Guys on dating apps are so sensitive. They don’t seem to understand that it can’t always be a match. When I have to turn someone down, I always do it politely by saying “Sorry”, and then I go the extra step of following up with an “I statement” that makes clear that it is about me and not them. They never seem to appreciate my polite gesture. For whatever reason, “Sorry, I am not desperate” always sends them over the edge.

I was inspired by a post I read by out gay actor Wentworth Miller last month, in which he broke down the things that were going on in his personal life at the time a photo was snapped of him that showed some weight gain. The photo was later turned into a cruel meme. He revealed in his powerful letter that he had been suicidal at the time the photo was taken. It is a visceral, emotionally raw piece of writing, and it is well worth a read.

A few weeks later, I saw another fat-shaming meme, but this time aimed specifically at the gay community. It featured young heartthrob Taylor Lautner from the Twilight Series. It shows a young and very fit Taylor on one side under the heading “Single Gay”, then the post-weight-gain Taylor on the right under the heading “Taken Gay”. The implication, of course, is that people take care of themselves and look “good” when they are looking for a mate, but once they pair off, they let themselves go.

I reacted negatively to this meme, but I dismissed it as silly, and I saw it only in passing–none of my friends had posted it or shared it. Today, however, I ran into an updated version that an actual friend had shared on Facebook. The “Single Vs Taken” heading was gone, this time replaced by “When Twilight is finally over and so is your career”. In addition to the change in heading, an additional visual pun was added in the form of a fierce looking CGI wolf, compared to a very fat dog.

This led to an exchange where I expressed surprise that my friend was stooping to fat-shaming, and a discussion that led me to understand that my friend thought my objection was because I didn’t know that the guy in the pic was Taylor Lautner from Twilight. I had actually been sort of puzzling this over in my mind, but the discussion clarified it for me: Is it possible that some people understand why fat-shaming someone like Wentworth Miller is wrong (because he is a well-respected actor and writer/director, and a valued member of the gay community), but they dismiss it when it is someone like Taylor Lautner because he is less respected, due to his stature as an actor and/or his association with the much-scorned Twilight series? Perhaps because he is young? Twink-ish?

In the case of Wentworth Miller, he spoke up for himself. The Lad Bible, the website that actually produced the cruel meme, took it down and issued a formal apology to Mr. Miller. I was not able to find any reaction from Mr. Lautner regarding the meme in which he is featured. The second meme, which hinges on his career being “over”, is also inaccurate: Mr. Lautner reportedly gained the extra weight that is revealed in his recent photos for a role in a movie. Extreme weight gain and loss in the service of a role is the province of serious actors (see Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull, Tom Hanks in Castaway, or Christian Bale in The Machinist). Perhaps the weight gained by Mr. Lautner is his stab at being considered a serious actor. Yet, due to his association with something frivolous and even girly like Twilight, many of his fans (and detractors), assume that the fact that he has gained some weight means that he must now be unemployable.

My take on the whole thing is this: It is not OK to fat-shame someone, no matter who they are. Whether they are young or old, serious or goofy, Well-respected or maligned, fat-shaming is wrong. In every case.

I saw a news story today under the headline “American Idol Seeks Replacements for Departing Judges Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler,” and I immediately thought: duh.  The most popular show in America, which has always had three or four judges (remember that ill-advised Ellen Degeneres season?), announces the departure of two of its judges, so of course they are going to ‘seek to replace’ them. Nobody wants to watch Randy Jackson as the solo judge of any competition.

The next news stories will be feelers for different potential judges. They will be leaked carefully to the press in order to judge public opinion. Two years ago, Jennifer Lopez was their apparent dream candidate, and Steven Tyler was a sort of surprise contender. They both have large fan bases that they couldn’t afford to alienate, so neither of them was able to fill the shoes of Simon Cowell, who has always been the sole voice of reason on the show.

Simon’s disappointing results with the first season of his own show, which I’m pretty sure is called ‘The X Factor’ (and really, I couldn’t watch more than a few episodes, even though I thought that British host was kind of cute), should make the way forward clear: one more season of “The X Factor,” followed by a period of unrest and rampant speculation, immediately followed by the announcement of Simon Cowell’s return to American Idol, for which he will be (and should be) paid something like $80-100 million dollars per season (while this seems INSANELY high, to put this in perspective, Dolly Parton was paid $40 million per season for starring in a show that lasted only a single season during the 1987/88 TV season—TWENTY years ago!). Is Simon worth it? If he can turn this foundering ship around, then HELL, YES, he’s worth it.  I tuned out when Simon left, because, really, who wants to watch Jennifer Lopez and Sleazy Gramps (Steven Tyler) try to tell somebody they suck without hurting their feelings?

