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.

Via Sullivan…

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

–John Updike

He called it a poem for Sunday.  I’d say it makes a good Valentine’s Day poem.  Or an any day poem at this stage of my life.  Being as I am, at that age where death isn’t totally unexpected…

"I thought he died a while ago…"

I hate this time of year.  Not only is it dark and cold and covered with ice, la, la, la, la, la…it’s that Most Romantic Day Of The Year!   !!!

Er…wait a minute…  Maybe there’s a connection…

…Just really preoccupied with the house.  On Wednesday I discovered that a leak in the roof, near the back of the house by the chimney, that I thought had been taken care of was back with a vengeance.  Between that and other more routine maintenance here at Casa del Garrett I’ve been away from the den computer more then usual. 

And…I really don’t feel talkative right now…for some reason…

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Sullivan notices the obvious…

The Budget And Sex

Just a glimpse into the far-right psyche. The two biggest ticket items that have leaped into public consciousness discrediting parts of the stimulus package have been family planning and STD prevention. Both have been blaring Drudge headlines. Now, this is technical stuff and I don’t doubt that there’s merit to the case against portraying these as in some way necessary counter-cyclical emergency funding.

But why is it the GOP is so easily galvanized by sexual panic? Weird, if you ask me. This is the budget we’re talking about here. Even there, they reach, like the exhausted tacticians they are, for the culture war. And it isn’t reaching back.

The republicans became the party of culture war when they gave the nomination to Nixon.  This is what people continue not to get about them…even now, amidst the horrific train wreckage of the "free market economy" republican domination of the federal government was supposed to usher in.  Oh…they betrayed their principles, did you say?  No.  Absolutely no.  They did nothing of the kind.  All that small government free market stuff was just the window dressing, over a core that was entirely, completely, absolutely about culture war.  When they finally got the power they craved, they set to work implementing their vision.  Yes, it is an unmitigated disaster.  But you have to understand that it was always going to be that. 

They didn’t care about the economy…they cared about elbowing science out of the classroom and out of government in favor of their nutty religion in which Jesus says to hate the stranger, obey the authorities, and that the rich will inherent the earth.  They didn’t care about the deficit…they cared about keeping women, people of color and homosexuals in their place.  They didn’t care about national security…they cared about rolling back decades of constitutional law that said all Americans were entitled to equal justice, equal rights, to life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness.  They didn’t care about fighting terrorism…they cared about fighting the 60s all over again, and winning this time.

In Goldwater they had their last honest small government candidate.  Nixon gave them culture war, which they embraced with gusto.  Why?  The darkies weren’t drinking from the fountain marked ‘coloreds’ anymore.  The kids weren’t passively going off to die in a war nobody understood, and what was worse, they weren’t cutting their hair.  And more horrifying then all of that, the women were going off the Miltown pill and going on the birth control one instead and asserting their sexual equality.  Suddenly you couldn’t make jokes about women drivers anymore.  And then the faggots started marching. 

Something had to be done.  Nixon was the one.  That he turned out to be a crook, should have been a warning.  But the first thing you have to understand about culture warriors, is they have no inner sense of morality, of right and wrong.  That is why they fight tooth and nail to keep their world from changing around them.  They have no brakes, so they need fences and guardrails.  That, and the privilege that comes with being on top of the cultural ladder, even if you’re at the bottom of the economic one.  White.  Male.  Protestant.  Heterosexual.  You got it made pal…drink up.  In a world where people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, or the shape of their own genitals or that of their lovers’, then what becomes of the privileged? 

The joke after the last Republican convention was that you didn’t see any black or brown faces in the crowd until it was all over, and the cleaning crews came out.  So what about all that Big Tent talk?  What about all that reaching out to minorities and stuff?  For real?  Why…the same Goddamned thing that happened to all that small government stuff.  It wasn’t important.  It wasn’t what the party is about.  The party is about the culture war.  Of course the first thing they had fits about in the stimulus plan was the family planning items.  Do you still think, after the last eight years of it, that they even saw the rest of it?   I sure hope you don’t think that since Bush went down in flames they went down with him.  They sure didn’t go down with Nixon.

