My dearest friends, Jack & Vicki Newton suffered a devastating house fire on Christmas morning. Their home was destroyed & they lost everything, but they and their two kids Emmett & Aly (and dogs Fenway & Scout) are safe.
They are all physically OK, but their life has been turned upside down once again. Jack, Veek, Emmett & Aly are going to need a lot of help in a lot of ways. A week after the fire, they managed to secure a rental house nearby (across the street actually). They will be staying there till demolition and construction is complete at their old home.
They were insured, "fully insured" as the euphemism goes. But they have now discovered there is a SIGNIFICANT gap between the amount they are likely to receive in a settlement and the cost to rebuild a similar home on the same property.
As a result, friends and family, neighbors and total strangers have begun to donate to the family in order to help to "close the gap."
For immediate assistance in this effort, I have also set up a PayPal donation link, where you can make a financial donation of any amount you can, shown below and also found at http://bdrileys.com
Cash or check donations (payable to John D. Newton) will also be accepted at : B.D. Riley's Irish Pub, 204 East 6th Street Austin TX 78701 512-494-1335
If you want to offer other assistance, or inquire about what they might need, send email to newtonfirehelp@bdrileys.com and I'll gather the offers and try to match them up with needs.
Test your smoke detectors & replace the batteries--Smoke detectors saved 6 lives on Christmas morning. Count our blessings--they are alive and unhurt, physically.
Amazon explanations for this weekend's de-ranking of GLBT-themed and authored books, so far, in reported order of issuance:
It's our policy to exclude adult material from ranking, searches & listings;
It's a "glitch" and we are working on it;
A hacker managed to script repeated "flag as inappropriate" actions targeted exclusively to GLBT-themed books, causing Amazon to assume that suddenly, an apparent unanticipated and heretofore unobserved increase of a couple orders of magnitude in customers all over the world upset with and flagging GLBT-themed books was, in fact, such an increase, and de-rank all those books;
Blame the French: "This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error [reportedly by a French Amazon staffer] for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection," wrote Drew Herdener, Amazon's director of communications, in an email.
Still waiting for the whole truth. And a complete explanation.
There has been a firestorm of outcry on Twitter (hashtag #AmazonFail has topped the trend list for about 24 hours), on Facebook (author Mark Probst ("The Filly") broke the story, and Christopher Rice ("A Density of Souls") posted about it on Facebook and commented on behalf of the Lambda Literary Foundation on NPR and other news stations) and countless news and literary blogs and author journals are ablaze with the story. All that Amazon has mustered are the lame statements noted in excuses 1, 2 & 4 above. No site message. No banner update. No Amazon blog entry. No official position proactively put in front of the millions of customers who make up this "world's most customer-centric company."
No matter that it happened on a holiday weekend. Plane crashes happen then too--and disaster response teams are always at the ready. For an international web-based commerce site such as Amazon (and cloud provider under the Amazon Web Services rubric) to lack a "Go Team" of web-monitoring, hacker-searching, weird-thing-noticing ready response developers and PR flacks in 2009, 14 years into its existence seems inexcusable.
Fail. Unmitigated corporate public relations failure. Giant unabashed PR disaster, and soon to be a case example of how NOT to respond to a corporate PR disaster in the age of Facebook and Twitter. It remains to be seen if their much-vaunted sales ranking, referral and recommendation engine and indeed site security will regain any vestiges of the credibility and power it once enjoyed.
Amazon has apparently forgotten to use the one perfect tool at its disposal that made it's very existence possible. The internet. Incredibly poor execution, and I have been an Amazon customer for nearly 14 years.
Still waiting for some answers, and hoping to see that someone may have learned that it's not the crime, it's the cover up that gets you. But I'm not optimistic.
