So as you probably know by now (because I’ve been bending everyone’s ear about it ever since October 12), I bought a brand new Mercedes-Benz. But no…you don’t just buy a car when you buy a Mercedes…you buy into a…culture. Sort of like another product line I’ve bought into recently…
So I drove my new car to Strudsburg PA, last weekend, to visit an old grade school friend. In the process my car turned over its first thousand miles and I was obliged to bring it into the dealership for its complementary 1k checkup. I did that this morning, and swear to god I’ve never been treated nicer by a car dealership in my life. The waiting room was a nicely furnished lounge with free pastries and soft drinks, a widescreen HDTV to watch, and an Enterprise rental car office right in the lounge, in case the service department told you they’d have to keep the car for a while (I expect that if the car was still in warranty Mercedes would just give you a loaner car…they did me, no questions asked, when I traded my Accord in, but my new Mercedes wasn’t ready for delivery just yet…). There was also a nice little Mercedes boutique shop, where you could shop Mercedes-Benz paraphernalia to your heart’s content while waiting for your car. There were the usual assortment of Mercedes-Benz approved car care products. Polo shirts, jackets, caps, wallets, wrist watches, key fobs, umbrellas, posters…you name it.
I bought a sharp looking little spun aluminum travel mug to go with the car. It had the Mercedes three pointed star logo. It was a lovely shape that seemed to go well with the look of the car I’d just bought. I saw it and I had to have it. I expect I’ll be experiencing that feeling a lot in the coming months, regarding Mercedes merchandise.
The guy behind the parts counter window handed my new Mercedes-Benz travel mug to me in a little box, that reminded me of something else I’d purchased not that long ago…
Oh yes…that. The cult of Apple. The cult of Mercedes-Benz. Perhaps this was how initiates to the cults of the old gods once felt. But was there merchandise they could buy…?
The Mercedes C Class, verses the Chinese made Geely Merrie 300. Check out the cute little hood ornament on the Geely. Ah…but pity the poor billionaire who spent his hard earned money on a Rolls Royce…
When he Could have bought the Chinese Hongqi HQD and saved so much. More auto knock-offs Here. Say…I don’t see a knockoff Spirit of Ecstasy standing on the Hongqi’s grill. Maybe some talented Chinese artisan could make one for it. Something like this maybe…
In the mid-1980s, I was on one local BBS system that had a gay Fidonet echomail board. Called Gaylink, it had participating BBS systems on it all over the world. Back in those days, I had an uncle who was a HAM radio operator, and was trying to interest me in taking up the hobby. He kept trying to tell me about all the people all over the world he was able to communicate with via shortwave radio, and I kept trying to tell him about all the people all over the world I was communicating with via FidoNet.
Gaylink was mostly a social forum. We chatted about this and that…a little politics, a little dishing. It never really got very serious. Then one day a message from a BSS in the Netherlands appeared. It was short and to the point:
I’m 14 years old. I think I might be gay but I’m not sure. How did you know about yourself? What was it like?
And from literally all over the world this kid got coming-out-to-self stories. Some of them were painful to read. Some were hopeful. Some were amazingly nonchalant. There were folks whose parents disowned them. There were others whose parents completely accepted them. Some people struggled for years with it. Others seemed to have always known and accepted it. There was romance. There was heartbreak. I sat down and for the first time ever, really thought about my own experience coming to terms with my sexual orientation, and wrote it down for this kid, and the whole world to see. I could sense that something…wonderful…was happening.
It went on for two weeks. We never heard a peep from the kid throughout that entire time. And the stories, from all over the world, from people in all walks of life, just kept coming and coming. We all began talking to each other, seeing common threads in our lives that we all had, which set us apart from the heterosexual majority. Seeing those things that made each of us unique and at the same time those things we all seemed to share, no matter where we lived, no matter what culture we were raised in. Then the kid spoke up one last time:
Thank you. You’ve all given me a lot to think about.
That was it. We never heard another word from him. Maybe we gave him what he needed to accept himself. Maybe he was just confused about his own awakening sexuality, and what it meant to be homosexual. At that age, who knows? Maybe he wasn’t what he represented himself to be. But as I watched that event unfold I realized that apart from this one Dutch teenager, there had to also be hundreds of others, all over the world, generation upon generation, watching that conversation, hungry for those same answers to that kid’s question. And I saw then what this new technology could do for us as a people. We no longer had to see ourselves through heterosexual eyes.
When I came out to myself in 1971, nearly everything I knew about homosexuals and homosexuality, I’d learned from heterosexuals. In those days, before the Internet, before the World Wide Web, before Blogs and MySpace and Facebook, what you knew depended in large measure on what the popular media wanted to tell you. Before cable TV, there were only three TV networks. You had your local newspaper. You had your local radio stations. You had whatever books and magazines the local stores were selling. And that was it basically. I had to struggle, in a way most of you reading this now probably never had to, to dig up anything factual, anything at all, about homosexuality. The image the popular media put forward of homosexuals was relentlessly negative. We were perverts. We were psychotic deviants. We were dangerous, deranged sexual predators. We raped children and then murdered them. We skulked the shadows looking for unwitting victims. Even we didn’t enjoy the sex we were having. We were mentally ill, psychotic, perverted, sexual compulsives, unable to keep ourselves from engaging in horrible, vile, deviant sex acts that repulsed even us. There is a film, The Detective, about a homosexual murder: watch the murderer’s tortured confession at the end to see what sick monsters the popular media viewed us as being back then.
Now, it seemed in the blink of an eye, all of that had been swept away. Maybe not from the eyes of our heterosexual neighbors, but critically, finally, from our own. We no longer had to see ourselves through heterosexual eyes. You have to appreciate how revolutionary that was back then.
Vince Cervantes, an ex-gay survivor and one of the this year’s Soulforce Equality Riders (and an attender of this summer’s Ex-Gay Survivor Conference), has been sharing his experiences on his blog and through video. In the following two videos he goes into detail about the reasons he pursued a variety of ex-gay therapies and ministries. He really captures the mindset, the motivations and the conflicts that many us experienced when we lived ex-gay lives.
Now we can tell our stories via Internet TV. While the corporate news media is still telling itself its comfortable lies about us, we can tell our own stories, in our own words, to each other, no matter where we live, no matter what our circumstances are. And to anyone who wants to hear it from us, as opposed to heterosexuals talking to each other. You want to know why the gay rights struggle has made so much progress, so quickly, this is why. It isn’t the decline of civilization. It isn’t falling moral standards. It isn’t rampant godlessness. Once upon a time the only image we had of ourselves was the mask heterosexuals made from their own sexual guilt and paranoia to make us wear. Once upon a time they could make us hate ourselves. If you understand nothing else about the gay rights struggle, understand this: those days are over.
They were waning as it was, thanks to the changes brought about after world war II. Jet air travel. Interstate highways. Greater mobility. We could migrate to where it was safer for us to live. There was already a critical mass developing in the major urban centers of America and the western world, to push for change. Where we could live together in relative peace, we could see ourselves as we were, not as the scarecrows of other people’s sexual fears and self loathings. But then the personal computer came along, and computer networks with them, and suddenly no matter where you lived, no matter how isolated you thought you were, you could reach out in an instant, in a heartbeat, and connect to a community of other gay people. All over the country. All over the world. And what we saw when we did that, were not monsters, but people. The first person you come out to is yourself. The first eyes you open to the truth are yours. Your own story is a part of that truth. Every time you share it with another, you defeat hate.
