No thunderstorms last night after all.  I stood out on my front porch and watched the front come in and all we got was a few periods of heavy rain and that was it.  After I went to bed I could hear the wind start to pick up, and throughout the night I could hear random noises from the alleyway.  A few plastic trash cans being kicked around.  Someone’s aluminum awning getting smacked by something carried along by the wind.  No thunder, no lightning.  Bah.   Central Maryland never gets any really interesting weather.  Which is good I guess because the interesting stuff tends to be a tad destructive.

According to the news the wind last night actually cased a partial collapse of an abandoned rowhouse.  But I doubt the wind is giving itself a high five over it.  Abandoned rowhouses in the worst of the city neighborhoods look like they’d collapse if someone stared at them too hard.  There are also the usual reports of power outages you get with any high wind situation.  But nothing major that I can tell.  It’s like the Appalachians take the kick out of anything that gets going on the plains.

A little oddness can be charming in a person…but in the weather its a tad scary.  Just a few weeks ago the temperature was in the single digits here in Charm City.  It is now, I kid you not, shirtsleeve weather outside.  Seriously.  I am about to go for a little before bed walk around the neighborhood without even so much as a light jacket.  It is too warm for it.

When you see severe temperature shifts like this you pretty much know you’re going to be in for it.  Normal right now is cold.  This is not normal.  So when nature restores normal it isn’t likely to be pretty.  They’re calling for some bad thunderstorms later tonight, around midnight.  This would be the same storm front that caused the tornadoes in the mid-west earlier. 

I mean…seriously…shirtsleeve weather in early February in Baltimore?  Get real.  Just this morning I went to work wearing my leather jacket with the removable liner in.  When I got home I couldn’t believe how warm it had become.  Not good.  The winds when the front hits will be pretty fierce…tornadoes or no.  But so far they aren’t warning us about tornadoes yet.  Just strong winds tonight and tomorrow.

I brought my bird feeders inside, lest they be blown off the tree out front.  I think I’ll probably bring in the deck chairs and tables too.

Quoted from Slashdot…  Here is why Wikipedia’s standard of what constitutes a fact is a bit problematic…

An anonymous reader writes

"Germany has a new minister of economic affairs. Mr. von und zu Guttenberg is descended from an old and noble lineage, so his official name is very long: Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. When first there were rumors that he would be appointed to the post, someone changed his Wikipedia entry and added the name ‘Wilhelm,’ so Wikipedia stated his full name as: Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm. What resulted from this edit points up a big problem for our information society (in German; Google translation). The German and international press picked up the wrong name from Wikipedia — including well-known newspapers, Internet sites, and TV news such as spiegel.de, Bild, heute.de, TAZ, or Süddeutsche Zeitung. In the meantime, the change on Wikipedia was reverted, with a request for proof of the name. The proof was quickly found. On spiegel.de an article cites Mr. von und zu Guttenberg using his ‘full name’; however, while the quote might have been real, the full name seems to have been looked up on Wikipedia while the false edit was in place. So the circle was closed: Wikipedia states a false fact, a reputable media outlet copies the false fact, and this outlet is then used as the source to prove the false fact to Wikipedia." Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg

Wikipedia bans articles based on the writer’s own research.  Articles in Wikipedia are simply supposed cite other sources for the facts presented.  But when those facts are challenged then someone, somewhere, somehow, has to show that one source is better then another, and that’s research. 

If all you are doing is simply passing along what someone else says uncritically, then you are not a knowledge base, you are a gossip columnist.

I hereby declare the opening of the Second Annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest!   What fun.   But before we go on, I have an important first announcement to make: The contest is closed to new entries.   Sorry to all you folks who didn’t get an entry in on time.   But that feeling of being left out is all part of the fun!

Already we have some very worthy first entries…

More worthy entries to come!   The winner (which, in the spirit of things, has already been chosen before the contest was even announced!) will be shown on Valentine’s Day.   You may not want to look…

[Update…] Last year’s contest, contest entries are Here, Here and Here.   Last year’s winner is Here.

Some time ago the Bay Shore Gay and Lesbian Center for Youths was vandalized.  Its front door was broken and its van had its tires slashed, its windows busted out, and its sideview mirrors mangled.

Today I read that arrests in the case have been made and…surprise, surprise, the police have in their impartial wisdom determined that the vandals had not a prejudiced bone in their bodies after all…

Cops: Vandalism at gay center not hate crime

Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy called the vandalism at a Bay Shore gay and lesbian center for youths an "attack against the gay community."