It's been a whirl of a week, replete with wind. The annual onslaught of South by South West film fanatics, interactive geeks and skinny pants music types has come and gone, and though i am exhausted, it was, as usual, a pretty excellent week. Very good music at our little venue (a curious luck of the draw) drew record crowds of mostly pleasant people who mostly tipped pleasantly as well; it's 4 days of compressed fun crammed into the end of the week after St. Patrick's Day and each year it's about all I can handle.
But this afternoon, something else ended as well. I made a visit to a bar (a rare event for me, in daylight hours anyway) to pay my last respects. The Austin Ginger Man, temple of taps that it is, closes its doors today in the final night before the NEW Austin Ginger Man opens about 100 yards away.
I love this bar. I have since I discovered it a few months after I moved to Austin in 1993 and hit the Waterloo Brewing Company right next door. Waterloo is long gone, as is the crappy food/bad service chain monstrosity that replaced it, but the Ginger Man has endured since 1994. Till today.
Over the past several years you could find me every Sunday and most Wednesday nights after midnight (when our own pub closed) bellied up to the massive Ginger Man bar, sipping a favorite draft from the wall of 85 taps. The years, and the beers blur, but every night has been a simple beery pleasure. I have enjoyed beer tastings from Belgium and Texas and all over the world, sipped beer in the glorious back yard, under the Live Oak trees, dodging grackle shit and luxuriating in the urban oasis the G-man provided, relished the creamy cask ale, often St. Arnold's Elissa IPA, served up old-style from a hand-pumped beer engine, and sampled exotic bottled brews from all over the world.
Each visit finds me in the company of great friends, either the beer lovers on my side of the bar, or the beer lovers behind the bar making the pub the wonder it has always been. Kristin and Corina, Jeff, Dave, Josh, Ben, Josie, Nick Eric, Chad, Anders, Joe and the entire staff have always made my friends and I feel welcome, and part of the G-Man family. The sum total of beer knowledge in the pub is astounding, and there is no lack of quality recommendations when I have needed a change or a bump in a new beer direction.
I'll miss this old barn of a building, the vast ceilings, the warm brick, the giant wall of cans, the creaky wide-plank floors, the woody aroma of malt and oak that pervades, the wonderful, irreplaceable back yard. But I celebrate the fact that the spirit of the Ginger Man will live on, just across the street (the new location is less than 100 yards South East, on Lavaca between 4th and 3rd) in new digs that will soon echo with the clink of pint glasses and the laughter of friends. As I said goodbye and good luck to the weary manager (facing a couple more days of intensive moving and rearranging) I actually felt a bit teary-eyed. Beer does that to me, especially from this fine watering hole.
The new location looks a bit new of course, but it looks beautiful. As the bits and pieces of transplanted breweriana are added to the new walls, a bit of the "something old, something new" will take hold, and the Ginger Man will once again emerge. We have some edges to round off, some beer to spill, some lovely new cedar tables to break in, but what makes the G-Man the G-man remains constant: people who love beer. Some who run the place and work there, and many more who celebrate the wonderful gift of the Sumerians and sharing a pint with friends and new-found fellow travelers.
Today, I really looked at the place, with melancholy shadows of posters and trays and dart boards lingering like spirits on walls I had scarcely noticed before in the dark. In the glorious sunlight streaming in through the skylights, the place showed its age, and its character, and its bones. I was honored to help carry the giant Ginger Man sign from the back yard to the new location, and saw in a quirk of fate just how perfectly its aged lettering matched the honey toned wood of the new deck, benches and tables. It fits. Just as we all will soon.
When all is wrapped up and buttoned down at 304 W 4th Street, a new temple of beer, and the people that make beer fun will emerge 3 days later at 301 Lavaca Street.
There is a rampant Facebook "poke" going on at present, in which you write down 25 random things about yourself, and then "tag" in FB parlance, 25 friends that you either mention, or whom you would like to read your missive, or share one of their own.
