I do know that yesterday I began plotting what I ate in a food diary. If it sounds a little gay, it probably is. But essentially you figure out all what you ate and how good or bad you ended up on main items like calories, fat, sodium, and stuff like that. Considering I’m nearing 32 years old and don’t have any health care, I probably need to be doing some watching of what I’m eating. I’m adding a bit of exercise to the whole thing too. But don’t call it a diet program. (And don’t call it a mid-life crisis either.)

In other news: Courtney (Elf) still looks fucking hot, DJ Rick Walsh is retiring from his duties behind the turntables at Heretic on Friday, and I’m really getting back into this Magic: The Gathering hobby again. I also still RP with Stephanie, play a few video games, and am looking forward to a jam packed fall season that includes DragonCon, Alchemy, my birthday, Atlanta Gay Pride Weekend, Halloween, and writing a new novel.

I still could find time for a boyfriend though. Any takers?

Julien Reid was headed home to Ottawa on a United flight after visiting his dad in San Francisco, a trip he makes about six times a year.

He left San Francisco at 6 a.m. and arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport at 11 a.m. He was supposed to catch a connecting flight from Chicago to Ottawa at 1:50 p.m., which would have put him in Ottawa at about 4:45 p.m.

His mother, Genevieve Harte, checked online and saw that Julien’s flight was delayed until 5:35 p.m. When she arrived at the airport to pick him up, she noticed other passengers had disembarked but that her son was nowhere to be found.

Then she got a call from Julien, using his own pre-paid cell phone.

He said he was still at the Chicago airport in a “tiny, little room cramped with kids,” where they played the same video on a loop all day, the Ottawa Citizen reported. The only food he’d been given was McDonald’s, but Julian is a vegetarian. He said the other children were yelled at to “stop being kids.”

Harte, 36, asked Julien to put her on the phone with the United attendant who was watching the children. That’s when the attendant let it slip that no one had come to fetch Julien to put him on his connecting flight, she told the Ottawa Citizen.
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Harte suspects her son may have been intentionally bumped from an overcrowded flight.

“It’s a lot easier to have a kid that’s not going to say anything than an adult who has a business meeting that’s going to scream at you in front of everybody,” his mother told the Ottawa Citizen.

Julien was finally put on a flight that left Chicago at 7 p.m. after spending nearly eight hours in the waiting room.

United spokeswoman Megan McCarthy told the Ottawa Citizen that the airline apologized for the inconvenience and planned to offer Harte a refund for the child care fee and an undisclosed goodwill gesture.

Julien had his own message for the airline.

“I’ll tell them to get me a better flight next time,” he told the Ottawa Citizen.

“L.A. Zombie”, which also features homosexual sex and full-frontal male nudity, is the first film in seven years to be banned from screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which starts on July 22.

Festival director Richard Moore told The Age newspaper he had received a letter from censors rejecting the film by Canadian director Bruce LaBruce.

Described by Moore as a “video art zombie film”, “L.A. Zombie” stars French porn actor Francois Sagat as a man convinced he is an alien zombie sent to Earth to roam the streets of Los Angeles in search of dead bodies and gay sex.

Australia’s film classification board said the movie had been denied an exemption from classification, not banned as Moore had claimed.

An exemption would have allowed the film to be shown at the festival, but board director Donald McDonald said he had concluded, from the film’s synopsis and the director’s previous classification history, that “L.A Zombie” was not suitable for screening.

“In the opinion of the director, the film, if classified, would be classified X18+ or RC (refused classification) and, in this circumstance, the law requires the director to refuse an exemption,” McDonald said in a statement to AFP.

Films may not be screened publicly unless they are classified, while classifications of X18+ or RC prevent a film from being shown in most public cinemas.

Moore has defended the festival’s attempt to show the film, telling public broadcaster ABC that people have a right to judge it for themselves.

“They know they’re not gonna go and see Fantasia or Bambi,” said Moore.

