confusion

Hetero (or Homo) Lifemates

Post date December 19, 2020

In Pocket’s Best of 2020 [getpocket.com] list I came across this article on The People Who Prioritize Friendship over Marriage [theatlantic.com]. Interesting article, you should read it.

A couple of random poorly connected thoughts on this:

I’ve pontificated before on this blog about an idea that is related to this. In this post on The Separation of Marriage and Civil Union [confusion.cc] (five years before the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodge [wikipedia.org], legalizing same-sex marriage throughout the US). I noted that Marriage is a religious idea and in a secular state, like America with the constitutional separation of church and state, it would be better to leave marriage to religions and out of state matters. To do this you need to remove any distinctions, advantages and disadvantages of being married from law. Replace the religious idea of marriage with a secular idea of a civil union (or some other phrase if that is too loaded) such that any legal or commercial issues which are today based on marriage would be instead based on civil union. Whats more a civil union, is not a romantic thing and need not be between romantic partners, so it could be between friends as described in The Atlantic’s article. The article comes close to the same idea:

[Elizabeth Brake, a philosophy professor at Rice University whose research focuses on marriage, love, and sex], takes issue not just with cultural norms that elevate romantic relationships above platonic ones, but also with the special status that governments confer on romantic relationships. Whereas access to marriage currently hinges on (assumed) sexual activity, Brake argues that caregiving, which she says is “absolutely crucial to our survival,” is a more sensible basis for legal recognition. She proposes that states limit the rights of marriage to only the benefits that support caregiving, such as special immigration eligibility and hospital visitation rights. Because sexual attraction is irrelevant to Brake’s marriage model, friends would be eligible.
Rhaina Cohen in The People Who Prioritize Friendship Over Marriage [theatlantic.com], published in The Atlantic.

I’ve always heard that the most successful, long term, marriages are those that begin or become close friendships. So breaking the idea of life-long legal entanglement from the idea of romantic love and opening it to friendship seems like a good idea.
Despite #1 and #2… I can’t even begin to imagine the changes to day-to-day society that would need to happen for this to be normal. Imagine you are ‘married’ to someone, living with them, I assume, but at the same time have a legal civil union with a lifelong friend. If you die the friend is the main beneficiary (unless your Will say otherwise). You could jointly file takes with someone you are not living with? And who might be living with someone else also? What rights and duties are their with respect to kids from any marriages the two people in a civil union have? And you don’t need to get married to have kids —you don’t need to be married today but it’s still the norm, if there are no legal benefits to being married then maybe people will stop doing it unless they are highly religious. There are so many little things, the traditional idea of what a marriage is is so ingrained, even with the opening of marriage to same-sex couples…
Urban Dictionary has a few definitions of Hetero Life Mate [urbandictionary.com], including one that says A best friend who is so close, that were they not to match your sexual orientation, you would be married to them. Other sexual orientations may use “homo lifemate” or equivalent. Pointing out that if there can be hetero lifemates there must also be homo lifemates. So maybe we need a better, less bigoted term. Another definition for Hetero Life Mate on Urban Dictionary notes that it’s basically a synonym for “Platonic Soulmate” [urbandictionary.com].
And finally, Kevin Smith had this shit figured out in the View Askewniverse [wikipedia.org] at least by 1999 in Dogma and maybe way back in 1994 in Clerks:

Oh, I’m Jay, and this is my hetero-lifemate Silent Bob.
Jay, in Dogma [quotes.net].

Maybe Platonic Soulmate is a better term than Hetero Lifemate, given the issue of bigotry that goes with the use of hetero and homo… but as a lifelong fan of Kevin Smiths movies I’m sticking with Hetero Lifemate. And I confess I wrote this whole post just so I could quote Jay.

photography ranting

My Best Mobile Photos — 2005

Post date December 9, 2020

I started 2005 using the same Sony Ericsson K700i I took my best 2004 mobile phtos [confusion.cc] with. I used it for the first half of the year, and the only photo worth sharing during that time that is not a portrait is another panorama:

ABC food center at lunchtime

The photo stitching is much better in this one, as the camera was sitting on the table when I took all the photos, I just had to rotate it for each shot. So maybe, just maybe, the software was good and the photos in that shot of the Singapore CBD skyline I shared from 2004 were really not level.