I like the "25 Things" idea, but hate the "chain letter" aspect of it. (i.e. "If you do not make 5 copies of this letter and mail them to 5 friends, your spine will curve and the Allies might lose the war...") So if you feel inspired, rather than compelled to respond with some things the world might not know about you, that would be nice.
1. I'm a visual learner, so languages learned long ago (French, German) are now reduced to a surprising ability to read signs and menus and such whilst abroad. But I'm not as good at it as I think I am. Despite a near total lack of fluency in any language but English, people ask me for directions in cities all over the world.
2. I lived in a 10' x 50' trailer with my mom and dad, brother Michael, sister Peggy until I was almost a year old. My grandparents ran the trailer park and my dad was a salesman there. I grew up in Albany, NY, and went to school in Syracuse, NY, and London. I have lived in New Britain, CT, Wickford, RI, Fall River, MA, Roslyn Heights NY, NY City and Austin. I like Austin a lot.
3. My "Irish twin" sister is 11 months 23 days younger than I. She was a bit premature and seemed to fail to thrive, until my mom realized I had been climbing out of my crib, across the changing table into her crib to drop off my empty bottle and retrieve hers. Survival of the fattest.
4. I had the most ordinary, vanilla, middle American home life imaginable, with two loving, present parents who remain happily married some 56 years after their big day. Almost losing my dad in 2001 changed my life. At 83 he and my mom, at 75, continue to inspire and amaze me.
5. First crushes: Timmy in Lassie, Mark in the Rifleman, Dennis the Menace, Jack Wild in HR PufnStuf, Wally in Leave it to Beaver, Luke in Flipper, wanting to BE Mark Lester in Oliver, I knew I was gay in my earliest recollections, long before I had any idea what it meant.
6. I skipped 4th grade. The thought was that my (then) oddly high IQ and late 8th grade reading level might have been a distraction to my classmates. My best friend Mike Church got held back a year; we ended up 2 years apart and were never really friends again. I have most often been a year younger than most of my classmates and was 20 when I finished college.
7. I went to every prom in my high school years, and most in the nearby "sister school." I always got the girls home early and was a perfect gentleman.
8. My first real concert was Bobby Sherman at Saratoga Performing Arts Center in 1970 or so. I went with my sisters and my cousin Patty. Duh. If there was any doubt about that gay thing it should have been cleared up by then.
9, I have been a construction laborer, sandwich maker, bartender, waiter, Gallup pollster, asbestos testing technician, construction safety trainer, telephone and computer salesman, professional services consultant, manager, director, vice-president and bartender again.
10. I voted for Reagan in 1984. I'm not proud of that but it was half my life ago.
11. I'm a Patriots fan and have been since I started watching them in New Britain, CT back in 1984.
12. There is nothing in my life more important than my family, and there is nothing I would not do for each and every one of them. Fortunately, I actually LIKE my family, really love them. I can hang out with any of them and enjoy it.
13. I have five nephews and a niece who give me hope for the future. I have three godsons and two goddaughters too, only one is related, my wonderfully liberal godson Brendan. I AM the Fairy Godfather.
14. I collect watches. I am enthralled by mechanical timepieces that need me to make them work well.
15. Recovering from early political stumbling, I helped to encircle the Bush White House with symbolic "Red Tape" in 1992 to protest continued Republican inaction on HIV and AIDS. I also worked on the display of the entire NAMES Project AIDS Quilt on the Mall that October. It was the kick in the ass I needed to come out of the closet to family and friends.
16. I believe we owe it to each other to help each other in any way we can.
17. I believe the last 8 years under George W. Bush represent the darkest days the Presidency, the Constitution, the American image in the world and the American people have yet endured. Besides "former" no adjective in front of "President Bush" would make me happier than "convicted criminal."
18. I am a remarkably fast typist who looks at his keys and types mainly with three fingers. When I took typing in high school in 1975 I assumed since I had no intention of becoming a secretary, I would never see a typewriter again; as a result I took it less than seriously. The word "keyboard" was foreign to me at that point.
