Personal

OK, that title might have been slighly inflammatory. They probably weren’t trying to kill me, but they sure did almost do it with MSG. Today, in a rare break from my normal tradition of not eating out for lunch, I went out to eat with my previous coworker John Morrow and friend Seth Gholson who also now works at Highland Clinic.

We all met at Imperial Cathay, a Chinese restaraunt, and I got the sweet and sour pork (#13). As a side note, in case you don’t know, when you go to Imperial Cathay for lunch, you just order the number of the item you want, not the name. That way you won’t look like a n00b. Chris Leon and John also got that. I don’t know what the other people got, since it was a group of six, but when Chris and I got back to the office, we were about to die going up the stairs and collapsed into our chairs.

I felt more sleepy than I’ve ever felt in my life, including when pulling an all-nighter for school. Not only that, but I had what I believe to be a headache. I’m not sure if that’s what it was, since I can’t recall having a headache before, but I felt as though I was about to die. Not only that, but I had an exceedingly rapid pulse rate. Chris similarly was tired and completely exhausted. When I looked at my computer, Seth had contacted me and told me that he was feeling the same way.

Chris and I remain convinced that there was an attempted homicide commited at Imperial Cathay today. The victims: Chris, Seth, and I. The weapon: Monosodium Glutamate. I don’t think I’m going back there for quite a while. I got a lot of food and it was extremely tasty and extremely filling. I just don’t want to feel that way for a long time.

Tonight, I attended a Shreveport Mayoral forum with most of the candidates for the Shreveport mayoral race. It was hosted by the Political Action Council for Equality, a group that supports and attempts to extend rights for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender people. One of the officers and “focus group facilitators” is one of my previous teachers for whom I have immense respect, Adrienne Critcher. She also sponsors our school‘s Gay Straight Alliance, of which I am a member. I’m really proud to be a part of the organization. It was the least I could do to show up to show solidarity for the mayoral forum.

That mayoral panel was informative and largely hilarious due to the crazy people. I’ll cover those first. For reference in the following, I’m an atheist who supports Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender rights. I support rights for everyone, actually. My impressions are below.

Crazy Ones

Vernon Adams
This guy is absolutely nuts. He brought his bible and spouted off about the lord Jesus on every single reply and ended by saying that in heaven he wanted to be on somebody’s football team. He then left because he said he had to get to somebody’s retirement party or something. He was laughed at by almost everyone. Not to mention that he said he wouldn’t hire gay people unless they knew the lord Jesus. As far as I could tell, Vernon never really answered a question. Picture the oldest, most crotchety man in the world literally thumping a bible. I was able to hold it back until the football team quote. Then I lost it. He also said that being gay was a choice.

Madjun Ali (No website that I can find)
I don’t know if he’s doing this because he lost a bet or because he’s doing it on a bet or if he thinks it’s a big joke. He’s definitely funny though. If I recall correctly, he said he is 29, and admittedly he has no experience to qualify him for the job. On top of that, he showed up late because he couldn’t find the place. On every response, he made most of the audience laugh including me. I don’t know if this was on purpose (in accordance with the “big joke” comment earlier), but he was definitely funny. A memorable comment was that he didn’t care who you got it on with. Madjun tried to answer questions, but he was so immature and not very well spoken. He seemed sincere and didn’t seem to hold any prejudices, but his lack of diplomacy (I can’t think of another word) left everyone laughing. I remember when he said it didn’t matter whether you’re as “straight as an arrow” or “crooked as an X”.

Henry Hodge-Bey (No website that I can find)
This guy was #3 on the laugh scale. Every comment he had was about being the best we could be. He never really answered a question either. I don’t have much to say about this guy, but he definitely isn’t a real candidate in my opinion. He invoked religion a lot too. “I thank God I’m here today”. “God didn’t make two men the same way; we all have something we’re better at than any other man every ‘made’”.

Not Crazy Ones

Cedric the Entertainer
He’s not really Cedric the Entertainer. He’s really Cedric B. Glover. But he is black and really large just like Cedric the Entertainer, so that’s with whom I immediately associated him. Sorry for the initial conclusions. His messages seemed to be, for the most part, directly on point. He did say he considers himself a minister and that he can’t leave his faith at home. There was nothing more said about that, but he said faith wouldn’t impact his hiring decisions. He didn’t seem to exhibit any real prejudices. I thought he was very personable and someone for whom I might possibly vote.