So hire Mayim Bialik or Soleil Moon Frye for all I care, because the next season is just filler anyway.

If you want to know who I’d REALLY love to see judging the show, then:

1. Not Randy Jackson
2. Velma from ‘Scooby Doo’ (voiced by Mindy Cohn, who was Natalie on ‘Facts of Life’)
3. Tony Danza (because he’s still so easy to look at).
4. Robert Rey, ‘Doctor 90210’
5. H.R. Pufnstuf
6. Charles Nelson Reilly (even though I know he’s dead—hell, hire the ghost of Paul Lynde while you’re at it).
7. Roddy McDowall (as Cornelius from The Planet of the Apes)
8. John Waters
9. Kevin Smith (I actually think this would be fun/funny to watch).
10. Pat Smear

I used to manage a tavern in Washington state.  A tavern is a specific designation that means a bar that serves only beer and wine—no hard alcohol.  In order to serve the hard stuff, you had to be a restaurant, meaning that all real bars served food, although you might never know it.  They were required to keep stock and a menu of about 10 entrees on hand at all times, and offer food during most of the hours they were open.  The laws in Washington were old and antiquated, and I think it’s a good thing for the state’s residents that this law was passed.

The state liquor control board had moved in recent years to modify some of the laws.  One change was the nightclub license that allowed bars to serve alcohol without serving food.  But it was too little, too late, in this case.

People in other states don’t really understand what it means to have to buy alcohol from the state.  It meant that all liquor stores were the same, with the same prices, and they had pretty much the same stock.  The employees were state employees, and the stores were run like a clean, brightly lit cafeteria.  To say they were uninviting would be an understatement.  In California, people are used to walking into Safeway or Walgreens and buying their vodka and whiskey.  In Texas, you can’t buy liquor at a regular grocery store, but there are plenty of private retailers with a wide variety of styles, from fancy boutique shops, to neighborhood liquor stores, to giant wal-mart-like mega stores (Spec’s Liquors).

The way the initiative came to pass is an interesting story, and it could certainly be unsettling, except for the fact that I am in total agreement with the need to get rid of the old laws.  Costco, which is based in Washington, simply bought the election.  They spent $20 million dollars of their own money (meaning they spent something like $4 for each and every likely voter in the state) to get this law passed.  Similar laws had been defeated because of the specters of teenage drinking and increased drunk driving.  This time, with Costco’s strong financial backing, the retailers won.

By June 1^st, Washington will close all of its state-run liquor stores, and the citizens of Washington will be able to go to Costco or Safeway to buy their liquor.  They are likely to see much cheaper prices, because part of the law allows retailers to deal directly with the distilleries, whereas before, all alcohol had to go through a liquor distributorship, which added one more level of profit that needed to be passed along.  Costco has enough power that it can get great deals, so I imagine that many people will be seeing a 35-to-40% decrease in prices.

Is it OK for a corporation to buy an election? No.  I don’t think it is, really.  In this case, however, I applaud the result.

I saw this pop up in the news yesterday, and I new I had to have one. I was happy to find that my old (non-programmable) thermostat could be replaced by this new “iPod” of thermostats.

Nest is the brainchild of Tony Fadell, who is credited as the original developer of the iPod for Apple. Tony took a year’s sabbatical to live in Paris with his wife and kids, and near the end of the year, after thinking about what he wanted to do next, he announced his new project to his wife: a thermostat. She was baffled.  But she soon became a believer.

The Nest Learning Thermostat

Turns out, the thermostat that most people have in their house is essentially the same thermostat that people have been using for 30 years or more. Some have touchscreens or other innovations, but they are still stand-alone boxes that pretty much do one thing. Even programmable thermostats aren’t an improvement, because studies have shown that most people don’t ever learn the complicated steps to program the thermostat, or they are unhappy with its performance, so they simply place it in permanent “hold” setting—which means they are essentially using it as an analog, non-programmable thermostat.