“L.A. Zombie” will have its world premiere next week in Locarno, Switzerland.

Last year’s festival drew protests from China and had its website hacked over the decision to show “Ten Conditions of Love”, a biopic of Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer.

For us, camping has always been a back-to-basics experience. We pack in all food and supplies to our remote site and take out trash and whatever is not consumed. For toilets, we dig holes with entrenching shovels and cover our traces. We teach our kids respect and responsibility in the forest. And we teach them to have a good time.

During the three-day weekend trip, we fished and cooked kielbasa, hot dogs and marshmallows over an open fire. We pitched our tents near the tip of a small peninsula jutting into Clarks Hill Lake, where red clay beaches rimmed our site. We scoured the water’s edge for mussel shells and arrowheads and skipped sleek stones on the water. The days were clear and cool, with high blue skies and wisps of moving clouds. Although the nights were cold, the weekend was as perfect as we could have hoped for.

The kids ran from one thing to the next with abandon, one minute scavenging wood for a fire, and the next returning breathlessly to tell us they had spotted a deer. At night, the tall pines sawed in the wind as my friend, whom I’ll refer to as Rusty, melted aluminum cans in the campfire using a tin can as a crucible. His crude alchemy and the sudden sense of the world as laboratory lighted our imaginations as he poured the quicksilver-like liquid over the rocks ringing the fire. The kids grew excited and impatient, studying the metal-coated rocks and waiting for the aluminum to cool into odd-shaped medallions they salvaged as mementos.

Later, after the kids had gone to bed in their tent and the cold descended, Rusty and I sat in our camp chairs, having a beer and warming our boots a little too close to the fire. I still wear that pair of Wolverines with the half-melted soles. And every time I put them on, I think of what happened when we returned from that weekend and how it changed all of our lives.

As usual during the trip, we took several photos. Because I forgot my digital camera, I bought a disposable camera at a gas station on the way to the campground. I took pictures of the kids using sticks to beat on old bottles and cans and logs as musical instruments. I took a few of my youngest daughter, Eliza, then age 3, skinny-dipping in the lake, and my son, Noah, then age 8, swimming in the lake in his underwear, and another of Noah naked, hamming it up while using a long stick to hold his underwear over the fire to dry. Finally, I took a photo of everyone, as was our camping tradition, peeing on the ashes of the fire to put it out for the last time. We also let the kids take photos of their own.

When we returned on Sunday, I forgot the throwaway camera and Rusty found it in his car. He gave it to his wife, whom I’ll call Janet, to get developed, and she dropped it off the next day with two other rolls of film at a local Eckerd drugstore. On Tuesday, when she returned to pick up the film, she was approached by two officers from the Savannah Police Department. They told her they had been called by Eckerd due to “questionable photos.”

One officer told Janet “there were pictures of little kids running around with no clothes on, pictures of minors drinking alcohol,” she recounted for me in an e-mail. “I asked to see the pictures and was told I couldn’t. I explained there must be a mistake. I was kind of laughing, you know, ‘Come on guys. There must be an explanation. This is crazy. Let me see the pictures.’ The officer told me that he personally did not find [the photos] offensive and that he had camped himself as a kid and knows what goes on.” But the officer also told Janet that “because Eckerd’s had called them and that because there were pictures of children naked, genitalia and alcohol, they would have to investigate.”

(more at salon.com)

The judgment handed down Friday in New York involves an Atlanta lawyer who has been crusading against circumcision as a dangerous and unnecessary practice.

Attorney David Llewellyn won a similar case in Atlanta last year and the injury behind that prior lawsuit in Fulton County Superior Court put the New York clamp manufacturer on notice about the danger of the device, his current lawsuit said.

The baby in the current case, identified in court documents only as L.G., lost the entire glans, or head, of his penis after it was pulled into the jaws of the clamp, according to a federal magistrate’s order. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Jack B. Weinstein ordered Mogen Circumcision Instruments of New York to pay $10.8 million in compensatory and punitive damages to the Florida boy, now 3, and his parents.

