AGMC's Christmas Concerts (sponsor this entry for $10)

As part of my effort to "assimilate" into Atlanta, I hooked up with the Atlanta Gay Men's Chorus this fall to sing in the Christmas concerts. They just concluded last night, with full houses for all three weekend performances and some good quality if I do say so myself.

Alas, AGMC just isn't a super fit for me. As I was noting with my friend Dave over drinks last night, Atlanta sure seems to be a "jaded queen" magnet, especially around entertainment organizations like choruses and acting troupes. More than one member of the chorus seemed to believe that humor lies in skewering others, even viciously. It's just not my thing.

And then there's the overwhelming sense of beggary from the chorus organization. We are an all "volunteer" chorus - when we're on stage, virtually everyone else around us (the director, the brass orchestra, the harpist, the deaf signer, and so on) are paid; we are not. Even worse, we actually pay for the privilege of appearing on stage, starting at three figures for the annual cycle, then charges for pieces of the uniform, and charges to go on "retreat" (which is essentially an excuse for the chorus to drink and carouse). There's an omnipresent collection dish at rehearsals for the treats provided, and from Day One this year there were appeals to get all our friends and co-workers to contribute to the chorus, and even "sponsor" individual songs in the program. It's almost as if the mission of the chorus is to find money, which of course blurs the true mission of any gay chorus - community outreach through music.

So, although I was able to meet a few good peeps, the negatives have outweighed the positives for me and I'll bow out. If I'm still in Atlanta in 2010, perhaps I'll revisit the gay chorus idea.

Happy Holidays - I Hope!

I took the plunge into using the web for Christmas cards this year. Well, sort of - I still don't think e-cards are very personal (though I use 'em for birthdays) and so I tried out Hallmark's service to print up personalized cards and send them out direct from Hallmark to each of the addresses I wanted to send to. No muss, no fuss.

Or...some muss, a great deal of fuss and angst. You can select from many cards on Hallmark's site and add the traditional Christmas letter text and even pictures. But then you must import addresses or enter them manually, a tedious process. And if you make a mistake and hit the "back" button on your browser, Hallmark promptly wipes out all your personalization work on the Christmas card and you get to start over from the beginning.

I know this because I got to start over from the beginning three times.

Even worse, in my opinion: Once you finally do have the card set up and "approved," Hallmark won't let you see the card after you commit to ordering it. So, I've ordered what I think is a card for everyone this year, but because Hallmark doesn't store the information anywhere to view, I have to take it on faith that my list won't end up with a pretty, blank card.

Looks like Hallmark has a ways to go before this process would be used by a lot of people. If you do get a blank card from me this year...Happy Holidays and perhaps I'll blog my Christmas letter right here!

Thanksgiving at Black Angus

It's really not as incongruous as it might seem. I traveled to Long Beach for the annual "Shovel Day" festivities with little brother Jim and his partner Joe.

In previous iterations of this trek, Jim and Joe have been invited to a big feast at a friend's house, but this year the friend kind of flaked out over the summer and that option wasn't available.

Although Joe can definitely cook (and his breakfast presentations are superb), he simply didn't want to for Thanksgiving, and I certainly wasn't going to argue. I'm not particularly a foodie; give me something edible, I'll eat it and like it.

Joe is, frankly, also a bit of a coupon whore. He discovered a $15 Thanksgiving special at Black Angus - no, not five pounds of porterhouse, but a real live Thanksgiving dinner with turkey, stuffing, mashers, yams, gravy, and all the trimmings.

So off we went, after first doing some Black Friday shopping. Regardless of the news reports saying BF went off pretty well for merchants, our survey of the Costco parking lot and its dozens of open spaces told us that people definitely are cutting back this year.

The Black Angus wasn't packed either. We arrived early for our mid-afternoon reservation but were seated immediately and promptly chowed down. Every bit as good as the innumerable family and extended family feasts, with the possible exception of lack of football on TV.