Good Initial Reports On The C300 – Cars I’ve Owned
So far, everything I’m seeing on the reliability of the new C class is good. This owner’s review on the Mercedes Benz Club of America C-class forum was especially heartening, since the man seems to have done the kind of long distance road trip loop I love doing…
We left Vancouver WA…went first to San Francisco for a week…then Las Vegas, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, then Monument Valley, Albuquerque, picked up the old Route 66 road through Kingman AZ, to San Diego…back to SF, then Sacramento…then home on 9/24.
Stats: 4750 miles covered [the car now has exactly 5000 miles on it], 26-28 mpg at freeway speeds, temps ranged from 40-115F, altitudes to 9000 feet.
Roads: Everything from Interstates with 75 mph limits [and actual speeds of 85], to back roads with pitted surfaces and extreme twists for miles at a time. Really smooth pavement was rare; back roads in AZ and NM were sometimes very rough. These observations are important to the next point…
The Car: Absolutely fantastic. The best part about the new car is the ride / handling compromise – very absorbent ride over every kind of surface, but handling that is noticeably better in every way over the W203. Another improvement is the larger trunk…we got everything we needed inside, and it is more useable than the previous generation in this respect. Great seats [nothing new here], very quiet, and the quickest car we’ve ever owned – passing is easy, and speed changes are mostly a matter of just thinking about it. AC was really tested during the SW part of the trip – we saw 115F in Vegas, and never less than 95F for nearly two weeks. Coolant temps never budged over 90C, the cabin was always cooled instantly after a hot sun soak, and so far the car has used no oil at all. And it’s tight – no noises inside, no squeaks or annoyances.
Issues: None. That’s right, everything works. Our car was built in Bremen in June, and carries a serial number in the 17xxx range. I knew we were running a risk – so far, so good.
Other misc observations:
-Didn’t think I’d care about the satellite radio, but now we’re hooked.
-The cruise control has a feature that I’ve never encountered on an MB before – if you speed up temporarily using the pedal, when you ease off, it doesn’t just coast back to the set speed [like every other car we’ve ever owned], but will actually apply the brakes gently to resume the old speed. Disconcerting at first, just something to get used to.
-The grade logic in the transmission is superb – whether going up hill or down, it was always doing the right thing – no hunting, and providing just the right gear to minimize brake use on down slopes. Very impressive.
Summary: The BEST CAR EVER in our household, and I’ve owned 54 cars total since 1962. DB has its act together again.
("W203" is a Mercedes chassis ID. Apparently Mercedes folk like to identify the cars by chassis number over model designation. I reckon that’s because Mercedes will make these not-so-minor changes in a model designation from time to time. The new c300 is chassis W204.)
This is the kind of driving I intend to do with this car myself, and a few of his observations match with mine so far:
The 7 speed transmission always seems to be right on the mark, regardless of the road grade. I’ve read complaints about it downshifting too much, but I’ll just bet those are coming from folks who have theirs set on the "Sport" program and not "Comfort" The "Sport" shifting program should be more aggressive. I’m still in the break-in period, and Mercedes says to only use "Comfort" for now, but "Comfort" is fine. The shifts are so smoothly done I have to watch the tach to know they’re even happening, and they happen at exactly the right moments. I’ve not felt the car straining to accelerate even once, and the downshifts are barely felt if at all. Acceleration just happens.
Road handling is way beyond any car I’ve ever owned. The ride is smooth, and yet you never loose the feel of the road, or what the car is doing. I’m not in a position to be pushing it yet, but it seems to take corners really nicely. I’ve driven it down a few windy Maryland Piedmont backroads and never once have I lost that solid Mercedes sedan feel in a corner or turn, no matter how much the road is undulating. It is a pure joy to drive. But then…it was made for the Autobahn after all…
I encountered the same cruse control behavior he did, when I accidentally turned it on while trying to signal a lane change. That’s all too easy on a Mercedes because the cruse control lives on a stick on the steering wheel close to the turn signal stick. They’re easy to confuse at first. I didn’t realize I had the cruse control on until I started down a hill and felt the car start breaking a tad to maintain speed.
And I know about how wonderful Satellite Radio is while long distance driving. For local driving it probably wouldn’t make much difference to most drivers. But when you’re crossing large swaths of countryside, its nice, really nice, to have a constant signal on a station you like. Plus, unlike Clearcut Clearchannel damaged broadcast radio, satellite radio has a variety of music that’s always there. You like bluegrass? There is a bluegrass channel. You like Techno-Trance? There’s that too. Classical? Yup…several different flavors of it. And so forth. Plus…Sirius has a gay channel. You’ve no idea how wonderful it is to have a gay channel to listen to, while you’re deep in red state territory, and the only thing on the broadcast dial is hate, hate, and more hate.
I’m taking a trip to Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania Saturday to visit an old friend. I’ll get a chance to let the Nav system direct me somewhere and give the car its first little road trip weekend. I’m halfway through the first thousand mile break-in period, and by the time I get back the car should be ready for its complementary thousand mile check-up.
A little history…
My first car was a blue 1973 Ford Pinto. It had no name in my mind, other then just Pinto because the model name seemed just right for that car. It was small, it was cute, and I loved driving it. I was fresh out of high school and working various fresh out of high school kid jobs. At $1997.48, the Pinto was barely affordable. At the time, one of my uncles owned a Mercedes diesel sedan and it was a marvel. Solid in a way none of the U.S. made cars of the 1970s could even come close to being, and yet agile on the road. It boasted safety features the U.S. automakers kept insisting would kill their business if they had to put them on their own products. I was a little teenage geek: where the other guys were all about Corvettes and GTOs, I was about my uncle’s Mercedes-Benz. Everything about that car made sense to me. But the pricetag for even the least expensive ones was well beyond what a teenage stock boy could afford. So I just dreamed…
I ran the the Pinto for 135 thousand miles and took fanatical care of the engine to get it there. But after ten years of driving it, everything but the engine was starting to come apart. By 1983 it was ready for the junk yard. A friend offered me his mom’s old 1974 Chrysler Imperial for 500 bucks and I snapped it up because in 1983 a 500 dollar car was about all I could afford. It had a 400 cubic inch V8 and was so damn huge the dash had two ashtrays in it. It could hold four in the front and four in the back bench seats easily, and maybe another six in the trunk. It also had a big ass hole in the floor under the driver’s seat that I could look down at and see the asphalt going by. I named it The Blue Whale.
A reckless driver in a little Ford Capri hit me head on while I was waiting to turn at an intersection, and while I was grateful that I had that massive car around me when it happened, that was the end of The Blue Whale. I was into hard times then, and could not afford to replace it. I did public transportation to and from whatever work I could find for another four years or so.
Then in 1991 I got some work as a software developer. The only problem was the job was in Baltimore and I was in Rockville. The agency I contracted through rented me a car for a couple of weeks until I got my first paycheck. From a friend of a friend I bought a huge white 1974 Ford LTD panel wagon, another $500 junker. It had 240 thousand miles on it, having been owned by a lady who drove it all over West Virginia for her gumball business. I named it The Great White because Moby Dick just seemed obvious. It had another big ass V8 engine with a collapsed lifter in it somewhere that rattled loudly. The fabric on the inside roof was hanging down partially blocking my view out the back window, and eventually I just pulled it all off. Thereafter the layer of foam between it and the roof started flaking off and I’d have a hair full of it by the time I got to work. For about two years The Great White got me to Baltimore and back from the basement room I was renting in Wheaton.