Moving on. At some point in 2005 I got a new phone, one that I loved, I think it was the best phone on the market at the time and I can’t understand why it was not more popular. The Sony Ericsson Z800i. A flip phone with a rotating 1.3 megapixel camera, a step up from the K700i’s 640×480 (with an “extrapolation mode” which output photos at 1280×960). The Z800i output photos at 1280×1024, which isn’t much bigger than the K700i’s extrapolation mode but they look much better:

There are still a serious lack of actual good photos in my library. Focus was an issue, on both the K700i and the Z800i. Also, action was an issue, even the slightest movement is blurred.

I actually went through two Z800i’s, as shortly after I got it my wife —now wife, then girlfriend— sent my new phone for a ride through the washing machine. One night after drinking I left it in my pocket and she decided do to the laundry early in the morning due to the smell of smoke and alcohol on the cloths. At the time I was living in a shared corporate flat and I didn’t even know the phone when through the wash, I found it on the table in the living room and just assumed I left it there. But when I tried to turn it on it was dead. I spent the afternoon waiting in Wisma Atria to see a Sony Ericsson agent to get it fixed, since it was nearly brand new. After waiting for my number to come up it took the agent all of 2 minutes to tell me the damage was not covered by the warranty as it was water damage. Apparently there is a little white square of material on the battery that turns blue when exposed to water. At first I couldn’t figure out how the phone got “submerged” and argued that it could only have been sweat or a splash from normal usage, I had not dropped it in water. I was only when we got home and my co-worker cum roommate told me he found the phone in the washing machine when he went to do his laundry that we managed to piece the story together.

So I had to buy a new phone… I don’t remember how much it cost but I do remember it being painful and my wife being surprise I did not get angry with her. C’est la vie.

Anyway, here are a couple of more photos for the Z8ooi that I can count as my best mobile phone photos of 2005. First a photo of the US flag from my hotel room in Washington DC on a trip back in July of 2005 to attend a wedding:

And… then there is this:

Death with nasty, big, pointy teeth… and a Guinness hat

That’s my killer rabbit that used to look down on my cube in the office in Virginia wearing a hat I got at a St. Paddy’s day pub bash in 2002 in England. I gave the rabbit away to a coworker, and the hat eventually got trashed. C’est la vie.

photography ranting

My Best Mobile Photos — 2004

Post date December 3, 2020
1 Comment on My Best Mobile Photos — 2004

I have embarked on a mission to cleanup my mobile phone photo library. As long as I’ve been taking photos with my mobile I have been ignoring them after I back them up. These days I back them up to Lightroom and I have even managed to find and imported photos from before I used Lightroom into my Lightroom library. There are a few gaps but I have a long mission ahead.

My library of mobile phone photos goes back as far as 29 September 2004. There are a couple of shots of people I was working with at the time, which I won’t post, and then this gem:

That’s the Alkaff Bridge [wikipedia.org] over the Singapore River, just down the quay from the hotel I was living in (The Gallery Hotel, no longer there) in September 2004. Having arrived from the US on, as I recall, September 4th (thought looking back at my 2004 post here on Confusion I seem to have left the US on August 30th [confusion.cc]… I know you skip a day and I took a crazy long, multi-stopover route, but it does not seem to add up, maybe I left well after midnight, I can’t remember.)

In any case, that photo was taken on a SonyEricsson K700i [wikipedia.org]. I’m sure I should have photos that were taken on even older photos, specifically the T610 [wikipedia.org] but it seems those are lost to time, so the K700i are my oldest. They are mostly crap photos, but there are some fun shots of people I worked with.

