A story is posted on Fark.Com, about the Somalian pirates that drowned when their speed boat capsized while carrying three million dollars in ransom money back to the lair.  The comment thread turns into an argument about whether Ninjas or Vikings could take on Pirates.  Stoners have nothing on geeks, I’m here to tell you.

In a nutshell…

The [Ford] Taurus is one of the top-selling nameplates of all time, for any carmaker, with more than 200,000 purchased in 1986, its first year, and 1 million by 1989.

The nation was enamored of its aerodynamic design and innovative features such as a wrap-around dash with new controls that could be identified by feel, keeping the driver’s eyes on the road. By 1992, Ford was selling more than 420,000 a year. That made it the No. 1 sedan in the country, and analysts suggested the car had saved Ford from bankruptcy.

By the mid-1990s, however, Ford’s focus had shifted to highly profitable trucks and sport utility vehicles, and its redesign of the Taurus for the 1996 model year was a disaster. Not only was it widely regarded as unattractive, but also cheaply made, with Ford skimping on quality and features such as replacing modern disc brakes with outdated, but less expensive, drum brakes.

The next year, Taurus relinquished its sedan leadership to the Toyota Camry, which has held the position ever since…

–Can The New Taurus Save Ford Again, The LA Times.

Drum brakes.  Drum brakes.  I remember drum brakes.  The Pinto had them and so did the two junkers that followed.  Drums don’t last very long and they fade horribly because they can’t shed heat as well as discs.  They just don’t have the stopping power.  But Detroit would sell people cars with Flintstone brakes if Washington didn’t require cars to have brakes that actually work. 

This model uses the most efficient and reliable braking system known to mankind…your own two feet.  Consider that while walking we stop and go hundreds of times a day and yet our feet last an entire lifetime without needing to be replaced.  Here at The Large American Car Company, we have gone back to the basics in order to bring you a car that not only uses the amazing power of the human foot to safely bring your car to a halt, but at a cost that is only slightly more expensive then last year’s model.  Full loads no longer tax your brakes because the more passengers you carry, the more feet are available for stopping and the greater your stopping power!  Dad, Mom, and all the kids can enjoy a far safer ride then in other vehicles equipped with antiquated mechanical braking systems…

They would do it.  I remember how they hollered like their teeth were being pulled out when Washington told them to put seat belts in cars.  And it’s not just the technical qualities of their cars that they allowed to suffer, but the aesthetic ones as well.  Sit down in an American economy car and run your fingers over the plastic in the dash and the center console.  Work the buttons, knobs and the shifter.  Then do the same in a Honda or Toyota.  The American car just feels cheaply made, the Honda and Toyota more solid to the touch.  I don’t think the cost differential between the plastic they use in Japan and the plastic they use in most American cars is much, if any.  It might even be the same basic kind of plastic.  They’re just not thinking about the impression it makes on the buyer just to touch the finished product.  That may seem trivial, but it’s the mindset and it’s ruining them.

I’ve woken up from vivid dreams where I was doing a lot of things, but never laughing so hard I was in tears.  But that’s what happened a few moments ago.  I guess my internal state of mind must be pretty good.

I was dreaming I was with two friends in one of the music rooms at my old high school.  One was the old friend from my grade school days who I just visited last week.  The other is a newer, younger, mostly online friend who I met on MySpace some years ago, through the Love In Action protests.  They are both Uber geeks and fun to be with, but they have never met each other.  In the dream we all ended up together at my old high school and got to giggling over the kind of arcane pop culture in-joke that only techno geeks would get and we were all laughing ourselves silly and I woke up.

I don’t think I’ve ever woken up from laughing in my dreams before.  Something’s changed inside of me.  I wonder what.

Via Fark, I stumbled across a post in Spike titled 10 Signs Your Car Is A Beater.  After a while I realized I was laughing because I’d owned some of those cars myself.

10. Your Trunk Looks Like a Pep Boys Exploded

My first car was a new car.  Looking back on it, I was unreasonably lucky in that regard.  Most kids on my side of the railroad tracks, fresh out of high school, were lucky to get hand me downs or well worn junkers.  I got a brand new 1973 Ford Pinto.  I had to make the payments myself, but Mom willingly co-signed the loan.  I guess I’d proven by that time that I could be responsible about money.  The drive it off the lot price was $1997.48.  It had a 1600cc overhead valve four with a tiny one barrel carb and a four-speed manual transmission.  I got the most bare bones one they had on the lot: it didn’t have a radio, it didn’t even have a cigarette lighter above the ash tray…only a metal plug where one would have gone.  I later found that the wiring for the lighter was there anyway when I added one so I could power things off it.

Ford and GM and AMC had just decided to get into the sub-compact car market, and the big selling point of the Pinto back then, was it’s basic simplicity.  In the sexist climate of the times, one of their ads was of a group of airline stewardesses standing around a Pinto with its hood up, holding various tools, demonstrating that even stewardesses could do the maintenance on one.  The great thing about that car for me was that even a kid fresh out of high school could work on one.  That was important, because I had absolutely no money to pay anyone to work on it. 

Over the years I learned to do the maintenance on it myself, even to the point of replacing brakes, clutches, water pumps and exhaust pipes and mufflers, even the radiator at one point.  That bought me a familiarity with automobile basics, and over time an appreciation for good mechanical design, which the Pinto had in some regards, and didn’t in others.  It also got me started on assembling a good tool collection. 