Then in 1993, more confident that I could keep earning a living doing what I was now doing, I moved to Baltimore, into my first apartment ever (I was 38 years old). I was feeling so confident in my income as a software developer that I bought my first new car since 1973: a little green Geo Prism. I named it Aya. Aya was a champ, took me to California three times and carried me over two-hundred thousand miles and never once left me stranded anywhere.
By 2005 I was ready to step up a tad, and decided to go for a slightly bigger car, and more bells and whistles. I bought a black 2005 Honda Accord sedan with all the trimmings and named it Beauty, because it was so damn beautiful. Beauty carried me to California twice, and was, before now, the best highway car I’d ever owned. I could drive that car for hours on end and never feel tired. Just last July I put over eight thousand miles on it, driving first to Memphis, then to Topeka, then to Portland, then to Oceano California, and back through the southwest to Baltimore.
I fully intended when I bought Beauty, to own it as long as I’ve owned every other new car I’ve ever bought, which is to say until it had absolutely no trade-in value whatsoever. But a friend of mine bought himself a very lovely Acura TL, and it got me to asking myself if I was ever going to get around to going for the car I always wanted or not.
All these years I would occasionally peek into a Mercedes dealership and steal a look at the cars…particularly the low end sedans that were at least theoretically affordable. Someday. Maybe. I would get a brochure and take it home and spend hours looking at it. Two weeks ago, my Honda paid off, I peeked into a Mercedes dealership again, sat down in one of the new c300s, and thought…I’m 54 years old now…Am I ever going to do this…?
You don’t want to be going right back into debt again over a new car so soon after you’ve paid the one you already have off.
I’m 54 years old now…Am I ever going to do this…?
Your car only has 47 thousand miles on it. Buying a new one now would be a total waste of money.
I’m 54 years old now…Am I ever going to do this…?
You could get ten more years out of the car you have. Easy.
But by then I might be too old to enjoy driving a Mercedes. I’m 54. In ten years I’ll be 64. And then the argument will be, can I afford to be borrowing money on a luxury car when I’m that close to retiring.
You don’t need it. Put it away for retirement. Put it into the house. You just don’t need a new car.
I’m 54 years old now…Am I ever going to do this…?
I stressed over it for two weeks. Then I did it. I’ve named it Traveler. One ‘l’…so as not to be confused with Lee’s horse. I am no admirer of Mr. Lee and his Lost Cause. The name just came to me as I was sitting in it and thinking about all the places we would go. In German its Reisender.
He is the nicest right-wing evangelical powerhouse you’ve never heard of. Jim Daly grew up the last of five children in what anyone would call a broken home. His mother died when he was 10 and he lived with, in turn, a stepfather, a foster family, his own alcoholic father and his divorced brother. He came to Jesus in high school, under the guidance of a football coach. His recent memoir, "Finding Home," has barely made a dent on the best-seller lists. Nevertheless, in 2005, Daly got the job of president and CEO of Focus on the Family, and although he denies this, it’s clear that he was picked to be the yin to James Dobson’s yang. While Dobson continues to threaten in the press, Daly chats amiably with a reporter about the fall weather. He sticks to the hard line on policy issues—gay marriage is bad for families, he says—but his presentation is all soft edges. "I’m sure there are wonderful gay parents out there; there’s a poster child for everything." If one of his boys turned out to be gay, he says, "I’d love him."
Sure he would. He’d love him right into an ex-gay camp. It’s telling of the relentless animus the religious right has toward gay people, that Miller considers a Pew study showing opposition to gay marriage has crept down a tad among white evangelicals under 30, to 76 percent, as a sign of growing tolerance. Yes. And mount Everest is still growing too but I wouldn’t try watching it.
But there’s this little tidbit also…
According to a new study by the Barna Research Group, 80 percent of churchgoers between the ages of 16 and 29 believe that the term "anti-homosexual" describes Christianity, and they complain that they don’t get enough guidance from their pastors in how to apply Christ’s message of love to their gay friends.
I’ve seen this statistic cited elsewhere recently. Well I just can’t imaging why young people would describe Christianity as "anti-homosexual"…
One of the Seven Straight Nights for Equal Rights gatherings was held on October 8 in Greenville, South Carolina, and Faith in America has passed on photos and coverage of what transpired there, as those at the vigil faced protesters from a local church.
When the voices of straight allies unite with those of their gay and lesbain friends, family and co-workers, the shrill voices of religion-based bigotry can’t stand up against reason and heart-felt conviction. That’s what happened last Monday in downtown Greenville, S.C.
It was a beautiful night for Seven Straight Nights for Equal Rights in Greenville, S.C. on Oct. 8. But when a van full of anti-gay protesters from a Greenville community church showed up, the special event’s celebratory mood was maligned by the anti-gay group’s attitudes of intimidation and confrontation.
The good men and women of faith arrived at the protest bearing signs that read God Abhors You. There’s a video over at Pam’s House Blend.
Strolling back and forth yelling out that gay and lesbian people were doomed to hell, one of the leaders of anti-gay protesters continued his booming tirade of hate toward gay and lesbian citizens.
After the initial intimidation – which is what the protesters were all about – several of the people gathered for the Seven Straight Nights event approached the protesters and began questioning the message and their tactics.
Jon and Dawn Kennedy were two of those people at the celebration. Their brother, Sean Kennedy, died May 16, 2007 in Greenville, S.C., after being struck by a man who reportedly called Sean a faggot before striking Sean with such force that it crushed the bones in his face. Sean died from the one fatal blow.
Sean’s mother was present at Seven Straight Nights and was one of the event’s several speakers, including Faith In America Executive Director Jimmy Creech.
When Sean’s brother and sister politely told the leader of the anti-gay protesters that their brother was killed and that their hateful speech promotes violence toward gay and lesbian people, the protester flatly and unemotionally told Jon and Dawn Kennedy that their brother "was burning in hell right now."
I realize that these people are not representative of the whole of Christianity. But the silence in the pews toward this kind of thing is telling.
If you have friends who seem to think that violence against gay and lesbian citizens isn’t pervasive in our society, you need to introduce them to Erin Davies and her Fagbug.
Erin Davies, a student at Sage College in New York, was targeted by anti-gay vandals when her VW Beetle was sprayed with the words "U R gay" and fag" in mid-April, most likely because the vehicle has a rainbow sticker affixed to its bumper. The incident occurred on the national "Day of Silence" in which students across the country use silence as a means to bringing awareness to intolerance and homophobia.
Instead of having the car cleaned up, Davies says she plans to use it to spread a message of tolerance and take it on a cross-country trip this summer with the hateful messages still emblazoned across its windows.
Erin attended the Seven Straight Nights for Equal Rights in Greenville, S.C. last week and it was there that she reported the awful news that she had been the victim of another painful – and potentially serious attack – in her hometown of Tampa, Fla.
On Oct. 4, just a week before arriving in Greenville, S.C., someone threw a brick through the window of her home in Tampa and the back window of her car parked there.
This is what Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin buys you. Not tolerance for the homosexual, but tolerance for bigotry. You cannot arouse religious passions against couples in love, without giving license to hate. This isn’t murder we’re talking about here. It isn’t violence. It isn’t theft. To denounce acts of violence, crimes of greed, the hurtful, harmful, things people to To their neighbors, is to condemn hatefulness. To denounce couples in love is to condemn love itself and that gives hate free reign to do what it will, because only love can stand against hate. Once you have destroyed love, you have unchained hate and hate obeys no one. It throws the brick through Erin Davies automobile. It laughs in Jon and Dawn Kennedy’s faces, and tells them their brother is burning in hell. It ties a 112 pound college student tied to a fence, tortures him, then leave him to die alone on the cold Wyoming plains. That is what Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin buys you. Not absolution, but blood. On your hands.
