I honesty figured he’d just round file it, but no, Steve Fidel has to write me back…
You just proved my point.
Cheers,
Steve
See…if you’d been raised a Baptist like me, you’d have smiled sweetly and said "I’ll pray for you" in that tone of voice where the other person hears "burn in hell".
I keep getting hits on This Post, via search strings like "sexy guys" "sexy guys underwear" and so forth. And from the most interesting places too…like Ogden, Utah and Dubai, Dubayy and Islamabad, Pakistan, where they’re only a little more sexually repressed then in Utah. No, I am not kidding about the hits from the middle east. I get an amazing amount of search engine hits on gay topics from that little sex hostile part of the world, and lately that post in particular. Oh…and the American bible belt of course. And…Utah.
Let’s face it…this poor world is hungry for images of sexy guys wearing little to next to nothing at all. And I’m here to help. Time for another drawing lesson. Bring your drawing pads and sharpened pencils here tomorrow. It’s easy. It’s fun. You could be excommunicated from the Mormon church!
A reader sends along this link, which he says is not a parody but is actually a serious statement by a guy named Matthew Stucky. He says that Santa Claus (which he spells Clause, for some reason) is satanic and is "corrupting people all over the world." Oh, and the reindeer are all gay. Seriously.
So I go take a look…
Santa Clause
1. He knows if a person has been naughty or nice. He is omniscient.
2. If a person has been nice then he will give them gifts.
3. If they have been naughty then they get a lump of coal.
4. Most people are good enough to receive gifts & few get a lump of coal.
5. Santa somehow has the ability to give gifts to the entire world in one time although that would be scientifically impossible. He is basically omnipresent and omniscient.
6. The word for Holy in Spanish is Santa. This gives the world the perception that a man can be a really good person & this makes Santa Clause a mock of God.
Okay…
Santa’s queer reindeer:
Take a look at the names of the 8 reindeer.
Blitzen, Comet, Cupid, Dancer, Dasher, Donder, Prancer and Vixen.
The person who originally came up with these names probably did not have this intent. They probably originally had some of the reindeer as male & some as female. However, the animated movie that was made in 1964 had a different idea. In the movie all 8 of these reindeer were male reindeer. Take a look at those names again. Male reindeer named Dancer, Prancer, Vixen & Cupid?!?!?!
Let’s start with Vixen in the dictionary:
1 : a shrewish ill-tempered woman 2 : a female fox 3 : a sexually attractive woman
So Vixen is a queer. It’s nice to know the creators of this sweet innocent cartoon were so concerned with young kids who would be watching.
Cupid
1: the Roman god of erotic love — compare eros 2 not capitalized : a figure that represents Cupid as a naked usually winged boy often holding a bow and arrow
Dancer & Prancer certainly sound like feminine terms as well.
I think from these names we know Vixen, Dancer, Prancer & Cupid are queer reindeer.
Let’s go back to the story from the animated movie with Rudolph. Rudolph gets shy around girls & his nose turns red. As a result, the other reindeer won’t let him play any reindeer games. That sounds sick, perverted & homosexual. Basically Rudolph like girls because he is straight & as a result they don’t let him participate in their homosexual games.
People are going to read this & say I’m crazy but hasn’t Hollywood always been trying to pump in homosexual themes into kids movies & cartoons. One of the teletubbies is gay. Bert & Ernie are gay. In Scooby Doo Greg is gay. Hollywood has always had agendas they are trying to push and one of those major agendas is homosexuality is ok. It’s no big deal. Another one they are trying to push is "It’s ok for women to work."
The truth is Santa Clause is being used by Satan to corrupt kids at a very young age. This is much like in the Disney movies which are littered with sexual content, homosexuality, etc… A woman falling in love with an animal(Beauty & the Beast). A grown man who wants to hang around little boys all day(Peter Pan). Peter Pan is also always played by women in plays because he is a long haired looking faggot in the movie.
We as Christians need to separate ourselves from this kind of garbage. You can say I’m crazy but Satan Clause is corrupting kids & we ought to have nothing to do with it. We ought to keep our kids away from these fun little animated shows that came from Hollywood. It came from the world so it’s not of God. 1 John 2:15-16 "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world."
Leviticus 20:13 "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them."
According to the Bible homosexuality should be punishable by death. I would be overjoyed if every single queer in the entire world died today. The Bible makes it clear they are reprobates who are past the point of salvation. The Bible also makes it clear they are rapists & very wicked people. They have no chance to get saved and no saved person could ever become a queer. Therefore, I would be overjoyed if they all died tonight & our government would actually follow what the Bible states. The death penalty should be enacted for the queers.