I made a decision early on, influenced by the Uber geek crowd I’d already fallen into at that age, to only buy the very best tools.  Since I was in no position to be buying expensive tool sets, I simply bought one of what I needed, when I needed it.  I could skimp on food and clothes if I had to, but if I needed a tool for something I would buy the very best Sears Craftsman or Snap-On.  The thinking was that a tool was something you didn’t just buy, but invested in because they made you self sufficient.  It’s a strategy I pursued the rest of my life.  When I moved into Casa del Garrett back in 2001, I came well equipped with tools (and spare parts…I’m a pack rat after all…) for doing all sorts of Harry Homeowner tasks around the house, many of which, particularly the hand tools, had been bought back in my teens and twenties.

I kept that Pinto for an entire decade, pampering it as best I could.  Back then you were doing good if you got over 50k out of a standard American made car.  They only made them back then with five digits on the odometer, which tells you right there what they expected the life span of one of their cars would be.  I got 135k out of that Pinto.  But age took its toll and the car began to fall completely apart in ways I simply could not cope with and I had to give it up. 

3. Starting Your Car Requires the Hood to be Open

That was the Pinto toward the end of its life.  The little one barrel carburetor had some sort of vapor lock going on inside of it.  During the hot summer months I had to open the hood unscrew the air filter lid and stick a paper clip, I swear, into a hole near where the float lived.  I’d hear a slight swoosh of pressure being released.  Then the car would start.  If I didn’t do that…forget it.

There were other problems.  The plastic in the dashboard and the steering wheel was severely cracked, as well as the vinyl in the driver’s seat.  I patched the driver seat with duct tape, I thing I reckoned I could get away with since I lived on the white trash side of the tracks anyway.  One of the windshield wiper arms was prone to popping off, as was the rear view mirror occasionally.  The gear shifter would come off the trans like a gecko’s tail in my hands while I was shifting if I wasn’t careful.  I’d added an oil cooler, a nice stereo cassette deck, a set of gauges including a Heathkit electronic tachometer, and an electric rear window defogger, and I’d religiously changed the engine oil every 2000 miles.  I pampered that engine and it never failed me, but by 135k everything around it was pretty much falling apart.  If mom and I had a house I’d have kept at it, but we lived in an apartment and while I could get away with the occasional oil change landlords tend to frown on tenants doing clutch work in the parking lot.

I had no money for a new one, and since I didn’t have steady work then I couldn’t ask mom to co-sign a loan for another one.  I couldn’t promise her I’d be able to keep up the payments.  A friend stepped forward and offered me his mom’s old Chrysler Newport.  It was a tank.  It had a 450 cubic inch V8 under the hood and bench seats front and rear.  It was so big the dashboard had two ashtrays, one on the driver side, and one on the passenger side.  Having driven a Pinto for ten years, I felt tiny and lost inside that thing.  I named it The Blue Wale.

Oh…and it had a pretty big hole in the floor in front of the driver’s seat.  I kept it covered with a floor mat.

I did my best to take care of it, including replacing the motor mounts after one broke loose.  But a reckless driver in a Mercury Capri hit me head-on and totaled what was left of it.  I was really grateful for that massive hood in front of me when I saw that Capri careening toward me.  It slammed my Newport backward three feet and pretty much creamed the front-end, but I walked out without a scratch.  Getting my face slammed into the all metal dashboard of a Rambler American one day when I was seven years old, had taught me the value of seatbelts long before I’d even heard of such things.

I entered a period of carlessness.  I was utterly dependent on public transportation to get around any further then my own two feet could take me…which wasn’t a trivial distance since I have always loved to walk.  But don’t ever ask me to depend on public transportation again.  At least not in America.  New York City and Portland Oregon exempted.

The last junker I ever owned was another 1974 model.  It was fall of 1991, and I’d just gotten my first good job as a software developer.  Problem was I had to commute to Baltimore from Rockville.  I tried taking the metro to Union Station in Washington, and the MARC rail to Baltimore, and the Baltimore Light Rail to Timonium.  Once.  It was three hours each way.  So I needed a car.  Another friend stepped forward and arranged for me to buy the car owned by the mother of another one of his friends. 

Common attributes include a gaping hole where a stereo might’ve once been, a stench which demands that the windows never get rolled up, and interior which constantly sheds various bits of material on anyone unfortunate enough to be within its confines. A thief looks at your car and says “man, sucks to be that guy” and moves on. Criminals pity you. That’s where you’re at right now.

It was a white 1974 Ford LTD panel wagon.  She’d used it to service her gumball machine business in West Virginia.  It had 240k miles on it, and was powered by a 400 cubic inch V8 with a collapsed hydraulic lifter in it somewhere.  I could make the tap, tap, tapping of the lifter go away for a few hundred miles after a fresh oil change, but it always came back and fixing the lifter would have meant serious engine work I was unwilling to put into it.  The interior roof cloth was delaminating and sagging to the point where it had started to block the view out the back window.  So I cut it all down.  The foam lining then began to flake off and I’d get out of the car with my hair full of it.  Big as the Newport was, the LTD wagon was immense.  I named it The Great White…as in great white whale.

After driving it for a year and a half to and from Baltimore I was at the place where I could finally believe that this earning a living as a computer programmer thing wasn’t a fluke and I moved into my first apartment of my very own.  I was thirty-eight years old.  Having that station wagon was a big plus during that move.  But shortly after I’d settled in, I wandered into a car dealer to see, just out of curiosity, if I could talk myself into a new car too.  That evening I drove home in a brand new 1993 Geo Prism and felt like I’d hit the big time.  I named it Aya.  The dealer took my LTD in for a hundred bucks trade-in and I felt grateful they hadn’t made me pay them to take it.

Aya was the size of my first new car, the Pinto.  But technologically it was light years away.  It had the same size engine but it was an overhead cam fuel injected little goer.  I could do 85 in it no sweat.  The Pinto labored at 60.  I did the Rocky Mountains in Aya and it just hummed along.  The Pinto gasped for breath in those mountains.  I owned Aya for twelve years, put just a tad over 200k on it, and the main reason I sold it was I was ready then to step up a bit.