The parents “are extraordinarily distraught and angered that this company tells people it can’t happen,” Llewellyn said.

It’s unclear whether they will ever collect the money. Mogen is already in default on a $7.5 million judgment in 2007 from a Massachusetts lawsuit, Llewellyn said.

(more at ajc.com)

They claim they boosted the signal. But, of course, they really haven’t. It’s just the same revolving door of double speak.

I’m getting the same run-around with Ebay. A while back I listed something that didn’t sell. Instead of instantly refunding my 6.15 they kept it. I didn’t think too much of it at first, but as I kept getting invoices that said I had -6.15 balance, I thought, it sure would be nice to have that money back. I wrote them, they said sure, attach a PayPal account and we’ll get right on that. 30 days went by, no refund. I wrote them back saying what’s the deal yo? They said, oh so sorry, but we need a credit card number or bank account number. I said, no, you told me you need a PayPal account attached. They replied, okay sure, we’ll get right on that. 30 days went by, no refund.

Customer No Service.

Normand Czepial of Ripon, Que. — less than an hour’s drive northeast of Gatineau — arrived at City Hall on Wednesday with a children’s pool filled with 213,625 pennies.

Czepial’s property tax bill reportedly rose by nearly $4,000 dollars last year to $6,400. Czepial tried to pay with pennies to protest the hike.

Ripon Mayor Luc Desjardins was surprised to see the stunt, but had to tell Czepial to find another way to pay his bill.

Under the Currency Act, nobody is obliged to accept more than 25 pennies as payment for any product or service. Normand Czepial, unfortunately, was 213,600 over the limit.

XY, which billed itself as a young gay men’s magazine and could be found at XY.com, ceased publishing in 2007. Its founder filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year, which could put names, addresses, e-mail addresses, unpublished personal stories, and other information about gay minors into creditors’ hands.

The Federal Trade Commission recently expressed its concerns, saying in a letter to creditors and attorneys involved in the case that “any sale, transfer, or use” of XY’s personal information “raises serious privacy issues and could violate” federal law.

XY’s creditors have hired a lawyer to obtain the personal information held by the magazine and Web site. But because XY.com’s privacy policy said that “We never give your info to anybody,” any personal data should be “destroyed,” wrote David Vladeck, the head of the FTC’s bureau of consumer protection, in a letter this month.

The question of who owns personal data collected by a failed company–and what should be done with it–is not exactly a new question.

A decade ago, as the dot-com bubble collapsed, failed companies scrambled to sell assets to appease creditors. In 2000, Boo.com sold its customer list to Fashionmall.com. The same year, Toysmart.com, majority-owned by the Walt Disney Co., tried to follow suit, but abandoned its plans following pressure from state attorneys general.

But none of those bankruptcy proceedings included information as sensitive as the customer list for a magazine and Web site that targeted gay youth between 13 and 17 years old who were in the process of grappling with their sexual identity.

(more a cnet)

(Ed note: Man, I miss XY Magazine. I still have dozens of copies. It never was on time and it really did just crash and burn, but man was it so satisfying to have that flying the faces of all those fuckers who try to put you down as a gay kid. I highly recommend finding some via the internets.)

At approximately 10 p.m., Jarvis Johnson, 19, and five other males ranging in age from 13 to 17 approached two men having a picnic in Piedmont Park, asked if they were gay and then threatened them, the report states. The suspects then began to attack each individual separately.

“We were just finishing up dinner and playing cards when they came up to us and asked if we were gay,” Joshua Noblitt, 32, told the AJC on Tuesday. “It wasn’t very organized. I don’t know if they thought gay men in the park would be an easy target based on stereotypes and stuff, or what.”

Noblitt said one of the suspects used a large stick to assault him, which he grabbed away from him and turned on his assailant.

