So I’m reading this morning that one of god’s little right hands shot a doctor to death…in his church…during services…

Kan. abortion doc killed in church; suspect held

WICHITA, Kan. – Dr. George Tiller, who remained one of the nation’s few providers of late-term abortions through decades of protests and attacks, was shot and killed Sunday in a church where he was serving as an usher and his wife was in the choir.

The gunman fled, but a 51-year-old suspect was arrested some 170 miles away in suburban Kansas City three hours after the shooting, Wichita Deputy Police Chief Tom Stolz said.

Andrew Sullivan writes that Bill O’Reilly painted a bull’s eye on the doctor during one of his shows. John Aravosis reminds us that President Obama caved recently to right wing demands to bottle up or tone down a report on domestic terrorism.  At some point, this naton is going to have to confront its right wing hate mongers and their willing tools.  Either that, or let them cow us all into the facist theocracy of their dreams.  In the meantime, I am on vacation and I have a new mantra…

…I will not become a misanthrope…I will not become a misanthrope…I will not become a misanthrope…

Yes…I haven’t been very talkative here lately.  I’m on vacation and these days I try to keep the world at arm’s length when I am trying to rest and relax.  I’m at my brother’s house in Oceano for a bit…then on to San Francisco and the Java One developer’s conference.  At the moment, I just don’t want to deal with the world.

Here’s some images for you, until the talking feather comes back my way again…

…still in it…

I decided to abandon my plan to go into lower Kansas and from there into the Rockies and take a small scenic side road though them up to I-70.  The weather here in the four corners states is horrible…all socked in with clouds and rain.  And it looks like it will be that way for days to come.  I suppose in some of the desert areas they appreciate getting rain, but this seems a tad much and the Colorado river is all floody now.  I drive over it and it’s almost up to the bottom of the road deck on some bridges now.  This throws my plans into some chaos since it means some of the scenic side roads I wanted to travel down might get washed out.  I don’t want to get stuck driving down a small side road in the Utah canyon lands only to have to turn around and drive hundreds of miles back the way I came because the road in front of me got washed out.  Or worse, get stuck because now the road behind me is washed out too.

So when I got to Oakley Kansas I drove US 40 for a while in the plains and then just let it take me back to I-70.  Now I’m here in Grand Junction after going through some serious elevation changes that seriously stressed my out of shape 55 year old body.  Around ten thousand feet I started noticing my heart pounding and my face getting all flushed out.  I stopped at a rest stop at ten thousand six hundred feet and tried to get myself stabilized and just kept being on the edge of too dizzy to drive.  Crap. I guess I my sitting down all the friggin’ time job has left my circulatory system a tad weakened.  Or maybe I just have my mom’s side of the family’s bad heart gene.  So I guess going up the volcano to see Keck is out of the question now… 

It’s memorial day weekend, which I wasn’t aware of when I planned this thing out (I’m a software engineer…I am oblivious to the regular work week of most folks…), so I’ve been watching warily the parking lots of the motels I pass along the way, trying to judge how full they’re getting.  I don’t normally make reservations on these road trips because I want the freedom to adjust my travel plans as I see things along the way.  But this puts me at risk of entering a town tired at the end of the day and wanting to stop now, and all the motels are full and then I have to keep driving and hope the next town over isn’t full too.  That’s happened to me. 

So I freaked when I drove past Rifle Colorado and saw all the motel lots jammed full.  When I got to Parachute I hit the first little motel I saw and asked for a room and they gladly gave it to me, which should have set my alarm bells off.  But I was just releaved to have a room for the night.  The room was around back and while it was nice the neighborhood behind the room was scary.  I sat in the room for a while looking out the window and thinking I’m driving a Mercedes-Benz and it’s going to stick out like a neon sign around here telling everyone who looks at it that there are probably things worth busting out a window in that car for…and breaking into the room it’s in front of…

So I freaked and got back in the car hoping that Grand Junction wouldn’t be full when I got there.  I shouldn’t have worried.  But once I got here I made a reservatin online via Travelocity for Kayenta, my favorite place to stay near Monument Valley.

I’m off now to try and see what I can see in the Utah canyon lands.  Given propsition 8 I’ll try not to spend much money while I’m there (Kayenta is in Arizona).  But the weather may make my trip through here a bust this year and that’s really bringing me down today because I don’t think the price of gasoline is going to allow me to do this for many more years.  This may be my last trip through the four corners area for a long, long time.  And it’s getting rained out.