After gaining several pounds, I bit Jim and Joe adieu on Friday to take the show to Las Vegas, where I observed crowds about 20% smaller than during similar Thanksgiving weekends in the recent past.

Hope you all had a wonderful "Shovel Day" as well.

"Time" to Combat the Recession

One of my "old chestnut" ideas might make sense in this crazy recession-credit-crisis-housing-market-crash world.

For many years I've observed as Daylight Saving Time, or DST, has been adjusted and re-adjusted, always in an effort to extend sunshine a little more into the evenings. In the U.S., both DST and changes to time zones have always worked to move daylight from the early mornings to the evenings; over the years, portions of Eastern, Central and Mountain time have moved west to help accomplish this goal.

I've said often that it's time for the U.S. to adopt a three time zone system, which would provide a major westward push to our time zones and provide even more of the evening sunshine we all seem to crave. Such an idea would have significant energy saving and schedule efficiencies.

Frankly, we have too many time zones across the continental U.S. - four, when across a similar distance in Europe, there are only two. This plus the on/off DST changes make for a mess of transportation schedules (airline, train, etc.) and an annual ritual of complaints from Americans who have to change clocks. In my house, despite the recent trend to auto-change, there are still about a dozen stove, microwave, decorative and other clocks to change twice a year.

My grand idea: Push the Pacific time zone off into the ocean. Extend Eastern time a bit more west to encompass Alabama and more of Kentucky and Tennessee. Place Central time more westward, to encompass all of Colorado and New Mexico. Mountain time becomes the "western" time zone, from Utah all the way to the Pacific.

This alignment would optionally put Chicago into Eastern time and give that metro area significantly more daylight during the evening hours in the summer. Denver would get the same effect by moving that area from Mountain to Central time. And all the west coast cities would move from Pacific to Mountain time.

By placing the country under three instead of four time zones, transportation schedules would instantly become 25% easier to calculate throughout the year. And the movement of daylight into more productive evening hours would result in additional energy savings.

One could even make a case for eliminating DST completely under this scheme, possibly by advancing ET, CT and MT by half an hour and then just leaving clocks alone year-round. Several countries around the world operate on a half-hour adjusted time zone, so this idea has precedent.

There are also efficiencies from more often using state borders as time zone boundaries, instead of breaking portions of states into different time zones, as in the current scheme.

Will such an idea ever take hold? Possibly, especially under a "change" administration such as we'll have starting in January. In the immortal words of my dad: We'll see.

There's Roughing It, and There's...

I'm away from Atlanta for a chorus retreat, and is usually the case with such events, we're stuck on a mountain miles from civilization, reliable cell phone service, and in the case of this property, night lighting of any kind.

Fortunately there is a Holiday Inn Express just off the mountain and I was able to find a 4-square-foot section of a deck to light up my bars on my phone and make a reservation.

I simply couldn't resign myself to the army-style twin beds, 45-degree interior, lack of internet and TV, and 2x2 shower that represented this property's "cozy cabins."

I think I've been spoiled over the last decade, especially during my stint at RockResorts, where "roughing it" meant you were isolated in geography but not in accouterments.

No doubt this property does a brisk business among the "retreat" crowd, and if I were yet 25, I might think of this as an adventure. At age 49, I just think of it as "been there, done that...and I have the means and desire to do it better."

I can spot others in the chorus who likely feel the same but who didn't take it to the extreme I did and actually book a real hotel nearby. This chorus seems almost resigned to the "well, we've been here 18 years, so it's obviously the only choice each year" philosophy.

I actually was able to get the Denver chorus to change from a similar "rustic" venue to Keystone Lodge a couple of years ago, and I believe they are still there for their annual retreats. Once you go "rustic with technology," you never go back, I suppose.

Celebrating Democracy in the Republic

I'm back in Denver tonight for a quadrennial ritual with my closest friends. We gather to watch the election returns and (usually) engage in spirited debate about the winners and losers.

Tonight's a bit subdued. The normally vociferous members of the conclave are also strong Republicans, and they're not happy - at - all - with the evening so far. Ah well.