I’m terribly sorry if all this puts you in a theological bind. But the bible says… Yes. And it says we shouldn’t suffer witches to live either. And then it turns around and says Love Thy Neighbor. Over here is God flooding the earth, killing everyone and everything on it, including by the way, all its little children. Over there is Jesus, warning people not to harm a hair on a little child’s head or face the wrath of God. The bible can have its cake and eat it too. Unfortunately, you can’t. Those people vitriolically condemning homosexuals and their families and friends, Are the face of Christianity in America, until you give it a better, more loving one. And you can’t. Not until you start loving your gay neighbor. And as long as you hold to the belief that the love between same sex couples is a sin, you don’t. All you can do is watch impotently, while they are eaten by wolves you cannot speak out wholeheartedly against. Or you can wash, wash your hands of it all, and look the other way.
According to the documentation, my new Mercedes c300 will read in vCards from a Bluetooth enabled cell phone. That’s really handy, except my iPhone doesn’t do vCards. That’s just one of many common smart phone features Apple mysteriously decided to re-invent the telephone without. However, the Mac address book application does do vCards, and the Mercedes has a PCMCIA card reader slot in the dash, from which it can also import vCards (it can also be used to play MP3 files and update the Nav system maps). So I figured all I needed to do was export my address book entries from one of my Macs, onto a PCMCIA card, then put the card in the Mercedes and import them into the car’s address book.
Back in the day, PCMCIA cards were how you expanded a laptop. Nowadays laptops come with just everything you’d want built-in, but I had on hand several old PCMCIA cards, including modems and Ethernet adapters, that I’d bought for laptops I’d previously owned. But I had no PCMCIA memory card. So I went looking for one online. They’re not exactly hot selling items anymore. I saw very few and those had very little memory on them by today’s standards. They also cost far more then the Compact Flash cards I use in my digital cameras. But lo and behold, there were PCMCIA Compact Flash card readers available for sale cheap. I could buy one of those, and pop one of my flash cards into it, and that had the extra added advantage that I already had a USB Compact Flash card reader.
I bought one from B&H Photo, who I’ve made a lot of online purchases from, for about ten bucks. It came in the mail today, and right away I put my plan to work. I connected my USB flash card reader to Akela, my Mac Powerbook, and exported a few selected entries from Akela’s address book onto vCards onto one of my Compact Flash cards. Thanks to my .Mac account, all the address books on my Apple computers plus my iPhone sync with each other, so Akela had the same address book list that my iPhone did.
Then I put the flash card into the PCMCIA card reader and took it out to the Mercedes. You activate the Command-Nav system and bring up the Phone menu, and then work your way into the Phone’s address book where you eventually find a menu item that’s normally grayed out, for importing vCards from a memory card. Once I popped the PCMCIA card in the slot in the dashboard that menu item came to life and I clicked on it. A little timer icon came up, and pretty quickly I got a message saying the import process had completed successfully.
Well…not. Most of the address book entries were malformatted. Some wouldn’t even come up when I clicked on them, but only displayed a “Function Not Available” message. I figured the Apple vCard format was different enough somehow from the standard, that the Mercedes software wasn’t able to cope. So I went back and tried exporting the vCards again, but this time from the Palm Pilot software I still had installed on Akela.
Once again I selected a few entries in the address book…only the ones I figured I’d want to call while on the road. This would be mostly immediate friends and family. I figured once I had the process down, I could add entries later as needed. Once again I copied the exported vCards to my Compact Flash card via the USB card reader, then popped the flash card into the PCMCIA card reader and walked it back out to the car.
I did the import and was horrified to see that the damn Palm Pilot software had exported not just the address book entries I’d highlighted, but Everything in that address book. Every phone number and contact I’d ever acquired in the last fifteen years or so. The Mercedes phone book was a complete mess now, though at least the entries seemed to be properly formatted. But it was too much. And I discovered then, that there was no way to delete a bunch of records from it all at one time. I had to go through each individual entry and manually delete it.
After about the first thirty I got frustrated enough that I started looking around for a way to just blow away the whole address book and start over. I found a “Reset” command under the “System” menu and gave that a shot. It promptly warned me that I was about to erase all my data and I figured that since I’d only had the car a few days, I didn’t have enough of my own data on it to worry about having to rebuild everything. It deleted everything, including all my radio presets and my Nav map customizations. But thankfully it didn’t delete the Bluetooth setup with my iPhone, so I didn’t have to go through that process again. And it didn’t delete the Gracenote database entries it had found for the CDs I had in the changer.
I spent a couple minutes redoing my radio presets and my Nav map settings, and making sure my iPhone was still talking to the car. Then I went back inside and sat down with Akela and looked at the preference settings for the Apple address book application. My theory at that point was that maybe the photos I’d attached to some of the entries in my iPhone contact list were getting into the vCards and confusing the import software on the Mercedes. So I looked around for a setting that allowed me to specify which fields in the address book I wanted included in a vCard. There wasn’t one of those, but there was a setting to choose between exporting a 3.0 vCard or a 2.1 vCard. I decided to give the older 2.1 format a try.
I redid the export, and walked the card back out to the Mercedes. It worked. The import went without a hitch, and all the phone entries were now correctly formatted.
That task finally finished, I flipped over to the Nav system to see if it got all the addresses. That was when I discovered that the car’s phone book, and the Nav system address book, were two entirely different entities. I could import vCards into the phone book, but the Nav system required you to manually enter every destination you wanted to save, and it offered no way to link those to the phone book entries.
I suspect that’s because the Nav book has its own database of city and street names that it uses to compute directions. Whenever you enter a destination into the Nav system, you go through a series of menus that drill you down to the street address. So for instance, to get to my workplace, The Space Telescope Science Institute, which is at 3700 San Martin Drive in Baltimore, first I select my state, “Maryland” from a pulldown menu that lists all the states in the U.S. Actually, Maryland comes helpfully pre-filled in the state field, I assume because the Nav system knows I’m in Maryland. Once I’ve selected my state, select “Baltimore”, again from a menu that lists all the named cities and towns in Maryland. When I’ve done that, I can go to another menu that lists all the named roadways in the city of Baltimore and select “San Martin Drive”. You’d think that having done that, I could simply enter the street address using the numeric keypad on the dashboard. Nope. The system gives me another menu, with all the valid numbers for that street. I can’t enter 23 San Martin Drive, because there is no such address on San Martin Drive in Baltimore, Maryland. But theoretically I could have a vCard with that wrong address on it, or a misspelled street name, and the Nav system wouldn’t know what to do with it.
But still, it would be nice to at least be able to link the phone number in the Phone book, with a physical destination in the Nav system, even if you had to enter that one in manually using the Nav system’s built-in street maps. The software engineer in me doesn’t much like the idea of having redundant information in a database. There should only be one contact list, that both the phone system and the Nav system use. I can accept not being able to import addresses from vCards into the Nav system, but at least I should be able to link a Nav system destination address with a name and phone number entry in the phone book.
But at least I got all my critical phone numbers copied over. I’ll add the addresses into the Nav system as I need to. Hopefully Apple will add vCard functionality to its re-invention of the telephone and then all I’ll have to do is sit in the car with my iPhone and send updated vCards to the Mercedes’ phone book via the Bluetooth connection.
