Cognitive Consonance

It's Sunday morning at Potlatch, and a bunch of people are sitting in the consuite watching a video projected onto a screen: a video of an interview with Bill Gibson. I've been watching the video with half my attention, and with the rest of it I've been surfing the Net, checking email, and now posting to this blog.

And while I've been doing this, the recorded image of Bill, twice life-sized, has been talking about how totally mediated people are nowadays, how communications technology has become what he describes as a prosthetic external nervous system. The truth tells itself to the truth, spoken by an electronic avatar of an old friend.

On the Road

I'm on the road again, and will be blogging, umm, intermittently.

Right now at this moment, I'm in Seattle, attending Potlatch 13. The hotel has opened up its wireless access to the convention membership; Cory Doctorow would be ecstatic.

On Monday, I'm driving down to Newport, Oregon, to attend the Global Process Institute's Worldwork on the Oregon Coast, and will be there until March 9, at which point I'll be driving home.

"But for these medd'ling kids and this their dog."

RJ points us to the Lost Quarto of Hamlet:

This recently discovered folio edition of "Hamlet" follows other known versions closely until Act V, Scene II, where it begins to diverge at line 232, as will be seen:

KING ...`Now the king drinks to Hamlet.' Come, begin,
And you the judges, bear a wary eye

Trumpets sound. HAMLET and LAERTES take their stations

HAMLET: Come on, sir.
LAERTES: Come, my lord.

Enter FRED, DAPHNE, VELMA, SHAGGY, AND SCOOBY

DAPHNE: Wait!
SHAGGY: Stop the fight!

HAMLET and LAERTES put up their foils

KING: I like this not. Say wherefore you do speak?
FRED: Good lord, I pray thee, let thy anger wait.
For we, in seeking clues, have found the truth
Behind the strange events of latter days. ...

A Zendo in Schenectady

C.E. Petit, in Scrivener's Error points us to a wonderful interview with Ursula Le Guin that appeared last week in the Guardian.

The quoatable throwaways include Le Guin's answer to the inevitable "Where do you get your crazy ideas" question

Q: What I would most like to ask you is where you get your inspiration.

UKL: I sit and listen.

as well as this gem, worthy of Stef Maruch's .sig file:

Q: Perhaps you feel a bit out of step with your contemporaries?

UKL: Why should a woman of 74 want to be "in step with" anybody? Am I in an army, or something?

But read the whole thing, because of the more substantial content as well.

Right Here, Right Now

Lynn Kendall was volunteering today in the San Francisco Recorder's Office, helping people get their marriage license applications in order. I met her for lunch outside City Hall, at the corner of Grove and Van Ness.

I've never seen anything quite like it: a line of people snaking down the steps of the main entrance to City Hall, turning on Grove Street, and looping up Franklin Street, behind the building. Everyone was happy, smiling, waiting in the slow-moving line for their chance to get hitched. Cars drove past on Van Ness, honking horns: "Bee-bee-bee-BEEEEEEEP!" – the Morse code for V-for-victory.

Lynn told me that inside City Hall the line of marriage license applicants snaked back and forth through the central hall like the line for an E-ticket ride at Disneyland. Something on the order of a hundred volunteers had turned up to help, and they were all needed. People came dressed in jeans and T-shirts, or in matching bridal gowns, matching tuxedos, or sweatsuits. People had driven in from all over the west. People had flown in from the East Coast.

After lunch, as I walked Lynn back to City Hall, a mariachi band was playing on the steps of the building. The line had gotten shorter, extending only to the corner of Grove and Van Ness. The cars were still honking joyously as they passed. Parked in the Civic Center plaza were trucks for local television stations.

"It really feels like the Berlin Wall coming down," Lynn told me. The comparison had come to my own mind also.

Here (via boing boing) is another eyewitness account, of City Hall on Valentine's Day, by Seth Schoen:

We walked around the side of the line and saw hundreds of same-sex couples in all states of dress (punk to tuxedo to family heirloom dress to just-off-the-street-in-work-attire). One couple wore yarmulkes and carried a siddur; another couple looked like ordained ministers, but I didn't know for sure of which Christian denomination. (It must be one willing to ordain gay women.) At the back of City Hall, the line was making its way through the door past a group of about half a dozen well-wishers with big pink signs. They looked like high school students. One of them was carrying an American flag with gay rights symbols in place of the stars. (Oddly enough, San Francisco regular Frank Chu was demonstrating too, with his usual sign that had nothing to do with same-sex marriage – instead about galaxies, a rocket society, and impeaching former U.S. presidents. I was pretty sure he was just trying to get on TV with his message. You see him frequently in the Financial District.)

