So I got Traveler back from the shop today, and I’m all entranced with my car all over again.  I’m probably one of those highly annoying people who fall in love for the first time, Every Frickin Time He Falls In Love.  So if you’d rather watch pill commercials then listen to me going on about my car, you should probably skip this post. 

While my car was in the shop, and I was moping about the tire pressure monitoring system failure…Because Electrical System Problems Were Among The Most Complained About Issues With Mercedes Automobiles During Its Let’s Forget That Decade Ever Happened Decade…I wandered over to the web sites of some of those Other luxury car web sites. I wanted to look at pictures of the competition. 

My motives were not honorable.  No, I wasn’t thinking of dumping my car just because the tire pressure monitoring system went belly up and it took three days to fix it.  My Mercedes dealer did what the factory told them to do: replace the broken parts with new factory parts that were better designed then the ones that failed.  That required a modification to the wiring harness.  I discussed it with the parts department guys after I got my car back, and was told that the new design was already in all new C class Mercedes.  This is the Mercedes Way of incrementally improving a model all during its production run.  When you buy parts for a Mercedes-Benz, you can’t just order them based on the model year, you have to order parts using the car’s VIN number.   

No…I wasn’t shopping around while my eyes roved over those photos of the newest Lexus, Acuras, Lincolns and Cadillacs.  What I was doing:  Gloating.  Okay…maybe not Gloating…but something akin.  My car was in the shop for almost ten days.  I wanted reminding of why I took a chance on a Mercedes, when I could have easily bought a Lexus, which constantly gets top marks in the Consumer Reports surveys, or the Acura, which is a very close second, and several thousand dollars less costly.  Just for kicks I browsed in the Lincoln and the Cadillac web sites too.  I wasn’t in the mood to play fair.

You will notice I left BMW and Audi out of it.   Porche doesn’t make an "entry level luxury car", and neither do Rolls and Bentley and not in this lifetime will I ever own one of those.  I wanted to compare like for like in price, specs and styling:  Four door sedans in the 30 to 45k price range, styled as nicely appointed "entry level" luxury models, not those so-called sport/luxury models.  I’ve never understood the appeal of those.

An "entry level" luxury car will have more plastic in the interior and fewer über luxury items; like the adaptive seat cushions of the Mercedes S class, which adjust to keep you firmly in your seat during emergency maneuvers.  The dash will be mostly plastic of some sort, with maybe a little wood inlay…none of this all hand sewn leather stuff.  But if it’s done right, the entry level luxury car can put within the reach of your average middle-class wage earner, something a little better, a little nicer, a tad more thrilling, then the bland, mass produced, lowest common denominator average.  If your car is merely a means to get from point A to point B, then a Camry will do.  If it is your wings, your magic carpet to explore the world with, then a Lexus doesn’t really seem like an extravagance.  More like the just right companion for your journey down life’s many highways.  If you can swing it.

But Mercedes doesn’t make anything equivalent to the Camry, and where it shows isn’t in the rarefied heights of the S class, but the car they call the Baby Benz…the C class.  The C is as economy model as Mercedes is willing to go.  But if the Lexus ES benefits from all the work Toyota puts into the Camry, in terms of being able to mass produce an affordable car that is absolutely reliable, the Mercedes C class benefits from having all that expensive engineering above it.  A Lexus ES is a Camry at heart, made to a higher standard.  A C class is a smaller and more modest E class, itself a smaller more modest S class.  But they are all made to the same Mercedes standard of engineering. 

So the C gets a plastic dash instead of a leather wrapped one, but it’s still made to the same engineering standard as the S class dash.  You slide your hand across its surface and your fingers don’t tell you it’s a toy.  Vinyl upholstery is standard instead of leather, no fancy trim or optional massaging function.  But the seats though basic, are still made to the same engineering standard as the seats in the S class.  I drove from one side of the country to the other sitting in them and I’m here to tell you I never had it so comfortable.  You still get the front seat warmers and the power adjust.  You get a lot of nice extras.  But it is a plain car compared to the E, let alone the S, with a much smaller body, frame and drive train.  It is less expensive, not because it is more cheaply made, but because there simply isn’t as much of it as its bigger siblings.  It is smaller, has way fewer high tech gizmos in it, and way, way less sumptuousness.  The C is the little brother that gets all the hand me downs.  The Lexus by comparison, is a (very) high end Camry.