So…I’m wandering the web and the various gay news sites and I come across this shot of actor TR Knight and his BF doing Disneyland…

More Here.  I recall wandering around Disneyworld not too long ago.  I had a great time.  But I go into these vacations willing myself not to think about how alone I am wherever I go…which is one reason I’ve always avoided theme parks.  If I don’t do that, if I’m not successful at forgetting, then I just want to go back home.  And there have been times I’ve done just that.

I’m happy for these guys.  I really am.  But seeing stuff like this…at this stage of my life…just reminds me of the life I never had and I don’t want it to.  I just want to feel happy for them.  But…I failed.  I never found it.  God knows I tried (even if a certain heartless jackass in Alexandria wants to keep telling himself that I never did).  I tried.  It never happened.  It just…never happened.  But then…people who look like that want people who look like that…

Wow…  That looks like the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride.  I wanted to do that one while I was at Disneyworld but I thought, one roller coaster at a time so I did Space Mountain instead.  Look at those smiles.  Damn.  Just…Damn…

Timothy Kincaid over at Box Turtle Bulletin, has the party line vote on the first of the so-called "common ground" bills put forward in Utah.  These bills actually do very little to insure equal rights for gay and lesbian citizens…almost the bare minimum you could imagine.  The first of these to come to a vote, simply made it possible for financial dependents, other then legally married spouses, parents and children, to sue if their breadwinner suffers wrongful death.  Keep in mind that these so-called "common ground" bills were introduced after the passage of Proposition 8, when the Mormon church’s staggering level of involvement became widely known, and the Mormon leadership, while in the glare of the public eye, averred they had no problem with extending gay people many of the rights of marriage…just not marriage itself.

Many of us found that statement interesting, since nothing was stopping them from giving gay Americans in Utah those rights and gay Americans in Utah have damn few if any.  The only places as bad to be gay are the deep south

The bill failed along party lines.  Republican verses democrat?  Oh my, no…

Let me be clear. There is no legitimate reason to exclude those who rely on someone for their livelihood from suing should that livelihood be taken away due to the wrongful actions of another. If a woman is killed directly due to the reckless or wrongful actions of another, why should her partner who stays home and raises the kids not be able to sue?

But because this bill was understood to benefit (among others) those gay persons who rely on each other, Sen. Buttars’ committee killed the bill 4 – 2.

And did the Mormon Church live up to its claim? Did it encourage its members to allow for probate rights for gay couples? Let’s see.

Voting “no” were:

Chris Buttars, Mormon
Lyle Hillyard, Mormon
Mark Madsen, Mormon
Michael Waddoups, Mormon

The three non-Mormons either voted Yes or were absent.

As Kincaid notes, this fits pretty well with recent polls showing that Utah Mormons are hugely against granting their gay neighbors any rights whatsoever, other then maybe, possibly, the right to breath.  So long as they don’t flaunt it.

Expect the Mormon church to claim it has no influence over the state legislature.  They’ve shown repeatedly that they can look you right in the eye, smile, and lie through their teeth.  Your hopes, your dreams, every smile you ever gave the one you love, and every smile you ever received in love, and placed somewhere deep within your heart: these things are their stepping stones to Godhood.  Nothing else matters to them.  Nothing.  They will walk over your every hope and dream, and grind them into dirt, for that promise of Godhood at the end of the road.

I know…I know…  But there are Mormons who don’t hate their gay neighbor…  Yes.  And they are either silent or they are on the road to excommunication.  We, that is America, saw it all during the battle over Proposition 8.  There are no Mormons who are not on board for the war on gay Americans…only Mormons who are about to leave, or be shown the door.

I’ve said before I’d rather have two feet of snow then even a little ice.  Snow you can at least dig out of.  Snow at least makes it clear that your car isn’t going anywhere.  And you know you are going to be in for a trudge when you walk through it, and that you need to watch where you put your feet.  Ice just sits there and pretends to be a little wet patch on the sidewalk ahead of you.  And if the temperature is just right, it coats itself with a film of water on its surface and dares you to walk across it.