For some reason about half of the photos from the K700i are 1280×960 while others are only 640×480.

Lanterns and menu at Ice Cold Beer on Emerald Hill in Singapore

But the K700i did have a fun panorama function built in. I made a few attempts but it wasn’t always so good at handling my inherent inability to keep the camera level from one shot to the next (a problem I have with my DSLR too). These buildings look like they are drunk or auditioning for Inception or Dr. Strange a few years early:

Singapore CBD from the top floor of the Stamford Raffles Hotel

So I really don’t have any good mobile phone photos from 2004, the title of this post is a bit misleading. I plan to post a few mobile phone photos for each year as I continue my cleanup. We’ll see how much the phones and my ability to use them advanced. Not sure what year I’ll stop at. I started using Lightroom mobile to take photos on my phone sometime in 2017 so that’s a logical place to stop… let’s see if I can get that far.

As a final aside, the photo of Alkaff bridge was taken on the night of September 29th. According to Confusion [confusion.cc] I visited the Chinese Gardens to view the lanterns setup for the Mid-autumn festival with some colleagues. But I don’t have any photo, or DSLR photos of that night…

photography travel

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, November 2019

Post date November 22, 2020

Back before COVID19 locked us all in our home countries we went to Amsterdam for a holiday. We also took a two day side trip to Billund, Denmark just to visit the Lego House [wikipedia.org], but more on that in another post. Amsterdam was the right combination of close to Billund and decent flights. Copenhagen was another option but Amsterdam won out.

We arrived quite early in the morning, before 6AM in Schiphol, a day after my mother and sister. After dropping our bags at the hotel room our first stop was the bakery on the corner for fresh stroopwafel [wikipedia.org]. Thus began a recurring theme for our period in Amsterdam: breakfast confections… maybe that’s not the right work but we had stroopwafel, proffertjes [wikipedia.org], icing sugar coated waffles, and even vegan pancakes at Mr. Stacks [mrstacks.nl].

But it was not all eating. We did some sight seeing. Actually we did a lot of walking to see things. Based on my iPhone we did 118km walking over the week and a half we were in Amsterdam.

Some of our sightseeing agenda was based on what I already knew about Amsterdam generally and from my time there in 2001/2002, but a lot of it was based on watching various travel videos, mostly on YouTube. We all sat around in the months leading up to our trip and watch different “best of” videos. It’s how we discovered Mr. Stacks, among other things.

One of our favorite sightseeing activities is museums and Amsterdam has some great ones. On this trip we visited:

The most important museum we visited was, without a doubt, The Anne Frank House [annefrank.org]. I remember reading the book as a teenager, I truly believe the world needs to remember the atrocities of the Nazi’s and the bigotry of ordinary people which allowed the Holocaust to happen. I’m not Jewish, I’m not religious at all, but the story of Anne Frank, her family and the 17 million other Jews, Poles, Russians, Romani, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Serbs, Slovenians, Homosexuals, Disabled, Spanish Republicans and who knows who else [wikipedia.org], must be told, over and over again. It is more important today than at anytime since the end of World War II, as xenophobia and racism seem to be on the rise again. Bigotry seems to be the default mode for most of humanity, us and them, the in group and the out group. Without constant reminders, humanity has no humanity. It’s important to remember and to teach our children so they can be mindful and hopefully live up to “never again” as we keep failing to.
The Rijksmuseum [wikipedia.org], where you can see The Night Watch [wikipedia.org] by Rembrandt and many other Dutch Golden Age paintings. THe Night Watch was under renovation at the time of our visit, you could see the painting but it was inside a giant glass box and there were people working on part of it. It was kind of interesting to see it under renovation and I’m glad they didn’t take it off display fort he renovation. Though the things my kids seems to like the best was sitting in the Research Library where you have to sit quietly. Interesting…
The Van Gogh Museum [wikipedia.org], filled with Van Gogh paintings… duh. Lots of self-portraits and sunflowers; also people eating potatoes [wikipedia.org]. A very good museum, love the way you ascend year-by-year up the building. The audio guides were included in our ticket price and were very good. I forgot that The Starry Night [wikipedia.org] is actually at MOMA.
NEMO [wikipedia.org], a hands on science museum for kids. Good for a full day of play. Bubbles, Rube-Goldberg machines, earthquake simulation room (very cool), water works to play in. We could have gone two days I’m sure.
MOCA, a small museum located in the Museamplein, near the Van Gogh Museum and Rijksmuseum. Like MOMA but Contemporary. Exhibitions on Banksy, Daniel Arsham and Yayoi Kusama as well as a general collection of contemporary art pieces. I got tickets to this one without consulting anyone else as I wanted to see the Banksy.
Body Worlds. Not, strictly speaking a museum, but an exhibition on the human body using actual human (and animal) bodies and body parts that have undergone plastination [wikipedia.org]. The smaller Amsterdam exhibition was not as good as the one I saw two in London two decades ago. Partly it was just smaller, but also the layout in a small, multi-story building and all the rooms being painted black made it feel less open and like it was trying to creep you out. In London it was a huge open space and all white and bright. My kids thought it was too creepy.