Jerry Jones (Beware of Flash, not a real site)
You’ve probably seen his signs everywhere. He’s the bald guy, or the white guy, or the male republican, or the charismatic one. Any of those could uniquely describe him in this race. I have a feeling he’ll win the Republican primary and go on to win the Mayoral race. I’m more than likely not voting for him, but I have a feeling he might win, and he is a candidate for whom I might possibly vote. He too said he doesn’t leave his faith at home, but that it makes him a better person. He didn’t seem overtly religious, but just regularly religious. He seemed to be straightforward with the fact that he didn’t care what color, sex, creed (or hopefully lack thereof), or sexual orientation that you are when considering applicants for appointed decisions. He was the only one that was straightforward with his position on same-sex marriage. I’ll cover that at the bottom with the others’ positions. Here’s a spoiler: You won’t like his position. However, he was the only really honest one with that question. He said he had some plan for the deficit but didn’t say what it was.

Ed Bradley
This is the same Ed Bradley of KSLA. He does frequent short speeches on that channel about issues in the Shreveport-Bossier City area. He has always cracked me up since I’ve been little with those because he employs the William Shatner style of delays in the middle of his sentences after every three syllables. I was thinking this was going to be another example of this. I was wrong. He is very well spoken when giving pseudo-impromptu speeches (a list of questions to be asked was given at the beginning, so there was limited time to prepare a response). With one exception that was shared by all but one candidate, he gave on-point answers for every question. He was the only candidate that always started off his 2 minute speech with a direct answer to the question that had been asked by the moderator. I would definitely consider voting for him, even though I didn’t think this would be the case before tonight.

Arlena Acree
She seemed to be pretty down to earth. Out of the two women running, I’d definitely vote for her over Liz Swaine. I’ve had a personal experience with Liz Swaine that makes me dislike her on which I’ll be willing to go more in depth at a later date. However, I don’t like Mayor Hightower’s fiscal policies and Liz is following directly in his footsteps. We don’t need another Hightower. Liz didn’t even show up for this panel due to a “previous commitment”. I don’t know if that commitment was not ever talking to people concerned with GLBT rights.

I started a new paragraph this time because that first one was just complaining about Liz Swaine. I made sure to not ambiguously use “she” in that paragraph. Arlena was well-spoken and claimed to have ways to deal with the budget deficit, but didn’t really say what those were. She didn’t seem to be overtly religious, but said that faith wouldn’t play a role in hiring. She said she was definitely against discrimination. Also, her daughter April is extremely attractive. She was sitting a few seats away from me. Arlena definitely wins the hot daughter award. I would consider voting for her, but not because of the daughter, unless the daughter will be publicly visible. 🙂

Wilson McMullan (No website that I can find)
Poor kid. He looked like he was about 12 years old. He didn’t get off work until really late so he only got to make a closing statement. He hated that buses didn’t run past midnight. That really seemed to piss him off. He was wearing a “Vote for Pedro” shirt, which is strange because his name doesn’t translate to Pedro in Spanish. What do I know though? I was wearing an “Oh, NOOOOO!!!” shirt.

Same-Sex Marriage

What did these candidates think that P.A.C.E. was? Vernon said gay people need to find Jesus because Jesus and his bible told him to. None of the candidates even voted on the same-sex state constitutional ban except Jerry. None of them had a firm position except Jerry. Arlena said she wanted to remain “neutral” on the issue. How in the world can you be neutral about civil rights? You’re either for or against them, not somewhere in between. To reiterate, they said (and they might be lying) that they didn’t even vote for or against the amendment. Your future elected officials don’t vote on important issues like this? I highly doubt that. If it’s true, then it is a sad city in which we live.

In case you’re still on the edge of your seat, Jerry said that he opposes same-sex marriage and that he voted for the amendment banning it. In case you’re wondering about me, I voted against it. The vast majority of Louisiana disagreed with me. Cedric the Entertainer was actually in the state house of representatives that put it before the state for a vote and he said that he supports “civil unions” but of course wouldn’t come down on the real issue either way. This was after saying he wouldn’t “tap dance around the issue” like the others. He got an ovation for that, and then proceeded to do a nice little tap dance number.

Conclusions

I will most likely be voting for Ed Bradley, Arlena Acree, or Cedric the Entertainer. Even though Jerry was a straight shooter on the issue of gay marriage, he hit the wrong target. However, if you want to laugh until you realize the reality, vote for Vernon.

I don’t even know who will be left after the primaries, but those are my opinions if the election was going to be held tomorrow between these candidates (and Liz Swaine… I don’t like her).

Please feel free to link freely to this for other people who want to know how the forum went. That is, if you’re interested in my opinions of the panel.

Disclaimer: The “quotes” are quotes as far as they go in my mind. They may be slightly off, but the meaning is the same. The quotes are there to denote they are things that they said, but not necessarily the exact words. For the most part, they are exact. Feel free to correct me on anything. These are all my opinions and not necessarily the opinions of anyone else.

Well, I’ve been caffeine free for about four and a half days. I had Diet Coke at Chick-fil-A when Chris and I went there before seeing Clerks II on Friday. To get off topic for a second, that movie was great. Go see it ASAP, unless you’re easily offended that is.