I realize I’m going to be spending more on gasoline now that I own a car that runs on premium, and what is more get’s almost ten miles per gallon less. But…geeze…
LONDON: Concern that Turkey may attack Kurdish militants in Iraq and disrupt petroleum shipments pushed crude oil to a record price Tuesday, nudging $88 a barrel and extending a rally that has added $8 in a week.
Crude oil for November delivery rose as much as $1.84, or 2.1 percent, to $87.97 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the highest level since the futures were introduced in 1983.
In early London trade, the contract was at $87.45.
Oil is closing in on the inflation-adjusted high of $90.46 seen in 1980, the year after the Iranian revolution and at the start of the Iran-Iraq war. Prices this year have averaged $67.
The latest surge in oil prices came after Turkey talked over the weekend of invading northern Iraq to pursue rebel fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.
You want to get people’s attention here in America? Instead of issuing terrorist threat alerts on a color scale, they should issue them on a cost of a gallon of gas scale. The Homeland Security Administration rose the terrorist threat level to $4 a gallon today…
The common media image of today’s youth is that they have, under a steady barrage of sexually charged images, become increasingly precocious – engaging in intercourse at a younger and younger age and with a dizzying array of partners.
But the reality, according to a new report entitled Sexual Health in Canada, is that adolescent sexual practices have remained largely unchanged for decades. "Young people aren’t having sex any younger than their parents or grandparents," Linda Capperauld, executive director of the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health, said in an interview.
Nor – despite suggestive music videos, ready access to Internet porn and creeping hemlines – are more teens having sex.
Nationwide, only 28 per cent of adolescents age 15 to 17 report having had sex, a figure that rises to 65 per cent by age 18 to 19.
All told, the mean age for sexual intercourse is 16.5 years, about where it’s been since the sexual revolution that was launched by today’s baby boomers.
Despite the closing gender gap – equal numbers of boys and girls now say they have had sex – the primary reason for not having done so remains remarkably unchanged from previous generations: Most girls said they were not ready, while most boys reported a lack of opportunity. The No. 2 reason for both sexes is the same: "I haven’t met the right person."
But when they do, teens are remarkably faithful. The number with a single sexual partner is on the rise.
It’s not all good news though
The 150-page report also contains some grim news. The number of teens with sexually transmitted infections like chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis is soaring.
Gosh…that wouldn’t be because they’re being given adequate sex education, on the theory that if we don’t tell them how to have sex they won’t have it? Sex is a basic instinct, older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates, let alone humans. Human couples are perfectly capable of figuring out how to have sex on their own. What they need to be taught is how to avoid pregnancy and disease. And…a little responsibility please. But responsible sex is the last thing they’ll learn from the Family Values crowd…
OCTOBER 8–An Alabama minister who died in June of "accidental mechanical asphyxia" was found hogtied and wearing two complete wet suits, including a face mask, diving gloves and slippers, rubberized underwear, and a head mask, according to an autopsy report. Investigators determined that Rev. Gary Aldridge’s death was not caused by foul play and that the 51-year-old pastor of Montgomery’s Thorington Road Baptist Church was alone in his home at the time he died (while apparently in the midst of some autoerotic undertaking). While the Montgomery Advertiser, which first obtained the autopsy records, reported on Aldridge’s two wet suits, the family newspaper chose not to mention what police discovered inside the minister’s rubber briefs. Aldridge served as the church’s pastor for 16 years. Immediately following his death, church officials issued a press release asking community members to "please refrain from speculation" about what led to Aldridge’s demise, adding that, "we will begin the healing process under the strong arm of our Savior, Jesus Christ."
GREEN BAY — The chairman of the Republican Party in Brown County faces criminal charges for allegedly fondling a 16-year-old Ethan House runaway and providing him with beer and marijuana late last year.
Donald Fleischman, 37, of Allouez, was charged last month with two counts of child enticement, two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a child and a single charge of exposing himself to a child.
If convicted on both felonies and all three misdemeanors, Fleischman faces up to 52 years in prison.
Fleischman’s attorney, Jeff Jazgar, said he plans to confront the charges at the preliminary hearing set for Oct. 29.
“My client is innocent of the charges,” Jazgar said Friday. “Our plan is to get some witnesses to testify and present enough information to dismiss the case.”
Efforts to reach Fleischman were unsuccessful.
Fleischman has resigned his post with the Brown County Republicans, said Kirsten Kukowski, communications director for the Republican Party of Wisconsin.
The teen, now 17, told authorities Fleischman took him to a hotel in Appleton during that time and then to a cabin near Florence for several days before returning to Fleischman’s Allouez home. The boy said Fleischman provided him with beer and marijuana, the complaint said.
The boy told police that when he would go to bed, Fleischman would fondle him and that on one occasion he awoke to find Fleischman at the foot of his bed masturbating.
To neighbors here, J. D. Roy Atchison was a deft federal prosecutor, an involved father and a devoted volunteer, coaching girls’ softball and basketball teams year in and year out.
His wife is a popular science teacher; his youngest daughter, an honors student who was on her high school homecoming court last year. Their house, with rocking chairs on the porch, oaks in the yard and a wrought-iron fence, is among the prettiest in town.
But in an instant last week, the community pillar became an object of community loathing. Mr. Atchison, 53, was arrested getting off a plane in Detroit on Sept. 16 and charged with the unthinkable. The authorities there said he was carrying a doll and petroleum jelly, and that he had arranged with an undercover agent to have sex with a 5-year-old girl.
Now Mr. Atchison is awaiting trial in a federal prison in Michigan, and the people of Gulf Breeze, an affluent bayside suburb in the Florida Panhandle, are outraged, baffled and repulsed.
…
Mr. Atchison has worked at the small United States Attorney’s Office in Pensacola since the 1980s, most recently handling asset forfeitures in criminal cases as an assistant United States attorney. In one high-profile case, Mr. Atchison oversaw the government seizure of a popular beach bar at the center of a cocaine-trafficking ring.
His is considered one of the most conservative United States attorney’s offices in the country, known for refusing plea agreements and seeking the stiffest sentences.
Mr. Johnson said Mr. Atchison was close with the other prosecutors in his office, going with some on an annual lobster-diving trip in the Florida Keys. A big white fishing boat sat in his otherwise-empty driveway this week. His interests, according to the Yahoo profile that the police said was his, include “surfing, skiing, diving, boating, young girls, petite girls, skinny girls.”
And yes…according to a commenter at Daily KOS who looked up the public election records for the Pensacola suburb of Gulf Breeze, Atchison was a republican. Surprise, surprise. And here’s another anti-gay republican with a wide stance…
A Florida state representative and co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign was arrested Wednesday for offering to perform oral sex on a male undercover cop in a Titusville, Fla., public restroom, police said.
Rep. Bob Allen, R-Merritt Island, was booked into the Brevard County jail on a charge of solicitation to commit prostitution, the Orlando Sentinel reported, then released on $500 bail. The charge, a second-degree misdemeanor, is punishable by a year in county jail and a $500 fine.
Titusville police told the Sentinel that they were carrying out a burglary detail in a city park when they saw a disheveled, unshaven man enter and leave the park restroom three times. They decided to send in an undercover officer; minutes later, they told the Sentinel, the man knocked on the stall door and offered to perform oral sex on the officer for $20.
"After he was arrested, he (Allen) mentioned he was a state legislator," Lt. Todd Hutchinson told the paper.
Allen, 48, is married with a daughter, according to his legislative bio.
First elected in 2000, Allen is the chairman of the House Committee on Energy. He received the Rainbow Democratic Club of Orlando’s worst possible rating.