Two junkers, and one Ford Pinto that became a junker simply because Ford hadn’t built it to last even if you took care of it.  But they encouraged me to buy good tools and learn how to take care of a car.  They taught me to keep emergency stuff in the trunk, jumper cables, flares, this and that for quick repairs, and not to panic if the car broke down and left me stranded somewhere miles from anything.  In retrospect for all that I am grateful.

After the Prism came a brand-new 2005 Honda Accord which I named Beauty because it was just so lovely to look at. Beauty had all the options…it was the first car I’d ever bought with a shopping list bigger then "whatever I can afford that rolls off the lot under its own power".  It had leather seats, fake wood trim, satellite radio, a power driver seat, seat warmers.  Seat warmers!  The rear seats folded down so I could transport large items.  I had to unbolt the back seat to do that in the Prism.  And after the Accord came a brand-new 2008 Mercedes-Benz C300.

A Mercedes-Benz…  I stood there just staring at it after I got it home, thinking of all the places we would go, and I named it Traveler.  I’d dreamed of owning a Mercedes since I was a teenager, when an uncle had driven down for a visit in his new 220D.  By the time I was thirty-five I figured it would always be just a dream.  But I never thought I’d ever have a house of my own either.

Almost eighteen years passed from the first time I laid eyes on The Great White to the first time I sat down in Traveler.  It wasn’t that long.  It was twenty between the time I bought the Pinto and when I was able once more to afford another new car, the Prism.  I was eighteen years old when I bought the Pinto.  Thirty-eight when I bought the Prism.  The time between them were some of the worst years of my life.  For eight of them I had no car at all.  When I finally did get a car again, the insurance companies wouldn’t touch me because I hadn’t owned a car for so long.  I had to get state funded insurance, at drunk driver rates even though my license was spotless.

I can sit here and close my eyes and with very little effort remember, vividly, struggling under the Pinto with the transmission, trying to get it threaded back through the clutch pack after replacing the clutch because yet another new clutch they’d sold me turned out to be a crappy rebuilt clutch instead which had failed after only a few miles.  I can recall sitting in the Newport with the hood open and the engine idling, tapping the gas pedal ever so slightly, and seeing the engine try to jump out of the car because one of the motor mounts had just broken off.  I can recall driving to Baltimore on a sunny February morning up I-95 listening to the loud tap, tap, tapping of the collapsed lifter and wondering if I had enough money that week for another six quarts of fresh oil or should I just let it rattle.

If it seems sometimes here like I never stop gushing over the Mercedes, there is a reason for it.

[Edited a tad…and then some more…]

I posted This a little while ago about a lecture I’d attended at Space Telescope on the nature of the first stars.  Folks I talked to afterward indicated that while the upcoming James Webb space Telescope might, just might, be able to see their explosive ends, it would be only by pure unreasonable luck.  They are just too far back in time, too red shifted, too distant and faint for anything we have in the works for the next twenty years or so.

But from this New York Times article, it looks as though maybe, just maybe, they’ve already been spotted.  Accidentally…just like the cosmic background noise was first spotted…

Theory Ties Radio Signal to Universe’s First Stars

When the universe was still young, they were already dying.

The first stars ever to grace the cosmos with light were brutish monsters, so the story believed by most astronomers goes, lumbering clouds of hydrogen and helium hundreds of times more massive than the Sun. They lived fast and bright and died hard, exploding or collapsing into massive black holes less than a billion years after the Big Bang, never to be seen again.

But they might have left something behind, a buzz of radio waves emitted by high-energy particles spit from the doomed gas swirling around those black holes.

They were looking at the cosmic background radiation at wavelengths not previously studied in detail.  What they saw were large magnetic whirls that were so energetic they’d be expected to come from the so-called radio galaxies…that is…galaxies that are very energetic in the radio frequencies due to the active and massive black holes in their center.  Active because they are still sucking in nearby matter.  You don’t generally see these galaxies in the visible light spectrum much, if at all, because they are so far away they’re red shifted.  But in the infrared, and in the radio spectrum there they are, bright as can be.  Hence they are referred to as radio galaxies.

But if these signals were coming from radio galaxies, then there should also be an equally strong infrared signal to go along with them, from the heat generated in their massive accretion disks.  But there is not much of a signal there.  There should be much more.  But that’s assuming the signal is coming from a massive center of a galaxy black hole. 

Even the first galaxies would have already had lots of recycled matter in them…matter that had already gone once or more though stars, and was seeded with heavier elements then hydrogen and helium in the process.  But if the black holes at the center of these accretion disks were surrounded by nothing but hydrogen and a little helium, and perhaps only a trace of heavier elements, then the infrared signal would be a lot weaker.  The only way that could be happening, is if the black hole in question is the ash from a first star. 

All the first stars had to burn with were the original hydrogen and helium left over from the big bang.  There was nothing else on the menu for stars in the newly born universe.  The first super-massive black holes would have lived in the same environment, as the heavier elements created by their star would have been blown far away in its final collapse.  So it’s possible that what they are seeing now, while not the light from the first stars, is the footprints they left behind. 

I have wondered for years now which comes first, the galaxy or the massive black hole in its center.  My layman’s hunch for a while now is that the black hole is the seed that starts it all.  But where do the first super massive black holes come from?  When I heard the story of the first stars I thought I had an idea where.  And then it came to me that the importance of the first stars isn’t that they started the process of generating the heavier elements, but that they generated the first black holes which were the seeds around which the galaxies could form.  Without those first super-massive black holes I don’t think you could get the galaxies as we see them now.  Maybe you’d get the kind of stars we see now, but a lot fewer of them and scattered around in a clusters and swarms in the darkness maybe.  But that’s just a layman’s guess, basically. 