Realizing that most of a household’s wasted energy is controlled by the thermostat, Tony Fadell thought that he could cut down on energy waste (and its concurrent pollution) by developing a thermostat that trains itself. The Nest is the outgrowth of that project. It is a thermostat that learns from you each time you turn the thermostat up or down. It recalls the time of day and the temperature setting, and it eventually learns your routine and begins to adjust itself automatically. It contains a motion sensor, so if it senses no motion for several hours, it assumes you are away from home and changes its settings to “away” mode, which means it adjusts itself to a more energy-efficient temperature—higher in the summer, lower in the winter.  It also senses when you are approaching at night and lights up for you.

But what if you don’t want your thermostat to adjust itself? What if you have a dog or cat that might prevent your thermostat from going into “away” mode? Well, the beauty of Nest is that it comes with an online account that allows you to set very specific temperature minimums and maximums, as well as setting specific times for any adjustments (these minimums and maximums will also make sure Nest keeps your pets comfortable while you’re away). It also allows you to set your account to permanent “away” mode if you go on vacation. And it does this by interacting with your computer wirelessly. As long as you have wireless internet access, the Nest can be controlled from your computer, or even via your iPhone. If you are coming home early in the middle of winter, you can pull up the app and tell it to start heating the house up before you arrive. If your family has a cabin in upstate Wisconsin and you are heading up for the weekend, you can tell Nest to make the cabin warm before you get there. So, not only is the thing energy efficient, it is also incredibly user friendly. It also trains you…when you make an adjustment that is going to save you energy, a little green leaf pops up as a sort of reward—like getting a gold star!  I can’t wait to get mine installed and try it out. It really does seem like this is something—one of the first real things—from “the house of the future.”

If you want to learn more, you can see their very nicely designed website at Nest.com.

It’s funny how things pop up sometimes.  I just stumbled across one of the most perplexing Amazon reviews I’ve ever seen.  It’s not laugh-out-loud hilarious or amazing, but it gives just enough of a hint of a situation that you’re left with nothing but questions.  It’s not like the Three Wolf Moon tee-shirt, where customers actually compete to write the funniest, most outlandish reviews ever.  It seems to be a real review.  Before I share it, a bit about how I came across it.

I have a hearing problem.  I grew up with some degree of hearing loss and then spent years working in a very loud nightclub, which damaged my hearing even more, particularly in the high frequencies.  I normally get by OK, but today my hearing loss was a pain.  I was doing laundry today.  Shirts, specifically, which require that you take them out of the dryer immediately and lay them out or hang them up, or they become wrinkled, after which you would have to “refresh” them by running the dryer for ten more minutes or so to de-wrinkle them (my dryer actually has a “Refresh” setting).  My problem is that I can’t hear the dryer buzzer, so I normally set a kitchen timer to remind me to take out the shirts.  Today, I kept missing the timer because I didn’t hear it.  I tried moving it with me into the other room, but things worked out so that I happened to be out of ear-shot every time the thing went off.  I “refreshed” my shirts four times before I finally remembered to remove them before they got wrinkled.

I realized that I needed a loud timer.  I went to Amazon and searched for “loud timer” and came across one made by ThermoWorks, the people who make my favorite instant-read thermometer, the Thermapen, which are the same ones they use on America’s Test Kitchen.  Looking at the reviews for this timer (it has a four star average, which is pretty good), there are four one-star reviews: three people who complain that it just wasn’t loud enough…and then there is my reviewer.  It’s another one star review, and her complaint is that it’s not waterproof (to be fair, it is only described as “water resistant”, not waterproof).  Here’s her review.  I’ll let you take a minute to go read it.

OK.  So the timer isn’t waterproof.  Whatever.  That’s not the good part.  Her son “loses track of time” in the shower?  How old is he?  If he’s around 13 to 18, I can tell you–he’s not losing track of time–he’s just not spending all his time in the shower actually “showering”, if you know what I mean.  He’s got something else going on.  And how long are we talking?  Is he spending 30 minutes in the shower?  45?  How much time does she allot for a shower?  5 minutes?  How does she determine exactly how long is too long?  I mean, I was raised in a poor family and I was never griped at for taking too long in the shower (well, maybe once or twice, but only in passing–my mother would certainly never have set a timer on me).  But beyond the timing issue…did her son really need to take a 90 decibel timer with him into the actual shower stall?  90 decibels is equivalent to a motorcycle or a police whistle.  Could he not have heard it if he left it on the bathroom counter or the back of the toilet?  Where did he put it?  Did he have to hold it in his hand while he was showering?  So many questions.