In March, he co-sponsored HB269, the Lewdness and Indecent Exposure Bill, which proposed enhanced penalties for "offenses involving unnatural and lascivious acts or exposure or exhibition of sexual organs committed within specified distance of certain locations." The bill never made it to a vote.
About six years ago, he was one of 21 Florida legislators to sign Gov. Jeb Bush’s friend-of-the-court brief supporting the state’s ban on gays adopting children, Rainbow Democratic Club secretary Carol Bartsch told Gay.com
"Practically as soon as he got into office, he wanted to go on record as being anti-gay," Bartsch said.
Due to be termed out of the House next year, Allen, however, had been considered a likely state Senate candidate, Sentinel writer John Kennedy blogged Wednesday.
Just a few of your friendly neighborhood Family Values folks who know what’s best for the rest of us when it comes to having sex…
The little door hatch in the center console, just above the air vents, is where the video display comes out when you activate it. It will show the navigation screen and the stereo system display. There are a lot of buttons there but in practice you don’t really have to use them. Just behind my furry little car mascot in the cup holder is a little knob that you can use a bit like a joystick when the video display is active, and cycle through a series of menus that control just about everything.
Below the stereo system controls, just in front of the shift lever is the climate control. The knobs on either side set the temperature for the driver’s side and passenger side independently. In the center of the speedometer is a display that you can cycle through with the buttons on the steering wheel to show you things like the odometer and trip odometer, miles per gallon, miles left before you need to refuel, the direction of travel, your street location, what’s playing on the iPod, and the caller ID when there is an incoming call on your cell phone. The car talks to my iPhone via a Bluetooth wireless interface and when the phone is in the car I can take and make calls via the voice control system.
The wood trim is real burled walnut. Mercedes backs the wood panels with aluminum so if there is an accident the wood won’t splinter. Some Mercedes fans are bellyaching online that they don’t like this new dash design but I just love it. I really hated the look of the old C class cockpit. This new look really appeals to me.
The car wants to do a lot for you automatically. I’ve been running the climate control on auto and just setting the temperature and its always been right. There are sensors that determine the ambient temperature inside and out, and which way the sun is beaming down on the car, and adjust the AC and fan speeds and vent openings accordingly. You can also set the headlamps on auto and the car will figure out when and which ones to turn on and how bright to set them. The turn signal lamps each have a backup, and when the active one burns out, and the backup is being used, you are notified in the speedometer info panel that you need to replace it. The dealer had to tell me about that because, she said, I might one day see a notice that I’ve got a burned out turn signal and I’ll go look at it and see that it’s still working and I might think the warning system is broken. But no…I really do need to replace the lamp. The rearview mirror is not adjustable for day/night operation. There is a sensor in it that darkens the mirror when it detects headlights behind you. The darkening varies according to the intensity of the light coming in behind you. The sideview mirrors do the same. I can’t begin to tell you how nice it is to have auto darkening sideviews. So many times I’ve had to turn my sideviews away when some idiot, particularly in an SUV, comes alongside with headlights that aren’t aligned right, and then reset them after they’ve passed.
You notice I’m not even talking about the ride. That’s mostly because I can’t push it yet. I’m still in the break-in period. I’ll say more about the ride when I’m free to do that. I’m looking forward to it. They say this car is as good on the road as any Mercedes sedan ever built. Not quite as good as the best of the E class…but good. And that’s probably way better then most other sedans. One thing I am noticing now though, is the difference between a rear wheel drive and the front wheel drives I’ve been used to driving since 1993 and my Geo Prism. But my first cars were rear wheel drive and it’s more like remembering how it was then learning something entirely new. This car has a very solid feel to it on the road. In part that’s probably because it’s heavy. But it’s also a Mercedes sedan, and they just feel like that.
There’s a lot I still haven’t tried yet, particularly the voice command system. I’ve been using the joystick to control the Nav system and the stereo. And I’m still working on a way to copy my iPhone’s phone book over to the car. The car will accept vCards, but the iPhone doesn’t do vCards yet. However the Apple address book does. There’s a slot in the console that accepts a PCMCIA memory card and I’m working on transferring the phone book that way. Once I get the phone book transferred, I can not only make and receive calls with it, I can get directions to the addresses in it from the Nav system.
The cockpit is so…sensual…to just sit in. When you buy a luxury grade car, you get (or damn well ought to for the price) a degree of fit and finish above the basic. It’s not just the finer quality materials, it’s the degree of care that goes into the making of it. Everywhere your eye looks, everything is fitted together just so…nothing is misaligned or out of place. You can see the care that was taken in the assembly of the car everywhere you look. It’s not the bells and whistles. it’s the solid feel of quality and care throughout the whole passenger compartment, and every other part of the car. It’s the real thing.
The folks who put this car together can be proud. It is a real fine piece of work. It was made in Germany, so the whole car actually rode the boat over to the U.S, unlike the previous two Japanese cars I’ve owned, which were made in factories here in America…the Geo Prism in California, the Honda Accord in Kentucky. I have the Mercedes factory tag with the chassis number, order number and production number info on it…in German. I’m still looking around the car to see if I can find a sticker somewhere with the actual factory location and production date on it.
Brown County GOP Chairman Donald Fleischman has resigned his post, says a spokesperson, after being accused of enticement and fondling of an underage boy, reports the Green Bay Press-Gazette Saturday.
Fleischman, 37, is free after posting a $20,000 bond on September 28. "My client is innocent of the charges," says attorney Jeff Jazgar, who "declined to discuss specifics."
"Our plan is to get some witnesses to testify and present enough information to dismiss the case."
The boy was found by police in Fleischman’s home on two occasions in late 2006 while being sought as a runaway from Ethan House, a home for at-risk youth. Now 17, he says he stayed with Fleischman at his house and a cabin, where he was provided with alcohol and cannabis, and regularly fondled.
On November 19, 2006, according to a September 7th complaint obtained from the WisPolitics Courtwatch Blog, the boy in question was found hiding in a bedroom closet, and a pipe was found in the house, which tested positive for THC. Shortly after, on December 8, 2006, Fleischman said he was trying to convince the boy, discovered again in the home, to turn himself in as a runaway.
Fleischman faces two counts of child enticement, two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a child, and one count of exposing himself to a child. He returns to court on October 29.
It’s been like a week doesn’t go by that some GOP operative or religious right nutcase turns up in the middle of some kind of sex scandal. And they’re lecturing us on sexual conduct?
The venue is owned by the Lynnwood Public Facilities District, a public taxing district that operates the convention center but is separate from the city.
“Our understanding is that they’re law-abiding. They have a right of free speech just like any other group,” said Mike Echelbarger, the board’s chairman.
“If we were talking about the (Ku Klux Klan) we’d have a totally different take on it. Of course we wouldn’t rent to the KKK,” he said.
Of course, they wouldn’t rent to the KKK. But as we reported earlier, they may as well. The rhetoric the Watchman use has often been violent, using the rhetoric of warfare in their speeches and writings. Founded by Redmond, Washington by preacher Kenneth Hutcherson, holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, and Latvian megachurch pastor Alexey Ledyaev, Watchmen on the Walls have gained a tremendous amount of influence in Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia. Ledyaev’s fomenting of anti-gay hatred in Riga, Latvia led to violence when skinhead and other demonstrators threw excrement and eggs at Gay Pride participants in 2006.