I was noticing in the server logs this morning that someone came in from an ip address at the University of Maryland on the following Google search string:

coming out comic garrett

Well…that made my day right there.  Someone went looking Specifically for my cartoon series, A Coming Out Story. They didn’t know or couldn’t remember the title exactly, but they knew what it was about and at least the last name of the guy who did it. 

Nice.  Cartooning was the first love.  I gave up hope that I’d ever make a living at it for pretty much the same reason I gave up on being a professional photographer.  I’m just not competitive enough, and when I was younger too timid, shy and scared to try making a go of things as a freelancer.  Ironically, I ended up spending most of my life freelancing in other fields, only one of which, architectural modelmaking, even remotely touched on my artistic skills.  But there it is.  I gave up dreaming about seeing my cartoons in print anywhere.  Then along came the internet and I could just put up my own web site and see if my stuff attracted anyone.

It does.  I have put zero effort into advertising anything I do here and yet after just a few years I get hits on my cartoons from all over the world.  Not a torrent of hits.  But the steady nature of what I do get is more rewarding then you can imagine. 

Which is why I’ll be spending the weekend down in the art room…

There are several good articles in today’s Pioneer Press Online, about the hostile environment gay teens still face in school every day.  Even in the best of situations, where school administrators really want to make sure those kids can get a decent education, it is still difficult. 

Do gay-straight alliances make a difference?

A culture of tolerance

Don’t read, don’t talk

That last article, is particularly good because it touches on the "soft bigotry" of silence…

One way to enhance a culture of school tolerance is to include gay characters and themes in the academic curriculum, said Shannon Sullivan, executive director of the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, a statewide non-profit group dedicated to ensuring the safety of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students.

Students who are gay or who are questioning their sexual identity will see themselves reflected in the curriculum and will feel more connected to their school which should have a positive impact on their academic achievement, she explained.

But of course, this is what the religious right calls pro-homosexual advocacy.  Never mind that they call teaching evolution pro Darwinism advocacy too.   And as in their attacks on science education, the Fundamentalists demand that if you are going to teach about homosexuality, then to be "fair" to "both sides" you must teach the controversy…

Last spring, for example, the Deerfield parent group North Shore Student Advocacy, opposed the inclusion of the Pulitzer prize-winning play "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," on the optional reading lists of some advanced placement English classes in Township District 113. (Deerfield and Highland Park High Schools are part of this district.) Set at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, the play focuses on political and social themes of the time.

Lora Sue Hauser, executive director of the parent group, declined to comment for this story. But Laurie Higgins, who taught in the writing center at Deerfield High for eight years before leaving recently to become the director of the division of school advocacy at the Illinois Family Institute, a fundamentalist Christian organization, weighed in.

Higgins said she opposes the inclusion of the play in the curriculum because the text is so "beyond the pale" in terms of its "obscene language" that there was widespread opposition to its teaching among faculty from both sides of the political spectrum.

But it isn’t just the sexually-explicit play that Higgins challenges. She said she is against the inclusion of any literature on the reading list for a public high school that affirms homosexuality as normal unless there are other books on the reading list which question that assumption of normalcy as well. The notion that homosexuality is biologically-determined is controversial and unproven, Higgins explained.

It’s only controversial because teaching the facts about human sexuality makes Fundamentalists pop their corks.  The evidence that sexual orientation is as much a biological fact as handedness is comprehensive and overwhelming.  But these are people who reject out of hand any scientific discovery that contradicts a literal reading of Genesis.  "Unproven" to them really means "unbiblical" and that is not something that is open to proof.  They don’t care about the science.  They spit on science and laugh.

The strategy here is simply to punish gay kids one way or another.  If the adults in their schools won’t make them feel ashamed to be living, then the strategy is to prevent the adults from saying anything good about them, and in that way maintain the climate of shame.  The lives and accomplishments of heterosexuals can be taught, but the lives and accomplishments of homosexuals must not be mentioned.  What it is for opposite sex pairs to love, honor, and cherish can be taught.  Whatever it is that same-sex pairs feel for one another cannot be told, cannot even be alluded to, because the very existence of same-sex pairs cannot even be mentioned.  Homosexuals are simply too disgusting to even think about, let alone talk about.  The purpose is to alienate gay teens from their peers, and hopefully, make them keep on hating themselves.

One more thing: The following leaped out at me from within the article on A Culture of Tolerance.  This is the same Laurie Higgins who was quoted above…

Laurie Higgins, who taught in the writing center at Deerfield for eight years before becoming the director of the division of school advocacy at the Illinois Family Institute, explained her position. She said she has compassion for gay and lesbian people and even has some in her life whom she loves, but she cannot condone their behavior which she views as immoral.

Some of my best friends are…  We are in that stage now in the struggle.  Since the fight over Proposition 8 I cannot count the number of bigots I’ve seen yap, yap, yapping in print that some of their Best Friends are gay.  Once upon a time they felt completely free to tell the world what sick, twisted, depraved monsters we are.  Now they have to mouth platitudes of how many gay friends they have first, before going on to explain why they’re twisting the knife in our backs.  Or in this case, kicking school kids in the face.  How they must hate us all the more, for making them do that.

There’s been some conversation over on SLOG today that the author of those threatening letters to gay bars in Seattle might actually be a gay man himself.  I wasn’t convinced, until I saw this…

Good Work, Sloggers

Posted by Dan Savage on Wed, Jan 7 at 12:31 PM

Remix in comments flagged an important clue about the author of the Ricin Letters. The line…

…is from a poem, "A Display of Mackerel", from a collection by poet Mark Doty. The poem appeared in Atlantis, a 1996 collection of poems that Doty wrote after the HIV-related death of his partner in 1994.