I don’t even like calling the C class a "luxury" car.  And…really…none of them are when you get right down to it.  At the price point we’re talking about, compromises have to be made, and a true luxury car isn’t about compromise.  And it’s here that you really see the difference: in the Mercedes, when it comes down to it, engineering wins over appearance.  The other makes really want you to think of them as luxury cars, so they go for that luxury car appearance and in the process cut corners everywhere.  The wood trim isn’t really wood, or a very low grade wood.  Likewise the aluminum trim is really just silvered plastic.  The leather in the upholstery is second or even third grade at best.  The dashes are so elegantly sculpted, but so very very cheesy to the touch.  The other makes want to be viewed as luxury cars.  The Mercedes C class wants you to think of it as a Mercedes and Mercedes has always been about engineering first.  Well…except for that Let’s Forget That Decade Ever Happened Decade…

To my mind the C is a very nice compact four door sedan, but made as well as you can make one.  The few luxury touches it has could as easily be options you’d find on any other mass produced  automobile.  It is hardly the most sumptuous thing you’ve ever seen.  It’s actually quite plain looking by comparison to the other "entry level" luxury cars.  There is nothing about the C that necessarily says Luxury Car at all.  Except…except…that uncanny feeling you get when you look at it, and especially when you sit down inside of one, that this thing is built like a damn vault…

Here’s how that all plays out in the cockpit…

The Lexus ES 350…

The Acura TL…

The Lincoln MKZ…

The Cadillac CTS…

The Mercedes-Benz C Class…

Do you see the difference?  Never mind for a moment how each of these cockpits looks.  Ask yourself how they would feel to the touch.  Which one of these interiors says to your eye that when your hands touch its surfaces it will feel something solid, or something brittle and plastic?  All that nice curvy plastic in the Lexus and Acura interiors feels about as cheap as it looks.  The Lexus in particular, looks very nice, very sumptuous.  No vinyl upholstery there.  The carpet on the floor is thick and luxurious.  But look at that dash, and the one on the Acura.  They both feel to the touch as plastic as they look.  The Cadillac is just an unmitigatedly ugly mess, in addition to feeling to the touch like it was made in a toy factory.  Only the Lincoln, surprisingly, looks anything like a solid, substantial piece of work.  But even there the eye catches little details that seem…well…cheap.  And alas, under the hood, it’s a Ford.

By comparison, the C class cockpit is almost Spartan.  Just a few nice touches of burled walnut here and there, and a little video display that hides inside the dash as if embarrassed to admit its even there in such a sparse setting.  But you sit down in one of these and you know right away how solidly built the damn thing is.

And then you start it up, and you hear a mill that sounds like you could drive it around the world several times and it would only just be broken in.  It doesn’t growl, and it doesn’t whine.  The sound of it is smooth and deep and precise and lovely.  You can tell it isn’t a sports car.  It’s a finely machined piece of 330 pound 220 horsepower steel and aluminum clockwork, as solid as everything else about the car.   I have driven big block American made V-8s that accelerated more raggedly and with less umpf then this V-6.

Well…I got mine back this afternoon.  And I’m going to take it for a ride…somewhere…anywhere…this weekend.  We’ve been apart for too damn long…

Is this how lovers feel when one goes away on a business trip?  It’s like my entire life is on hold until I get my friggin’ car back.  I’m actually getting depressed about this.

I took Traveler in to the shop a week ago Monday to finally have the damage from my neighbor’s sideswipe repaired.  It was minor damage, thankfully.  Just around the front of the driver’s side front wheel well, and the side indicator light cover.  But I didn’t want anyone but my Mercedes dealer touching that car, and especially doing the body work.  The instant you lay your hands on that car you notice how nice and smooth and substantial the paint job on it is.  I wanted it fixed, not covered over.  I had to make an appointment for the work, and the best date they could give me was three weeks away.  So I waited three weeks to have the work done, fuming quietly to myself every time I saw the neighbor who I am certain did the damage.

But the weekend before I was to take the car in, I got a sudden message from the speedometer display…

The Tire Pressure Monitoring System Is Inoperative.

HuH?  Well, I thought, maybe it’s the battery inside one of the tire pressure sensors that’s gone bad.  The cars Mercedes sells everywhere else in the world but here use a system that monitors the wheel spin as the car drives down the road, through the Electronic Stability Control system.  A tire that’s getting low will drag more then the others and the stability control system will detect that.  But when I bought Traveler, that method of monitoring the tire pressure hadn’t yet been approved by whatever U.S. regulatory department it is that approves these things.  I have the Electronic Stability Control system in my car, but it doesn’t also monitor the tire pressure.  In 2007-08 Mercedes sold its cars in the U.S. with a tire pressure monitoring system that has pressure monitors inside each wheel.  They communicate with the tire pressure monitoring system via an RFID chip inside each pressure monitor. 

It’s a more complex system and it gives Mercedes owners headaches whenever a new set of tires or wheels needs to be "registered" with the monitoring system.  You can’t just swap on the snow tires every winter.  You have to reset the tire pressure monitor and register the pressure monitors inside the snows with the system.  That’s to prevent someone else’s car from driving up alongside yours and the pressure monitors in its wheels confusing your car’s monitoring system.  Then in the spring you have to do the process all over again when you take off your snows and put back on the regular tires.  It’s something an owner can do themselves, but it’s a pain.  And the monitors in the wheels sometimes fail and then you have to pull a tire apart to get a new one in.