Gov. David A. Paterson dispatched the state’s commissioner of human rights to visit the site and deliver a message calling for acceptance.

And the Suffolk County Police Hate Crimes Unit investigated last week’s incident as a hate crime.

It turns out the vandalism at the Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth Center was not a hate crime after all, police said Tuesday.

What a relief to know that!  Because…er…because…  Well because the police just say so…

Police declined to say what led them to determine the crime was not bias-related.

I see.  Three men and a woman, two of them 21 years old, one 20 and one 19, decided to slash a van’s tires completely at random.  And then they broke out all its windows.  And then they mangled the sideview mirrors.  And then…again completely at random, they decided to break out a door that only happened to belong to the same group that owned the van.  Just…on a lark…  It had nothing to do with the fact that the van had the Long Island LGBT Youth center logo on it.  And that door…it was just a coincidence that it also happened to be the door to the Long Island LGBT Youth center.  There was no anti-gay animus involved here.  Take our word for it.  Because we insist you take our word for it.

Police arrested three men and a woman, all from Bay Shore, Monday in connection with the vandalism and charged each of them with second-degree criminal mischief. None of the four was charged with a hate crime.

Mischief…

Mischief…

But seriously…what more could attacking homosexuals amount to anyway, other then mischief?  You say "hate crime" like its a bad thing…

[Update…]  Reports are coming out now that two of the suspects were former clients of the center, who had been asked to leave for an as yet unspecified disruptive behavior…more then three years ago.

Anyone visiting my house for even a few minutes can see what a book lover I am.  Casa del Garrett is full of book cases and book shelves and they’re full of books I’ve been collecting since I was a kid.  Somehow during the move from Rockville to Baltimore I lost two boxes full of paperbacks and I still grieve over the loss of some of them.  But to all you Star Trek fans out there I still have, for example, a bunch of first editions of James Blish’s Star Trek books, including a first printing of Spock Must Die which was the first original Star Trek novel ever published. 

I have a first printing of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 in paperback, first editions in hardback of all his later sequels, 2010, 2061, and 3001.  A first hardback edition of The Songs of Distant Earth.  A first paperback printing of his Fountains of Paradise.  I have hardback first editions of Mary Renault’s The Fire From Heaven and The Persian Boy, and the paperback first edition of Funeral Games.  The seemingly odd mix of hardback and paperback editions tracks with times I had the money for the hardback and times I didn’t.

I have tons of other first editions on my bookshelves.  I tell you this not to present myself as a book collector, but just simply as a reader.  I keep nearly all the books I read.  Unless I really hate it, like I absolutely despise Frank Herbert’s Soul Catcher, which I threw across the room when I was finished with it, or unless a book bores me to tears, it will generally find a permanent home on my shelves..not as a collector’s item, but as something to pick up and read a passage from again, if not the whole thing, every so often. 

I love books.  They have been my escape ever since I was a kid. I can’t remember how many times I got caught in class reading a paperback hidden behind a textbook.  One teacher, who managed to make the history of World War II boring, gave me a good chewing out in front of the class for about ten minutes, demanding 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 biting my tongue and not telling him no, just his history class.

I love to read.  I spend more time at home now web surfing then watching TV because it is an act of reading and what is more, discovering links between the things I am reading and other things I’ve never read before, as opposed to passively being entertained by the tube.  I am not at all averse to seeing words on a computer screen.  In fact I love it.  I love the way one thing can link to another, and then to another still.   I love how you can browse entire libraries of books and essays and articles on this and that all from home.  The Internet is the best encylopedia ever, the best instruction manual ever, the best library ever.  You can explore.  And it took me all of about a minute to get sick, thoroughly sick, of the hype over Amazon’s new Kindle…which is like the old Kindle, only new. 

Yes books take up space.  Yes, it would be nice to be able to read anything from my personal library while away from home.  Books weigh tons.  I’ve moved several times on the way from Rockville where I grew up to Casa del Garrett and I can tell you almost half the mass of moving my stuff is in the form of books…many, many boxes of them that just about break your back.  It would be nice to just have much of it, if not all, in electric form.  There’s a scene in Arthur C. Clarke’s The Songs of Distant Earth, where a space traveler reverently takes out of a sealed container his prize posession: a first edition of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.  It was a prize because books off earth were so rare…almost non-existant.  If our books are to journey with us to the stars, they’ll have to weigh a whole lot less.

