Oil Change

Just a quick entry while I get my oil changed. I am impressed my the old TV her at the service center. I don't know if it means they have been open for a long time or that they can't afford a better set. I am excited about this oil change, because it is my first in this car. I don't think it is worth my time to do it myself because you don't save that much money, and you don't have to figure out where to dispose of the used oil.



It is a really nice day, and I think I will do something fun outside when they are done with my car. Can't decide if that will be a bike ride or some yard work. Yard work could be fun if it isn't too hot and if my neighbor doesn't try to talk to me. If he does talk to me then I will probably try to clean out my old car that he wants to buy.



I think they are almost done with my car. Time to go.

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Nice day, part 2: The Puppies

Here are the puppies that were mentioned before. I don't know if you can see them, but they really were cute.
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Nice Day

It's a nice day here in Menahga. Maybe a little cool, but I like it. I walked over to Spirit Lake, and thought I would share the view. The air is cool, and there is just a slight breeze. As you can see, the water is almost like glass.

I don't know if it shows up in my picture, but there is some kind of radio tower across the lake from me. I wonder if it is the tower my phone uses? I have always enjoyed walking and being outside, but I am very fussy about my temperature. I don't like being too hot, so I don't care for the middle of summer. I suppose that is also why I never played many sports...too sweaty.

The sun has poked out from behind the clouds. That might of been a better picture, but I don't know how to do that in the middle of an e-mail, which is how I am writing this. Some other people just showed up here. I think they are having some kind of mid-afternoon picnic. They say the frog are out.

From where I sit, I can hear several birds singing, but I can also hear cars and trucks on the highway, which is only a few blocks from the lake. I have always found the sounds of nature and civilization to complement each other in the most interesting ways. Like me blogging from my phone at a picnic table by a beautiful glassy lake, across from what might be my cell tower.

The people who stopped her actually wanted to walk their puppies. They are very cute. I took a picture, but I don't know how to add it at this point. I'm not good at identifying puppy breeds, but they are either chihuahuas or golden labs.
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Trepidation about Netflix selection

I am finding that I am especially anxious about my Netflix selection that is slated to arrive tomorrow. It is the movie Happy Endings, which is classified as a Independent/Romance/Comedy/Gay-Lesbian movie. It has Lisa Kudrow and Maggie Gyllenhaal, who I normally like, but it is described as "a series of connected vignettes". That choice of phrase makes me a little nervous about the film. Add to that that one of the vignettes is described thusly: "a gay man discovers that his partner may (or may not) be the father of their friend's baby".

Now, I don't have anything against a movie that has gay romance in it. My problem with it is that in this day and age, it seems like every movie with gay romance is trying to do for homosexual on-screen romance what Guess Who's Coming to Dinner did for inter-racial on-screen romance. These days, only the most conservative kooks think anything of it when a black and white couple is seen on TV or in a movie, but when you put two men or two women together, it gets some attention.

I remember in my twelfth-grade English class, I learnt that nothing is ever colored red unless it symbolizes something (red blood, a rose, a red dress, red drapes, etc.). Movies are the same way right now--No one is ever gay, unless it means something. I don't think I have seen any movies that had a gay character that didn't have some huge aspect of the plot hinge on that character's sexuality. I really think that is sad. I look forward to someday when movies can have characters who turn out to be gay or straight without their sexual identity being a major plot point. Sadly, movies these days are not able to have characters with gay relationships without being about gay relationships.

I am kind of burnt out on serious thought about this issue after #amazonfail, so I really hope that Happy Endings will not be too much about gay relationships, but given the desciption, I don't really see that happening. And that raises another point...

Why do so many movies that depict gay relationships involve one of the partners either just discovering that they prefer the same sex or cheating with the opposite sex? That is just another face of the problem that movies so far cannot have gay relationships without being about gay relationships, and apparently a great number of filmmakers think that without including heterosexuality as a contrast they won't appeal to the "mainstream audience". I don't get it at all.

If anyone actually reads this, and they know of any movies that involve gay relationships without becoming some kind of preachy thing about homosexuality, let me know. Any gay or lesbian romance or romantic comedy that isn't about homosexuality but is just a movie where the characters happen to be of the same gender...I don't think it exists yet, but if it does, and you know about it, let me know. I would love to see it.