But it was not always stuffy museums, we got out of town to see some amazing things too. We went to Haarlem, and spent a day wondering around it’s medieval center. Quaint red-brick buildings and streets surround it’s cathedral. A nice sleepy town to spend an afternoon in, enjoy some food and walking. Unfortunately it was a wet day, light rain off and on all day, when we were there so we didn’t cover much other then the main square around the cathedral.

Out other excursion was more successful. On our first day in Holland, we took the train an hour out from Centraal station to Zaanse Schans, famous for its windmills. From the train station it’s a 15 minute walk to the riverfront where the windmills sit. And you get to walk past a chocolate factory. Smells amazing, looks like it’s straight out of Willy Wonka, of course you can’t see the Umppa Loompas, they stay inside.

We visited a couple of windmills along the Zaan river. Two of them were actually working: De Kat [wikipedia.org], a dyemill crushing chalk to make dies for paint, and De Zoeker [wikipedia.org] an oilmill, roasting and crushing linseed for oil. Their was a presentation inside De Zoeker showing how they use various mechanisms to transfer the wind power from the mill stones to hammers and other tools using various mechanical means. The oil from the linseed’s pressed at De Zoeker can, and is sometimes, used to make paint with the dye from De Kat. The inside of De Zoeker looked and smelled a lot like my grandfather’s shop/barn. The smell of oil and wood and sawdust.

There was also a few shops/exhibits in Zaanse Schans, one making Dutch cheeses, Catharina Hoeve Cheese Farm, and one making and selling traditional Dutch wooden clogs: Kooijman Wooden Shoe Workshop [woodenshoes.nl]. The cheese did not interest the kids so much, but the wooden shoes were a hit, especially the giant ones you could sit in outside.

I also managed to meet up with two friends while in Amsterdam, one planned meeting and one random chance. Both are, funny enough, ex-colleagues from working here in Singapore. The planned meeting was with a recent ex-colleague who is dutch and moved back to Amsterdam a few years ago. We met up for an afternoon drinking in a pub. We didn’t drink that much, but we managed to stretch it out for about 6 hours and he ended up missing a flight for work because we took too long. Oops.

The second meetup was completely random. I posted about it at the time [confusion.cc], but, in brief, an Irish, ex-colleague who worked with me in Singapore, before moving to Russia, happened to be in Amsterdam for a conference and we managed to meet up for a evening of good beer and great food. Absolutely random and the best, if not only, reason to still have social media.