But here’s the problem:  Suppose you were offered a book that could only be read with a pair of reading glasses made by the publisher of the book.  Oh…and the glasses will cost you $360 dollars.  But you could use them to read a whole lot of other books from that same publisher.  But all those books could only be read by those glasses.  And whether or not those glasses kept on working was solely at the discretion of the publisher of those books.  Doesn’t take much thinking to realize that all you are buying when you purchase those books, is a dust jacket only those glasses can open up…not the right to read what is inside.  Those books can be closed forever to you, at the discretion of the publisher, at any time.

And it gets worse.  Suppose somebody decides that the contents of a particular book are offensive in some way.  Maybe its sex.  Maybe it’s political.  Maybe its an expose’ of corporate malfeasance that somebody in some corporate boardroom somewhere decides you shouldn’t be able to read anymore.  A flick of the switch from corporate headquarters and any book in that library suddenly vanishes…like it never existed.  And it happens to all the copies of that book, in everyone’s personal library, all over the world.  Just like that.  Snap.  Gone.  Censorship was never so easy, so simple, so beautifully invisiable.  What book?  There was never any such book.

No thank you.  I learned to read before I entered grade school.  I still remember a bit of how difficult it was to get what all those marks on the paper were telling me.  But mom was patient and eventually I got the hang of it and that was my key to the world books opened up for me.  And what a world.  Down the Navajo Trail, along the back alleys and side streets of Old London, across the sea to Treasure Island, down Persia to Babylon with Alexander and through the stargate and back again.  Corporate America can have my ability to read when they pry it from my cold dead eyes.

They’re figuring out now, that gallons-per-miles gives folks a better way to compare fuel efficiency and savings among cars then their miles per gallon figure.  I’d intuited this for years, probably because I love taking big cross-country road trips.  Take a few of those and pretty soon come to view your car’s gas mileage in terms of how much the total distance you went cost you rather then how many miles you get for the price of one gallon.  The first thing I did when I seriously started thinking about replacing the Honda Accord with the Mercedes was try to figure out how much more it would cost me to drive the Mercedes from Baltimore to California.

Turns out…not so much.  The Mercedes is actually very fuel efficient for a six banger.  It takes the more expensive premium gas, but it uses it almost as well as the Accord did, and the Accord was a four banger mated to a five speed manual transmission.  The Mercedes has a seven speed (yes…seven) automatic.  If I let the cruse control decide how to maintain speed on the highway I actually get anywhere from 29 to 31 or 32 mpg.  One trip back from southern Virgina I got 33 mpg out of it.  That was at Virginia’s feeble 65 mph speed limit, which I didn’t want to break because the highway cops are thick on that stretch of I-83.  So I had the cruse control on the whole time.  But the car is no fun to drive like that.

This gallons-per-mile calculator tells me that the Mercedes, using only the EPA figures and not my own better highway figures, only needs an extra 38 gallons of gas to go from Baltimore to California and back again, over the Accord.  That’s only a little over two tankfulls…not really all that much.  But it is more expensive gas to start with.  Even so, the extra works out to about 85 bucks more at $2.25 a gallon, about $120 bucks at $3.00 a gallon, and $150 bucks extra at $4.00 a gallon.  On the other hand, at $4.00 a gallon the total trip costs me nearly a thousand dollars just in gas.  That’s the problem.  I could make up the difference in cost between the Mercedes and the Accord easily by just not buying so much turquoise every time I drive through the southwest.  The difference between $2.25 a gallon gas and $4.00 a gallon not so much.

Buying the Mercedes really didn’t really make the big road trips much more expensive.  It’s the rising price of gas that really hurts. And where that hurts the most is in your day-to-day use.  That’s a line item in the household budget you can’t easily get rid of.  But what the Gallons-Per-Miles calculator reveals is that trading in a car that gets 33 mpg for one that gets 50 actually doesn’t save you as much as trading in a car that gets 14 for one that gets 20.  That hybrid you are looking at may not save you as much as you think.

Better to just not drive if you don’t have to.  This is a hobby horse of mine, but I’ll say it again: if the nation wants to really do something to make a dent in oil usage, encourage walkablity in cities and suburbs.  Mix housing and shopping with offices…even factories where feasible.  Make city life attractive.  Plan communities around pedestrian traffic.  Try to make driving the exception rather then the rule…not something you do to get the basic necessities, but something you do to get the odds and ends you can’t get locally…or just to pleasure drive.  I live within walking distance of work and two good grocery stores.  My car sits in front of the house most of the time.  That saves me tons of money.  More people do that and there’s less oil being consumed and less damage to the environment.