19. I value friendship dearly, and count my friends, my real friends as the greatest things in my life outside of family. Austin has brought me a world of friends I cannot imagine being without.
20. Whenever I hear the Lord's Prayer, I subconsciously say the words in German in my head. Thank you Doctor Wiley. Ruhe in Frieden.
21. I have gone on a canoe trip called "Brew Canoe" with a bunch of lunatic friends on the Delaware River every single Summer since 1984 without exception. We have been going long enough that THEIR kids are now bringing friends of their own.
22. I have never had any formal education in computers or computer science. After a dalliance in Pre-Med, and despite majoring in English/Broadcast Communication with Minors in Philosophy and Psychology I was computer salesperson of the year in 1986, managed a team of systems engineers at a huge systems integrator and ran marketing for the Americas at a billion dollar division of IBM. You can fool some of the people some of the time.
23. I love the written word, and appreciate great writing. I have been reading since age 4 or so and have never stopped.
24. Managing and working in a cool Irish pub remains a surprisingly satisfying adventure.
25. Social networking intrigues, delights and annoys me, sometimes at the same time.
I used to work with this pretty cool woman, a capable, tough as nails sales person, who single-handedly wrangled countless Federal agencies into becoming customers for the software we were hawking. She put our Federal sales on the map and had a great time doing so.
Over the years I met her husband a few times, and her kids once, but work was work; over time, we moved to new companies, new locations, and out of each other's lives. Years passed.
Enter LinkedIn, of all things. A request to connect, a glimpse at an online profile, and suddenly, we were re-connected, electronically at least. Then I saw a "caringbridge.org" URL in the list of websites in her personal profile. It gave me an actual chill. I swallowed hard--I knew this meant something bad had happened.
So began several hours of reading about a cataclysmic tragedy, life-threatening injury, and a struggle to stay alive for an average 17 year old boy who simply dove into the wrong wave at the beach.
I moved from the medical updates to the blogs, hers (http://elisacafferky.org/ ) and her son's, (http://nickcafferky.org/ ) the updates about little triumphs and major setbacks, about literal small steps forward in therapy, in healing, and most of all, in faith. Suddenly, I was immersed in this amazing story of good people working to grasp and overcome grave badness, a sudden "pulling out the rug" moment in an ordinary family's life turned to a series of steps toward acceptance of the fact that life would never be the same.
But it would be LIFE. And so it is. I have had a glimpse into a whirlwind of tragedy, shock, and horror. Of luck and faith and success and strength and humor and faith and family and friendship and community and incredible resolve and love. And faith. I have seen, online, a life emerge, far different from a path that anyone would have chosen, but one which my friends are LIVING, every single day at a time.
This faith is a powerful force here. The word religion come from the Latin "re ligare," meaning "to bind together." I am witness to the ties of faith that have drawn tightly around this mother and her family, around this young man and his friends, around doctors and therapists, teachers and counselors, lifeguards and caregivers and I am awed by their power. The power of faith is tangible, and its effects soothing and far reaching.
The wheel turns forward. A year and a half removed from that day at the beach, this boy, this young man, will attend college in the Fall, accepted early at Virginia Tech after working hard to rejoin with his high school class after his accident. His mother and father are working to handle the myriad challenges that health care costs and bureaucracy and debt throw in their path. His little brother also seeks what will pass for normal as time passes. This is the new normal. The normal that will never be the same, but one which includes the whole family, the extended family and the community of friends who rally to celebrate the triumph of love and of life.
I am awed by this family. They show what we can overcome. They show the power of faith, and hope, and love.
I join them in celebrating the new normal, and in hoping that every challenging day moves closer to fine.
6 years ago, I visited Washington DC with my sister & brother-in-law and their three boys, then aged 8, 12 and 14. We hit the museums along the Mall, and in the American History Museum, one exhibit caught the eye of my godson, 8-year-old Brendan. It was a pair of water fountains, adjacent to a lunch counter.