The report states that Noblitt and his boyfriend, Trent Williams, 25, “began to get the best of the suspects,” and Johnson used his cellphone to call for help from friends.

(more at AJC.com)

I’ve added to the NAVI section a link to my new blog over on Wizards of the Coast’s website. It will be where I detail my return to playing of the game. Will it be a success or an unmitigated disaster? Who knows, but it sure will probably be fun to watch the carnage.

Evolution has produced a range of humans capable of being alert to danger at every hour of the day. Our experience confirms these findings. We all know people who love to be at work bright and early, with a cup of coffee to hand and decisions to make, and others who would rather stumble through the day until reaching a state of relaxed clarity around dusk, when their minds are purring.

The problem is that those with the genetic gift of “morning-ness” tend to be more highly rewarded. Morning-ness is perceived as a sign of activity and zest, whereas evening-ness implies laziness and loafing. How often did we have to see David Cameron on one of his early-morning runs to get the idea that here was a leader of potency and vigour? How different would it have been if he slunk out of bed to work, then exercised at around 8pm? Could a Prime Minister be elected today who worked like Churchill, reading, writing and thinking in bed before getting out of it at noon?

History is full of great bores praising the virtues of early rising, but few have made the case for letting the day drift by until you kick into gear around happy hour.

Yet the research continues to mount, arguing that evening people have qualities which should be nurtured. They tend to be more creative, intelligent, humorous and extroverted. They are the balance to morning people, who are said to be more optimistic, proactive and conscientious.

Evening and morning are the right and left sides of our brain, the creative and the analytical, both of which we need to organise, process and advance our lives.

New research by Christoph Randler, a biology professor at the University of Education at Heidelberg, however, concludes that morning people are more likely to succeed in their careers because they are more proactive than evening people.

He surveyed 367 university students, asking them when they were most energetic and willing to change a situation. It was the morning people who were more likely to agree with statements such as “I feel in charge of making things happen” and “I spend time identifying long-range goals for myself.”

Discussing his research in the Harvard Business Review, Randler says: “When it comes to business success, morning people hold the important cards. My earlier research showed that they tend to get better grades in school, which gets them into better colleges, which then leads to better job opportunities. Morning people also anticipate problems and try to minimise them. They’re proactive.”

Christopher Coleridge, the founder of V Water, the fast-growing vitamin-enhanced water brand, has a different view on the advantages of morning-ness. “Morning is always the best time to get people to make decisions because people are full of optimism in the morning. By 9am, nothing really can go wrong. You’re full of hope. By 4pm, at least six annoying things will have happened, so by the evening you’re slightly annoyed and frustrated. Fortunately, you then have the rest of the evening to pick yourself up.”

Earlier in his career, when Coleridge worked in advertising, he found the culture much more focused on the evenings, when conversations over drinks would lead to creative ideas. But as an entrepreneur, he found mornings were the best time to corral people’s energies.

Evening-ness, he says, can be exploited by companies that are full of young people. But mornings appeal more to people with families who want a schedule which allows them to get in early and leave on time. For the growing army of part-time and freelance workers, tight schedules are just as important. “They tend to be very focused because they are moving from project to project and they don’t have time to yack away.”

In certain environments, morning-ness is unavoidable. In the City, many of the most significant meetings take place before the markets open. Schools, however, force morning-ness on teenagers at a moment when everything else in their lives — their hormones, their social lives, their working patterns — is drifting towards the evening.

But can one change one’s chronotype from evening to morning? Randler says “somewhat”, but it can be hard. He cites one study that showed half of school pupils were able permanently to shift the time they woke up by one hour. Chronotypes, however, do evolve over one’s life. Adolescents tend towards evening-ness; from the ages of 30 to 50, people are evenly split between morning and evening; and over-50s are more morning types.

The challenge for companies, Randler says, is to accept that evening-ness is an inherent trait and, rather than battling against it, find ways to “get the best out from their night owls”.