Walt Disney had a dream for the city of the future.  It was EPCOT (as opposed to Epcot – lower case spelling – the theme park his dream became after he died).  In EPCOT he said, no one would ever need to use a car, except to go for weekend pleasure drives.  The entire city was planned around the pedestrian, with the Disney monorails acting as transportation between the city, the Magic Kingdom theme park to the north, and the industrial center and airport to the south.  Within the city Wedway People Movers would serve as transportation between the city center and the outlaying housing areas.  There were lots of green spaces and pedestrian and bike paths, all cleverly isolated from the roads.  A pedestrian would never have to navigate a street crossing in EPCOT.

Sniff all you want at the 1950-ish world-o-tomorrow dreamland, but had Walt Disney’s vision come to pass that Experimental Prototype City Of Tomorrow would be perfectly positioned to weather the oil price shocks now and to come.  The whole transportation system ran on electricity and you could generate that with any number of alternative sources.  It didn’t have to be oil.  And with residents not needing to use their cars for anything other then pleasure driving, they needn’t be so dramatically impacted by the rising cost of gas.  Yes, goods and services would still cost them more.  And probably the taxes to support the transportation infrastructure.  But how many household budgets were absolutely crushed by the monthly cost of gasoline for commuting back and forth to work every day?  How much of that contributed to the current economic collapse?  People can’t spend money they don’t have, because the gasoline bill ate it all.

I love to drive.  I love the automobile.  I have been entranced by them since I was a kid.  I make no bones about it.  The fact that some folks seem to just loath automobiles completely mystifies me.  I cannot imagine a time when I would not own one.  And I would have loved to have lived in Walt Disney’s city of tomorrow.  Because as a matter of fact, I love to walk too.  And I hate commuting.  And I absolutely despise traffic jams.  A city built from the ground up around the pedestrian would have suited me just fine.

I was re-reading the previous post, and just realized that I’d driven Traveler the equivalent of somewhat over once around the earth at the equator.  But so far all that’s been up a little bit into Pennsylvania (to Stroudsburg to visit a friend), twice to Ocean City New Jersey, twice to Florida…once all the way to Key West, once only as far as Orlando and Disneyworld…once to Memphis Tennessee, once to Hillsville Virginia, and a lot around central Maryland and between Baltimore and northern Virgina. 

It’s just a small portion of Planet Earth I’ve been driving on, yet I’ve already racked up enough miles to have theoretically driven once around the equator. 

Mercedes-Benz cars made since 2004 have the new Flexible Service Scheduling system installed, which monitors the car’s usage and your driving habits and the level and condition of various fluids and figures out when the next service is due.  I’m told that nagging is a popular pastime in Germany, so I reckon it’s no surprise that their cars nag you too.  But for those absent-minded among us, and those who drive their cars a little harder then normal, it’s useful all the same.  You don’t buy a car like this to just run it into the ground.  That’s a waste of money for one thing, and an insult to all the work the engineers and factory workers put into making it for another.

You also get a booklet which outlines the recommended intervals, apart from the FSS system.  My experience has been so far that the FSS system tracks pretty well with the typical recommended servicing intervals anyway.  But not exactly.  This time around, Traveler gave me an 800 mile extension on the 25,000 mile Service ‘B’ interval.  I suppose that’s because I don’t drive it like a bat out of hell and I keep changing the oil at less then half the recommended interval.  Oil, even synthetic oil, is cheap.  Engines not so much.

800 miles before my Service ‘B’ was due, Traveler started nagging reminding me that its service ‘B’ was needed in 800 miles.  I have an analog speedometer with a lovely gauge circling around an LCD screen that displays various messages to me from time to time, in addition to a host of other readouts I can choose from such as the odometer and travel computer.  Every time I put my key in the ignition the speedometer display would nag helpfully remind me that service ‘B’ was due in 800, then 700, then 600, then 500, then 400, then 300, then 200 miles.  You know you have to give in.  So this morning I took Traveler in for its service ‘B’

Service ‘B’:

