The Binary Circumstance

I’m currently in the process of dumping AOL which I have used for years. I recently started using Yahoo.com as my primary e-mail provider.

One of the problems with cancelling AOL was to find a way to get dialup access when I’m away from home and don’t have access to another high-speed connection, like when I visit my mother’s house. I hoped that my DSL provider, Qwest, offered that service to their customers but they don’t.

I wondered if there was a company that offered a pay-as-you-go dialup ISP service with no long-term contracts or monthly billing. I figured that such a service might be expensive but since I wouldn’t use it very much, I figured I’d still come out way ahead.

Typing “temporary dialup access” into Google gave me the answer.

BudgetDialup.com was at the top of the list and they are exactly what I was looking for.

For as little as $5.95/year you can open a pre-paid account. So it’s not expensive. You get 10 hours of dialup Internet access on their nationwide network and you have up to 365 days to use that time. There are many other plans to choose from including a month-t0-month billing arrangement for $9.95 for those who need more hours at a lower per-minute rate.

In addition, all plans come with their 5x Web Accelerator software (downloaded separately) which compresses uploads and downloads to make your 56KB connection seem much faster than standard dialup. I tested it on Yahoo and was very impressed with the improvement in speed. It seemed faster than my DSL does when it’s very slow.

They offer a whole lot more including international access, a free e-mail account,global access from 78 countries, corporate accounts and software that makes setup a breeze.

For a higher price per minute you can use one of their toll-free dialup numbers if a local number is not available where you are, but I there seem to be plenty of local numbers and I had no problem dialing into a local Seattle number.

When you run out of minutes, you just add more time to your account, much like a phone card or pre-paid wireless.

It’s a perfect solution for those who only need occasional, temporary dialup access to the Internet.

They offer a free, five-hour, 30-day trial of the service. After 30 minutes on it, I’m sold.

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain got a warm reception from a select movie audience in San Francisco.

“Brokeback Mountain” opens here Dec. 9, the same day as in the critical New York and Los Angeles markets. Focus Features, the film’s distributor, decided it made sense to open early in San Francisco in the hope that an enthusiastic response from the city’s large gay population would help the film cross over into multiplexes in Middle America.

If the response Monday evening was any indication, “Brokeback” should do very well in this part of the West. The sold-out crowd sat transfixed in the early scenes when Ledger as Ennis Del Mar and Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist are hired to herd sheep together on the regal mountain from which the title comes.

On a chilly night, Jack invites his work partner into his tent to keep warm. Jack takes the sleepy Ennis’ hand, and the two begin to kiss. Initially reluctant, Ennis is overcome by lust. The only sounds are of them moaning and of their belts being hastily unbuckled.

From the time Lee began working on the film, based on Annie Proulx’s memorable 1997 New Yorker short story, he decided to imply more than he showed in the men’s first sexual encounter.

But when I read comments like this, it makes me nervous about seeing the movie.

[Heath] Ledger describes himself and [Chip] Gyllenhaal as “friendly associates” before they became co-stars. “We shared the same agency so often we would be dragged along to the same gatherings.”

No one they pay for advice tried to dissuade the actors from playing gay characters. Once Lee, the Oscar-winning director of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” whose work also includes “The Wedding Banquet” and “Sense and Sensibility,” came onboard, the consensus was that “Brokeback Mountain” would be a high-quality project. Ledger had appeared as a gay man before in an Australian TV series. “He was really mild, and it was a terrible show and I was terrible in it,” he recalled. So it didn’t prepare him for the sexual intimacy he would have to portray. He and Gyllenhaal never really discussed it.

“The one thing we did agree on was that we had both committed ourselves to this story,” Ledger said. “We were up to our knees in it. We really respected each other for being brave enough to play these characters. But the process wasn’t as collaborative as I thought it was going to be. It was more segregated in terms of how we prepared. Ang individually took us aside and gave us notes on the development of our characters. I didn’t know what Ang had told Jake. We had our own private little life figured out for Ennis and Jack, and then we met up on the screen.

“It was such an awkward story, such a lonely, powerful story that it became a lonely experience making the movie.” [emphasis mine]

How much courage does it take to play a homo on screen and go back one’s socially acceptable straight life after the filming has ended compared to being a homosexual every day of your life and not being able to turn off rejection and bigotry whenever you want to?

My previous posts about Brokeback Mountain are here.

Tags: brokeback mountain

Time.com has an article that looks at medical discoveries in 2005 from A-Z.

First to pop out at me are that air bags, which are required by the government may increase deaths, and that marijuana, banned by the government, has more legitimate medical uses than previously thought.

Air Bags:

AIR BAGS The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s boast that inflatable air bags have saved nearly 14,000 lives since 1998, when they were required in all new cars, was challenged by a University of Georgia statistician. By analyzing a random sample of all accidents (rather than just those in which a death occurred), she found that air bags were actually associated with a slightly higher chance of death in an accident. Some of that discrepancy may be attributed to the greater risk of air-bag injuries to children who ride–against all advice–in the front seat of a car.

Marijuana:

MARIJUANA Research into the analgesic and anti-inflammatory effects of cannabis continued to bolster the case for the medicinal use of marijuana, making the “patient pot laws” that have passed in 11 states seem less like a social movement than a legitimate medical trend. One trial–the first controlled study of its kind–showed that a medicine containing cannabis extracts called Sativex not only lessened the pain of rheumatoid arthritis but actually suppressed the disease. An earlier study published in the Journal of Neuroscience showed that synthetic cannabinoids, the chemicals in marijuana, can reduce inflammation in the brain and may protect it from the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Ironically, the article never notes the obvious: government intervention in the marketplace can be hazardous to your health.

The Supreme Court is going to hear another abortion case that concerns parental notification when a minor seeks an abortion.

Sabrina Holmquist trained as a physician in low-income neighborhoods in the Bronx, N.Y. She says she often saw pregnant teenagers in desperate health and family crises, including some girls who had been abused at home. That, Holmquist says, led her to believe that doctors sometimes should be able to perform abortions on minors without informing a parent.

But in Texas, Linda W. Flower, who practiced obstetrics for two decades, disagrees. She says that in the vast majority of cases in which a teenage girl seeks an abortion, a parent’s guidance is helpful and needed. Flower says she knows of young women who have regretted having abortions.

The doctors’ views reflect the dueling arguments in the first abortion case to come before the Supreme Court in five years: a New Hampshire dispute that tests whether a state may bar physicians from performing an abortion on a girl younger than 18 unless one of her parents has been notified at least 48 hours in advance - even in instances in which the girl faces a health emergency.

The case, to be heard by the court Wednesday, is the first abortion dispute before the justices since 2000, when they voted 5-4 to strike down Nebraska’s ban on a procedure that critics call “partial birth” abortion because the ban lacked an exception for cases in which the woman’s health was at risk. The new dispute tests whether such a health exception should be required in parental-involvement mandates, which have been passed in various forms by 43 states.

If the Supreme Court holds that a young girl cannot get an abortion without parental consent when she’s facing a health emergency or some kind of retaliation from her parents, we will know who among the Justices does not value the life or liberty of our most vulnerable citizens.