So I was expecting it to be something like that.  But my dealer is having problems figuring out what’s wrong with the tire pressure monitoring system apparently.  I brought Traveler into the shop a week ago Monday.  It was supposed to be a three day body shop repair and then maybe an afternoon with the mechanic fixing the tire pressure monitor.  But the body shop didn’t get done until Friday afternoon, and the machanic said they needed to order a part because they thought there was a grounding problem in the cabling.  Swell.

I had a rental Volkswagon Jetta, but it was on the insurance for the body work, so I couldn’t keep it for the machanical work too.  So I brought the Jetta back in and the dealer gave me a Subaru Forester to take home for the weekend.  It’s nice for an SUV; small, easy to handle and park, yet very spacious inside.  It was so new it still had that new car smell to it.  I took another load of…stuff…to the city recycling drop-off with it and having that extra cargo capacity was very nice.  But it has that odd Subaru opposing piston four banger and seems to get good gas milage.  Driving it I could almost see owning an SUV.  Well…a mini SUV.  Almost.

Yesterday I called the dealer hoping to get Traveler back.  No luck.  They’re still waiting on a part.  And I’m depressed.  I don’t have my car.  And now I can’t give it a clean bill of health when the next Consumer Reports survey comes along.  I’m going to have to report that my Mercedes had an electrical system failure, and even though it wasn’t anything that would have left me stranded and waiting for a tow truck, it will get tallied up and Mercedes cars are going to keep getting a black eye in the Consumer Reports annual report compaired to the Japanese makes.  But I’ve looked at the new Lexus and Acuras and I would still not buy one.  I might go find another dealer though.

[Geek Alert...]

My Windows/Linux workstation, Mowgli, died some weeks ago.  It’s had a recurring problem having to do with somehow loosing the keyboard state when it was turned off and refusing to turn back on again until I’d gone through this ritual of unplugging the keyboard and switching off the power supply at the back end and then plugging the keyboard back in and switching back on the power supply.  It was a frustrating exercise in appeasing recalcitrant hardware and I was getting tired of it.  But simply replacing Mowgli’s motherboard wasn’t a simple option.  Ever since Microsoft went to its software branding anti-pirating technology what had been the painfully slow, gruesomely ugly chore of reinstalling Windows took on an added test of wills between Redmond and its customers. 

Please activate my license again.

You’re stealing our product!

No…I’m just reinstalling it.  Please activate my license again. 

This is not the same computer you licensed this software for. 

I had to replace the motherboard. Theses things fail you know.  Please activate my license again.

Ah-Ha!  The hard drive is different too!  And the video card!

Duh.  I figured as long as I was buying a new motherboard I’d upgrade a few other parts to.  Why is it every time Windows Upgrade runs my computer gets a little slower?

This is a different computer.  You are not licensed for more then one computer.

No…seriously…you think I’d go to all the time wasting nail biting hair pulling cursing profanely pain of installing Windows just for kicks and grins??  Hey, I know, I think I’ll reinstall Windows today.  No idiot, my fucking hardware failed and I had to buy new parts!  Activate my license again.

You’re a software thief!  You must buy a license for this software!

I ALREADY HAVE A LICENSE!!!

Please wait while you are transferred to our sales department…

&#*@%#$!!!…

I’d planned on just giving up on Windows and running Linux on Mowgli long ago.  But Linux has posed its own problems lately, the killer one for me being that for some reason "the community" decided to break Samba somehow.  Samba is the open source networking layer that lets you connect to Windows computers and share resources such as files and printers.  Previous versions let me network just fine with Bagheera, my art room PowerMac G5, and Akela, my Powerbook G4, just fine.  More recent versions can’t seem to talk with them at all.  Windows XP never had any problems talking to the Macs, so if there was a problem it was either something introduced in Vista or something introduced in MacOSX Leopard that only affected Samba, but not Windows XP.  Since I started networking Casa del Garrett, I’ve taken advantage of being able to balance my storage needs between the art room and the front office.  Networking here has to work, or I’m running up and down the stairs with a flash drive in my hand.  And while the exercise is probably good for me, the frustration isn’t.

I’m at a stage in my life now where I just need my computers to work.  I don’t have time anymore to keep on fiddling with them just for kicks and grins.  I have work to do, both at home and for my employer when I’m working from home.  I need things to be reliable here.  And the only absolutely reliable computers in the house for the past half decade have been the Macs.  I have never had any problems with either Bagheera or Akela.  Never.  I’ve had Mowgli apart dozens of times.  And when it hasn’t been apart, I’ve been struggling for hours to resolve either some Windows issue or some Linux issue, usually right in the middle of some other important project.  I need computers I can mostly just setup and use and they keep working.  That’s the Macs.