First attempt at e-mail

As you can see, my wife's Mac is way across the room, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to experiment with some of the mobile capabilities of my blog. In the interest of full disclosure, you should know that my laptop is within arms length, but is shut down. It is a PC.



I don't have too much experience typing on a phone, so you will have to forgive any typos and spelling errors. Oh, let me check here...I guess my phone will let me spell check before I send this, so that's good. I am hoping to be able to use this e-mail stuff so that if I have a good thought while I am out and about, I can get it in the blog before it passes. I also think most pictures that make it to my blog will get there this way, since we don't use the camera much except when we go on a trip. "We", in this case, is my wife and I.



We not much else to say. I hope this e-mail thing works. If so, I might do a few more posts with pics of my excursion today and tomorrow to see Jim Gaffigan in Fargo. Also to see my sister-in-law.

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Celebrities and Twitter Ratio

A few days ago, one of my friends sent a tweet wondering why celebrities only follow other celebrities on Twitter. Other than a few thoughts about respecting the privacy of their less famous (regular?) friends, I have no idea. However, ever since then, I have been thinking about how Twitter could be used as a way of judging how much of a celebrity someone is. This would be based on the ratio of the number of people following them to the number of people they follow. Here are some examples:

As I write this, I have 21 followers on Twitter, and I am currently following 45 people, so my Twitter Ratio would be 21/45, which is about .47, so I would not be considered a celebrity.

Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight on the American version of The Office has 442,732 followers and only follows 85 people, so his Twitter Ratio is 442,732/85 which is 5208.6118, considerably larger than mine.

I would think that anyone who has a Twitter Ratio greater than one could be considered a celebrity. I have not figured out too many people's Twitter Ratios yet, but I think that a scale could be devised that determines how much of a celebrity someone is based on this number. There would have to be some rules in place so that people could not inflate their Ratio. For instance, Brent Spiner, who played Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation only follows four people, so his ratio is 57880.5, and I doubt anyone would argue that he is ten times the celebrity that Rainn Wilson is.

The ratio would also not apply very well to the many non-persons who tweet, such as TheOnion and SciFri, as these generally follow anyone who follows them, and would have ratios very close to or equal to one. There are also many celebrities on Twitter who pretty clearly aren't actually doing their own tweets, and their Ratios would be less meaningful as well.

I don't know if this idea has already been put out there by anyone before, but I think it is kind of fun. Kind of like figuring out how many degrees away from Kevin Bacon someone is.

In fact, now that I have written all of this, it occurs to me that the number of followers you have tells how big of a celebrity you are, all by itself. What the Twitter Ratio instead measures is how down to earth a celebrity is. It tells how many followers someone has for every one person they follow. Rainn Wilson is more down to earth than Brent Spiner, because he has a lower Twitter Ratio. I suppose that is also apparent when one reads what they tweet about...

Let's try this again

I got a new phone recently, one of those fancy ones that does the internet and all that sort of stuff. I started getting Twitter updates on my phone, and started sending them more frequently as well. The whole micro-blogging thing is kind of fun, so I thought I should give the actual blogging another shot as well.

I haven't been too successful with previous attempts at blogs, but I see that a lot of the people that I am following on Twitter have blogs, and looking at some of the posts, I realized that not every blog post has to be a Pulitzer Prize winning essay. Of course, I already knew that most aren't, but I have such high standards for myself. On Twitter, I saw links for well known bloggers, such as Wil Wheaton and Dooce, and saw that the key to a good blog was more of a doing it regularly type thing, and the good writing follows from that. That is true of any writing, but the point is to stick with it, and to post something pretty often.

There are plenty of things that I could blog about, especially now that I have seen what some of the most read blogs are doing. I often spend big chunks of time reading about whatever random thing catches my interest on the internet. If I just make myself post some links and write a little something about why whatever it was caught my fancy, then I will be on my way to having a serviceable blog.

To paraphrase Will Riker in Star Trek: First Contact, "Don't try to be a great blogger, just be a blogger and let the internet make its own judgments."