They don’t care they’re dead
and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,
they didn’t care that they were living:

So whoever wrote the letter knows—and plagiarizes—his gay poets.

That’s…pretty telling.  It’s not conclusive, but I’m not making any more assumptions about this guy until he’s caught.  Let’s hope that happens before he actually kills someone…

From SLOG…   Here is the letter one gay bar in Seattle received…

Read between the lines of every love the sinner hate the sin sermon you have ever heard, and you will see these words.  There must be no homosexuals…  The ex-gay movement gets back to basics…

So…is traffic bad out there…?

I woke up to the sound of rain on my bedroom window awnings.  I can tell the difference between the sound of rain hitting them and sleet.  When I went out to feed the birds I saw the temperatures had risen enough that the rain had washed all the ice from my tree and the front step handrails.   But the outer burbs got it last night.  A co-worker told me this morning that all the trees in her neighborhood were drooping from the weight of the ice on them.

I had to come in early because we are deploying software today, so I drove Traveler the few blocks to work rather then walk in the rain.  It’s not a bad drive since it’s just a few neighborhood streets I drive down, not any major highways, and there was no ice anywhere here in the city.  But I am so glad when it’s like this outside that I live so close to where I work. 

There is a thin film of ice on the tree in my front yard now.  It’s raining a tad…and cold.  They said there would be no ice in the city tonight…only in the burbs.  And yet there is ice on my tree.  Also on the front step rails. The deck in the back yard, the ac/compressor unit, my bird feeders and who knows what else.

We have a big software deployment scheduled for tomorrow at work, so I probably can’t telecommute tomorrow.  I’d rather have three feet of snow then any amount of ice.  At least you can see the snow on the roads and sidewalks.

Posted on SLOG…

Gay Bars Receive Threatening Letters

Posted by Dan Savage on Tue, Jan 6 at 4:41 PM

Eleven gay bars in Seattle received letters today addressed to the "Owner/Manager" from someone claiming to be in the possession of ricin, a deadly poison. "Your establishment has been targeted," the letter begins. "I have in my possession approximately 67 grams of ricin with which I will indiscriminately target at least five of your clients."

"I felt sick when I read it," said Carla, the owner/manager of Re-bar. "It’s so vile. It’s just hatred. It made me worry for all the other bars, and for my bartenders, and our clientele."

According to the CDC’s website, someone who has ingested "a significant amount" will develop vomiting and diarrhea within the first 6-12 hours; other symptoms of ricin poisoning include hallucinations, seizures, and blood in the urine. There is no antidote for ricin but ricin exposure is not invariably fatal.

"I just had the police come pick [the letter] up," said Keith Christensen, the manager of The Eagle, when reached by phone. Christensen had already heard about the letter from other bar owners and managers, and so he didn’t open it. "It’s probably nothing," Christensen added, "but the economy is really screwing all the bars right now, and the last thing we need is something ramping up the not-go-out mode people seem to be in right now. It’s really freaky that someone would do something like this at a time like this."

Christensen says he’s posted signs at the Eagle advising patrons not to leave their drinks unattended.

"The police have already come and gone," said Roland, the manager at Madison Pub. "They collected the letter and that’s about it. I don’t think it’s anything to worry about it." Roland admitted to being unnerved by the letter at first.

"But after the initial ‘what?’, it’s like whatever."

A letter also arrived in the Stranger‘s offices, addressed to the attention of "Obituaries." The letter’s author said the paper should "be prepared to announce the deaths of approximately 55 individuals all of whom were patrons of the following establishments on a Saturday in January." The listed bars are: The Elite, Neighbours, Wild Rose, The Cuff, Purr, The Eagle, R Place, Re-bar, CC’s, Madison Pub, and the Crescent. "I could take this moment to launch into a diatribe about my indignation towards the gay community," the letter concludes, "however, I think the deaths will speak for themselves."

Alison, Luying, and Tippett, local promoters and DJs who do nights at various bars around town, came up with the idea of organizing a pub crawl for this Friday night to show support for the bars that were threatened.

Carla at Re-bar added that, as distressing as the letter was, she was pleased with the response from the community.

"Everyone is calling each other, everyone’s got each other’s backs."

I hope this isn’t surprising anyone.  Pope Ratzinger said the other day that fighting for the human race against the gay agenda was akin to saving the rain forests.  And this is a constant, steady refrain from the pulpits:  Homosexuals threaten the very existence of the human race.  The solution to the homosexual problem, is there must be no homosexuals.  They say it over and over again.  And in the next breath of course, insist they don’t mean anyone should take their words as calling for violence. Wink, Wink.  But they have already lost the war.  Hate has defeated them.  Our struggle is to insure it does not defeat us too.  First and foremost, that is a fight we wage within ourselves, every day. 

We need to understand this, and accept it as the condition of the struggle we find ourselves in.  Someone or some ones spray painted swasticas on a catholic church in San Francisco the other day and it was all over Google News the next as evidence of how hateful and violent the gays are becoming in the wake of Proposition 8.  Well if that’s as violent as we are becoming, then we are doing pretty good all things considered…

Gay man’s killer could serve as little as eight months in prison

Sean William Kennedy, 20, was attacked in the early morning of May 17, 2007 outside the former Brew’s Bar in Greenville, South Carolina. His assailant, Stephen Andrew Moller, pulled up in a car, threw one punch after reportedly yelling anti-gay slurs, and fled. Kennedy died about 17 hours later from the brain injury he sustained, and friends and family believe he was targeted at least in part due to his sexual orientation.

Since South Carolina has no hate crime statute, no enhancement was available for Moller’s June 2008 sentence of five years in prison on a reduced charge of involuntary manslaughter. The judge reduced the sentence to three years with credit for seven months’ time served and ordered Moller to seek help to manage anger and substance abuse.

