james nunn | blog

We have just returned from a very pleasant evening celebrating Chris’s birthday. Chris wanted to try Jasper’s Restaurant, which offers Gourmet Backyard Cuisine, and then enjoy a glass of wine at Cru Wine Bar after the meal.

It was a wonderful evening celebrated with our friends: Bobby & Ian, Layton, Brian, Jonas & Corey.

We even had time to explore dodgeball and update our listings while we waited for our table at Cru.

Layton was the only sensible one that bought a camera, so hopefully there will be some pictures from the evening posted shortly.

I was remiss to not post this at the start of the day, but it’s my man’s birthday today, and I have to let the world know that I am wishing him a happy birthday!

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday dear Chris
Happy birthday to you.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. federal court ruled on Thursday that a 1998 law designed to block children from viewing Internet pornography violates the U.S. Constitution’s free speech protections.

Read the article here.

It seems that “some gay rights advocates who previously fought for ‘marriage or nothing’ are shifting strategies,” according to a report in the Boston Herald. Of course, the big organizations that claim to represent the interest of the GLBT community aren’t going to be changing their strategy, and so things will get much worse before they start to get better.

The Freedom to Marry group has stated that, “anything short of marriage relegates gays and lesbians to second-class status,” a position that is reflected by the Human Rights Campaign. Sadly, it is this attitude (in my view) that has been responsible for the vast amount of constitutional amendments across the United States that ban gay marriage, or anything that resembles it. It’s the main reason that I’m no longer a member of HRC.

It seems that it’s not just the North Texas region that is seeing an increase HIV infections among mid-life men (35-49). According to this article, the increase could be explained by a number of reasons:

• having survived the HIV pandemic, urban gay men in mid-life may be particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of decimated social networks
• the methamphetamine epidemic that has swept through urban gay communities also contributes to high levels of new HIV infections
• gay men in mid-life are at the center of a ‘perfect storm,’ in which multiple problems converge to create a very high-risk environment

I couldn’t agree more with this comment from the article, “We urgently need to create programs that directly address the real reasons that gay men engage in high-risk behavior.” It’s not always just about remembering those we’ve lost to HIV/AIDS, but sometimes the fight has to intervene and prevent more losses.

Source: Gay News Blog

I’m getting really tired with one of our hosting providers (i.e. Vista Pages). It seems that everytime they make an improvement to their service, they totally mess up the email and/or web hosting.

Last night, I sat down to send some email. I copied myself on one of those emails, and hit the send button. My BlackBerry didn’t beep. Odd, I thought. So I logged into my gMail, to see if the message had been received in my inbox (I’ll explain my email structure soon – so this will make sense). Nothing.

I’ve had this happen before, so I logged onto VP Support, and advised them that this was an issue, and that it has happened before. “Submit a trouble ticket”, I was told. So I did, and then reactivated all the other trouble tickets that related to this same problem (referring them to the new trouble ticket).

It’s been over twelve hours and still no email is flowing in (or out).

As for why my BlackBerry didn’t beep, or gMail was empty … when an email is sent to my personal email address it goes to three places: my email account (for when I download in Outlook), my BlackBerry and my gMail account. This system actually works really well for me, as if I am at work or school and get an email that has an attachment that I read on my BlackBerry, and I decide I want to forward it (BB’s don’t do forwarding of attachments very well, if at all), then I just log into gMail and forward it that way. Of course, then I get home and download all my mail, primarily for archival purposes. Simple, eh?

Today is the official start of my spring break! Yay!!

So how does one start their spring break? By catching up on blogs, of course!

To start of with, you have to read this post by danah over at apophenia.

The article mainly covers the topic of narcissism, and touches on issues covering the search for fame, the value we place on fame (“I am worried that Paris Hilton is a more meaningful role model to most American girls than Mother Theresa ever was”), and how all this affects society. danah writes about how narcissism drives adolescent’s (in particular) use of social network sites, like MySpace. She also discusses religiosity (which many of my friends will confirm, always gets me to perk up a little). Nothing like a good dose of religiosity in the morning to get the blood pumping. I will say that I was surprised by the comment that “[w]hen i started seeing how people in rural America recovered from meth, i found one common solution: born-again Christianity.” That says a lot!

From a sociological perspective, I was interested in danah’s view on the role of Christian Industrial Complex and how it endorses the continued stratisfication of society. I actually agree with her statement that the “Christian Industrial Complex has risen into power in both politics and corporate life, but their underlying mission is the same: justify poor people’s industrial slavery so that the rich and powerful can become more rich and powerful.”

Read the article. As with most of danah’s posts, this is extremely thought provoking.

James Watkins also discusses the Christian Industrial Complex more over here. Watkins gives a brief overview of the issue over “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Holidays” and what may have been driving that. He also mentions some interesting insights into Christmas, in particular that in many New England towns, Christmas was prohibited by law. Watkins refers to this as the “forgotten history of Christmas.”

It appears that Mr Humphries (John Inman) has died from complications of Hepatitis A. Andy over at Towleroad provides a summary and links to articles relating to this.

It will be sad not to have another “Are You Being Served?” reunion or panto with John in it.