Matthew Stucky
Just one screwy little blogger boy you say? Yes. Of course. But there’s your grass roots. Right there. The fertile soil decades of pulpit thumping against the Homosexual Threat was meant to take root in. Check out his goals for the new year…
Personal Physical Goals
1. Get my mile time under 5 minutes & keep it there for the entire year.
2. Run a marathon.
3. Bench 250 lbs.
4. Leg Press 900 lbs.
5. Get my 6 pack abs back before the end of January & keep it for the entire year.
6. Dunk a basketball.
7. Maintain my side to side split but be able to do one front to back both with left leg forward & right leg forward.
8. Learn how to do a front flip.
9. Learn how to do a back flip.
10. Be able to flat jump on the pulpit by the end of the year.
Nice. He also wants to "Personally lead 1000 people to the Lord" this year. No word on how many homosexuals he intends to kill. I suppose we’ll find that out eventually.
Good thing I’m not a Mormon though. Then I’d have to endure angry threats and rhetoric.
Steve Fidel over at the Mormon Times complains, Thusly ….
For those who have (correctly) assumed the editor of a Web site called MormonTimes.com is a Mormon, I’ve been called on to be an insider in this discussion by those looking for support for their views against same-sex marriage. As a Mormon, I’ve also been the target of the most angry threats and rhetoric I’ve seen in 25 years as a journalist from the community that considers gay marriage a civil right.
Two men walking in Vancouver’s Davie neighborhood were targeted for attack in still another anti-gay incident in the gay-friendly area.
The attack took place on the evening of Dec. 4 at around 8:00 p.m., according to a Dec. 8 article posted online at Canadian Web site Xtra!.
Chris Hiller was quoted as saying that he and his boyfriend had just come out of a gay bar and were walking along the sidewalk holding hands.
Hiller noted that he knew another person was following behind, but the presence of the other individual did not alarm him until, Hiller said, "my friend goes, ’Come on, Chris, let’s keep walking,’ and next thing I know I’m on the ground with my face covered in blood and dazed, and my friend’s gone to get help."
Hiller did not see his attacker, but he said that he heard the man utter the words, "You fag, I’m going to beat the shit out of you, I don’t like you, stay away from me."
Added the alleged attacker, "Don’t even come near me, you fag."
The article said that Hiller recounted being stuck on the jaw and then receiving a blow right to the teeth.
The article quoted Hiller as saying that he was down for "about four to five minutes," at which point, "I got up and I’m woozy and staggering a bit."
Hiller continued, "I couldn’t see for a few minutes, and then I sat down."
Police arrived a few minutes later in response to the call Hiller’s boyfriend placed, but by then the alleged attacker was long gone.
A state appellate court reversed Steven Pomie’s conviction on charges of first-degree assault and first-degree assault as a hate crime in the 2005 anti-gay attack on Dwan Prince, ordered a new trial for Pomie, and said he could only be tried on lesser charges of second-degree assault and second-degree assault as a hate crime.
The assault, which happened in Brooklyn’s Brownsville section, left Prince permanently disabled and unable to work.
Note that three of the four appellate judges in that case, Peter B. Skelos, Robert A. Lifson, and William F. Mastro, were appointed by Republican Governor George Pataki. Oh…and Skelos is the brother of Dean Skelos, currently the Republican majority leader in the State Senate. You know…the guy who has been single handedly blocking a vote on same-sex marriage in New York for the past several years.
In 2005, Lifson was one of three judges on a five-judge panel who barred a gay man from bringing a wrongful death suit against St. Vincent’s Hospital after his partner died there. The majority ruled that only a spouse could bring such a case and that the couple’s Vermont civil union did not confer that status on the surviving partner. That same gay man won a 2008 case that sought a benefit from an insurance company for his partner’s death. Mastro was one of two judges who dissented from that ruling from a five-judge panel.
We can only assume it would have been even worse for the spouse, had he been a heterosexual Mormon suing for the wrongful death of his legally married wife. Who knows what angry threats and rhetoric he’d have had to endure then.
So…I write back to Mr Mormon Times Fidel…Thusly…
"As a Mormon, I’ve also been the target of the most angry threats and rhetoric I’ve seen in 25 years as a journalist from the community that considers gay marriage a civil right."