Here and here are San Francisco Chronicle stories on the political background and legal implications of Gavin Newsom's stunning decision to issue marriage licenses to same-sex applicants. (via Janet Lafler)

Addendum: Here is RJ's account of helping out at City Hall.

Addendum #2: And here is Lynn Kendall's:

The wedding parties had been standing in line for hours – two to four hours once they got inside the building, plus many hours in line outside. The air in City Hall was warm and humid, chilly and wet outside. Many had children with them – tiny babies in Snuglis, toddlers in strollers, teenagers playing games on cell phones. Almost everyone was burdened with umbrellas, backpacks, or blankets, and some had brought clothes to change into.

Yet what struck me most was the joy in that endless line. Every person I helped thanked me. Several offered warm hugs. People whose papers had already been validated still thanked me for coming out to help. Whenever volunteers entered or left the building, the people in line cheered and thanked them.

Valentine's Day

I spent the first part of the morning with Debbie, catching up with her after my having gone for the week before at Esalen. I told her Esalen stories, and also about how things are developing with my new sweetie Lynn, whom I had visited on my drive home the afternoon before.

We went out to breakfast, and then drove in two cars to return the car I had rented for my trip down the coast. From there, I dropped Deb off at the BART station so she could be Girl Editor at a writer's conference in the city.

Genuinely on my own for the first time in a week, I headed to the Oaks Club, and sat down in a brand-new 15-30 hold'em game. (It was old enough, though, that I had to post behind the button to get a hand.) I started out with mediocre luck, having my QQ cracked by AK (I got cute and checkraised the flop when an ace flopped, silly me). But then Lynda Ebner sat down in the box to deal, and my luck turned. The deck ran over me like a Mack truck while she dealt.

I had been chatting with her, asking if she had gotten any valentines. She answered that Wayne, the shift manager, had brought a large box of chocolates and the staff had decimated it in just a few minutes. She dealt me a winning hand: suited AK flopped top pair. Then, in the big blind, I caught the king and queen of spades, with five limpers – in the 15-30 game! – so naturally I raised. The flop came low and rainbow, with one card of my suit, and I figured that overcards plus a backdoor flush draw was enough for checking and calling one bet. The nine of spades fell on the turn, so I was committed to see the river, which obliged me by also being a spade. Dennis Dahlgren paid me off. I said to Lynda, "What sort of chocolates do you like?" "See's," she said without missing a beat.

I kept winning, sometimes outrageously, such as when pocket eights beat 5-3 when the board was 4 5 6 7, as well as more than my fair share of hands like AK, AQ, and AJ that flopped top pair and held up. By the time Lynda's push came along, my stack had grown from $400 to $1200.

At two o'clock, I picked up my chips, now more than $1300 worth, even though one of the local live ones (who had won the Oaks' tournament the previous Wednesday) sat down. Juicy though the prospect was of playing with him, I had more errands to run.

Off to the Berkeley Farmer's Market to get ingredients for dinner: Andouille sausage, garlic, and crimini mushrooms for a spaghetti sauce; some mixed greens for a salad, and a dozen roses as a Valentine's offering for D. Potter. I took a side trip to See's Candy, on Shattuck, to get boxes of chocolate: one each for Debbie and for Lynda Ebner. Hey, an $800 down on Valentine's Day is worth a box of chocolates.

I went back to the Oaks, only to find that Lynda had left early. The dealer captain said that he could make sure she got her box of chocolates. From there I went to D.'s apartment, to deliver the roses. D was not home, so I left the flowers on her bed, next to her iBook, and went home.

I went home, and began the long, slow process of getting caught up with my LiveJournal friends list. The process was all the slower because Lynn showed up on IM and we chatted through the afternoon, until it was time for each of us to start dinner. Somewhere along the line, D. crept in through the front door and up the stairs, leaving a bouquet of flowers on the newell post. I didn't find this out until she told me when I called her later. The sneak.

I fixed, as I said, a spaghetti sauce with Andouille sausage, onions, and mushrooms. Debbie came home shortly after seven, and we ate at about 8:00. afterwards, my lack of sleep from the previous week caught up with me, and I fell over.

All in all, a whole lot of love in the day. And a juicy win at the poker table. A person can't ask for much more than that.