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FATAL CRASH AT CASTRO AND 18TH STREET CAUSES EXPLOSION !!!
Tonight, as I returned from downtown to my office in the Castro around 7:00 P.M., I came face-to-face with a terrific accident, which claimed one victim's life and injured at least one more. A car careened out of control down Castro Street, slamming into another car and causing an explosion just minutes before I emerged from the subway.
 | | Chain Reaction |
 | | Cliff's Variety Ablaze |  | | The Aftermath of an Explosion | The explosion caused gasoline to leak down the sloping street, sending a trail of fire underneath four other parked cars (see photo above). One by one, they ignited, first the tires, then the entire automobiles.
By the time I arrived in my neighborhood, emergency response crews were already containing the fire and gasoline leak. Pedestrians were sent away from the scene, so I had to waltz around the block to reach my office. When I arrived, I discovered that my office-mate was in the office when it happened, and he photographed the fire as it consumed the parked cars.
We just happen to have the best view of the entire neighborhood from our office suite, so I have several photos to share which depict the accident. The emergency response was very swift, and the safety of the neighborhood was in good hands. I tried to focus on the rescue and disaster control efforts in the photos below, to honor our civil servants for a job well done. The photo above and to the one to the upper left were taken by my office-mate, and the other three were taken by yours truly.
This is certainly not the first time that an explosion sent a fiery trail of gasoline down a steep avenue in San Francisco. This type of freak accident is unavoidable on many of our streets, the only thing stopping a stream of gasoline being a sewer drain. However, there are often flammable materials and sediment festering down in the sewer, which is why the fire department was frantic about stopping the gasoline at the drain (my corner).
Yesterday, I mentioned that I would embark on a photo journal of my fair city, but this was not what I had in mind. To offset today's sombre events with the best photo opportunities that a summer in California provides, I definitely have my work cut out for me!
 | | Silhouette of Heroes |  | | Repair-an-Awning Day |
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(By Daniel Culveyhouse | No comments yet | comment here)
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I have just begun a very familiar transformation, and it's always entertaining to me. Almost every year, I gain a layer of insulation to keep me nice and warm in the winter. About 20 pounds worth of insulation, that is! Then suddenly, usually about this time each year, I start to lose this extra matter. Of course, countless others experience the same cycle involving seasonal cellulite, and different people have different names for it. My favorite is chubification, coined by fellow blogger David! But I feel that this happens to me for a different reason.
Insulation Abatement
I am from the Midwest, and this annual shift from flubber to rubber would happen to me as far back into my childhood as I can remember. It is a learned behavior that probably became a physiological reponse and continues to reassert itself. And here we are once again— I am undergoing insulation abatement whether I like it or not! I could stop working out, eat Kentucky Fried Chickens for two months straight, and I would still be totally ripped by summer (this actually happened in 2003).
Yes, the boys of summer cometh. I thought I'd strike first by tossing in three men I currently lust over, for your own scrutiny. Gay readers, tell me your favorite of the three. Straight readers, try to pick out how many of the three are on the juice! The first is Stephen Kuclo, a fellow troll (which means he's from lower Michigan like me). The second is a mighty fine Mexican, and the last is the hottest Thai stud I've ever seen. If I am forced to choose my favorite, then the answer is immutable: Ricardo the Mexican— ultra-possessive and innately beastly.
 | | Detroit |  | | Bangkok |  | | Puerto Vallarta |
Flaggers-R-Us
For those of you who have a Xanga account, You may have noticed the alert about the proposed Xanga flagging system. The Xanga team invited us to comment on the proposed flagging types. What I saw really disappointed me, particularly since they did a half-baked job at explaining how their flagging mechanism would work. I agree with a few flagging types, but in general I think it's a bad move, and I was definitely vocal about it. I am particularly not excited over how easily any flagging system can be abused. One of the flags covers "Breaking the Law." This is beyond ludicrous, as we all have made posts that in one way or another mention something that we did that was illegal.
We have no clue where this feature came from, and I have no idea whether they checked with their investors before committing to such a task. Launch flagging and lose about 20 percent of your users. Would Xanga's investors invite that kind of exodus? We're on Xanga because we enjoy a sense of community without being muffled and over-regulated. If we wanted to be regulated, we'd pop Ex-Lax every day.
