Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has resigned.

I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut.

Just 20 months ago I replaced the heat pump in my condo, to the tune of over $4,000. The original had lasted over twenty years, but finally had given up the ghost.

Yesterday evening, then, it was a shock when Jeff and I arrived home to find the temperature inside a muggy 79 degrees, the heat pump fan blowing but the compressor not on, and a tiny pool of water, mostly inside the utility closet around the base of the unit, though some also had wicked out into the hallway carpet. We put towels down, and changed them out this morning before heading to work; I also called my downstairs neighbors to let them know, and to ask them to be on the alert for any water seeping down into their utility closet.

Right away, I called the heating and cooling service company from whom I’d purchased the unit–and from whom I’d also bought an ongoing annual service contract after the first year–to be told that they can’t even get someone out to look at it until next Tuesday, a week away, and that I need to keep the unit turned off until then, which should, they said, stop the water leakage. Apparently folks without service contracts have a three-week waiting period for emergency calls while the several hundred dollars I’ve paid to them for service means I’m lucky just to have to wait only one. One June/July week without A/C, with the temperature outside pushing 90. Lucky.

So we kept the lights off, ate salad rather than cooking a hot meal, and opened the windows and patio door overnight, hoping that the predicted rainstorms (which materialized only briefly, and only as a light rain) would cool the place down some. When we woke up this morning, the temperature inside had dropped… one degree to 78. Today all the blinds are drawn in an attempt to keep the place as dark and cool as possible, and the weather forecast again has called for rainstorms all day long; so far, though, nada.

Also, I stopped by the front desk this morning before work to speak to the building manager, and he’s going to have the building’s maintenance guy stop in and take a look. There’s a strong suspicion from several people with whom I’ve spoken that this might just be a clogged drain, perhaps from lint or algae in the condensation pan, and that it might be possible to clean it out, at least well enough to keep it from leaking any more water and to let the compressor run again (if the unit is turned off and back on, the compressor will start up, but it will only run for about ten seconds or so, and then shut off again leaving only the fan running).

As if that weren’t bad enough, just as we were preparing to go to bed–at just past 11, unusually early for us, but it was too hot to do much else–we had a repeat of an evening last October, when Alex was having a bout of diarrhea and got his tail covered in his loose stools. Fortunately, this time was at least a little milder–the substance was a little less liquid and was confined solely to his tail, unlike last time when it ended up smeared over more of his fur and over the carpets and floors as well–though still traumatic for him and unpleasant for us, when I again had to resort to chopping off a chunk of his tail fur, which was too badly matted to get cleaned up otherwise.

[Update: Tuesday night, June 29: We ended up only having to go one day with no air conditioning; the maintenance staff in my building were able to clean out the clog in the drain pipe that was indeed the problem, and when I got home from work the temperature already had fallen three degrees, and is now quite comfortable.]

is, of course, 42, as anyone familiar with Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series knows. It’s a nice coincidence that I was 42 when the film version of Hitchhiker was released this year. It’s a number I’ve been seeing fairly often, recently, and indeed I had started to draft this entry back when I still had just 42 days left of being 42, but as I didn’t complete and post it at the time, there’s now only a little more than a month until I turn 43 at the end of July.

One reason I’ve seen and heard the number so often recently is because of the ubiquity in the news of a Mr. Tom Cruise, 42, of Hollywood. That realization got me to wondering who else is 42. In addition to Tom Cruise (who will also turn 43 next month, 28 days before I do), the list of those of us born in the latter half of 1962 or the first half of 1963 includes rather an attractive and talented lot. I’m in great company here.

Among the males, for example, there’s:

• Bill Brochtrup;
• Farscape and Stargate‘s incredibly yummy Ben Browder;
• Sean Connery’s son, Jason Connery;
• the sexy plumber from Desperate Housewives, James Denton;
• People Magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” Johnny Depp (and also his 21 Jump Street co-star, Dustin Nguyen);
• the dashing Cary Elwes;
• and his equally dashing countryman Ralph Fiennes;
• Kid in the Hall Dave Foley;
• string theorist (and Harvard classmate) Brian Greene;
• John Michael Higgins, of mockumentaries Best in Show and A Mighty Wind;
• Dominic Keating, of the recently cancelled Star Trek: Enterprise;
• two Red Hot Chili Peppers, Flea and Anthony Kiedis;
• Greg Kinnear;
• notoriously well-endowed Tommy Lee;
• Jet Li;
• Andrew McCarthy, brat pack star of St. Elmo’s Fire, Pretty in Pink and Weekend at Bernie’s;
• Buffy’s pal Spike, James Marsters;
• Strictly Ballroom‘s Paul Mercurio;
• John Cameron Mitchell;
• cutie Rob Morrow, from the quirky Northern Exposure;
• Mike Myers, oh, behave;
• another Harvard classmate, Conan O’Brien;
• Survivor host Jeff Probst;
• 1992 Playgirl “Man of the Year” Dirk Shafer;
• Wesley Snipes, born the same day as me;
• Oscar-winning Director Steven Soderbergh;
• The Daily Show‘s funny and handsome anchor, Jon Stewart;
• Quentin Tarantino;
• B.D. Wong;
• athletes Charles Barkley, Roger Clemens, Doug Flutie, Evander Holyfield, and Michael Jordan;
• and not a few porn stars, including Colton Ford, Jon King, Jon Vincent and Jeff “Powertool” Stryker.