We've been friends through eight years of Bill Clinton, a president who had an amazing IQ yet couldn't use it in any kind of ethically meaningful way; and eight years of George W. Bush, who brought the country together in a moment of crisis and then squandered it along with the national treasury.

Something tells me we will be friends four or eight years from now. Maybe then we can get back to arguing!

At Home on the Interstate

For the weekend I decided to take a side trip to Savannah, a place I've never been. For me, it wasn't so much the destination as the journey - it would allow me to travel lengths of I-75 and I-16 that I have never been on before.

This little habit of mine traces from about age 8. I clearly remember trips to Kansas City to see Uncle Joe and Aunt Agnes, and Dad would take the '64 Pontiac Star Chief along the rapidly evolving I-70 route from western Kansas to KC.

As "navigator" and holder of the map, I was fascinated with the number of times we would drive on pristine four-lane concrete, then merge off to bump along "old" US 40, then re-enter another stretch of new Interstate.

Sometime in my teens, I took one of the collection of Rand McNally Road Atlases I had and began to highlight all of the Interstate routes I had traveled. Over the years I've gone back to this particular atlas and added all my trips - to New England to see Mark G; across the Appalachians into DC to see Mark C; all through Texas during my Santikos days; and throughout the West for lots of vacations based out of Denver.

There is something about the ribbon of four-lane that fascinates me. I was almost depressed when I-70 was finished in Kansas in 1970, and when the Interstate Highway System was finally "completed" in the 80s. My spirits lifted when new freeway projects were announced, including the proposed I-27 in Colorado and Texas; alas, most of them ended up being proposals only.

Given the current economic mess and the renewed talk of infrastructure projects, I wonder if the "I-66" project will be revived. This is the idea of a new Route 66 through the heartland, cutting across the East, into southern Missouri, Kansas and Colorado, then eventually through Las Vegas and California. It's been talked about for years, sometimes as an all-truck route, sometimes as a coast-to-coast SIX-lane Interstate with a speed limit of 100 or more.

Most likely I won't see this project built, but how wonderful it would be if it were. I could once again plan a trip involving miles of pristine concrete and asphalt, peppered with veeroffs to the "old" two-lane, with the giant earth movers building and leveling.

Maybe it's that building is a future-oriented activity, and that is how I am always thinking.

The Business of Going Out of Business

I did a bit of shopping at Linens N Things today - only a bit, as the "Going Out of Business" sale is still in the 10-30% off phase.

While there, I realized that the current recession notwithstanding, there is an entire business around GOOB - and possibly the same company involved in every major liquidation in the last 20 years, including CompUSA, various furniture stores, Computer City, Mervyns, Montgomery Ward, and on and on.

There seems to be a well defined pattern to these GOOB sales. Here's my rule of thumb:

Week One: 10-30% off; store looks normal; few bargains, but lots of loud signs and human "signs" at every major intersection.

Week Two: 20-30% off; store still looks normal; you might find something interesting.

Somewhere Around Weeks Three-Five: The Golden Week. 30-50% off. Every item worth purchasing is gone in the first thirty minutes on Monday. I believe it's flea market and Ebay resellers. By Tuesday the store looks like a Russian supermarket with vast swaths of empty shelves.

Week Six: 70-90% off the four remaining items in the store, which literally looks like a carcass inside.

Given all of this, there really is only one hour within a GOOB sale when you might find bargains, and you're a lucky shopper indeed if you happen to hit it exactly right.

For now, I passed on anything from LNT and added my weekly 20% off any single item coupon from Bed, Bath and Beyond to the growing stack from that store.

Well, well...

I guess it's time. The blogging phenomenon has apparently extended past the "fad" phase, and so I'm going to give it a try here. Who knows? I might even say something profound.

I'm a near-50-year veteran of the planet and have done a few things that I'll try to write about over the ensuing months. For now, I'll be a bit circumspect, but no doubt as I write there will be enough context so that those who know me will figure out who's keyboarding.

Brian/\/\