The water fountains had been taken from a train station in a southern city, and were marked "White" and "Colored" like this photo.
The lunch counter, labeled "Whites Only," was the actual Woolworth luncheonette counter from Greensboro, NC at which a 6-month boycott and several "sit-ins" took place when African-American diners refused to leave and demanded to be served lunch.
Bren was amazed. He didn't believe it was real at first. "No WAY!" he said. "They didn't really have separate water fountains! Really?" Then he decided this must have been "like...a LONG LONG time ago right?" When his parents and I pointed out that not only was it real, but also that it happened while we were kids, in OUR lifetime, he was stunned. It really affected him. Even after seeing Dorothy's ruby slippers, the original Kermit the Frog, Archie Bunker's chair, melted steel from the WTC attack, and the actual flag that inspired the Star Spangled Banner, he kept wandering back to the counter, as if to soak it all in. He was stunned, and it seemed to affect him. We talked a bit about progress we have made, and work that needs to be done. God I love that kid. He's a true progressive today too, even at 14.
Flash forward to today. I got an email passed along from Brendan’s oldest brother, who at 20 is studying in Galway, and visiting European cities as often as he can, especially when he can spend some time with his girlfriend, who is also abroad. Today's email came from Florence, where they of course visited the gallery in which Michelangelo’s “David” is displayed.
Tim’s words from the Galleria dell'Accademia made me tear up as I recalled the emotions I felt on seeing the same awe-inspiring sight at his age almost 30 years ago. They struck me as sweetly evocative of what I am feeling today, and a bookend to his little brother’s amazement 6 years ago at what we have done to each other in the past:
“We were walking through some of the front rooms and then I turned a corner and saw him. They have him standing at the far end of a long hallway in a circular room with a glass ceiling. Caroline let me stay for half an hour in that room but I would have stayed longer. It was a room of people from all over the world who all traveled far to see this. We were all thinking the same thing as we looked at him. Look at what we're capable of.”
Indeed. Look at what we are capable of.
The wheel only turns forward. Let us move forward and celebrate what we are capable of. VOTE.
If this election represents a hard choice, you might not be paying attention. McCain's VP pick might have cemented it for a few people still on the fence. Judgment is suspect here. Worst. Vetting. Ever. Least qualified VP candidate that I can recall, a fact made even more ridiculous by the lemming-like surrogates who try to defend her "experience" running a moose fart of a town in Alaska as worthy of even our contempt.
This election is about a new-er direction or the old direction, unmodified. That's easy. While neither of these candidates are perfect, one is less of the same old crap that has brought us through 8 years of hell to a point at which 81% of the country believes we are on the wrong track. One side, McCain's side, has brought us to a war-mired recession economy with the largest simultaneous foreclosure, bankruptcy, health care and credit crises in history. And the worst world-wide reputation this country has ever endured.
I'm sorry, but there is no chance that a third-party candidacy in the US will ever be viable again until we go to a parliamentary form of government, which is not likely. Our system is broken and will not allow such a candidacy to take hold. This is not good, but it is true. As such, even our best third party candidates, along with flaming egos like Nader are forever relegated to 4th class treatment and zero possibility of doing anything but taking votes from other candidates.
So the winner on November 4th will either be Senators Obama & Biden OR the anti-choice, pro-gun, pro-drilling in ANWR, Ted Stevens supporting, earmark-supporting, bridge to nowhere supporting, lying about all three, leave my Down Syndrome kid at home while I dabble in National Politics, 20-month governor of Alaska and (one heartbeat away) the 72-year old four-time cancer survivor with an anger problem who voted with George W. Bush more than 90% of the time and no doubt worships him as a superior intellect.
See? I said it would be easy. I'm with the 81% of the country who believes we're on the wrong track. I believe the train is in reverse, off the track and on fire. I'm voting for new engineers.