• Inspect windshield wiper inserts and service windshield washer system (Replacement of wiper inserts additional*)
• Inspect and rotate tires, record tread depth, and correct tire pressure. (Wheel balance additional*).
  (excludes AMG, Sports Models, SLK, and vehicles with staggered wheels)
• Engine oil change and oil filter replacement (Includes Mobil 1 synthetic oil)
• Lubrication service (Includes hood hinges, lock cylinders, striker plates, sun roof tracks and top off all fluids)
• Cooling system inspection (Includes antifreeze protection level, hoses and clamps)
• Brake inspection (Includes check of pad thickness and condition of discs, fluids and lines)
• Inspect heating and ventilation dust filter, replace if needed. (Replacement additional*. Dust filter prices vary by model)
• Function check (Includes warning lamps, headlights, exterior lights, seat belts, windshield wiper and washer)
• Inspect and lubricate throttle linkage
• Check and clean air filter
• Reset flexible service system counter
• Inspect front axle ball joints; check steering play and power steering clutch; and rear differential levels
• Inspect Poly V-Belt for condition
• Inspect starting and charging system and service battery
• Inspect climate control refrigerant 

…which cost me all together $425.31.  Whew!  But this is one reason why I didn’t get an ‘E’ Class.  The ‘E’ is bigger then I need anyway, but although I could probably have afforded the payments for one, I almost certainly couldn’t have afforded both the payments and the servicing too.  And you don’t buy a car like this just to run it into the ground. 

They gave my car a nice wash and interior cleaning and gave it back to me.  I’m happy to say my 2008 Mercedes-Benz C300 has almost 26,000 miles on it now and not a single thing has gone wrong or needed fixing.  Nothing.  That car is still as solid as a vault and the best thing I have ever driven.  Mercedes definitely has its groove back…

Mercedes-Benz quality increasing, dealer profit decreasing

Mercedes-Benz dealerships have not only been hit hard by the slow car sales in recent months, they are also losing money in the service department. It seems that the increased Mercedes quality is finally paying off for consumers – not so much for dealers. Compared to 5 or 6 years ago, dealers were making record profit for servicing Mercedes vehicles, which cost Daimler millions in warranty cost. Ever since, Mercedes has pledged to increase quality and to bring consumers back the trust in the Mercedes brand.

It’s great to see that people have less quality issues these days, and just one way to see this is the decrease in customers visiting the service center, in some areas up to 30% less.

Warranty service comes out of the factory’s pocket not the dealer’s.  So this is good for Daimler but not so much for the dealers.  On the other hand, who do you want doing the routine servicing on a car like this?  Not Jiffy Lube.  You don’t just pull the plug on the oil pan on one of these and just let the old oil drain out, because the plug is situated a little higher up on the side so that if it accidentally comes out all the oil won’t leak out of the engine while you’re driving.  To properly do an oil change on a Mercedes you have to pump the old oil out or you won’t get it all.  Think Jiffy Lube will do that?  If the dealers maintain a certain level of service quality that drivers expect for cars like these, then they won’t have to depend on the cars breaking down to make money.  And besides, cars that are always breaking down drive customers away.  Just ask GM, Ford and Chrysler where Toyota and Honda got their U.S. customer base from.

Normally I’d take Traveler on a nice long road trip now…but that’ll have to wait for warmer weather.

Over at Pam’s House Blend, the Homophobia Is A Made-Up Word argument rises grimly once more from its grave, and starts eating brains…

Words have meaning. Henceforth, I shall make a reasonable effort to eliminate "homophobia" and "homophobic" from my vocabulary.

The word "homophobia" suggests that the intolerant are afflicted; It follows that a treatable pathology can be associated with the condition. Moreover, the implication is that this condition represents an irrational fear like "acrophobia," a fear of heights or "zoophobia," a fear of animals. How about "pogonophobia" which is a fear of beards?

Hey…how about lexophobia, which is fear of dictionaries?  Okay…I just made that one up.  But a lot of people suffer from it.  

Yeah words have meaning.  And homophobia is a perfectly useful word that takes its meaning from another word, xenophobia, and applies it to homosexuals rather then foreigners or strangers.  Here is xenophobia:

xenophobia
noun

Etymology:
    New Latin
Date:
    1903

Fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.
 

The word homophobia simply replaces strangers or foreigners with homosexuals in the definition.  The meaning is the same, it just refers to a different class or category of people who are the object of the fear and/or hatred.  Simple, no?

Apparently not.  This isn’t complicated.  Yes, the words phobic and phobia do not have that meaning, but the motherfucking suffixes can!  Learn to read a dictionary and look up the goddamned suffix!  There is nothing wrong with the usage of the suffix in the word homophobia. 