And as the SPLC recently reported, the Watchmen also represent an increasingly violent anti-gay movement among Slavic evangelical immigrants in several U.S. cities which have previously been known as being gay friendly. In July 2007, a group of Russian-speaking men killed Satender Singh, a 26-year-old gay Fijian of Indian near Sacramento, California. Two men, Andrey Vusik, 29, and Aleksandr Shevchenko, 21 were charged in connection with Singh’s death. Vusik fled to Russian in July and is being sought by the FBI. Ledyaev and Lively have refused to publicly condemn the killing.
Jim quotes Lively, who employs rhetoric chillingly similar to the eliminationist what the Third Reich once emplyed against Jews:
There is a war that is going on in the world. There is a war that is waging across the entire face of the globe. It’s been waging in the United States for decades, and it’s been waging in Europe for decades. It’s a war between Christians and homosexuals.
This is a war you haven’t seen yet. You’ve only seen a little bit of it, because Russia had been protected against the homosexual movement by the Communists. One of the few good things that the Soviet Union did is that it stopped the sexual revolution from infecting the Russian people. But all across the West, the sexual revolution changed the culture of the nations. The sexual revolution embraces the idea that there should be no limits on sexual conduct.
And this is the design of the Devil to destroy civilization, because civilization is based on the natural family. One man and one woman united in marriage bringing children into the world and training them to replace them in the next generation. That’s the foundation of civilization and the heart of Christian living.
And in the United States where the sexual revolution began, it was the homosexual political movement that designed this strategy to attack Christianity. The homosexual movement teaches sexual freedom, and its first target is the heterosexual people. The homosexual activists stayed hidden but they taught this philosophy through their activists. And out of the philosophy came the principalities and powers that is destroying the West: The pornography industry, the abortion industry, and the destruction of marriage through divorce.
These things are the product of a way of thinking. They deny the Truth of God. They deny the design of God for human beings. And their purpose is the change the cultures of the world.
Now, the homosexual movement has been winning this war in the United States, and it has been winning this war in Europe. And we’re looking at the future collapse of Western civilization. And Watchmen on the Walls is an organization to fight against this collapse. Watchmen On the Walls is an organization of men and women with courage, who will stand on the Truth of God and without compromise demand that the culture will follow the guidance of God. That marriage and family must be held at the highest level.
So Lively and his pal Ledyaev have been feeding this to the Slavic immigrant community in several west coast cities and it did its work. Two of their useful tools killed Satender Singh and Lively isn’t merely refusing to condemn the act, he’s making excuses for it:
Now, I’ve been working with the Russian community in Sacramento. And I want to tell you this is an example of how bad things are in the United States. Because we’ve come to a place in the United States where the homosexuals have achieved very high power. And they’ve begun to punish… They’ve begun to cause the political powers to punish anyone who says that homosexuality is wrong.
There was a situation in Sacramento a few weeks ago in a public park. There was a group of homosexuals and they were very drunk and one of the homosexual men was taking off his pants. And there were children in the park. And a Russian man went over to these homosexuals and he was rebuking them and there started a fight. And the Russian man punched the homosexual. [The audience starts to shout and applaud.] No, no, no, don’t… The man was very drunk… the homosexual was very drunk. He was very drunk and he fell down and he hit his head and he died. [Some in the audience start to applaud and laugh] No…. no…
Now the Russian man has been accused of murder and the FBI is seeking him. And all of the powers in Sacramento have been accusing all of the Russian community of being murderers. And the goal is to silence everyone who speaks against homosexuality. And this is a very dangerous situation because we don’t want homosexuals to be killed. We want them to be saved. Amen?
But that’s not what happened in the park. Singh and his friends, three couples including a pregnant woman, were taunted by a group of young slavs who hurled racist and homophobic insults at them. One of the Slavs called some friends on his cell phone and they came and joined the group just as Singh and his friends were leaving the park. There was no fight. One of the Slavs sucker punched Singh hard in the head and he fell and hit his head again on the sidewalk. He remained in a coma until eventually taken off life support.
Make no mistake…Lively is excusing murder there. Note not only the audience response to Lively’s telling them that the gay man was struck and died, but Lively’s half hearted attempt to quell their enthusiasm for murder. He’s not telling them their blood thirsty hatred is wrong, he’s telling them to shut up because his speech there is being recorded.
Burroway’s right, The Lynnwood Convention Center might as well be hosting a Ku Klux Klan gathering. The Watchmen On The Walls aren’t just some anti-gay right wing religious group. They are the public face of a violently anti-gay movement that has already killed at least one gay person. And that’s not the only act of violence associated with this Slavic religious community. People will die as a result of the hatred that will be passionately inflamed at The Lynnwood Convention Center on October 19, 20 and 21. They might be gay. They might be family or friend to a gay person. They may be straight and merely mistaken for being gay in the wrong place at the wrong time. But look at the rhetoric this movement employs. …this is the design of the Devil to destroy civilization…it was the homosexual political movement that designed this strategy to attack Christianity… We better wake up. This is a war. They aren’t using that word "war" metaphorically.
Someone will die as a result of what is said in the Lynnwood Convention Center in the coming weeks. Some of that blood will be on the hands of the The Lynnwood Convention Center Management. Just sayin…
I’m fortunate enough to be working for an employer that takes diversity in the workplace serious. I have never, Never, felt more comfortable as a gay man in the workplace as I have at Space Telescope. The work environment I’ve experienced has been pleasant, professional, and genuinely good-natured. But I have worked in a hostile environment too, so I know how it is. I’ve been told to my face that there was "no place for homosexuals in our company". And I’ve been let go in situations that I was certain were about my sexual orientation and nothing else, even when other excuses were being made. I’ve been harassed, I’ve been threatened. I’ve seen the atmosphere turn on a dime, the instant my sexual orientation became known.
365Gay.Com has a good post up today, about the Gay Glass Ceiling. There’s an interesting little tidbit in it…
In one ingenious study at Rice University, undergraduates were fitted with one of two hats: one of them said “Texan and proud”; the other, “Gay and proud.” The students didn’t know which hat they were wearing, but they were instructed to apply for retail jobs.
The researchers found something interesting: the gay hat-wearing students were just as likely to be hired as the Texan-hat wearing students. There was no hiring discrimination (and in fact, the students were in a municipality that protects against gay employment discrimination). But the interviewers were more hostile toward the gay hat-wearing students and more likely to end the interview early.
Most students were able to tell which hat they were wearing from the treatment they received.
I’ll bet they were. The difference between being gay, and being black or Hispanic, is that you can’t usually tell someone’s gay just by looking at them. Unless something in their job application or resume alerts them to it, a prospective employer isn’t likely to know that the person they’re interviewing for a job is gay. So white gay folks don’t generally experience job discrimination upfront. But unless the gay person is deeply, and I mean Deeply closeted, sooner or later their co-workers figure it out and then things change.
The glass ceiling is what you experience if you’re lucky. Otherwise you are simply ushered out the door. Sometimes they tell you to your face it’s because you’re gay. Sometimes they make some other excuse. When the religious right points to studies that they claim prove that gay people earn far more money then heterosexuals, what they’re really pointing to are studies that prove that rich people aren’t as afraid of being open about their sexual orientation on a job survey form as someone barely making ends meet has to be.
I knew I was in for it when I bought a car that runs on premium instead of regular. I accepted that as part of the joy of owning a Mercedes (The Mercedes Experience…as my friend Dan puts it…). But still I had visions of all the gas station signs I saw while on the road last July, particularly in Nevada for some reason, advertising premium gasoline for over four dollars a gallon. We were having a gasoline price peak back then, right as I was taking my annual road trip vacation. I was driving the Accord, and counting my blessings that I had a car that was doing about 33 miles per gallon. I’m still in the break-in period on the Mercedes, but it looks like I’ll be getting at best around 25 mpg in it.