And the Macs had the added benefit of Much nicer software licensing terms.  There is no branding…at least none that’s visible to the end user.  You just install OSX and it runs.  I assume Apple already knows its own computers are supposed to be running its OS.  And I’ve upgraded both Bagheera and Akela twice now with no fuss at all.  What is more, I’ve actually replaced the system drive in Bagheera with a bigger one and simply file-copied over the old to the new drive and the new drive booted OSX without complaint.  You just can’t do that with Windows.  You need to use drive imaging software for that, and pray the anti-piracy code in Windows doesn’t decide you’re running an unauthorized copy.  Hell…I can file-copy the system drives of either of my Macs to an external drive and boot from it if I need to.  Try that on a Windows box, go ahead.

And the five license "family" OSX packs cost less then two single licenses.  That’s also true for the "productivity" software Apple sells too, such as iLife.  Ever since they came into the house, the Macs have just been all-around easier machines to live with.

I’d been considering becoming an all Mac household for some time now. My plain was to replace Bagheera, which is a PowerMac G5, with one of the newer Intel multi-core Mac Pros next year, and then move the PowerPC box up to the front office where Mowgli was.  But Mowgli died before I could put that plan into action, and my budget this summer just didn’t have room for a Mac Pro.  I considered a Mac Mini, but even one of those ended up being over a thousand bucks when I’d added the extra memory and disk space I figured I’d need.  And you’d better buy one of those with everything you want already in it because you are not opening it up yourself to add anything later.  

I really wanted something more like what I had in Bagheera.  The tower case Macs are so cleanly, so damn elegantly laid out inside that getting into one to add memory, or a new hard drive, is a pure pleasure.  I wanted to keep the option of working on my own hardware open.  I remember my jaw dropping when I opened Bagheera that first time to add memory to it and saw how beautiful it was in there.  Then later, when I opened it again to add a second hard drive, I was floored to see not only how easy it was, but how Apple had even put the extra screws I’d need for the job in a series of screw holes right next to the empty drive bay.

So I looked around at the second hand market, and found a company that deals in used Macs.  They had another PowerMac similar to Bagheera for about $450.  With added memory the total cost came to $550.  It’s sitting beside me now, and I’ve named it Baloo. 

Baloo came vi FedEx in a huge box swaddled in what looked like spray insulation foam.  The first thing I did after unpacking it was take it up to the office and plug it into everything and boot it up, to make sure it arrived in working order.  It was running Tiger (OSX 10.4) and seemed to be in fine shape. It was only later that I discovered it was not the machine I ordered.  I had ordered a machine similar to Bagheera, a 1.8g G5 with 1g of system ram.  What I got was a 1.6g G5 with 512meg of ram.  But I’d also ordered an additional 2g of ram to put into it, so I still had enough to run a decently fast machine.  Instead of it being topped up to 3g though, it would be 2.5g. 

I spoke with the company I ordered it from and said I’d be willing to live with what they sent if I got a refund for the difference.  It was annoying, but not fatal because I had the extra memory and the difference in processors wasn’t that great.  And I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of sending it back and waiting for another one.  The company agreed to send me a refund after apologizing for the mix-up, so I’m satisfied.

I got out my Leopard install disk and did a clean reformat and install on Baloo’s system drive.  I’d saved money by buying the family license pack for two household Macs…I was saving more now by adding a third.  Problem is none of the household Macs, which are all PowerPCs, will run the upcoming "Snow Leopard" version of OSX, so the next OS upgrade, when it happens, will be a lot most costly.  But I’m not going to be in any big hurry for it.

When Mowgli died I pulled its data drive and put it in a IDE to USB converter box.  Then I hooked it up to Akela, then copied its contents over to an external Firewire drive I’d partitioned and formatted in the MacOS file system.  While I was running Akela as my front office computer, I kept the firewire drive attached to it and used that as my data drive.  With Leopard installed on Baloo, I simply unplugged the firewire drive I had connected to Akela and put it on Baloo and now I had all my data on Baloo now. At some point, I’m going to add a second data drive to Baloo and copy the firewire drive to that, and then use the firewire drive as my backup drive.  I’m going to keep the external backup drives I used with Mowgli archived in case I find I need something off of them later.  The backup drives have data backups for both the Linux and Windows systems I ran on Mowgli and not all of that was copied over to the firewire drive I have on Baloo now.  I’m also archiving the original data drive that was in Mowgli.  Baloo starts with a fresh set.  Hard drive space is cheap.

I’ve been adding the software I normally use in the front office to Baloo as I go along.  Firefox… Thunderbird… Neo Office on the Mac rather then Open Office… the NetBeans IDE for Java development…  Oh…and MoneyDance, the checkbook software I’m using lately.  MoneyDance is a Java application, so it runs on Windows, Macs and Linux, and the user license attaches to the user, not the computer.  So if I want to run it on any of the computers here at Casa del Garrett I can, provided that it’s me that’s using it, and only one instance of it is running at any given time.  Nice.