I see. Tell you what… Walk down almost any street in America holding another man’s hand and see what kind of angry threats and rhetoric you get. That’s all. Just holding hands. That simple, elegant, beautiful gesture of heart-to-heart love is enough to get your head bashed-in, in a lot of places. And you don’t even have to be gay to get gay bashed either, as Jose and Romel Sucuzhanay found out. A couple brothers walking down the street arm-in-arm and suddenly an SUV full of angry young men jumps out at them and one of them has an aluminum baseball bat in his hand. And now Jose, alas, is dead. And his brother will take the memory of that night to his grave. Or if holding another man’s hand is too much for you, just try putting a rainbow bumper sticker on your car. You might get what happened to a lesbian in Richmond California last week when four young men saw the rainbow sticker on her car. All those ads your church paid for warning Californians that the homos were coming into the schools for their kids sure paid off didn’t they? You wrote that sentence I quoted above for your fellow Mormons to read so you could all nod your heads together about how hateful the gays are, didn’t you?
I love it when the faithful complain that teh gays are trying to elevate behavior to the level of a civil right. You’re a Mormon…right? Well…no. You aren’t. Mormon is just a behavior. It isn’t what you are, it’s what you do. You attend church. You do whatever church activities it is that Mormons do. And it came to pass you read the Book of Mormon. You wear the magic underwear. Mormon is something you do, not something you are. See? And we don’t want to be elevating behavior to the status of civil right now do we?
Jackass.
—
Bruce Garrett
Baltimore, Maryland.
Which is about as much calm and respectful dialogue as I can manage at the moment. It’s too early in the morning here in Baltimore for me to be getting angry at knuckle-dragging morons.
If you are a Proposition 8 supporter and you don’t like my attitude…I strongly suggest you don’t try to tell me about it here in the comments. This is my web site and I will endure a lot of things here but bile from gutter crawling bigots isn’t one of them.
I’m angry. At you. At all your pathetic self righteous excuses. At your absolute moral squalor. At your total inner depravity. At you. I’m angry. Want to see how angry? Once upon a time a writer named Harlen Ellison wrote a passage about what it is to hate that captures it…exactly:
Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live.
There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my
complex. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds
of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this
micro-instant for you. Hate. Hate.
Via Atrios… I’m reading this story about how the republican governor of South Carolina finally decided it was better to let people collect unemployment then…well…starve or something I guess…
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Just hours before the unemployment benefits fund was to run out in South Carolina, the state with the nation’s third-highest jobless rate, Gov. Mark Sanford relented Wednesday and agreed to apply for a $146 million federal loan to shore it up, after weeks of refusing to do so.
The governor’s position had drawn rebukes even from fellow Republicans in the Legislature, one of whom denounced Mr. Sanford as “heartless,” and from newspaper editorial pages. On Wednesday, The State, the daily newspaper here in Columbia, accused the governor of playing “chicken with the lives of the 77,000” who are unemployed in South Carolina.
For weeks, Mr. Sanford, newly elected as head of the Republican Governors Association and known for being a fierce free-market foe of government spending, stuck to his stand, questioning the probity of the South Carolina Employment Security Commission and demanding a new audit of the agency.
Emphasis mine. Even from fellow Republicans. Even from fellow Republicans. Even from fellow Republicans. Wow. That must have been pretty heartless then.
Third highest unemployment rate in the nation. You’d think there were things South Carolina could do to put its unemployed to work, some infrastructure work, or other short term one-off projects that need doing that might not only keep the state economy going, but even improve it a tad. But that would be government spending wouldn’t it? Better to let people who can’t find work loose everything. Gotta love that free market stuff.
Even from fellow Republicans. Even from fellow Republicans. Even from fellow Republicans. I think quite a few working people who have voted republican lately because they hate the darkies and the feminists and the Jews and the wetbacks and the liberals and the homos are starting to discover that as far as the country club republicans are concerned working people aren’t shit either, even if they’re male, white, heterosexual and protestant.
No job? Retirement fund gone? About to loose your house? Oh cheer up. The gays can’t get married so things can’t be all bad now can they? You got what you voted for. Smile!
US software giant Microsoft has taken steps to shield from the public, the value of Tax Haven transactions of two Irish-registered subsidiaries that have enabled it to save billions of dollars in US taxes.
The company applied to the Irish Companies Office on Monday to re-register its Round Island One and Flat Island Company subsidiaries as companies with unlimited liability. Unlimited companies have no obligation to file their accounts publicly.
The U.S. taxes that multi-billionaire Bill Gates is using Ireland to avoid are paid for in the end by the rest of us. Which might seem like a good excuse to pirate his software but it isn’t. Because Bill is corrupt is no reason to corrupt yourself. And there is one very good reason to not pirate Microsoft products in any case. They suck. Or more specifically…
Microsoft’s Zune 30GB music player just wasn’t ready for a leap year. That’s what owners of the devices discovered Wednesday morning when they awoke to find their players frozen and unworkable.