And, among the women:

• funny girl Joan Cusack;
• Cruise’s hooker Lana in Risky Business, Rebecca De Mornay;
• fellow Ivy Leaguer (and if the rumors are true, that’s not all she and I have in common) Jodie Foster;
• diva Denyce Graves;
• one of James Denton’s co-stars on Desperate Housewives, Felicity Huffman;
• perennial Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Kathy Ireland;
• supermodel Elle Macpherson;
• Deep Space Nine‘s sexiest Bajoran, Chase Masterson;
• just like me, with her own 28-year-old boyfriend, Demi Moore;
• Nancy O’Dell;
• Mrs. John Travolta, Kelly Preston;
• Natasha Richardson;
• Laura San Giacomo;
• Rob Morrow’s Northern Exposure co-star Janine Turner;
• Nia Vardalos;
• Vanessa Williams;
• and sexy Bond girl and Crouching Tiger heroine Michelle Yeoh.

Jim Carrey, Jon Bon Jovi and Matthew Broderick are other famous 1962ers, but with birthdays in January (Carrey) and March (Bon Jovi and Broderick), they’re already 43, as are Sheryl Crow, Rosie O’Donnell and yet another Desperate Housewives co-star, Marcia Cross, born in February (Crow) and March (O’Donnell and Cross). Grant Show, also on Desperate Housewives, was born in February, 1962; that show seems to have a very strong 1962 connection.

Saturday night, I dreamed that my mom bought me a car that was simultaneously a digital camera. When first describing the dream to Jeff, I couldn’t recall if the car actually shrank to the size of a portable camera, or if the camera detached from the car. As I’ve continued to recall details from the dream, however, I believe it was the former.

As a car, it looked like something out of the heyday of wide bodies and fins, with a convertible top and a smooth chrome steering wheel as large as a hula hoop. However, this car had a secondary dashboard and steering wheel on the driver’s side door, permitting it to be driven widthwise rather than only lengthwise; in my dream, for example, I drove up to a parallel parking space, and then turned 45 degrees in my seat to face the secondary wheel and display, so that I could back into the spot rather than actually having to parallel park.

But although the car itself had a classic 1950s look, as a camera it was definitely high-tech and digital. There were slots on the dashboard for two of each common kind of storage card, and the car’s GPS navigation system digitally stamped each photo with the location where it was taken. If you turned the switch on the glovebox to the right, it opened normally for storage; if you turned it to the left, however, it opened onto a digital photo printer with a variety of specialized photo papers in various paper trays.

One of the details I’ve remembered that leads me to believe that the car actually shrank–a la the Jetsons suitcase-car–when being used as a camera, rather than the camera being a detachable part of the car, is that in camera mode the headlights acted as the flash, while the closing and opening convertable ragtop gave the car-camera the appearance of a folding Polaroid SX-7.

Yesterday afternoon, Jeff and I drove over to Ballston (in North Arlington, just a couple miles away) for the Signature Theatre’s free summer concert, “Signature Sings Broadway in Ballston.” We think of Signature as “our” theater; it’s physically located in Arlington County, as opposed to downtown in the District, and we’ve seen a number of shows there together. It’s also particularly gay-friendly (even as theaters go), and we like to support it. It also has a reputation for doing great Sondheim, including at least one Sondheim show every season.

Yesterday, the theater hosted a live outdoor concert featuring six local actors who frequently perform at Signature singing sixteen selections from a variety of Broadway musicals, including (and seen here) “A Little Priest” from Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and “Agony” from his Into the Woods. It was a beautiful day, and the concert was great fun. Afterwards we walked over to the Ballston Mall, where we’d parked the car, and had margaritas and dinner at Chevy’s.

In addition to these two shots of the performers, and the other shown here of two ladies shielding their eyes from the sun with Woodsy Owl fans, I took a number of photos; the rest can be seen, as I upload them, on my Flickr site under the tag “broadway in ballston”.

elfintech posted a photo:

Last Sunday was my aunt and uncle’s 50th wedding anniversary; Jeff and I were home visiting, because it was also the day before my mom’s 62nd birthday (and the first Father’s Day since my grandfather died, and only the second since my father died).

[ geotagged: see this photo’s location on a map ]

elfintech posted a photo:

the striatic on the far right, along with the background, is the original photo; as he was talking, I took two other shots from the same spot, and then cut him out of those and superimposed them next to himself in the original.

[ geotagged: see this photo’s location on a map ]

Many opponents of gay marriage are not just against the marriage part, but have an absolute “conviction that homosexuality is a sin, is immoral, harms children and spreads disease”; they have no patience for those who seek even “tolerance”.

Via del.icio.us/elfintech

with straight men adopting fashion much more quickly, and gay men feeling free to be slobs, gaydar is less reliable than ever

Via del.icio.us/elfintech