So Baloo 2 and I are getting acquainted and the process is happening just the way I expected it to…smoothly and without fuss.  Baloo was the name of my old IBM PS2 Model 80, which is headed for the recycling center soon now.  So I’ve passed the name along.  In Kipling’s Jungle Books, Baloo was the wise old teacher.  In its first incarnation, Baloo was the IBM PC I used for maintenance work on the old DOS programs I’d developed back in my early contractor years.  I had an Ethernet card in it, and actually had it networked to the other household Windows computers with a copy of Windows For Workgroups For MS-DOS.  I haven’t fired up Baloo 1 in years though.  In its second incarnation here, Baloo is the old PowerPC mac that’s taking care of my front office chores while I figure out what to do with Mowgli. 

I still need a machine I can run Windows and Linux on occasionally for work related tasks, so that’s what Mowgli may become eventually.  Or not.  I have a whole new test center facility that I’m working on at the Institute and I can use that if I need to for any Institute work.  I really don’t feel like bothering with either Windows or Linux at home anymore. 

From our Department of Clueless Nitwits…

Via SLOG, The Seattle Times ran an article yesterday about how fragmented the Religious Right has become lately, and in particular over the fight against gay equality.  The general complaint among the local culture warriors, if not the big generals, is that the fight has become too negative.  Oh really?

Fuiten, senior pastor at Cedar Park Assembly of God Church in Bothell, long has been a staunch, articulate voice for conservative Christian values.

But his position on what role the church should play on gay rights is shifting, and he’s struggling to understand what God wants him to do next.

He remains against gay marriage, still sees same-sex relations as sinful, and also was against a measure passed by the Legislature this spring that expanded domestic-partnership benefits for same-sex couples.

But he has publicly opposed — and won’t sign — Referendum 71, the effort to repeal that measure, saying people are preoccupied with the economy and there’s not enough support.

More important, he said, Ref. 71 "drags us backward into a negative fight we’re not going to win."

"I don’t want the church to be viewed as oppressive, [and] as opposed to people living their lives and eking out whatever happiness they can."

Well if he’s willing to concede that gay folk are "people" now, instead of a cancer on society, God cursed abominations that want to destroy marriage and families and the very moral fabric of western civilization, I guess that’s progress.  But when you’re more concerned about how you are viewed, then the person you really are, you are going to keep missing the point of their anger. 

Senior Pastor Emeritus Jan Hettinga, 64, of Northshore Baptist Church, and an organizer of 2004’s Mayday for Marriage rally, said many at his church feel they’ve "been there and done that" on political issues, and "all we got was really, really bad press and a bad image."

The problem isn’t that you have a bad image.  Here’s the problem:

Branding the disagreement over same-sex marriage as hatred and bigotry was a smart strategy by gay-rights supporters, Hettinga said. "No Christians I know want to be considered haters.

And here’s where I just want to scream in his face.  Strategy.  Strategy.  Strategy.  You stick a knife into people’s hearts, tell them, no, scream in their faces day in and day out that they are condemned by god, call them abominations, threats to families, menaces to children, cancers on society, defilers of the sanctity of marriage, you barge into the gardens of their hopes and dreams and trash everything you can lay your hands on and when they call you haters and bigots you think that’s a fucking strategy???  No asshole, it’s called getting angry with morons who are laying waste to your inner life as if they don’t think you have one.  Still can’t see the people for the homosexuals can you?  Well…that’s how bigots are.

You don’t see people.  You see bogeymen.  You see scarecrows.  They don’t have human hearts, they have an agenda.  They don’t feel pain, they plot strategies.   They don’t love, they just have sex.  And you are not a bigot, just someone who can’t see the people for the homosexuals.  An image makeover isn’t going to solve your problem Jan.

Welcome to the brave new world of digital publishing…

Amazon Removes E-Books From Kindle Store, Revokes Ownership

Today, Amazon removed George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from its Kindle e-book store. The company also went ahead and removed any digital trace of the books, too-striking them from both users’ digital lockers and from Kindle devices.

…

This unusual maneuver, which Amazon says occurred because Orwell’s publisher changed its mind about offering the electronic version of these titles, is all the more unsettling simply because readers already purchased the books and had their ownership of the item revoked. In the Orwell book case, the item was simply no longer there-it was as if those Kindle users never owned it.

What book citizen?  That book does not exist.  That book never existed…

I have this quirky sense of humor that (I think) alternately charms and appalls my friends.  The problem with being a nerd is you never quite know for sure when you’ve taken it too far until your friends are giving you that Oh Do Grow Up look again.  There is some subtle social sensibility you are missing, which prevents you from stumbling across the line from smart and funny into dumb and annoying. 

I have to admit…I was tempted when I saw This.  Oh…very tempted…

Novelty Bavarian Lederhosen With Yodeling Frankfurter Controls: Hurry!

Each 6-inch tall plastic pair of Bavarian Remote Control Lederhosen is activated by an infrared remote control knockwurst.  Press the button and the self propelled Lederhosen hops around and sings a merry yodel.

You can have your very own Bavarian Remote Control Lederhosen for $19.49.  Requires two AAA batteries.  Knockwurst remote control operates your Lederhosen to within 10 feet.

