TiVo

The guys from Verizon showed up on Wednesday morning to install the Super-Secret Decoder Cards in my new TiVo.

Thank God one of them had actually "seen" a TiVo before Wednesday. Between the 2 of them it took less than 2 hours to do what a qualified technician should've been able to do in 1 hour. This is known as "job security." In all fairness to them, they are "phone company" employees which, in the past, meant hours of boredom hanging off of telephone poles, or down in freezing cold manholes, splicing miles of copper cable together in order to form "The Bell System." These days, though, it's just as likely to mean "the cable company" or "the computer guys." They don't know what the hell their job descriptions are any more. I feel for them.

This is what my TiVo looks like from the front:



This is what it does: It's a digital video recorder. It has an onscreen program guide that puts Verizon's to shame. All you have to do is "point and click" to record any show on the schedule. You can even tell it to record an entire season for you with just a few clicks. It holds up to 180 hours of regular programming (or 20 hours of HD programming). I can stick another (external) hard drive on the thing to up the recordable ante to nearly 200 hours of HD programming and nearly 1,000 hours of regular.

It does all kinds of other "tricks" with time and space (it's nearly as good as an episode of "Lost"). My favorite trick so far is, if I'm watching a show in "real time" and the phone rings all I have to do is hit the "Pause" button on the remote. The picture will instantly freeze. I take the call and after I hang up, 20 minutes later, hit the "Play" button and it will continue playing, as though I had been playing back a tape or a DVD.

It also learns and makes suggestions about things I might enjoy based on my past viewing patterns. This is both good news and bad news.

I am very excited about my TiVo. I'll be even more excited when the TiVo company issues me a refund for the defective unit they originally sold me.

Meanwhile, though, I'm a happy camper.

p.s.

Tomorrow I'm seeing the new Charles Busch play "The Third Story" also starring Kathleen Turner ("Body Heat", "War of the Roses", voice of Jessica Rabbit in "Who Killed Roger Rabbit?")

Full review to follow.

Ted Haggard on Oprah and HBO!

Here's a nice photo of Oprah and her boyfriend, Stedman Graham (wink, wink).



And speaking of closet cases and their beards, guess who's gonna be on Oprah tomorrow???!!!!

OMFG, YOU'RE LIKE TOTALLY RIGHT!!!!


[REUTERS/Phil McCarten (UNITED STATES)]

Ted Haggard and his long-suffering and even longer-lied-to wife!!!!! That's who!!!! Can you believe it??!! And can you stand the absolute symmetry of it?

I know I can't. And what pure dumb luck on my part. I've already put in for the day off (to spend the day waiting to get the frickin' TiVo set up by Verizon), so I'll be, like, totally able to watch the lyin' sack of shit show!

I'm so excited, I THINK I JUST WET MYSELF!!!

Needless to say, I can hardly wait to see this AND the new Alexandra Pelosi biotrashing of Ted, "The Trials of Ted Haggard", coming up on HBO starting this Thursday, January 29, 2009 at 8:00 p.m. (EST).

There's nothing I enjoy more than watching some fag-bashing, self-loathing, closet-case, piece of crap get what's coming to him on national tv. And this week, I hit the jackpot!

Gay Kultcha

I spotted this over at JoeMyGod's website today and decided to poach post it here.

This guy is terrific. His name is Matt Alber. He used to sing with "Chanticleer." Apparently this video has been playing on Logo for a couple of weeks now. It's entitled "End of the World" and by the end of the song I think you'll be in love with Matt, too. Or, at least, the song.

Enjoy.

St. Francis Bites the Dust

Nothing sucks the fun out of life faster, or more efficiently, than a well-placed article in l'Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican. Today is no exception.

It turns out that the St. Francis Prayer:

Lord, make me a channel of thy peace;
that where there is hatred, I may bring love;
that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness;
that where there is discord, I may bring harmony;
that where there is error, I may bring truth;
that where there is doubt, I may bring faith;
that where there is despair, I may bring hope;
that where there are shadows, I may bring light;
that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.
Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted;
to understand, than to be understood;
to love, than to be loved.
For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.
It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.
It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.
Amen.

is a fraud. Remember when they announced that St. Christopher was a fraud, too? You gotta love Catholicism whose motto seems to be "Believe what we tell you or you will spend eternity in hell!!!!! Until we tell you otherwise, after which all bets are off." Oh, and by the way Galileo, we were wrong. SOOORRRYYYYY!!!.

With such a laissez-faire attitude, it's a wonder anyone bothers to believe anything the Church tells us when it'll all be repealed in a couple of hundred years with a shrug of the shoulders and a big, "Oh well, shit happens!" from whoever happens to be in charge then.

This is one case, however, where I don't really care that the prayer ascribed to Francis of Assisi wasn't actually written by him.

And the reason for that is that it's a wonderful prayer. No matter who uttered it first.

In my particular 12-Step Program, an essay on our 11th Step quotes the entire prayer. The 11th Step, for the uninitiated, states that we will "Try through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out." It's a pretty tall order. And it's just about the only way we recovering drunks can stay sober.

This prayer has helped millions of recovering drunks to stay focused on the most important things in our lives, i.e. our need to be spiritually dependent upon a power greater than ourselves and the importance of reaching out to help other recovering alcholics as a way of avoiding self-centeredness. For it is by "self-forgetting" that one finds.