Truckhinge – Topeka, Kansas

Tomorrow morning around now, bright eyed and bushy tailed, I should be on I-70 headed west.  The Institute is sending me to the Java One conference in San Fransisco the first week in June, and I am taking vacation time to do another small road trip across the great plains, and the Rockies, and a little of the southwest.  I want to do this while the price of gasoline still makes it possible.  Last year at four dollars a gallon plus I simply could not do it.

Lane Wallace, posting on Sullivan’s blog yesterday, put up this image from a current MOMA exhibit titled, "Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West".  I have a similar image of my own that I’ll post later today for comparison, taken on at the northern approach to Monument Valley down Utah highway 163.  Images like these capture the allure of the road trip for me perfectly…

Dorothea Lange, The Road West, New Mexico, 1938

Escaping The Gravity Of Home

There’s a moment in every long distance road trip that I think of as escaping the gravity of home. Like the Apollo astronauts who escaped the earth’s gravity to go to the moon…there is a threshold you cross on a long distance drive where heading back home to your own comfortable bed is no longer possible, even if you push it bleary eyed into the night.  You must bed down somewhere else.  Keep going and its two nights.  Then three.  You’ve left the safe comfortable orbit of home.  Now you’re traveling among the planets.  At some point, and for me it’s usually the middle of the second day, comes the awareness that no matter what happens, you’re not getting back home any time soon.  You and your car are a self contained capsule, scooting down the highway, looking for whatever it is ahead of you that you’ve never seen before…

Friday May 24, 2003

To really get to know planet Earth you have to travel across it.  Not over it in an airplane.  A train comes closer. But you need a personal, private mode of transit to really get to know it, see its many different faces.  You have to have your hands on the steering wheel, your feet on the pedals, feel your vehicle respond to the road.  Then you are one with the land you’re traveling across.  You should feel the sun and wind on your skin, be completely free, untethered.  Then you can stop whenever, wherever.  Get out of your car.  Feel the land under your feet.  The wind plays with your hair.  It came from over that horizon.  Look.  It’s telling you that there is something over there you should go see.

From today’s Washington Post…

Look Who’s in Bed Together on Gay Marriage Fight

Lying on his cot in the Longworth House Office Building in the small of the night, Jason Chaffetz had a scary dream: The conservative Republican from Utah had beaten the odds, defeated an incumbent and made it to Washington, only to end up by some bizarre twist of events arm-in-arm with Marion Barry, the crack-smoking laughingstock former mayor of the District of Columbia.

"Oh man, if I had run a campaign saying I’d be working closely with Marion Barry, I don’t know that I would have been elected," Chaffetz says

Mirror, mirror on the wall…  Sure you’d have been elected Jason.  Your voters are cut from the same cloth you are…the same bolt of cloth Washington’s former Mayor For Life was cut from.  Barry wasn’t our ally, we were his tools…his useful stepping stones to political power.  Just like we are to you.  And to your voters, we’re convenient scapegoats for every cheapshit failure of personal character.  We give them someone to blame for how lousy their lives are, how dead and rotten their conscience is, so they don’t have to blame themselves.  Useful tools Jason…that’s what gay people are.  To Barry.  To you.  To your constituents.  Tools.  Nothing more.  Look in Barry’s empty smiling eyes Jason, and see yourself.

So go ahead and smoke yourself some crack Jason.  It won’t matter.  Smoke it right in church if you like.  As long as you’re willing to put a knife in the hearts of loving, devoted same sex couples you’ll still be a Mormon in good standing.  Because nothing matters more then the war against The Homosexual, not even the resurrection.  You could spit in Christ’s face on Judgment Day and as long as you’ve left a trail of destruction in the lives of gay and lesbian people you’ll make it to heaven on a red carpet.  Oh wait…Mormons think they get to be gods in the afterlife don’t they…?

So on The Local…which is an English Language German news site…I read the following…

Study says teens familiar with pornography and alcohol

Oh…you think…?  And there I read that the study was done via the German youth magazine Bravo, which "combines no-holds-barred sex advice with explicit photos". 

Wow.  I’m sitting here trying to picture what my teen years would have been like if American youth magazines had treated sex that matter of factly.  Damn. 

My co-workers and I at the Space Telescope Science Institute watch the launch of Atlantis in the main auditorium…

Atlantis went up right on schedule and it was just about a perfect burn to orbit.  So good they didn’t need to tweak it a tad immediately after main engine cut-off like they often do.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they’ll be able to do all the work on Hubble they want to this mission.  If they can, then the telescope may very well keep on giving us great science about the heavens for the next decade.