This argument makes me want to scream whenever I hear it.  How about hydrophobic?  That’s a molecule that does not bind with water.  How can a molecule have an irrational fear of water?  Tell a chemist that they should eliminate that word from their vocabulary because a molecule cannot have fear, irrational or otherwise.  Or hydrophobia…which is another term for rabies.  There’s thermophobic, which is intolerance for high temperatures by either inorganic material or organisms.  Or photophobia…which is hypersensitivity to light?  There are a lot of words like these, that do not refer exclusively or even partially to irrational fear.

The argument that homophobia just means an irrational fear of homosexuals is another one of those cute little rhetorical ploys that bigots throw out there to confuse people.  They do that.  They will always do that.  Accepting their definitions for words and terms and employing others you only think makes the concept more clear doesn’t buy you anything because they will simply redefine those new words and terms too.  And they’ll keep on doing that. 

How…just how…do you spend Any time in this fight without knowing that, as a matter of fact no, the other side actually does Not want to make the meaning of things clear?  Do you just sleepwalk through the culture war?  Look at how they redefine the word homosexual for chrissake.  On the one hand, there is no such thing as a homosexual because it is a leaned behavior we could all stop engaging in if we wanted to.  There are no homosexuals, there is only homosexuality.  On the other hand, the homosexual agenda threatens the very fabric of western civilization, and militant homosexuals want to destroy the nuclear family.  Yes words have meaning.  And to the culture warriors that meaning is whatever they need it to be at any given moment.  They don’t want to make anything clear.  They don’t want you to understand their point of view.  They aren’t arguing in good faith.  They never argue in good faith.  They want to win.

We don’t have to help them by letting them turn every converstation about gay people into a game of Calvinball.  Homophobia is a perfectly legitimate word that describes a particular kind of bigotry.  When one of those bigots starts yap, yap, yapping that they’re not a homophobe because they aren’t afraid of homosexuals, smack them upside the head with a dictionary and show them their photograph next to the word Bigot.

I sat down when I came home from work today, and started writing a post about Maureen Mullarkey, the pretentious jackass of a painter slash art critic who painted gay pride parades and was discovered to have donated a thousand dollars to help pass Proposition 8.  I have it all pretty well written out in my head just now.  I actually started writing it a moment ago.  And then I just go tired.

I’m sick of this fight.  Just sick of it.  I never wanted my life to be a war zone.  I never wanted to be the scapegoat for every cheap character flaw that heterosexuals are ashamed of.  I never wanted my hopes and dreams of love to be other people’s stepping stones to heaven.  But this is the world I was born into.

So I’m sitting here listening to Debussy’s Reverie, and the world I thought I was going to grow up in, and the life I thought I was going to have, keeps coming back into view from between the notes, keeps floating out there in the melodies…just out of reach…and I just can’t keep on writing my post.  I’m sick of it all.  Just sick of it.  I think of this monster with a paint brush using our lives to gratify her soulless ego…selling our lives in her art gallery…cutting our ring fingers off without compunction while selling her twisted vision of our lives to the highest bidder…and I just want to walk away from this world.  I really do.  Except there is nowhere to go.

It seems, the golden state is bankrupt…

California goes broke, halts $3.5 billion in payments

California, the eighth largest economy in the world, is broke.

"People are going to be hurt starting today," said Hallye Jordan, speaking on behalf of the state Controller. "There’s no money."

Since state legislators failed to meet an end of January deadline on an agreement to make up for California’s $40 billion budget gap, residents won’t be getting their state tax rebates, scholarships to Cal Grant college will go unpaid, vendors invoices will remain uncollected and county social services will cease.

It takes a two-thirds majority in both legislative houses for future increases in all state tax rates or amounts of revenue collected, including income tax rates. It also requires two-thirds vote majority in local elections for local governments wishing to raise special taxes.   What that means in practice, is a small minority of anti-government republicans can veto all tax increases, but not any spending bills. 

This was deliberate.  Knowing that the voters would never accept lower taxes if it meant reduced services, the ideologues decided to sell the voters on the free lunch theory of government…that taxes were high because government was inherently wasteful and corrupt, not because the public wanted it to do things above and beyond the basic services of police, courts, armed forces, like…fight fires…build roads…keep the water supply drinkable…prevent mass outbreaks of food poisoning…provide for the needy…put the unemployed back to work…and so on.  Right wing anti-Government operatives like Howard Jarvis and Grover Norquist knew exactly what they were doing.  The idea Was to bankrupt government, as a back door way of killing the New Deal.  As Grover Norquist put it, to starve government "down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub."