This morning the sidewalks and streets around my neighborhood were dangerous to even stand on.  You just couldn’t. The moment I stepped outside to start cleaning off my sidewalk, I knew I had to be careful.  My snow boots give me no traction at all on the pavement.  The ice was easy to break up though, because the pavement under it was wet, not frozen.  I have an all metal snow shovel I bought ages ago, for digging my car out when the snow plows had buried it.  I begin to just bang the shovel down on the ice while standing on the dry portions of my front porch.  The ice cracked apart and I could just shovel off the broken chunks.  Then I moved forward and bit and repeated the process.  Wash, rinse, repeat…  I’d got all the way down to my street and I was breaking up the ice on my sidewalk when I head a moan behind me.

It was coming from somewhere in the street, but I couldn’t see who it was because of the parked cars.  When I tried to walk out onto the street I could tell right away that two feet just weren’t going to cut it so I knelt down.  The street was a solid sheet of ice…not very thick…but with a little layer of water on top as the temperature was hovering around the freezing point.  I literally had to walk on my hands and knees out into the street.  That was when I saw her…an older neighbor of mine laying on her side in the middle of the road.  I could see blood around her head from where I was.

You have to picture this.  There really isn’t very much ice on the road, but it is smooth…almost ice rink smooth.  And it has just enough water on its surface that you simply can’t stand on it. Your instinct is to run over to help her and you can’t.  You simply cannot stand on the ice.  The woman’s daughter was trying to get out to her from the sidewalk just then too, but she wasn’t able to navigate the road any better then me.  She’s telling her mom not to move and I’m telling them both I’m coming and nobody is getting there any time soon.  I had to literally walk on my hands and knees to get out to her, but eventually I did.  Luckily, oh so very luckily, our street is a small side street that dead ends, sort-of (there is an alleyway access driveway at the end of it).  So there was no traffic trying to get down our street.  Not that anyone could have anyway without sliding into something.  But that was what I was afraid of right then…some idiot trying to drive down our street, seeing us, hitting the brakes…and well…

This particular neighbor is an older lady…in her 60s going on 70s I think.  She was laying on her side and the ice under her head was bloody.  She was talkative when I got to her, and I asked her if she could feel anything broken.  She said not, just her head was painful a bit where her glasses, which she said were up on her head when she tried to walk across the street, banged into her ear when she fell.  There was blood all over the ice around her head, but she seemed clear headed and knew to just stay put until the ambulance came.  I was hoping the injury was better then it looked.  I asked her if she could move her toes and fingers and she said she could.  The daughter called for an ambulance, but I think everyone knew it wasn’t going to get there quickly. 

What eventually happened was a fire truck with some EMTs tried to come down our street and almost slid into some parked cars.  So they decided to just send the EMTs on foot to the scene.  By that time I was worried about her getting hypothermic and so I crawled back to the sidewalk and went back into the house and I got one of my moving pads out and the EMT people moved her onto it so she wasn’t laying on the ice.  She was talkative the whole time and could move her limbs and her fingers and toes. 

It took the Emergency Crew almost an hour to get an ambulance to her because the streets were all so bad.  The initial responder, a fire truck so I was told (I never actually saw it) almost slid into some parked cars and couldn’t get turned onto our street.  The ambulance eventually had to back slowly down one side street, up an alley, and then drive over the grassy lot at the end of my street to get close enough to where they could bring a stretcher out to her.  When the ambulance crew finally arrived with a stretcher they carefully got her onto it.  You could tell she was in pain when they moved her. 

It really doesn’t matter how much ice you get in an ice storm.  Even a little amount of ice is dangerous.  And all the more so when the air temperature is hovering around freezing because that leaves a little tad of melt on top and then you might was well crawl across it because you are not walking over it unless you’ve got spikes or something.  My neighbor apparently thought that since clearing the sidewalks was so easy this morning, the street wasn’t so bad either.  She only got halfway across when her legs went out from under her and she fell.  And the problem was with the streets like they were no ambulance was getting to her quickly.