First…  Robin Wilson, professor of law at Washington and Lee University School of Law, writing in the Los Angles Times…

So what should states do to respond to [these] clashes between same-sex relationships and religious liberty?

What they should not do is what New Hampshire’s Senate did last week: pay lip-service to religious freedom while enacting meaningless protections. New Hampshire’s bill provides that "members of the clergy … shall not be obligated … to officiate at any particular civil marriage or religious rite of marriage in violation of their right to free exercise of religion." But this is a hollow guarantee: The 1st Amendment already provides such protection.

Okay.  Got that?  All those religious freedom clauses being written into same-sex marriage statutes are hollow, since the 1st Amendment already establishes religious freedom in the first place.  Well…duh.  But that’s not the point. 

Here’s the point…

In her May 3 Times Op-Ed article, "The flip-side of same-sex marriage," Robin Wilson urges state legislators across the country to undertake "the careful crafting of robust religious protections" when they draft laws to recognize same-sex marriages. Her goal in recommending such religious accommodations is to "allow Americans with radically different views on moral questions to live in peace and equality in the same society."

I share Wilson’s goals. States that recognize same-sex marriages should protect the autonomy rights of religious individuals and institutions at the same time that they protect the autonomy rights of gay and lesbian individuals and couples. But Wilson’s column does little to promote the careful crafting of accommodations to achieve the equality she seeks.

Wilson starts off on the wrong foot. She characterizes clauses such as the one in the New Hampshire same-sex marriage bill that reiterates the protection of clergy from being required to officiate at same-sex marriage ceremonies as "meaningless protections" and a "hollow guarantee" since the 1st Amendment already provides such protection.

Where was Wilson six months ago when we had an election in which the opponents of same-sex marriage insisted that the defeat of Proposition 8 would result in churches being forced to conduct marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples?

-Letter to the Editor, Alan Brownstein, May 11, 2009

[Emphasis mine]  See…here’s the problem:  No Alan…you don’t share Wilson’s goals.  Wilson’s goals are that his gay and lesbian neighbors remain second class citizens, Regardless Of What The Law Says.  This claptrap about churches being forced to marry same-sex couples, and all the other crap, is what we in the IT profession call FUD…  Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.  Wilson is a goddamned professor of law…he’ knows goddamned well that the first Amendment prevents states from doing to churches, precisely what the Proposition 8 hatemongers said they would.  And no…you didn’t see him taking them to task for it in the pages of the L.A. Times, did you?  There’s a reason for that.  It isn’t the religious freedom clause in New Hampshire that’s hollow.  As far as Wilson is concerned it’s the First Amendment that’s hollow.

So now what’s happening is that states and some gay rights activists are starting to call the religious rights bluff on this and expressly including religious freedom protections in their same-sex marriage and civil unions statutes.  And naturally, now we find out the truth…that the first amendment protections aren’t enough.  What they want is a religious exemption from the equal opportunity laws that everyone else must abide by.  A Specific Exemption in fact, just to accommodate their specific hatred of a specific class of people…gay people.  They want to be able to deny gay people health care and medicine, housing, jobs, services…in short, they want to be free to keep on persecuting gay people and same-sex couples regardless of their status in the eyes of the law. 

What you have to understand about the religious right is they’ve elevated persecuting gay people to a religious piety greater then that of belief in the resurrection.   You aren’t saved by the blood of Jesus Christ…you are saved by your hatred of homosexual people.  That is what religion is in the kook pews.  If a nurse can’t eject a gay person’s spouse from their hospital room, they have no freedom of religion.  Because it isn’t Jesus who saves.  Salvation depends on how much you hate your gay neighbor.  If we don’t bleed, they aren’t being righteous enough.

[Edited a tad...]

Ta-da…

Basically, I got tired of how it was always getting in my face unless I had it pulled back into a ponytail.  This is how I always used to wear it.

I’d forgotten how energetic the wave in my hair is.  Without all that extra weight it just comes roaring back, even when I blow dry it.

I’m going to let it grow out again in the back and sides eventually, but I’m keeping the bang because I don’t like it getting in my eyes.  The problem has always been finding hair stylists who know how to do long-haired guys any good.  That was why I just let it all grow out some years ago…I’d given up on hair stylists and decided to just let it grow and pull it back into a pony tail when necessary.  And…I wanted to see just how long I could get it to grow.  Now I know…about a third of the way down my back.  That’s it.  It won’t grow any longer then that.  I have this very fine baby hair and it takes forever to grow and it never gets very long.  I was hoping I could get it down to my waist.  But…not…

Damn…I’ve really gone gray haven’t I…?  Crap…