Blackmoor Vituperative

I am watching You Kill Me with Ben Kingsley and Luke Wilson. This is pretty funny. I kind of wish we had a family business. It might give us a sense of belonging, of being a part of something. I am glad that it’s not the Polish mob, though.

My nephew Spencer has been selected in this year’s “Who’s who in band”. He plays the cornet, “a brass instrument very similar to the trumpet”. I have been trying to find out more about “Who’s who in band”, but a Google search surprisingly turns up nothing at all about it.

Even so, it’s pretty cool. I always wished I could play an instrument, but apparently you need to do more than wish. Spencer has accomplished something I never did. That’s pretty nifty.

My niece Makayla being interviewed on television.

She earned third place in a school-wide spelling bee. 🙂

You may have heard about “Proposition 8“, the California ballot to enshrine “marriage = one man and one woman” in their state constitution, and how the citizens of California ratified it in November 2008. By itself, I do not find this so surprising. People are really quite stupid, by and large, and California is no exception. Still, it makes me a little sad.

The New Yorker has an interesting article which examines some of the social trends behind efforts like Proposition 8. You might enjoy reading it.

I do not remember my biological father. I was two or maybe three when my biological parents split up, and I do not remember anything from when I was that young (my memory from before the age of ten or eleven is actually pretty spotty — I remember snatches of things, but there are large spans of time I do not recall at all).

A while ago, a friend of mine asked if I’d ever tried contacting my biological father. I said “no”. To be frank, it just never occurred to me. Why would I? He said I might regret it if I never tried to contact him. At the time, it just seemed like a senseless thing to do. Why would I bother trying to contact some stranger?

But after thinking about it a while, I decided to go ahead and try. What the heck? It might be interesting. I guess I was just curious. So I asked my mother for my biological father’s complete name and last known address. She had his name, but not his address. She told me the last city she knew of where he’d lived, but that was decades ago. Well, I was a private detective for a brief time, and that was enough. I found him in about ten minutes. Yeah, I’m pretty awesome. 🙂

I called him on the phone, asked if he was the man I was looking for, and told him who I was. He seemed a little taken aback, but welcomed the suggestion that we meet at some neutral place to meet and see what kind of people the other person is.

Well, that’s not going to happen. He called me back the other night, and said that he’d given it a great deal of thought, and he’d decided that 40 years apart is too long a span to get to know someone again. He said he had a wife and a son, and a good life, and that I was a stranger to him and there’d be no point in our meeting. I said I understood completely, and there were no hard feelings. I told him that I didn’t want to disrupt his life, and that I didn’t want anything from him, and that I didn’t blame him at all for not wanting to meet after all this time.

He seemed a little defensive. Maybe he thought I’d take it badly. He also seemed to have some unresolved issues with my mother. He said things like, “I’m sure you’ve been told a lot about me, and I want you to know that a lot of it isn’t true,” and “I don’t know anything about how your mother is doing, and I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know anything about her.”

I told him that other than his name and the fact he was my biological father, I hadn’t been told anything about him, and that I wouldn’t mention my mother at all if he didn’t want me too. Not a problem. I didn’t look him up to discuss her. He seemed to relax a little after that, and said that he’d be willing to answer a couple of questions, “within reason”.

He answered a couple of medical questions for me, and we talked a few more minutes. He said that he had a good life, he’d been married for 37 years and was proud of his (other) son, that he’d never been arrested, and so forth. I said that sounded great, that I’d been married 16 years, and that I also was happy and had a good life, and that I was glad that we had that in common.

At the end of the conversation, he said I could call him again some time if I wanted, and that maybe we could meet some day. I don’t think I’ll bother. I think my curiosity is satisfied, and what I told him was true: I really don’t want anything from him. I am glad I called him, though.

My nephew Kai is a real-life Jack-Jack.

My gorgeous and talented wife Susan won the 2005 Simplicity American Sewing Guild Creativity Contest in the category “Most Interesting Wardrobe Concept”.

Susan works in a laboratory analyzing materials for asbestos. The color scheme of her six-piece wardrobe, which ranges from magenta to purple to dark blue on a black field, echoes the dispersion staining colors of Chrysotile, the most common type of asbestos. Embellishment details were inspired by the way Chrysotile fibers look under a microscope.

(from Simplicity, The American Sewing Guild Creativity Contest Winners)

One of my sisters sent me (and about a hundred other people) an email entitled “Help this little Boy – Tsunami Victim”. It was a forwarded message written by someone she’d never met, and she had no idea if either the author or the little boy actually existed. But she forwarded it anyway, just like millions of people do, clogging up the mail servers of the world with yet more junk mail. As if we do not already get enough garbage in our mailboxes.

I spent the ten seconds it takes to research this sort of thing, and discovered that a) surprisingly, the little boy does exist, and b) that he was identified and rescued by his family months ago. So why are people still forwarding this junk mail to dozens of people who wouldn’t know this little boy if he walked in the room? Because they don’t think.

I replied (to all) with a very polite response, saying that one should investigate email from strangers before forwarding it, and that the little boy in the eponymous email had, in fact, already been helped back in December. She was offended, naturally.

What makes me really sad is that my family is brighter than most. I weep for my species.