He’d probably never speak to me again…

Le Dance Pathetique…as choreographed by Linda in San Diego…

Un…

I am against the gay pride parade. 

Deux…

It is never report about the luid acts that happen down and around that area.

Trois…

I had friends go down there for dinner not realizing about the parade.

Quatre…

The cops have been told to ignore these acts of luidness.

Cinq…

Please stop this gross parade.

Six…

Oh by the way I do have gay friends.

Le Curtian…Applaus a Voux…

You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.

Last week, a same-sex couple was arrested in Salt Lake City’s "Main Street Plaza".  Their crime was kissing.  That’s right.  They kissed, they got thrown on the ground, handcuffed and arrested…

Matt Aune, 28, and his partner, Derek Jones, 25, crossed the plaza holding hands, according to Aune.  About 20 feet from the edge of the plaza, Aune said he stopped, put his arm on Jones’ back and kissed him on the cheek.  Several security guards then arrived and asked the pair to leave, saying that public displays of affection are not allowed on the church property, Aune and Jones said.  They protested, saying they often see other couples holding hands and kissing there.  "We were kind of standing up for ourselves.  It was obviously because we were gay."

Jones said that the guards put Jones on the ground and handcuffed him.  Aune said he was also cuffed roughly, suffering bruises and a swollen wrist.

LDC Church spokesperson Kim Farah said the two men "became argumentative," refused to leave, and used profanity.

And goodness knows no heterosexual would swear at a couple of rent-a-cops for arresting them for kissing their date.  Oh…and this all happened in a public place too…right?

Wrong…

The path where they walked is officially church property, but is used as a pedestrian avenue open to the public. That’s because it was a public walkway until 2003, when, reports the Salt Lake Tribune, "in a controversial land-swap deal … the easement became private property, allowing the church to ban protesting, smoking, sunbathing and other ‘offensive, indecent, obscene, lewd or disorderly speech, dress or conduct,’ church officials said at the time. In exchange, the city got church property for a west-side community center."

Dig it.  That space was public property.  And then one day the church that teaches its flock that they too will become Gods, decided it needed more control over that public space.  So they asked the city council nicely if they could have it in exchange for some pretty worthless property somewhere else.  And all the Mormons on the city council gave it to them. 

This is what people are missing in this story.  That city space was a popular tourist zone…particularly for couples…

An LDS Church spokesperson, in a written statement, denied that the two were singled out for being gay.  "Two individuals came on church property and were politely asked to stop engaging in inappropriate behavior — just as any other couple would have been."

The spokesperson declined to comment on what is considered inappropriate behavior, and on the rules governing the plaza.

Salt Lake City sold the property to the LDS Church in the late 1990s.  It is a popular pedestrian thoroughfare, and reportedly a site where couples often pose affectionately for photos.

This isn’t about this oddball God Is A Being From Another Planet religion’s bedrock of anti-gay animus.  It’s about its need to control…well…everyone.  Mormon or not.  It wasn’t a swarm of same-sex couples all necking in that plaza that made the church decide it needed to grab ownership of it away from the public.  And this isn’t Las Vegas we’re talking about here…it’s Salt Lake City…where until just this month, by law you had to fill out an application, pay a fee and become a member of a private club before setting foot in a bar…

The Mormon church has always helped shape alcohol policy here, and the change to the law this year was no different.  Only after consultation with church leaders and an agreement that DUI penalties would be stiffened, did lawmakers make progress on the changes.

The Mormon church "helps" shape all public policy in Utah.  Never mind the bible belt, which may consider itself Christian America, but isn’t under the thumb of any one particular church…it is Utah that is as close to a theocracy as can be managed under the U.S. constitution.  In Utah, the Mormon church wants, the Mormon church gets.  Whatever was going on in that plaza before the Mormon church ate it, it couldn’t have been much.  This is Salt Lake City not Key West.  But for theocrats there is never enough control, especially over lovers. 

The Salt Lake Police Department on Friday denied a request by the Salt Lake Tribune for a full police report on the incident, citing Utah laws giving them five business days to respond to records requests.

Sgt. Robin Snyder of the SLC PD refused to name the reason security guards gave for alerting police, saying it is "irrelevant."

They’re getting their stories straight.  I would bet money that every single person who had a hand in writing that police report, when it finally comes out, is a Mormon.

What you need to understand about the leaders of religions like this, is that it isn’t sin they’re waging war against.  Their sworn enemy isn’t the devil.  Theocracy hates the human heart.  And fears it.  Because the heart acknowledges no master other then Love…

 And when two lovers woo
They still say, "I love you."
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by…

Via Sullivan…

Brüno is, in more than one sense, beyond gay. Is any viewer really going to think that this hyperbolically crass and ridiculous narcissist—who wears mesh tops and eye-searing lederhosen, refers to his adopted African baby as a "dick magnet," and drops faux-Teutonic vulgarities about his waxed arschenhaller—represents "the mainstream of the gay community," as one troubled Hollywood "gay insider" put it?