What I didn’t expect was how widely the price of premium varies. At least around here. The price of regular only varies by a few cents locally. Last night as I was looking to fill up, I noticed the price of premium here in the Baltimore area running between $3.10 and $2.80. I saw stations right down the street from each other, having the same exact price for regular, differing by as much as 20 cents a gallon on the price of premium. I’ve no idea why that might be.
There’s A Period Of Adjustment In Every Relationship
First, you have to understand that for years…decades really…I’ve considered driving a stick shift to be the only kind of real driving there is. Everything else is merely riding. When looking at a new car, the stick was a manditory feature. If the dealer couldn’t sell me a stick it was a deal breaker. Every new car I’ve ever bought, has had a stick.
Until now. Because I always wanted a Mercedes…
So I’m driving my new Mercedes-Benz c300 to Arlington Virginia, to visit some friends that I visit most every Friday evening. There are a group of us middle aged gay guys who get-together every Friday for happy hour drinks, and then a good restaurant, and then maybe a little clubbing afterwards. I usually stop first at Jon’s house, where we meet up with Joe, and then the three of us all go in Joe’s nice new Acura TL to the 30 Degrees lounge where we meet up with the others in our group.
It was admiring Joe’s Acura when he got it, that got me thinking about actually buying the Mercedes I’ve always wanted. We’re both IT professionals, both of us in pretty well paying positions. If he didn’t feel ostentatious about owning a car like that, then maybe I shouldn’t either.
I took delivery of the Mercedes Friday morning. I put the key in the ignition at 1PM (actually an infrared dongle thingy that only vaguely resembles a key…there’s a picture of it a couple posts down…), started the car up, drove it off the dealer’s lot and headed right to Jon’s. I left early so I could take my first drive in the new car casually, unhurriedly, learning its road feel, keeping its speed and revs within the limits set by the manual for the first thousand mile break-in period. The car is a pure pleasure to take down the highway.
When I get to Arlington, I realize I haven’t eaten all day and I’m famished. As soon as I get off the beltway, I head for a Subway shop I know is in a shopping center near the exit. I pull in to a parking spot, set the parking brake, switch off the ignition, and for a few moments savor the feeling of being surrounded by the car I’d always dreamed of owning. Then I go to pull the key out of the ignition.
It doesn’t budge. What the hell…??? The damn key is stuck in the ignition and I can’t get it out. I turn it this way and that…turn the motor back on and off again. Nothing works the key is frozen in the ignition.
Damn! Damn! My new car…and it’s already broken. When Jon and Joe hear about this they’re going to laugh their tails off… I could hear the teasing already… Nice car Bruce…guess you’ll always know where the key is… Hey…that’s one of those Mercedes safety features…so you’ll never loose the key…right…? I’d hear about it for years…I just knew it.
Damn! Damn! How do I get this goddamned key out of the ignition? My eyes begin to wander around the dash, which is still activated because the key is still in the ignition. I try pulling out the key again. It won’t budge. My hand drops down to my side…taps randomly on the shift lever while I try to think. And then I realize…
…I’d forgotten to put the car in Park.
Oh. Right.
Once I do that, the car gives me my key back. See…I could just turn the engine off and leave the car in gear when I was driving a stick. All you people who only drive automatics and hate sticks can go ahead and laugh at me now.
I’ve wanted to own one of these since I was a teenager…
Reisender
Now there’s a happy face. That’s my new 2008 Mercedes-Benz c300, the U.S. version of which was just released for sale last month on my birthday. I took it as an omen. Also, the rush of satisfaction I experienced the first time I sat in one at the dealership.
It was more, much more then I Like It. It was This Is Me. I’ve seen very few cars in my lifetime that didn’t have at least one small detail of style and design that I didn’t care for. A nice body with a weirdly shaped grill. Nice leather seats over carpeting that seemed to have been borrowed from the local miniature golf course. Instrument panels that were either too cluttered or not informative enough. But from the moment I set eyes on the new c class, I was completely entranced. There is nothing, nothing about the design of this car that I don’t find attractive. It drives with that same solid, substantial feel to it that every Mercedes sedan I’ve ever rode in has. It not only has state-of-the-art technological gizmos galore, they all make sense. This car is, to my eye, extravagantly beautiful, inside and out, and yet there is not one superfluous thing about it. Naturally, your mileage may vary, but if a car is a statement, no car I have ever owned has ever been more Me then this one. I knew it the moment I sat in one.
I’d just finished paying off the Accord, and I stressed for weeks about whether or not to do this now, or wait a bit longer. But I’ve been waiting for so long. I have several old Mercedes-Benz brochures going back to the 1980s in my storage bins, from when I almost thought one of the least expensive sedans might…might just…finally be within my reach. It never happened. Mostly it was that for so much of my life I’ve lived right at the edge of poverty. Partly it was that when I was living well, I was too afraid to spend a lot of money on anything, let alone a new car. And then, in the 1990s, Mercedes quality took a nosedive. I’d begun making good money as a software developer by then, and I could have afforded the c-class then, but I kept taking a pass. The old Mercedes reliability wasn’t there, and I just hated the design of the dash and the passenger compartment. And it was too small a car for the asking price.
As I said, I’d just finished paying off the Accord, and for kicks and grins decided to look around. A friend of mine in Northern Virginia had bought himself an Acura TL, and it was just lovely. It had a nicely fitted leather interior, the bluetooth cell phone connectivity and the video navigation system. And you could control almost everything via spoken commands if you didn’t want to be taking your hands off the steering wheel. I looked at that car and though to myself that I’d been making good money now for over a decade, why don’t I have a nice car like this?
Well for one thing, I was raised not to want luxuries. Of all the deadly sins pounded into my head while growing up Baptist, I think my household regarded Pride as the worst, followed closely by Vanity. So all my life I’ve pulled back from spending more for something, just because I found it beautiful. When comparing products, if the plain no-frills version did the job just as well, then I bought that, and…no kidding, this is how thoroughly they pounded it into me when I was a kid, felt a twinge of guilt just for desiring the more beautiful one.
But to want beauty in your world, for its own sake, isn’t vanity. Rationally and logically I’ve accepted this for years. But emotionally, down in my gut, it’s been hard to overcome the way I was raised. There is a difference between spending a lot of money on something like a car, just for the status value, just to make people envy you, and spending the money because you you really admire the craftsmanship, the engineering, and the art of its makers. It takes your breath away, verses you think it makes you somebody. I know this rationally. I think I’m finally comfortable with it now emotionally. I was raised for so long, so very very long, to fear taking joy in material things, lest I loose sight of spiritual things. But there are harmful extremes on both sides of that scale.
I did the math, and looked long and hard at my budget. I’d paid off the Accord quickly, and so it had a lot of trade-in value, and that made buying the Mercedes make more financial sense then it would have otherwise. Thing is, paying for this car will not be a hardship, even with the other obligations I have currently. Of course, I could put the money to some more practical use, or just stash it away in savings until I needed to spend it on something more practical. But…see that smile? There’s, really, all the reason beauty needs. I only wish I could thank each and every person whose hands called steel and copper and aluminum and glass and fabric and plastic and rubber and leather and little bits of silicone and software code into becoming this car. All the engineers, all the assembly line workers…everyone. Thank you for wanting more then good enough. I promise from now on, not to feel guilty about wanting it too.
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