doubting thom

elfintech posted a photo:

We saw this in Taneytown, MD this weekend while we were there for our friends’ wedding. Isn’t the name a little bit creepy? Oh, and it really is just a block away from the funeral home.

Last night after upgrading my version of Firefox I reopened my browser to discover a blank content area confronting me here. Obviously, I’ve been quite absent recently, having fallen behind not only on my own writing, but on uploading pictures to Flickr, posting quick links or even on keeping up with what my other friends are writing and photographing.

My overall excuse is two-fold. Yes, I’ve become engrossed in a couple of new computer games, but I’ve also been just so stressed out recently by work that most days when I get home I want to do nothing that requires much thought or energy. Unfortunately, this may not change for a while, as many of the more serious underlying issues at work are not going to go away for the foreseeable future, if ever, while one specific new project that’s been dumped on me is pretty much keeping me occupied full-time (including skipping lunch and staying late daily, and cancelling two days of leave that had been planned since January) through March 31. Regretfully, I feel like I can’t really write too much more online about work, so I’ll have to stew about it privately.

On the more positive front, we’ve been busy planning our three-day trip with my mother to New York next month, and she’s becoming very excited. Tonight we’re seeing An Ideal Husband at a local Arlington theater, and this weekend we head up to Maryland for the wedding of some friends, so there are respites, at least.

And I promise that I’ll have more pictures online soon; I have a ton on the PC that just need to be color-adjusted, cropped and posted, and I expect to take quite a few this coming weekend.

Fortunately, my wonderful and patient boyfriend has been maintaining his site and his photos with more regularity and consistency, so you can always keep up on our comings and goings there when I’ve gone silent.

See the video clip that so outraged incoming Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on the very first day of her job, and that led to PBS’s censorship of an episode of a children’s television series.

Via del.icio.us/elfintech

An article about the phenomenon of “cyberbullying”.

Last night, I dreamed that Jeff and I had been somewhere abroad on holiday, and at the end of the week he needed to return home, but I still had two days of vacation so I decided to travel on by myself. I left my bag in storage at the airport, and went to the British Airways counter to get a ticket; a BA employee signaled me to come out of the line over to her station. As I walked past the other agents, I noticed that one of them was Chris Burke, the actor with Down’s Syndrome who played Corky Thatcher on the old television series Life Goes On. I nodded politely to him and said hello before moving on to see the agent who had signaled me. When I got to her station, though, it turned out that she had thought that I was just checking in rather than buying a new ticket, and that she couldn’t actually help me after all. So I got back in the original line, which now was much longer, worried that I wouldn’t be able to purchase a ticket for the flight I wanted before it left in less than an hour.

A few minutes later, the agent came back over with her supervisor, who apologized for the misunderstanding and the attendant delays, offering to take me to her office to get my ticket. We walked over to a sphere set up on stilts, up into which she climbed. I started to follow when she began frantically to signal to me to get back, and then told me that I couldn’t come up to her office but had to stand back inside the painted orange box on the floor, about twenty feet away, “for security purposes.” A go-between dressed in bellboy livery carried my credit card and passport to her, and returned with my tickets.

After rushing to get my luggage out of storage and make my plane, in the dream I was suddenly already at my destination hotel, which I understood sometimes to be in Malta, at other times Morocco and at still others Amsterdam. Standing behind the hotel front desk was Chris Burke, now working as a concierge for the hotel. Again I nodded and said hello.

At this point I found myself in an ice rink, wearing skates and being handed a fencing mask, and given hasty apologies that the attendant could only find a single glove to fit me. Part of my vacation package, apparently, included lessons in ice fencing. I skated out onto the ice with my epee, where I passed Chris Burke, now engaged in an ice-dancing pas de deux with some young female ice skater. I nodded and continued on to meet my instructor. At that point, Chris skated over and thanked me for having acknowledged him at the airport, at the hotel and at the rink, noting that most other people were uncomfortable around him and wouldn’t look him in the eye or speak to him. We shook hands, and he glided back to his skating partner.

And that’s when I woke up.

Yesterday's warmth naught
but a groundhog's brief dream.
Punxatawney sleeps still.

---

Yesterday the temperature here reached a balmy 70 Fahrenheit; people were out on the courtyard in their shirtsleeves, enjoying lunch on the patio outside the cafeteria. Today the temperature already has dropped into the 30s, there’s a mix of snow and freezing rain falling, and the winds are fierce and bitter. By tonight, temperatures are forecast to hit the lower 20s, completing a drop of 40-50 degrees over a 24-hour period, and wind gusts of 45 mph also are predicted. Twain famously may have been speaking of New England, but his quip that “if you don’t like the weather…, wait five minutes” could easily apply to DC today.

We’re going to see Tori Amos during the April 6th stop on her Original Sinsuality tour. Tickets went on sale to the general public today at noon and while we didn’t do as well as Jeff’s co-worker Tina, who managed to snag 4th row center tickets on presale, we’re in the first balcony at the Warner, which isn’t too bad given that the Warner is a relatively intimate space.

This will be my fourth time to see Tori perform live. The first time was back in September 1992 at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium, during her Little Earthquakes tour, then again in March 1994 for the Under the Pink tour, and most recently in August 2003 at Merriweather Post Pavilion, when she paired with Ben Folds on the Lottapianos tour. I downloaded her new album from iTunes earlier this evening, and what little I’ve listened to so far sounds fantastic.

Gay men seem to read maps in a similar way to women. Although this seems like an insigificant finding, it may help uncover some of the neural functions that are related to sexual preference, as these abilities are known to involve specific areas of the brain.

In fact, this isn’t the first study to find a similarities between gay men and women in spatial abilities. Result published in 2003 showed that both women and gay men performed better on a memory test for locations than straight men.

These sorts of abilities are known to rely heavily on area of the brain known as the hippocampus and differences in these abilities are likely to reflect differences in how these brain structures process information.

What is not clear however, is how much these differences can account for individual sexual behaviour. This is because sexual behaviour can be motivated by a wide range of different desires and motivations, all of which may be supported by complex network of brain structures. Few of these are currently known about or understood.

Link to story from New Scientist.
Link to story from The Telegraph.

NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, etc.