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(By Daniel Culveyhouse | No comments yet | comment here)
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 | | 100 Years Later |  | | FuFu Lighting |
But my office-mate Samuel and I drove downtown later in the evening to see the pretty lights adorning the Ferry Building downtown at the shore. These were taken with a Palm Treo 650 (I know, not a real camera), but you can get the idea.
Remember that we are not exactly celebrating the quake, but rather, we're mourning how it destroyed virtually the entire city along with nearly one thousand lives. It stung the national economy as well, a phenomena that few people realize. Any disaster, manmade or otherwise, tends to have a cascading effect. And the Great Earthquake certainly did.
This isn't the first time that I've seen a city honor their losses from a past disaster. Years ago I watched Chicago pay tribute to the 125th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. It's a legend we Chicagoans love to tell... about a cow in a barn that knocked over a lamp, started a fire that spread and burned for days, and nearly flattened the entire city. There was also the Great Peshtigo Fire, also in 1871, that burned most of Wisconsin and Michigan. America definitely had plenty of growing pains in those days, and hopefully that era is one that has long passed!
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(By Daniel Culveyhouse | No comments yet | comment here)
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 | It rained for
40 days and 40 nights |
Tonight, I was building another personal Windows PC — a regular grind for me — when I realize the extra space I need for my eternally private journals. These files exist in a "cryptainer" which mounts as a virtual drive only if I supply three layers of passwords. I thought I'd entertain myself, as I often do, and peruse a few of them for a dose of nostalgia. They cover my past 11 years, and my written notes go back much further.
I also realized that I am now one year old on Xanga! So, to celebrate my first Xangaversary, I thought I'd toss you a quick-and-dirty snapshot of these 11 years of blogging. I was blogging when blogging wasn't cool. The tone will be a little harsh in some areas, but I'm just echoing those prolific flows back in the day.
1995 - A pilot in Kalamazoo: Michigan ensnared me, kept me barely alive in the harsh winter. Lucky for me Kalamazoo is a cultural center, surprisingly enough. This neck of the woods was quite diverse for Michigan. I earned my private pilot certificate and consequently had a few brushes with death!
1996 - Da Windy City: I came out proudly and completely as a gay male and moved to Chicago. Everyone here has an Italian accent. Had to shake my bootay for cash for a few months, until my career took off. I was obsessed with the gym, and I ate up all the attention. I would fly my friends around the skyline on the weekends. It was heavenly.
1997 - Appalled: By this time, six of my acquaintances and one friend had died of AIDS. I was almost shocked into abstaining from sex. This "abstention psychology" would remain with me right through to present day. But as a city, Chicago was my kind of town.
1998 - Arthur Andersen and thinking westward: I'm working in downtown Chicago at Andersen, surrounded by truckloads of fucked-up people. "Holy shit," I thought, "every American can't be this twisted and evil!" Perhaps on the West Coast it's different, right? San Francisco, here I come.
1999 - West coast transplant: I was wrong. Many of the companies are just as sketchy, and as far as society goes, the lifestyle out here revolves around promiscuity, drugs, befuddlement, and general disarray. But through this change of scene I learn my new amazing talent: adaptation. Not once did I let California corrupt me.
2000 - Dot com rocks: Making money was easy, saving it was almost as easy, and investing was a piece of cake. Dating was perpetual, and online hookups were way too easy and seemed to happen whether I was online or not. Constant shopping sprees hardly put a dent in these efforts. It was that easy. I dated a drug dealer by accident, who turned out to be an ex-con. Oops!
2001 - Destruction: My dot com folded, and to compound the ill fortune, I lost every single penny I earned to the NYSE and NASDAQ's downward spiral. Not all was lost. I had a short-term boyfriend (let's call him Android) from Indonesia who could manage vanilla sex at the least. Good enough.
2002 - Recession fuckhole: In the midst of ruin, I found a tiny company which seemed like a great opportunity in the computer gaming industry. The over-medicated boss and his bitch turned out to be vile bigots and the vomitus of society. My luck had run out, so it seemed.
