Gay Sex and Health
--Doctors reporting that butt sex is bad for you because it is
"against the natural flow"
as it were, fail to face reality. Most wouldn't know a natural flow if it
swept them away. Homosexuality has existed as long as
"human history"
. Suggesting to me at least
that sometimes the natural flow might go in reverse...quite naturally.
Gay Sex and Health Part 2
--And now I read that some gay super booster has written a book about how gay
sex doesn't work? He says it was sort of a let down for him. Not because
of the partners, no, because of the act.
Mark Simpson
is the author, don't remember the title, but anyway he tries to build an
argument against gay sex as being off-putting or simply to anti-hip for words.
I think
one can become physically ill from irony alone.
Visibility
--Regarding how the decision to come out of the closet would be influenced by
an awareness of the limits of fantasy, i.e. could two men conceive of let alone
desire
to spend their lives together. If the answer was no, as it might have been in
the
1950's (and earlier) then how many men would opt to retain their closeted
denial ("or straight
identity")? And as a result, could there be a larger population of out, gay men
during times of enlarged visibility and acceptance? It would seem so. Clearly
things are much easier on queers than they
used to be.
Vision
--Regarding how it must feel to a writer if his play is undermined at a crucial
early scene, say for example in "The Devil at 4 O'clock" that Spencer Tracy is
killed when the plane crashes during the initial reconnaissance flight around
the volcano--15 minutes into the movie. Leaving the supporting cast with no
will to proceed with the script that the writer had in mind. With destiny no
longer obvious, how do our replacement heroes go on?
Applied Science (1992)
--Engineering touts itself as being applied science, but most of the time it
seems to me like little more than making an educated guess and applying a
safety factor. I've spent the morning trying to determine water hammer in a
piping system. All this talk about bulk modulus and elasticity and shock waves
is well and good but I've already specified a wall thickness for the pipe
that's four times larger than the equations call for, making for a very
reliable (if a bit over-sized) design. Meanwhile in the next cubicle Sven is
performing a similar analysis down to a gnat's eyebrow, making a design equally
reliable, and perhaps a bit more cost effective, tho spending a good deal more
time than I on this one issue (pipe analysis). To my mind though, in the end
it works out even; typically Army requirements tie our hands from trying
anything remotely risky, in a design sense, which is fine with me. Its kind of
a question of how many assumptions do you take for granted and how many do you
verify.
With all our insights into the laws of physics, we're still forced to stay
inside our mental box by a quandry of engineering “assumptions”-- for example,
that we can define the tendancy of a piece of steel to deform elastically, in
terms of pounds per square inch, and that this particular quantity is
applicable to the matter at hand. (Do you know how many kinds of steel piping
there are?) We can predict the outcome of certain events within a narrow set
of parameters, and normally those parameters are adequate to our needs, say to
fly a space shuttle or build a bridge, or design a fuel storage facility for
Fort Lewis. But it intrigues me that so much of our science--at least as it
applies to everyday reality--hangs on a cloak of uncertainty and doubt. And
not surprisingly, engineers would typically be the last to admit that there's
anything they don't understand. But the only reason to apply a “safety factor”
is to compensate for what you can't know.
How's that for a sample of Dennis's reality? It's Tuesday, so this is
definitely a work day, which explains in part the prior two paragraph's
ramblings. Suffice to say that I'm a bit frustrated today. The job over-all
is fine, tho.