I’ve been wanting to quit drinking caffeine for quite a while now, but never quite had the impetus to go ahead and commit to really having it again. It’s a huge thing, when you’re used to drinking lots of Diet Coke every single day. My laziness has finally become my friend in battle. I was out of Diet Cokes when I got home after midnight on Saturday morning, and I was way too tired to go to Walgreen’s or CVS to get some more. I figured I’d just get some on Saturday, but I never got around to doing that because I stayed home all weekend. I just was too lazy to get ready and get dressed and drive somewhere to get my addictive drinks.

People say they get headaches and stuff when they quit. I don’t know what’s up with that. I am drinking a lot of water though. I mean like a LOT of water. I drink a lot of water at work during the day. It’s pretty much a habit at this point, and maybe that helps stave off the headaches. I think I have more willpower than a lot of people. As you know if you know me, I just decided to stop eating less about 1.5 years ago and I went from 270 lbs (122.5 kg) to 180lbs (81.6 kg). I’m willing myself to make this work.

I don’t even really know why I’m quitting. I’m not advocating the stance that moderate consumption of caffeine is a health risk if you are an otherwise healthy individual. I think it’s really a combination of things. I really don’t like having a metal can subconsciously dictate to me what and when I will drink from it. Also, I spend a LOT of money carbonated beverages, so perhaps I’ll save money, but probably not because I spent it all on Kool-Aid last night (more on that later). Perhaps it’s just a sense of accomplishment I’m seeking. If I can stay off caffeine, I’ve gotten the monkey of physical, chemical dependency off of my back.

I’ve been drinking a lot of water like I said, but water is bland. That’s more than likely a good thing and an indicator that there are no potent pollutants in the Shreveport water supply, at least none that I can taste. However, that’s pretty boring when that’s all you drink, so I went to Wal*Mart and bought a pitcher, a few little portable drinking containers, Kool-Aid (Fruit Punch Flavor), Crystal Light (Pink Lemonade), and some other Crystal Light type brand that had some other flavor; I don’t care enough to go and see what it was.

If you have any good fruity type flavors to recommend to me, please leave it in the comments. I’m willing to try any number of things to stay off caffeine.

Also, yes I know other things, like tea and chocolate, contain caffeine. I don’t drink Tea (yet), and I damn sure am not giving up my chocolate, so I’m not saying I can avoid all caffeine in my life, but I am saying I’ve quit drinking the comparatively massive amounts of it cold turkey since Friday night, and I plan to keep it that way. Wish me luck!… as if that could do any good.

I posted the following as a bulletin on MySpace, but I figured it might be best to post here too (for the good of Google). More people need to know about this. Also, here’s a link to my MySpace.

Several important things before the explanation:
1) I didn’t post the “Fuck all ya’ll niggas” post
2) I didn’t post the “Get free laptops” or whatever post
3) If you viewed the former, you should look at the bulletins “you’ve posted”

If you actually know me, you probably know I didn’t post either. It appears what happened is that there is a flash “virus” going around via bulletins.

Normally stupid people are fooled into clicking on “surveys” or whatever like “Do you think Bush is a good leader?” In actuality when you click on those, it is posting back to a form on MySpace’s servers. Since the people who made those forms are too stupid to verify the referrer, that tricks people into having bulletins posted as them. I was actually laughing about this phenomenon with people at lunch on the Friday before last.

However, I specifically remember looking at Chele‘s “18 and older pics” bulletin that I now realize she probably didn’t actually post. I use Firefox and the Adblock Plus extension, so I see an Adblock tab on all flash applets. One showed and I specifically remember clicking on it and seeing an offsite, invisible flash applet that was titled bob.swf.

It didn’t do anything, so I figured it was a failed slideshow or something she tried to post. Apparently that must have “infected” me. When flash runs inside the browser, it runs inside the context of the currently logged on user… in this case, me. It also has all the rights and privileges of the logged on user, including posting of bulletins. Since it can read the current url, it can also get the “token” and cookies that are used to identify a user on MySpace.

So, while I was looking at a page that was seemingly doing nothing, there was a Flash applet posting as me on myspace. So now I have no idea what has been sent because it could have just as easily deleted messages from my outbox after sending them.

Again, this is not my fault, since I just viewed a bulletin, but I thought it might be advisable to anyone using Firefox and Adblock to block: http://*/bob.swf

That file name can (and probably will change), but myspace needs to stop flash from loading in bulletins or actually implement some kind of captcha or something for posting.

If you aren’t technical enough to understand all of what I just posted, you’re probably one of the people who posts bulletins unknowingly because you want a “friends tracker” or something, so it’s not like it changes your life anyway. This is an interesting attack vector, though.