2003 - Fighting fire with fire: Can it get any more rotten than this? I resigned and spent most of this year fighting the aforementioned bottom-dwellers of the civilized world, these "iBigots." Volleys of fire from both sides cost them time, money, and resources, but I taught myself just how much resolve I really have.
2004 - Turnaround: The economy fired a few sparks, so I started a business and also found a marginal full-time job. The boss was acceptable, but the young techie trying to manage us was practically useless. These nuts also hire fresh graduates, pay them peanuts, and retain them practically by force (floor after floor of H1B workers). I resigned to work for Friendster.
2005 - Journey of Self: I rediscovered classical music, I learned forgiveness, and I learned to love myself. A bonus to boot is that I can say I worked for Friendster, but it was too bad that I jumped too late onto a sinking boat. I befriended yet another drug addict, and it ended bittersweet. In November, I moved away from San Francisco for a few months.
2006 - Under construction: This shall be BEST year yet. I'm still writing it!
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(By Daniel Culveyhouse | See the 1 comment | comment here)
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It’s a fact of American life that most all of us must face our day in court. I endured a lawsuit, and I neglected my blog during its course. The case is now over, and I am satisfied with the results. I have agreed not to blog about the specifics, but arguably much of the case involved one or more of my blog entries, and since I have truly hurt the other party, I have removed those entries out of goodwill.
Most bloggers never intend for their material to cause any harm, and I try especially to maintain this level of ethics on my weblog. My entries are overwhelmingly positive and spirited, and anyone who has read my entries should be able to attest to this. But there is an uncommon social risk involved with blogging, and two phemomena in the social sciences that affects us bloggers are referred to as social reflexivity and the Hawthorne effect.
There are several theories and other types of studies that apply to blogs, but in this instance, reflexivity seems to have prevailed. Reflexivity occurs when an examination or action bends back upon, refers to, and affects the entity instigating the action or examination. In other words, a blogger who writes an entry about a particular event and who then causes repercussions in his own life by posting that entry, has experienced reflexivity. I have now experienced this effect twice throughout my eight years of blogging. This lawsuit being a direct product of my weblog is a textbook example of reflexivity.
There is also another matter that comes into play in my case: The Hawthorne effect, where the act of observing or reporting may adversely affect the activity or events being observed. This is different than reflexivity in that a series of events that I have covered in my blog entries may have turned out differently had I not blogged about them.
These implications are perplexing, aren’t they! The complexity and uncertainty that all of these forces weave upon us bloggers seem to bleed into quantum theory. This is partially correct because some areas of quantum physics have indeed been applied to the social sciences. But, it’s a common misconception in journalism that reporters experience the famous quantum dilemma called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Often, simply the mere presence of journalists will alter the events being covered or broadcast, but this is not the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. This phenomena is actually a combination of observer effect and observer bias.
While all these laws of circumstance wreak havoc in every part of our lives, I was able to predict the worst outcome of all, and stop short of a disaster. Imagine if I blogged about every intricate detail of this lawsuit, thus exposing me to yet another lawsuit. I researched such a situation, but could find no comparable theory to describe a "perpetual" outcome like this. So even though it never happened, since there is nothing on record of such an event, I hereby dub thee... The Culveyhouse Effect!
Rather than churn up events passed and postulate on what could have happened, it’s time to add a little humanity to these inexplicable antics that the universe deals us: it is time again for me to forgive. As I discussed forgiveness in my blog last year, once again I renew that oath, especially to the thief that stole my credit card:
For the few people who have committed injustices upon me this year, you are forgiven.
Now that I have done this, I want my fellow bloggers (and hopefully all of my readers) to try the same personal exercise, right now. Choose one person who has wronged you gravely, and forgive them, completely and unconditionally. Once you have done so, please be sure to tell me about it. I always long for news of personal growth!
March 2006 was a month of personal trial. My credit card was stolen, I endured a very expensive lawsuit, I lost my Palm Treo, and to top it off, it rained perpetually for the entire month. The Romans named this month "March" because they thought that it was a lucky time of the year to begin a war.
Their legacy lives on.
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(By Daniel Culveyhouse | See the 3 comments | comment here)
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