It may just be me, but I find this review fascinatingly odd.  Buying a kitchen timer and then taking it with you into the shower is the mark of somebody who just doesn’t function on all cylinders.  It’s like this one barista who used to work at Walton’s, Sandra Bullock’s cafe/florist/bakery in downtown Austin.  I bought a cup of coffee from him one day.  It was freshly brewed and piping hot.  There was plenty of room for cream, and I only add a little, so there was still 3/4 of an inch of room at the top.  I took it back and asked if he could give me two or three cubes of ice to cool it down (I don’t like to sip coffee–I just drink it).  He looked at it skeptically and said, “I’ll have to dump some of it out”.  I told him there was no reason, that I just wanted to cool it down a little bit–I still wanted it warm, just not hot (I also knew they have small ice cubes).  He gave me a look like he couldn’t believe I was forcing him to do this, said, “Okay,” and then took his ice scoop, scooped up a massive mound of cubes, and began shaking it about 8 inches over my cup.  Of course, 10 cubes dislodged and tumbled off his mountain of ice and landed in the cup, causing the coffee to splash out on all sides and all over everything nearby.  He threw the remaining ice and scoop back into the icebin and then picked up my coffee (spilling more in the process, since it was now full to the brim)  and gingerly tried to hand the wet cup back to me, dripping all the way.  I looked at him and asked him to set it down on the counter–I had no intention of trying to reenact a Keystone Cops routine with him as he tried to transfer the overflowing, dripping cup to my hand without spilling any on me.

I’ve worked in coffee a long time.  You don’t hand a dripping cup to a customer.  You don’t hand a wet cup to a customer.  In fact, in my view, you never hand a cup to a customer at all–the hand-off is when accidents happen, and people end up spilling coffee on each other and getting burned.  Even with a lid, I’ve seen the lid pop off when the barista or customer misjudged and managed to squeeze the cup between their two hands as they tried to transfer it.  It is much better to put the cup down and allow the customer to pick it up–especially if it has no lid!  If you spill something down the side of a cup, you either double cup by sliding a fresh cup over the spill, or you transfer the drink to a fresh cup and dispose of the old one if it’s too soggy.  And, for goodness sake, if you want to add three ice cubes to an almost-full cup, pick up three ice cubes!  Your scoop works just as well to pick up a few cubes as to pick up a whole scoopful.

It’s funny the direction this post took.  Maybe I should have called it “people who don’t have a clue.”

That boy no longer works at Walton’s.

My favorite and most-used app, the Stanza Ereader, was broken by Apple’s latest update, the iOS 5 operating system. I can’t tell you how much this disappoints me. By reading online message boards, it’s clear that thousands of other people are just as upset as I am.

Amazon bought the Stanza application from its developer several years ago and stopped updating the app. I suppose Amazon might argue that they wanted the code or the technology or a patent or something, but it feels an awful lot like they just purchased a popular competitor (to their proprietary Kindle App) to put it out of business. To understand the significance of this, you need to understand that Amazon’s Kindle only allows you to read books that are in Amazon’s own, proprietary format. Most ebooks come in ePub format, but you can’t read an ePub book on Kindle. Stanza was the most elegant ereading app out there. It allowed for one-touch brightness adjustment while you were reading, by simply swiping your finger up or down the screen. It also offered easy font size adjustment and many other customization options.

The Kindle app is simply not an acceptable replacement for Stanza. I have tested dozens of free ereader apps over the last two days, and the only ones that come close to Stanza’s functionality are the Kobo e-reader and Bluefire Reader. Both of these apps offer landscape locking, night mode (white text on a black background so you can read in bed without producing a lot of ambient light, so you don’t disturb anybody else who is in bed with you), a progress bar, font and margin adjustments, and many other nice features. I slightly prefer the Bluefire Reader, although it has an odd and complicated way of managing bookmarks—I prefer the simple, one-touch tap in the upper right corner, but Bluefire Reader makes you go through several steps to create a bookmark, and even then, it does not provide a visual clue on the page to identify the page as having been bookmarked.

Really, what I hope happens is that enough people get upset with the death of Stanza that Amazon decides to respond, and update the app so that its legions of fans can continue using it. I used it every single day, and, although I am normally a big fan of Amazon, at the moment I’m holding a grudge against them. You can bet they made sure the Kindle App was ready for iOS 5! If you want to tweet to @Amazon and ask them to fix the @stanza_reader, please feel free to do so! In fact, here’s an easy way to do it: copy the following text, then hit the Tweet button at the top of this article, paste it in, and send!

Please @Amazon do the right thing and fix the @stanza_reader ! #Stanza #AmazonKilledStanza #RIP