Well…here we are.  In right wing Nirvana…

"Some 46 states face budget shortfalls, forcing them to slash funding for many services," reported CNN. "But California, the largest state in the union by population, faces a deficit that totals more than 35% of its general fund."

Nice work Mr. Norquist, Mr. Jarvis.  The whirlwind you ordered is in the mail.  And all those people you sold free lunch government to won’t be very happy with you when they’re watching their homes being auctioned off, and their children going hungry, so that your fat cat bankrollers could buy a few more yachts and luxury condos…

I am never tagged for these things.  I just end up doing them.   Peterson just did one (Facebook only) …and since he began his with a photo of his much younger self, I will too.  The boy is father to the man and all that…

Twenty-Five Things About Me

1. I stopped wearing a wrist watch for decades.  Then I found the mechanical wrist watch I wore in high school in a box of old memorabilia and had it repaired and restored.  Took me months to find a wide leather watchband like the ones I used to wear back then…but eventually I found a place that made them online.  Winding it every night before bed gives me a connection with the boy I once was.
2. Speaking of which…I keep boxes of…stuff…saved over the course of my life just to have it for memory’s sake.  I think of them as History boxes.  They contain old toys, notebooks, report cards, draft cards, letters, everyday knick-knacks…the random artifacts of life that at one time or another almost got thrown out, and that I decided at the last minute to keep instead and toss them in a "history box" for memory’s sake.  I’ve done this since I was a kid.
3. I am almost always wearing blue jeans and sneakers and a light shirt of some sort.  I hate long sleeves, and often roll up the sleeves on a long sleeved shirt if I have to wear one.
4. One of my childhood hobbies was model building.  By the time I was 16 I’d made tons of models and had shelves in my bedroom full of them.  Model cars, model airplanes, model submarines…  Later, when in my 30s, I managed to get paid for it when I became an architectural model maker.  
5. I visited a Disney theme park for the first time in my life last November…Disney World in Orlando.
6. Sandwiches make up 2/3rds of my diet.  Ice Tea 90 percent of my fluid intake.  I brew my own of course.
7. I smoke the occasional cigar.  For the nicotine.  When I’m stressed.  Which is usually.  Never cigarettes.  I was never able to get tobacco smoke into my lungs.  But I like the taste and smell of cigar smoke, believe it or not.  Dad smoked them, so maybe there is a link there somewhere…either in the genes or the memory of him.  I have to cut back though…my body is starting to complain. 
8. I developed extremely crooked front teeth in my childhood, and my folks never had the money to get them straightened.  So I hardly ever smiled openly when I was a kid.  Just…grinned.  Or put my hand up to my mouth when I smiled or laughed.  It probably seriously impacted my dating abilities when I was a young man.  Eventually I got them capped when I was in my late thirties, and for the first time since I was 5 or 6 I could smile openly.  (Thank you forever Stuart!)
9. I love road trips.  My favorite form of vacation is to just toss my bags and cameras in the car and just drive down some roads I’ve never been down before, and see landscapes and towns and roadside this and that I’ve never seen before.
10. The first not-a-children’s-book I ever read was Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.  In fourth grade.  After I was told I was too young to be looking at the books on that side of the school library.  Later that year, I read Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling.  My English teacher at the time accused me of letting my mom write my book report on it for me…a thing I still get angry to remember.
11. I had a little stack of Tiger Beat and "16" Magazines stashed under my bed when I was in my early teens.  I kept telling myself I just wanted to read about my favorite bands while I gwaked at the pictures of all the beautiful guys.
12. I still have my collection of 45 rpm records from back in the day.  Most of them are very worn out though, and sound pretty scratchy.
13. I still have many of the comic books I read when I was a kid…the ones grandma didn’t throw out anyway.  And my old Mad Magazines.  And a big stack of Undergrounds from the early 70s.
14. I still have my first camera…a Kodak Brownie Fiesta mom gave me for my ninth birthday.  Shutter doesn’t work right anymore though.  And…I don’t think they even Make 127 roll film anymore.
15. I still have nightmares about my junior high school years.
16. But then…I have nightmares on a pretty regular basis anyway.  They say it comes with the territory for us creative types.  They don’t really scare me much anymore.
17. I love to paint in oils on canvas.  However, I haven’t done an oil painting in years.
18. For the life of me, I simply cannot draw on a digitizer pad.  I need a pencil or pen and paper.  I can touch up just fine on a digitizer pad.  But do the original art?  No.  It’s not just the disconnect between hand and eye…it’s the tactile feel of it.  I don’t do big bold sweeping strokes of the pen…I do these nit-picky little lines and I need to feel them in my hand as well as see them on the paper.
19. I do most of my preliminary drawings entirely in my head.  I compose most of what I write entirely in my head too.  Then I just type it all out.
20. To relax, I take these once-or-twice-a-day walks in a big circle around whatever neighborhood I happen to be living in.  A couple miles usually.  I’ve done this ever since I was a kid.
21. When I am concentrating on what someone is saying to me, I have a bad habit of staring off into space, usually in a downward direction.  It must seem like I’m not paying attention or getting bored but actually it’s total attention.  I’m just tuning out the visual stuff and focusing on what I’m being told.
22. And…is it just me or does everyone else know they have more then one thing going on in their heads at any given moment?  I have lots going on in my head.  Constantly.
23. I was born in California.  I often wish I’d grown up there too.
24. The walls of my basement art room are covered with random photos, artwork, and images clipped from various sources.  They’re like a giant collage of random…stuff.  Much like the thoughts in my head at any given moment.  I did this to my bedroom walls when I was a kid too. 
25. A few of the things decorating my office desk/hutch:  Flaming Carrot action figure; Gigantor and Jimmy Sparks action figures; Stuffed Opus; Crazy Harry action figure; can of Wash Away Your Sins bubble bath; Original Slinky toy (that a co-worker can’t keep his hands away from whenever he comes over to my desk); small cast metal Supercar, sans Mike Mercury; Navajo Long Hair carving by artist Nelson Yazzie; Borg cube Christmas tree orniment; Walt Disney World Monorail replica; stuffed Maryland Crab toy with Blue Meany rider.

