The Blog Watch: A selection from the week's blogosphere

Arthur, remembered
www.hahnathome.com

National HIV/AIDS Awareness Day was [Dec. 1]. ... Every single person afflicted has a story. Today, that would make [about] 40 million stories. But, I just want to tell you about one.

Arthur was a long, lithe, sexy, beautiful, graceful black man about my age. He was witty, bright, sardonic, seductive, charming and though he could be a Miss Thang, he was mostly just kind. I met him in the last two years of his life. He had been infected very early in the epidemic, probably during his travels with the theater company he sang and danced in -- he never really knew for sure. ...

The last time I spoke to him, he sat at the bar and asked me to join him. Slowly, he told me about the man with whom he'd been on a date. Arthur, who was always joking and laughing, looked so incredibly sad as he told me that as much as he'd like to see the man again, and be held ... just be held, comforted and loved ? he knew he wouldn't see him again in his current state, which was quickly deteriorating for some unexplained reason. I listened and hoped I provided some comfort to him that night ...

I moved that month to California. ... I kept tabs on his condition through the friends who were caring for him. In April, I returned for my household goods. I was told I needed to go to the hospice to see Arthur that night, as he wasn't expected to live many more hours. ... I joined four friends to hold Arthur's hands, rub his now stick-like arms, massage his feet, and run a damp and cool washcloth across his forehead. We talked to him; fairly certain he was no longer capable of hearing our words, hoping he'd understand our touch. Finally, his family arrived. We each took turns kissing him goodbye and left. On the way out, I took his mother aside and told her what Arthur had meant to me. She was polite, nothing more. Arthur died two hours later.

The funeral ... was a spiritual African-American service, ... according to the reports I received after my return to California. All of his friends -- his nearly 200 gay and lesbian friends -- sat on one side of the church ... his family and their friends sat on the other. ... At the end of the service, there was no mingling of the two camps. No opportunity for his family to hear of Arthur's impact on the lives of others in the many years he was not close to them. ...

Arthur's friends raised the money to pay the cost of burying Arthur and providing him with a memorial stone. ... Arthur's friends did not judge him, they loved him. The God I know did too. Arthur will be remembered for how he lived, how he loved, and how he danced to Al Green.

Economic lessons learned
drtaxsacto.blogspot.com

One of the fun things about some of the doom and gloomers in many fields is every once in a while they get called into account. The classic example was the famous bet between Paul Ehrlich versus Julian Simon. Simon bet Ehrlich that he could more accurately project the price of a marketbasket of commodities 10 years hence -- and he did. ...

But there is an even better one that was in Wired. ... Wired had a programmer who was upset about programming being moved offshore. In an article about four years ago, he yammered that globalization would take away the livelihood of American programmers. He started a group called Information Technology Professionals Association of America, whose job it was to protect against these supposed evils. ... But then ... he found even more rewarding work as an analyst and software architect. His pay went up. So ... he says, "I don't view outsourcing as the big threat it was."

Ultimately the strength of the American system rests in its ability to train people who can do more than write code, or for that matter do all sorts of other tasks that require some creativity and ingenuity. That may not mean that the current moves toward standardized tests will help us continue to compete. But it should also be a caution to those who would immediately leap to protectionist measures to protect our way of life.

Have a blog or know a regional blog we should be watching? Contact John Hughes.