You can see the full Amsterdam, The Netherlands, November 2019 photoset [flickr.com] on Flickr.

ranting

The gall…

Post date November 15, 2020

Last year I posted about my first ever experience spending a night in the hospital [confusion.cc]. Initial diagnosis was that I had an H. Pylori infection. Which was true, confirmed by endoscopic examination. But… 10 days later and we’ll into taking all my drugs I woke up at five in the morning in a hotel in Jakarta —I was on a business trip— with the same crazy agonizing pain in my lower chest and even in my back. I struggled through it for hours hoping it would go away, drifting in and out of sleep till close to noon. At that point I gave up and managed to pack my shit, checked myself out of the hotel and get to the airport where I took the next available flight back to Singapore. Luckily these flights run every hour or so and they are used to business travelers changing to the next available one when they finish early.

As a side note: with all the scanners and health checks, in place even before COVID19 in this part of the world, no one questioned a guy who looked like death warmed over, sweating and pale, wincing in pain at either the Jakarta or Singapore airports… anyway.

When I landed I went straight to the hospital and checked in. After a long discussion with the doctor who was treating me, going back over the entire history of issues starting in January and describing the pain again he asked about the back pain. Was it present in the other attacks? Yea I think so. After that he suggested that I might be having gall stones and based on that he requested a specialist to take over.

The specialist was fairly certain it was gallstones after an interview and a few hours later it was confirmed by an ultrasound. Ultrasounds are much, much, much more pleasant than endoscopic examinations. Someone sliding a plastic thing like a tennis ball covered in lubricant over you is weird but not so much unpleasant, even if the lube is cold. Endoscopic examinations on the other hand is… well, read the other post [confusion.cc] for my thoughts on that. But the ultrasound worked, diagnosis: gallstones, treatment: cut them out. So the doctor explained the surgery:

In summary, it’s a laparoscopic procedure, meaning they poke a few holes in you and use instruments on sticks to look around and cut shit up. Then they pull said shit out of one of the holes. Basically surgery by chopstick through a button hole. There is always a small chance they can’t complete the procedure via laparoscopy and will still have to make a big hole so they can get in their and work better.

And now, a second aside: doctors handwriting is really another language they learn to speak in med school. Why do you think it takes them so long? As evidence I posted the doctors explanation to Facebook to see if anyone could guess what it was. Answers ranged from the location of the lost ark of the covenant to, oddly, Vladimir Putin’s notes (I have a wide variety of friends…), to a lost page from the Necronomicon or Voynich Manuscript. A few observant people did note that the words liver and gallbladder are there and so guessed it was something to do with anatomy. But the winner was my uncle, a surgeon himself, who was spot on:

It sounds like he’s making it up, but no, I checked: Pancreaticoduodenectomy [wikipedia.org] and Cholecystectomy [wikipedia.org]. I did not, in fact, need a Pancreaticoduodenectomy but I was going to have a Cholecystectomy. So, yea, anyway enough five dollar words: I had to have my gallbladder removed. Unfortunately, before I could have my gallbladder removed, I had to finish my H. Pylori treatment which would take another month. So surgery was scheduled for September.

Luckily I had no more painful issues after that and I arrived for surgery early on a Monday in mid-September for a quick three day stay. After all the checkin and prep they put me under and…

I woke up in the early evening back in my room with tubes running into me and way more bandages than a few small holes would justify. A bit later the doctor came to explain to me that he was not able to remove the gallstones laparoscopically and had to cut me open. Apparently my gallbladder was in fairly bad shape so he was not able to separate it for the liver using he tools-on-sticks.

Long story short, I spent a full week in the hospital on good drugs but still in crazy pain every time I moved or, especially, when in coughed which I was told to do regularly to ensure I didn’t develop pneumonia. Though the doctor did say I had a very high pain threshold as I was able to get up and walk after only a day and usually it took people two days due to the pain. Maybe he was just encouraging me.

In any case I made a full recovery, even going on holiday on schedule in November though I was not able to do any heavy lifting of luggage so the kids had to help, and we packed light. This did not prevent us from doing over 150km of walking around Amsterdam. And I’ve had no problems since. I have an 8 inch scare across my upper stomach like some sort of war wound and I got to keep the gallstones. Yea! Souvenirs:

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