It’s going to freeze over again tonight, but the rest of the week looks good.  First chance I get I am buying some extra-strength sidewalk and pavement de-icer.  The box at the end of the street the city provides is a mix of sand and salt this year…I’m guessing because we have no money and they’re trying to make the salt go further…and it’s a solid brick in there.  I have to take a pick to it to get enough of the stuff apart to put into a bucket and salt my sidewalk.  They say putting out salt eats away at your pavement, and some of my neighbors refuse to do it because of that. But better my sidewalk and steps get eaten by salt then covered in blood.

There is a sheet of ice all over everything outside here in my little Baltimore neighborhood, but not a quarter inch of it.  It’s pretty significant though.

When I got up, the first thing I did was look outside to check the ice accumulation.  I didn’t see much right off the bat…although the sidewalks looked obviously iced over.  But the powerlines and tree branches didn’t seem to have any.  Usually, when it’s a really bad freezing rain storm, you get the trees looking a bit glossy, almost like they’re encased in snow, but it’s not snow its ice.  This morning they just looked wet.

Then I put my glasses on. (sigh)  I’ve had to wear glasses for distance vision ever since last February, when I was driving to Memphis and noticed that the lettering on the big highway signs was looking a little fuzzy.  I can see okay at a distance, but to see small detail I need my glasses now.  Once I had them on this morning, the extent of the ice outside was more apparent.  I could clearly see the trees were encased in the stuff too.  But not a quarter inch of it. 

I got dressed and went to step outside.  My bird feeders had a full load of customers and there was a downy woodpecker on the suet feeder so I waited for it to get done.  The woodpeckers are very shy, even the big ones, and will scoot at a shadow.  It didn’t stay long and when it flitted off I stepped out.  The gold finches all over my thistle feeders scattered but they come right back.

Everything outside here is iced over, but only on top.  The tree branches aren’t completely encased it in…they’re dry on the bottom side.  In some places it’s thicker then others, but I’d say the thickest it is most places is 1/16 inch.  That’s still a lot when it comes to ice.  More then enough to shut everything down. When I look upstreet, Redfern Avenue looks like an ice rink, I kid you not.  But a neighbor, shoveling it off his sidewalk, said everything was wet underneath.  He wasn’t having a hard time getting it up off the sidewalk.  So the ground here in Baltimore isn’t frozen.  That’ll make it go away quicker.  Later in the day, they’re calling for rain.

The Institute is closed until 10am, and we can take vacation for the rest of the day on "liberal leave"…meaning it’s okay that you didn’t properly schedule it just go ahead and take it.  I’ll wait and see what it’s like before I decide. 

Not exactly your foot deep snowfall…but enough to keep Traveler at home…

Doesn’t it look adorable in the snow?  Well…I think it does.  And I’m here to tell you owning a forty-five thousand dollar automobile does make you think twice about driving it in snow and icy conditions.  And tonight they are forecasting a freezing rain.  Swell.  If I had studded tires (which are illegal in Maryland anyway) I would not move that car.  I can walk to two grocery stores and to work, and in really bad weather, the Institute encourages us to either telecommute or take leave.  In a really severe situation they will close down the Institute altogether, for the safety of staff.  But you have to understand the work we do is in support of space missions that don’t pause for bad weather on earth, and some folks just have to be on call no matter what.  If the power goes out due to ice bringing down lines, or trees onto lines though, I doubt I’ll be able to telecommute.

It’s sleeting now as I write this.  The forecast is for ice accumulation up to a quarter inch in the city.  That’s…pretty bad.  The city seldom if ever plows or salts the sidestreets (we have no money) but distributes salt boxes all around the neighborhoods, which I’ve never seen done anywhere else.  I am responsible for my own patch of sidewalk…all sixteen feet of it…so I shoveled mine and salted it down before bed.  I also put out some extra seed for the birds.  Hopefully the feeders won’t be so iced up they can’t get to it.

If the power goes out tomorrow, because some tree somewhere upgrid from me came down on some lines, I probably won’t be blogging.  BGE is usually pretty good about getting the power back on here in the city…but if the ice is widespread it might take a while.  Hopefully, once again, it won’t be as bad as the worst case scenerio the forecast is predicting.  A quarter inch of ice is a lot.  That’ll bring down some tree limbs around here for sure.