OK to be GAY? And other issues... Henrieta's Hetero Defense Workshop II 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.