…

While Moller’s attorney said after the sentencing that he was unaware Kennedy was gay at the time of the assault, a text message received from a friend shortly after the incident stated: "You tell your faggot friend that when he wakes up he owes me $500 for my broken hand."

Nobody on the side of love this culture war has any business embracing the ways and means of hate.  Because the minute you  do that, you are defeated.  Ours is a moral crusade in the best sense of the words moral and crusade.  Violence, vandalism, terror and fear…these are the weapons of the other side.  We are an army of lovers.  Ours is a struggle to reclaim the right to love and be loved.  With what hands do we caress the one we love after we have taken up the club?  With what eyes do we look into theirs when we have reveled in the pain of others?  It is impossible.  The heart must triumph over the Pit, or the human race has no tomorrow.  That is our struggle.  That is our glory.  We can do this.  But only so long as we remember what it is to love.  Every time you look into a stranger’s face, and see them for the person they are, and not just the color of their skin, or their religion, their culture or their sex or sexual orientation, you defeat hate.

Take pride in knowing that despite the fact that the haters have been calling us every kind of monsters they could imagine for generations now, these days people are shocked when gay people spray paint a church.  Yes…that is out of character for us.  That is not who we are.  We aren’t monsters and we aren’t weaklings.  We are decent.  It is the other side, that keeps confusing decency with weakness.

So someone in the gutter is threatening gay people with death.  So what’s new?  The fight goes on and we will win so long as we can love wholeheartedly no matter what they do to us.  And the ages to come will know that it was the gay minority who fought for humanity’s future, in an age when hate served poison not in bars, but from the pulpits.

Next time you are in a bar or a club, keep an eye on your neighbor’s drink.  Next time you see anger threaten to turn a friend’s heart to hate, tell them they are loved.  We have to watch out for one another.  That is what you do during times of war.

[Major Geek Alert…]

Some of you may have read the news items about Microsoft’s Zune player freezing up on its users last December 31st. The problem it turned out, was in a bit of software that calculates how many days since January 1st the current date is.  I’ve no idea why the Zune’s software needed to do that, but it isn’t important to what I’m about to show you.  I have fun doing the work I do, in a techno geeky kinda way, and I want to share a bit of that fun with you.

The code that caused that particular bug was leaked out into the wild.  Here’s the relevant fragment:

  while (days > 365)
  {
      if (IsLeapYear(year))
      {
          if (days > 366)
          {
              days -= 366;
              year += 1;
          }
      }
      else
      {
          days -= 365;
          year += 1;
      }
  }

Don’t panic…it’s just code.  Code is to a computer program what a chart is to music.  It’s not so much the program, as instructions for how to create the program.  It’s more human readable then the machine language code microprocessors digest, although that might seem a tad hard to believe if you’re seeing code here for the first time.  It’s a kind of highly structured syntax that is precise enough to describe, step-by-step, a series of actions the computer needs to perform.  That series of actions is called an ‘algorithm’.

An algorithm is a series of steps needed to perform a specific task in a specific time.  So for example, consider the steps necessary to bake a single cake.  Those steps constitute an algorithm because they perform a specific task in a specific time.  The task is baking a cake.  When the cake is baked you are done.  Note that a specific time isn’t necessarily a specific amount of time.  The important thing is there is an end to it somewhere. The steps needed for a cake factory to make ‘cakes’ is not an algorithm because there is no defined end to the task of baking cakes.  It could be one cake or many.  But you can repeat the algorithm for baking a single cake as many times as you like, once you have it defined.

Writing computer programs is essentially the art of creating well defined, simple, straightforward algorithms.  If you’ve got a head for that, the rest is a matter of mastering a particular programming language or more.  The code fragment above is in a language called C++.  Never mind why it’s called that and not something more warm and friendly like Fred or Ethel.  Computer geeks are weird like that.

This code fragment is from a larger bit of code that tries to determine the number of years the current year is from the year 1980, and the number of days since January 1st.  Never mind for now Why.  Just focus on the task: to get the number of years since 1980 and the number of days since January 1st. 

The function this code fragment lives in receives the current date in the form of the number of days since January 1, 1980.  This seems odd, but it is how computers tell time.  At the most basic level, they are merely counting fractions of seconds from a given starting point.  Consider that a mechanical wrist watch (like the one I wear) tells the time only by counting ticks.  If you know how many ticks there are in a second, then you can compute the second, the minute, and the hour by counting the number of ticks and that is just what a mechanical wrist watch does…mechanically.  Computers do pretty much the same thing electronically, but their ticks are much smaller, and far more precise.

We know there are 365 days in a normal year.  So if we get a number that’s, let’s say 10220, we might just divide that by 365 to get the number of years that have passed.  But the added factor of having leap years makes it less simple then that. 

Now let me try to make some sense of that C++ code for you.  As I said, it’s a highly structured syntax that precisely describes the steps a computer program must perform.  Just ignore the brackets…they’re just there to mark off specific sections of the code.  Don’t worry about them.

At the beginning of the code you see the word "while".  This is a Keyword in the C and C++ languages and it denotes the start of a program Loop.  A loop is a series of steps that are repeated.  They are very useful for repeating a series of steps over and over as just a few lines of code instead of one or more lines repeated exactly for every time the steps need to be executed. If, say, you had to do something a hundred times you would write the code to loop through the same steps a hundred times, rather then writing the same steps a hundred times in the code.  If the steps change, then that’s a hundred changes you need to make.  If you’ve written it as a loop you only need to change it once. 

Loops are also helpful if you don’t know ahead of time how many times you might have to repeat a particular set of steps.  In the cake baking example for instance, you might have to stir some ingredients until they are mixed properly.  If you were coding that, you’d write it as a loop where you stir the mix, and then test to see if it’s mixed well enough to stop.  If not, stir once more.  Test…stir…test…stir…  And so on until the the test says you can stop stirring now.