Okay…I have a question for you.  How many top grossing box office movies can you name that honestly represented that mainstream of gay people you speak of?  How many?  No…not just a walk-on token gay character, but a movie About gay people that wasn’t full of the same stupid ignorant stereotypes that are propelling Sacha Baron Cohen’s gayface act to number one?  How many?

That one about the gay cowboys?  The one that couldn’t win an academy award because John Wayne was rolling in his grave?  The one academy members openly said they’d never vote for.  The one they made Bruno-esq jokes about at the award ceremony?  The one that got practically no cable channel airplay after it left the theaters, even though it was nominated for best picture?  That one?

Once upon a time my diet of fiction was huge.  In grade school I was a voracious reader of it, much to the annoyance of my teachers who often caught me at it in class when I should have been paying attention to them.  Once a dour old history teacher of mine, a man who could make World War II seem boring, caught me reading a western behind my text book and berated me for a good ten minutes in front of the whole class.  He demanded to know if my copy of Louis L’amour’s Flint was more important then history class.  It was all I could do to keep from telling him no, just his history class.

But as I have grown older my diet of fiction has dropped severely off.  Where I used to go through one or two fiction books a week, now I’m doing good if I read one or two a year.  It isn’t that I’ve stopped reading altogether.  Far from it.  I read constantly.  Between the web and the few magazines I still subscribe to, my eyes are constantly scanning words.  And I always have a book I am digesting, sometimes several, on the side table in my office with bookmarks carefully inserted.  But these are non-fiction titles.  A history of German-English relations, Death of the German Cousin, by Peter Edgerly Firchow.  A history of Walt Disney Word, Since The World Began, by Jeff Kurtti.  A history of the anti-gay witch hunts of the 1950s, The Lavender Scare, by David K. Johnson.  These are the sorts of books I read now. 

I think I know why, and it’s why I don’t like watching movies all that much anymore, or TV shows that, once again, aren’t non-fictional.  I can watch The Science Channel and The Discovery Channel and The History Channel for hours.  But very little else.  Fiction mostly bores me anymore.

At work, there is a little bookshelf in one corner of the cafeteria where staff can leave books they are finished with, for others to pick up and take home and read.  It’s a kind of informal book exchange.  When I first joined the Institute ten years ago (has it been that long?), it was just a small stack of books on a window ledge.  One day someone had left a few there with a note saying anyone who wanted one could have it.  Over the next few months some books disappeared and others were deposited to take their place.  Eventually the stack outgrew its window ledge and a small bookshelf was installed.

I check it daily, and have even fed from it a time or two.  But as I hardly read any fiction anymore my interest was mostly curiosity as to what my co-workers were reading.  As you might expect, the mix is largely science-fiction and computer technology.  There is an old Word Perfect manual there, and a Turbo-C manual, that have been waiting for a hand to lift them off the shelf and take them home now for almost as long as the exchange has been going.  About half of it cycles quickly and the rest just sits and waits for the recycling bin to come along.  But they’re like me there…loath to toss out a book that might possibly still be useful.

The other day someone left a small collection of science-fiction hardbacks, their dust covers looking almost like new.  But it was older stuff…stuff from my kidhood, when I read it voraciously.  I sorted through them and saw an interesting cover.  It was of an older man sitting in a rocking chair his front porch, reading a book to a companion who stood nearby with a coffee cup in one hand.  The man in the rocking chair seemed to be a farmer of some sort…you could see fields of wheat going off into the distance just off the porch.  His companion was a grey skinned, pointy eared bug-eyed alien.  The two of them were enjoying a restful moment looking over the book the farmer was reading.

I picked it up…it was by Clifford D. Simak titled, Way Station…I’ve never read him…and on a lark brought it home thinking I could always take it back if I got a few pages in and lost interest. 

That’s been my pattern lately with fiction and I know why.  Even back in my kidhood, most of what I read was very light on the romantic interest.  My favorite authors, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement, and others, seldom spoke of that baffling dating and mating game, which suited me fine then, and ironically enough still would, although for a very different reason.  Action writer Alistair MacLean (of Ice Station Zebra and Guns of Navarone fame), whose books I devoured, once averred that the love interest just slowed down the action.  I wondered since if he wasn’t simply, as Clarke was, a gay man who couldn’t bring himself to write about love as he knew it, and simply left it out of his writing altogether, but I read now that he was married twice and had three kids.

Clarke, let it be said, wrote one of the most touching same-sex love stories in science-fiction in Imperial Earth.  But even then he had to make his main character bisexual, not gay and there is a female love interest too.  I pretty much just glossed over those scenes, which were gratefully few.  The scenes between the two male characters had real emotion to them.  Or at least, they did for me.