So, if you use Internet Explorer, you’re screwed. You’re going to be posting bulletins that you don’t want to post. If you use Firefox, do what I’m about to do and install the Flashblock extension. It requires you to click on a flash animation to start it. This will prevent the automatic infections (unless you click on it).

I hope this helps someone else.

Chris

I hope that clears some things up and I hope that it helps some other people as well who may be less technically inclined. Much to my chagrin, many things have been going out as me, including racist posts, thanks to a combination of MySpace insecurity and Macromedia Flash.

Tonight, Chris Leon and I went to Whataburger to grab something to eat before we went back to my house and watched the DVD of The God Who Wasn’t There. We were talking in the car and Chris forgot about the Whatabuger by my house, so we ended up at the one in southeast Shreveport. The meal was uneventful except for my consumption of all of the ketchup in a 1 mile radius.

[Note: All of what follows will more than likely not amuse you. It was hilarious, but you probably “had to be there”. I warned you.]

Frog Gutter Run-Off DecorationAfterwards, we went to the Wal-Mart across the street to seek out gifts for Mother’s Day, since neither of us had purchased gifts yet. We first went to the “electronics” section because we’re both nerds. I use the term “electronics” lightly, because well, it’s Wal-Mart. Also, with their new arrangement, if you go one too many isles over, you’re in the shoe department with no point of demarcation.

After deciding that the “electronics” department sucked with their non-usb reading digital picture printing kiosks, we headed over to the gardening department to look at silly yard decorations that might appease the maternal sensibilities of a good present. I first came upon a frog decoration that appeard to serve the purpose of adorning the water exit of a gutter system. It had a little frog boat sitting in a little frog river that would look like frogs whitewater rafting through a rainwater river during a storm. I thought my mom might like that, but I wasn’t willing to pay outrageous sums of money for it. I lifted it up by the handle (what appeared to be a handle that would actually serve to anchor the top part of the gutter water exit) and turned it over to see if there was a price tag. Immediately, the frog boat detatched, fell to the ground, and shattered.

I’m fairly certain the frog boat was already broken off and someone set it back in the decoration, but it still came as quite a shock, because I’ve never broken anything in a store that I can remember, and definitely not quite as dramatically. Amazingly, the other guy on the isle didn’t even appear to be phased in the slightest. Chris suggested we leave, but now my primary choice had been removed from the running and I wasn’t about to leave without something to show for it.

Chris then pointed out a 4-foot tall lighthouse and suggested that I knock it over too. He pointed out angel decorations that I might want to pick up and throw against a wall to shatter those too. I’m actually laughing out loud while I’m typing this, but I realize the humor inherent in this won’t amuse anyone but Chris and me.

After I was able to stop crying from laughing so hard and literally having to crouch from not being able to breathe from laughing so hard, Chris noticed a bird cage directly above us with a dead bird in it. Apparently, Wal-Mart doesn’t like the birds that fly into their store a lot. They capture them in birdcage traps and leave them there to die instead of releasing them outside. I postured a hypothesis. I’m guessing they don’t want the birds to swoop down and make a “CAWW” sound while they steal your birdseed or fish or something that you’re trying to buy. Alternatively, they might try to perch on your shoulder or bite out your eyeball like in The Passion of the Christ.

Either way, Wal-Mart really hates those birds, enough to trap them and let them die in the store, above its customers. I have to wonder, what about the bird crap? There seemed to be no mechanism for dealing with this eventuality. I guess Wal-Mart would rather its customers be defecated upon in a limited area than the possiblity of being hit by falling feces throughout the store.

Chris and I rewarded their animal cruelty by purchasing windchimes. I also purchased a miniature garden gnome. I hope my mom doesn’t read this before I give it to her, because that will ruin the surprise. It’s slightly less likely that Chris’ mom will read my blog, so I’m not too worried about that. The hilarity about windchimes is that they aren’t in a box. They’re just hanging, with a pricetag on them, so Chris and I had to walk from one end of the store to another (Garden to Food/20 Items or Less) carrying clanging windchimes. Needless to say, everyone was looking at us and I was laughing my ass off. It’s probably not too often that people see two guys walking across Wal-Mart carrying windchimes as their only item with no buggy. I was too busy laughing and I forgot to get a card. I’ll get that tomorrow before I see my mom (or I guess I should say today since it’s past 3 AM).

We came back to my house, watched The God Who Wasn’t There, and then watched the two part series that Richard Dawkins made named The Root of All Evil (Episode 1: The God Delusion | Episode 2: The Virus of Faith). I’ve now seen TGWWT about 5 times, and it’s still as good as the first time, but this was only my second time seeing The Root of All Evil. It’s an excellent documentary series, and Richard Dawkins is a great speaker, writer, and scientist.

All in all, I’d say I’m pretty glad Chris screwed up and went to that Whataburger on the other side of town. I haven’t laughed as hard as I had tonight in quite some time.