That test is important.  It tells you when you can stop stirring.  For now just hold this thought: it is important to have a way out of a loop.

The keyword "while" has a test enclosed in the parenthesis next to it: (days > 365).  This test compares the variable "days" against a literal value of 366.  Think of a variable as a post office box with a name on it, and something inside.  In this case, the variable is named "days" and it holds a number that represents a given number of days.  This variable is set elsewhere in the code and we don’t need to know why or how at the moment.  We’re just looking at what this one bit of code does. 

The ">" symbol is an Operator in the C and C++ languages, which means "greater then"  If "days" is "greater then" 365 then the next lines of code are executed.  This test is at the beginning of the loop, which means the condition is tested first before any of the code in the loop is executed.  If the test is true, the loop is entered.  If not, the loop is never entered.  So the loop takes a value for a number of days at its very beginning.  If that value is greater then 365, the rest of the loop executes.  If it isn’t, the loop is skipped over.  Think of it as saying "while the value stored in "days" is greater then 365, do the following…"

So we enter the body of the loop.  The next line is "if (IsLeapYear(year))"  Let me unpack that.  The word "if" is another keyword, and it denotes a logical test.  You are testing if something is, or is not true.  The part in the parenthesis is the thing you are testing.  IsLeapYear(year) is a function call with its own set of parenthesis.  Functions are bits of code that return a value.  This particular function returns a value of either true or false.  We don’t need to see how this particular works for this example…just that it will return either "true" or "false" back to our "if" test.  The word "year" in its parenthesis is another variable and it holds a number that represents the number of years since 1980. 

So we are passing in to the function IsLeapYear a number, and it returns either true or false depending on whether or not the number we give it, translates into a leap year.  Remember, we’re counting the number of years since 1980.  Lets say we make "year" equal to 3.  We could as easily write the call as "IsLeapYear(3)", and it would return false, since 1980 plus three years is 1983 which was not a leap year.

Okay…still with me?

An "if" test tests a condition, and the lines of code following the test are either executed or not depending on whether or not the test passed or failed.  If IsLeapYear(year) returns true, then the next line is executed.

The next line is another "if" test.  if (days > 366).  This test compares the variable "days" against a literal value of 366.  It is like the test at the beginning of the loop.  If "days" is "greater then" 366 then the next lines of code are executed. 

These next lines actually do something.  the line "days -= 366" means "take the value that’s stored in the variable named "days", subtract 366 from it and store the result back in that variable.  The line "year += 1" means "add one to the value stored in the variable named year and put the result back in that variable". 

A couple brackets on down (I told you to just ignore them) there is the word "else"  It is another keyword that works with the keyword "if" to denote lines of code to be executed if the if test above fails.  So in other words, if IsLeapYear(year) returns false, then the steps following the word "else" are performed.  Think of the whole thing as "if it’s a leap year do this…if it isn’t (else) do that…"  In this case, that is "subtract 365 from the value of the variable named days", and "add one to the value of the variable named year".

So…still with me?  This is what the code is doing.  The algorithm it embodies is this:

1) Repeat the following for as long as the value of "days" is greater then 365:
2) Check to see if "year" is a leap year.
3) If it is a leap year, check to see if the value of "days" is greater then 366.
4) If it is, then subtract 366 from "days" and add 1 to the value of "year"
5) If "year" isn’t a leap year, then subtract 365 from "days" and add 1 to the value of "year"

There is our loop.  Basically, it is taking a number that is the number of days since 1980, and subtracting 365 days for every normal year, 366 for every leap year, and when it finishes you should have a count of the number of years since 1980, and what’s left over is the number of days since January 1st.  Simple…no?

The bug in it is subtle.  Let’s run through it for December 31, 2007.  Lets say we have run this loop for a while and now we have a value of 26 in "year".  The value of "days" is 730. 

1) The value of "days" is greater then 365…so we do the loop again.
2) Check to see if "year" is a leap year.  26 years since 1980 is 2006.  2006 isn’t a leap year.  So the code following the "else" keyword is executed.
3) We subtract 365 from "days" and add 1 to the value of "year"
4) We’re at the beginning of our loop again.  The value of "days" is 365.  365 is not greater then 365.  So the condition for continuing the loop is now false.  So now we can exit the loop.
5) The end values are, year = 27, days = 365.

Okay.  That works.  But now let’s try it for December 31, 2008.  Lets say we have run this loop for a while and now we have a value of 27 in "year".  The value of "days" is 731.

1) The value of "days" is greater then 365…so we do the loop again.
2) Check to see if "year" is a leap year.  27 years since 1980 is 2007.  2007 isn’t a leap year.  So the code following the "else" keyword is executed.
3) We subtract 365 from "days" and add 1 to the value of "year"
4) We’re at the beginning of our loop again.  The value of "days" is 366.  366 is greater then 365.  So the condition for continuing the loop is still true.
5) Check to see if "year" is a leap year.  2008 is a leap year.  So the code following the "if" keyword is executed.
6) Check to see if the value of "days" is greater then 366.  366 isn’t greater then 366, it’s equal to 366…so the code following the "if" keyword is not executed.
7) We’re at the beginning of our loop again.  The value of "days" is still 366 and the value of year is still 28.  366 is greater then 365.  So the condition for continuing the loop is still true.
10) Check to see if "year" is a leap year.  The value of year wasn’t changed by the last run through the loop.  It is still 2008 and 2008 isn’t a leap year.  So the code following the "if" keyword is executed.

(can you see this thing starting to run away now…?)