Hey! It's working for me. Unlike religion.

The Homosexual Agenda

Is now published on the White House website! You can read it here:

And even after the fuckups regarding Rick Warren and Gene Robinson, I have to hope that there are, at least, some good intentions towards the LGBT community by the new administration. Provided, of course, that they don't pull a Clinton on us and throw us under the first bus that comes along.

Only time will tell --- and I am willing to give the new President time. After all, we gave Dubya eight years to royally fuck things up, didn't we?

Peace.

My Long National Nightmare is Finally Over

When I started this blog my little "Backward Bush" clock at the bottom indicated that we still had over 700 (more) days of Bush as President.

Now that clock has run out and I have removed the computer code that kept it in place for well over two years. Tomorrow (as of this writing), in accordance with the dictates of our Constitution, President Obama will take the oath of office at exactly noon as our 44th President of these United States. And whatshisname will fade, quickly I hope, into well-deserved oblivion.

I feel like I can finally breath for the first time in many years. And for that, I am truly grateful and thank God!

Dating Straight Men

BroHarmony.Com - A Place for Dudes to Meet Other Dudes @ Yahoo! Video

HELP!!!!

Should I buy the above-referenced gizmo? They want nearly $650.00 (including tax) for it. That's with a "lifetime subscription" to the updating service which, apparently, is indispensible if you're going to get the gadget to begin with.

Oh, it's a High-Definition TiVo (20 hrs. of hd or 180 hrs of regular tv).

All this just so I can watch the upcoming season of "Lost" within 48 hours of the broadcast. That's not completely true, there might be one or two other shows I'd "time shift" with it.

I'm only thinking about this because a) my 20 year old Panasonic S-VHS recorder (which cost a grand when IT was new) finally died a horrible death and b) I'm pretty certain there's no point in investing any more money in VHS technology.

So, what do you folks think? Blow the big $$$$'s and finally get with the 21st Century program here... or continue to be my old, Luddite self, trudging along the canal paths of 17th century technology?

I await YOUR decision.

Thank yew.

Memory Lane (ROM, RAM & HD)

Something popped into my head today. A fond memory of my first personal computer, purchased at the expense of a big-assed Wall Street brokerage house, for a whopping $6,000.00. I was told by the head of the equities trading department, whose approval was needed for the purchase, to hide the PC "under" my desk. Reason? So that visiting clients wouldn't think that we were "using video games to make investment decisions." I kid you not. That's what he told me.

Anyway, it was an IBM PC-XT. It came with 256kbytes of RAM and a 5Mbyte hard drive. Yeah, I know. Laughable. Mine had a color monitor, unlike the one shown below:



I wasn't the only PC "guru" on the trading floor, however. I had a counterpart who worked on the Risk Arbitrage Desk, a PhD from Cambridge University in England who happened to have a pirated version of a game called:



I loved Digger. I would spend hours ostensibly working but actually playing Digger. If anyone asked what I was doing my stock response was "Solving a programming problem" and that would shut them up.

In time the hardware outstripped the ability of Digger to keep up with it. By the time we graduated from a PC-AT (8Mhz) to a Compaq 386/16 (16Mhz), the game became impossible to play due to the zippier performance speed of the CPU (is this byte-head enough for you?).

I never got into any other "arcade" pc games the way I had with Digger. Some of the happiest moments of my life were spent zoning out (checking out) with Digger.

It didn't help matters that the musical background that accompanied the game was a famous song from the early 80's, "Popcorn." Click on it, below.

Christianist Hypocrite Asks for Tolerance

Some guy named Jordan Lorance, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, a nonprofit organization of Christian attorneys, has an editorial over on CNN arguing in favor of "tolerance" towards Rick Warren and his appearance on the podium during President-elect Obama's inauguration. Read it by clicking HERE.

He is, of course, incensed, that "we" aren't practicing the same sort of tolerance we are demanding (meaning, of course, that we aren't entitled to tolerance unless we're willing to give it and, therefore, they are justified in denying us tolerance because we're so intolerant --- capeesh?)

He waves the usual flags of America, marriage, motherhood, tradition, bullshit, etc.

And, as usual, I have one question for Mr. Lorance. Where are the n-word-hating cross-burners on the podium? (his answer: "it's not the same." my answer: "yes, it is.")

We will never have peace in the Middle East because both sides intractably hate each other -- for reasons that have nothing to do with anything other than religious beliefs because they are, undeniably, first cousins in all other respects. And they know this but neither side wants to be the first to "drop the rocks" of hatred towards each other because in their society that would be seen as a sign of weakness.

I think it's pretty clear that religious testosterone is behind our problems here, too.

Goodbye 2008

I started out 2008 looking somewhat like this:








and finished up 2008 looking a lot like this:












It hasn't been easy. Along the way there were numerous doctors appointments, dangerous surgery, support groups (other than 12-Step) and a lot of trial and error experiments with food, many of which ended in vomiting.

But I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Look, I've had a lot of medical challenges in recovery. Every thing from quadruple bypass surgery to this, gastric bypass surgery.

And this is the only one which, I feel, was truly life-altering.

I won't miss 2008. I'm hoping to use my vacation time in 2009 for actual vacations, rather than recuperating from surgery.

Here's to 2009. May it be a blessed, peaceful, calm, healthy and serene year for us all.

Peace.

-JoyZeeBoy