That’s been my pattern.  I pick up a book that looks interesting and as soon as it gets to the love interest I put it down.  Okay…I get that I’m living in a heterosexual world.  But it is the rare straight writer who can hold my interest while I’m reading about it.  And come to think of it, those writers have all been women.  And as more and more science-fiction writers became comfortable, insisting even, with writing about sex too, I just lost interest.  I suppose I can appreciate that heterosexuals probably don’t want to read about gay sex either.  But it would be nice if their gay neighbors had the same kind of depth to their fiction shelves.  Mary Renault is dead.  Mercedes Lackey only wrote one set of stories featuring a gay male lead.  It was wonderful, absolutely wonderful.  But then there was no more.  The various gay authors I’ve read have been mostly one hit wonders, and there is no good gay science fiction to speak of.  None.  Most of what I read these days that is fiction, are yaoi manga from Japan.  I have a bookshelf practically filled with those damn things.

So I picked up this Clifford D. Simak novel hoping that at least it was representative enough of its time that its love interest was minimal.  I got about thirty pages into it when I stumbled upon The Mute Free Spirit Girl In The Woods and thought…yeah…here it comes.  But then I did something, probably out of shear frustration, that I’ve always done when listening to pop music.  I mentally switched around a few pronouns and read it as The Mute Free Spirit Guy In The Woods and kept on reading.  What I found was I could empathize with the main character’s feelings once more, and my interest in the story perked up considerably.  And thus the pages kept turning.

I do this all the time with pop music.  It’s not always easy, particularly with rock songs that are über masculine male meets über feminine female.  But it is do-able.  Sometimes I need to substitute genderless pronouns to make the song make sense.  But in years of doing this, it comes to me almost as second-nature now…

You are all the woman I need
And baby you know it
You can make this beggar a king
A clown or a poet 

…runs through my mind as…

You are all the lover I need
And baby you know it
You can make this beggar a king
A clown or a poet 

…so easily now I hardly think about it.  This is how I cope with living in a world where 99 44/100 percent of the songs about love are songs about heterosexuals in love.  Sometimes I wonder if this is why my imagination is so potent.  I’m constantly re-imagining my pop culture environment to suit myself.  But no…I’ve been a day dreamer since well before puberty.  The imagination has kept me sane all these years.  Or at least, pleasant company. 

So I try this out on Way Station and find myself not putting the book down after all.  It’s more difficult then with rock songs, as I have to buffer the images in my mind as the words create them, then re-build them with the new pronouns, before actually looking at them.  I’m editing it on the fly and taking it in as I’m editing it. 

It’s…do-able, but hard.  With music it’s more the direct emotional content and the words are poetry and their images are meant to free-associate in your mind anyway.  You’re not building any specific image in your mind.  With a novel you are and re-casting an opposite sex love interest as a same-sex one is more mental gymnastics.  And I don’t have the genderless pronoun out I do with rock songs, when explicitly switching gender won’t make any sense.  On the other hand I don’t have to worry about how the words scan to a beat either.  

It is not that much harder, really, then what I do for a living when I’m trying to visualize program flow from computer code.  And I don’t have to do it everywhere in the novel, just when the love interest shows its face.  It’s work…I think it’s cutting my reading speed in half…but as time goes on I’ll probably get mentally faster at it.  As long as it doesn’t involve any actual sex scenes. 

I have a confession to make.  I do this all the time with favorite movies.  Not in real time though…that’s more then even my hyperactive imagination can handle.  But there are titles I could tell you about, some blockbusters, some just little niche films I happen to have liked a lot, that I have recast in my mind, mentally changing a pronoun as it were when the love interest appears, sometimes mentally re-writing huge sections of the plot, to satisfy my need for some reflection of my life and my own romantic desires in the pop culture.  I daydream these rewrites constantly, refining them a little every time I replay them in my head.  With the iPod, I can even daydream them to their actual background scores too.  These are favorite movies, but if you look on my video shelves you won’t see any of them there because I have them all stored inside my head, just the way I want them.

They say gay folk are more creative.  I think that’s more myth then fact, but if there is some truth to it, it’s because we need to be to survive.  We live in a world that is hostile at worst, and uncaring at best.  I wish there was more gay fiction out there.  There are probably tons of good gay writers out there…but it isn’t gay folk who run most of the publishing houses, let alone the Hollywood film studios.

From our We’re Not Racists We Just Believe In Racial Purity Department…

Fox News’ Kilmeade: We "marry other species," Finns "pure"

Kilmeade and two colleagues were discussing a study that, based on research done in Finland and Sweden, showed people who stay married are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s. Kilmeade questioned the results, though, saying, "We are — we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other …"

At this point, his co-host tried to — in that jokey morning show way — tell Kilmeade he needed to shut up, and quick, for his own sake. But he didn’t get the message, adding, "See, the problem is the Swedes have pure genes. Because they marry other Swedes …. Finns marry other Finns, so they have a pure society."

You can see the video of it on Salon.  I suppose they’ll be touting the benefits of incest on FOX News next.  It doesn’t get much purer then that…