11)  Check to see if the value of "days" is greater then 366.  366 isn’t greater then 366, it’s equal to 366…so the code following the "if" keyword is not executed.
12) We’re at the beginning of the loop again…

And that’s where we will keep on ending up until the heat death of the universe, or the Zune’s battery dies, whichever comes first.  This is why the Zunes all locked up on December 31st, 2008.  The code works fine during a normal year, and on every day but the last day of a leap year.  But on the last day of a leap year that loop will run indefinitely, because there is no way out of it on that one day.

Since this code was leaked out into the wild, everybody who does this for a living has an opinion on how to write that algorithm better.  There is a kind of fine art and a pure pleasure to some of us in crafting tight, simple, elegant algorithms and some folks have their own deeply held religious beliefs on how to do it best.  I haven’t had time to really wrap my head around what this algorithm is doing, but for kicks and grins I might try to write a better version of it myself later.  It’s kinda fun to take something like this and try to craft something simple and clean and so logically pure it’s beautiful just to look at.  But I’m in a testing and deployment phase of the project I’m one at work now though, and what went through my head when I saw this was they obviously didn’t test how it behaved during a leap year.

This is the world I live and work in.  This is what programming is and what programmer’s do.  We build these tight little algorithms and embody them in computer code that hopefully allows you to get things done.  Except when they don’t.

[Edited a tad to explain the test at the start of the loop, and make some of the rest of it clearer…]

Very cool photos of frozen soap bubbles…

It’s very cold tonight, so we played with bubbles. If you blow them upwards enough they have time to freeze on the way down.

And this…

Chasing bubbles round a very icy garden (we’d made an ice-slide right down the path), in the dark while looking through a viewfinder is surprisingly hard.

Go see them.  Kudos to the Über Geeks who did this!

Via Pam’s House Blend.  Don’t read this if stories about Mormons physically and sexually abusing children might make you want to go out and throttle the first Mormon you see afterward.  Probably some of them don’t even know how depraved their church is.  They just see the Donny and Marie side of it and keep on smiling.

What you need to keep in mind as you are reading this, is that it is happening to a fifteen year old boy.  He has been sent to a Mormon "tough love" camp by his mother, who had recently married a religious fanatic.

I was led down a long hall of doors with nameplates. I had no clue what kind of place this was. I didn’t see any cows or horses…no sign of what I thought a "ranch" would resemble. Paul took me into a small room that was no bigger than a broom closet, which was stacked to the ceiling with three colors of cloth, blue, green and brown. There were green t-shirts, blue t-shirts, and blue jeans.

There were also brown army wool blankets, and I remember thinking that I didn’t want to sleep under such a coarse covering before I was told to "put it on." I was told to wrap a thick, itchy blanket around my waist like a towel and wear it like a dress.

I was then given a "leash" made of climbing rope and what I think was a square knot to tie around my waist.

I had never imagined being tethered and walked like a dog, but here I was, being walked like a dog towards a cluster of about 12 other boys. They were lined up facing a wall while two large men in red sweatshirts watched them from a couple of chairs off to the side.

Some of the boys had camouflage pants on, a few others wore dresses. I wondered how long I was to be in this blanket dress. I was later told that it was so I wouldn’t run away – and they were right – I literally could not run in this humiliating getup. I could barely get a full stride walking.

That’s when I saw Brent – or ‘Captain America,’ as he was called disparagingly – for the first time. My leash was handed off to him, but he told me to wrap it around my waist and go join the group of young men who were standing with their noses touching the wall, all spread out about arms length from each other.

I turned to the boy who was standing to my right and asked him how long he had been here, but before I could get my question all the way out, my forehead careened into the carpeted wall in front of me. A sharp pain stabbed the back of my head, and suddenly bad breath filled my nostrils. "Are you talking on my work crew, boy?" a red-shirted man screamed at me.

My head was ringing. I was still trying to piece together what had just happened when I looked behind me and massaged the pain in my head. Suddenly my legs fell out from underneath me and I was on my back.

He had just slammed my forehead into the wall, and now he had put his foot behind mine and pushed me, sending me to the floor flat on my back.

He stood over me and bawled, "Don’t look at me. Don’t look around. Don’t you MOVE without permission! You don’t do anything without permission! If you talk, I think you are talking about running away, and I will restrain you. Do you understand?" I nodded. I knew then that I had to get out of this place. I wasn’t going to last here.

…

His filthy digit tasted like rust and fish. "I can hurt you without leaving any marks," Brent growled as I writhed in agony on the ground. I struggled for breath as he mounted my back, put his finger in my mouth, and pulled back on my cheek, fish-hooking me. The pain was incredible. I tried to beg him to stop, but the words would not come.

After he finished beating and bludgeoning submissiveness into me, he pulled me up by the rope that was lassoed around my waist. The wool army blanket I had fashioned as a skirt had shifted askew and I stood there in my boxers bleeding from my nose, humiliated.

My green Utah Boys Ranch t-shirt had been ridiculously stretched out and looked more like a low cut blouse. I loosened the noose around my waist and pulled the itchy blanket through the loop and folded it over so it looked like a brown bath towel secured by a belt. He wasn’t satisfied, he wanted more.

Another notorious gulag for children is Tranquility Bay, located in Jamaica to it keep safely away from the reach of American law.  Like Utah Boy’s Ranch it is also operated by Mormons.  If you think the camps operated by Christian fundamentalists are horrific, take a look at what it is Mormons do to children.  The righteous Mormon gentleman running the Utah Boys Ranch?  His name is Chris Buttars.  He is a Utah state senator. 

More information the Mormon Gulag Here.  Think about it the next time you hear someone from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints bellyaching that the gays are hateful.  Think about the TV ads they ran in California, warning voters about how the homosexuals were coming for their kids. 

I can hurt you without leaving any marks…