I hereby tag the first five people to read this.

Browsing Slashdot, I just came across this, and figured it needed sharing right away…

Microsoft Update Slips In a Firefox Extension

Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 01, @10:45PM
from the hitch-hiker dept.

An anonymous reader writes 

"While doing a weekly scrub of my Windows systems, which includes checking for driver updates and running virus scans, I found Firefox notifying me of a new add-on. It’s labelled ‘Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant,’ and it ‘Adds ClickOnce support and the ability to report installed .NET versions to the web server.’ The add-on could not be uninstalled in the usual way. A little Net searching turned up a number of sites offering advice on getting rid of the unrequested add-on."

The unasked-for extension has been hitchhiking along with updates to Visual Studio, and perhaps other products that depend on .NET, since August. It appears to have gone wider recently, coming in with updates to XP SP3.

Dig it.  Microsoft is not only trying to modified everyone’s Firefox browser, they’re doing it surreptitiously And in a way that makes it difficult for most home users to undo.

People switch to Firefox, largely because they are concerned about the many security flaws in Internet Explorer.  So what does Microsoft do?  Instead of making a better web browser, they infect the one people are turning to in order to have a more secure computer.  Here’s what I think: Microsoft didn’t do this simply to get its .NET technology into Firefox whether users wanted it or not…they did it to make users who are afraid to use IE, afraid to use Firefox too.  Because now you have no idea what new security holes Microsoft has opened up in Firefox.  This is an absolutely brilliant bit of Microsoft FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt). 

Somehow, I don’t think this is going to win them any fans.  Somehow I don’t think Microsoft gives a damn either.  Microsoft will never change its predatory behavior.  It needs to be broken up.

[Update…]

Some Microsoft droids on Slashdot are bellyaching that…well gosh, Adobe installs plug-ins onto Firefox and so does Sun in the form of its Java plug-in and golly a bunch of other software makers do that too so what’s so bad about Microsoft doing it?  You people just like to hate on Microsoft is all.  Which of course conveniently ignores the reality of Microsoft’s ownership of the operating system and the fact that this Firefox plug-in is being delivered in an update to the fucking operating system. 

Microsoft’s position for years has been that its browser (Internet Explorer) is part of the operating system and cannot be separated from it.  Fine.  Swell.  Great.  Really.  But Firefox is not part of the operating system.  So Windows updates need to leave it the fuck alone!  Or…at minimum…ask first.  I realize that asking is not part of the Microsoft vocabulary though…

If there are no Atheists in foxholes, then there are probably no believers in Dumpsville either.