The problem turned out to be "a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year," Microsoft Zune spokesman Matt Akers said in a posting to Zune forums Wednesday. The issue does not affect all Zune players, but all models of the Zune 30GB are potentially affected, he said.
Zune is Microsoft’s alternative to Apple’s popular iPod devices.
And you can tell it’s Microsoft’s alternative because it took just one tiny little leap second to bring it down to a crashing locked up total halt. Why pirate Microsoft Windows when you can run a Linux distribution for free and have a more reliable, more secure operating system in the bargain. Yes, Linux is more work. But it’s work defeating Microsoft’s anti-piracy schemes too. Why go to the trouble? Just run Linux. If you are smart and skillful enough to defeat Microsoft’s anti-piracy systems you can figure out and run Linux. And then you don’t have to be a thief.
Character is what you are, not what other people think you are.
The news this morning tells me that the marriage (second try) of the guy who dressed up as Santa and killed nine people at a party recently started to break apart after his (second) wife found out about the brain damaged son he’d abandoned…
He was a software engineer who liked SUVs and went to Mass on Sundays. She was a secretary with a quick mind and an infectious laugh. When Bruce Pardo married Sylvia Orza three years ago, the match seemed ideal — right down to the housing arrangements: He lived alone in a sparsely furnished house and she had three children and plenty of furniture.
But the marriage splintered nearly a year ago when she discovered that, years earlier, he had abandoned a brain-damaged son but continued to claim him as a tax write-off.
Sylvia Pardo was appalled, according to a source close to the police investigation…
I’d read about the son previously and how Pardo had continued to claim him as a tax write-off even though he’d basically abandoned him and wasn’t paying any child support. The tale I got from the news outlets about the Christmas party massacre contained this horrible detail I hadn’t been able to get out of my mind: Pardo’s first victim was an 8 year old girl who had come running up to him when she saw him in the Santa suit. He shot her in the face. I just couldn’t fathom that. I’d read about the nasty divorce, and his loosing his job, but shooting the kid like that was more cold blooded then I could picture from all that by itself. There had to be more then the divorce and the job I thought at the time.
And there was more. Well…less. Less to him then anyone around him really grasped. There were all the usual statements from friends about how Pardo’s behavior that night was a total shock and completely out of character and so on. But it wasn’t. He had an easy laugh and a calm, quiet disposition. But character isn’t what you do, it’s why you do it. That’s what’s missing from so many of these horrible news stories about the quiet man who suddenly goes on a berserk rampage. People see the easy going smile and they don’t notice there is nothing behind it.
If I had read these news stories about Pardo and seen a man who had abandoned a son, used him to cheat on his taxes, married another woman for her money and was living it up until he got caught, I’d still be confused as to how he could be so cold blooded. But he wasn’t a crook. He was a cheat. It’s not the passionate man you need to be afraid of. The angry one. The wily one. It’s the empty one. Be afraid of the empty one.
Figured it’s going to take me another couple weeks to get used to writing 2009 instead of 2008 so I thought I’d get a start on it now. 2009. 2009. 2009.
It’s bright and sun-shiny here in Baltimore. Also cold. 20 degrees at BWI and 23 in my back yard according to my does-it-all digital furnace/ac system controller/thermostat. Not nearly as windy as yesterday though. Yesterday morning I looked out the front window and my bird feeders were being blown horizontal and the damn birds were still hanging on. Eating. They get hungry when the temperatures drop.
I’m not hung over because I didn’t drink much at all last night and I went to bed early. My egg nog didn’t turn out very well, and truth to tell I was getting a little tired of drinking egg nog anyway. I spent the last of 2008 with a tall glass of my ice tea, still working on catching up with my filing. The major big part of the filing task is going through all the files here and sorting out what I can move into storage, and what I can just toss. I thought I was done with that last Tuesday but then I came across a big cardboard box of papers from way, Way back around the time of the move from the Cockeysville apartment to Casa del Garrett. It’s full of stuff I never got around to filing because I was in the middle of moving, and then settling into my new house. That box has just sat here for years and I’m going through it now. There isn’t a lot in it I need to keep…obviously since I haven’t needed to get into it to find anything in over 7 years…but I can’t just toss it all out without going though it first. I hope to be done with it today sometime.
But…they’re calling for rain and snow later, so I’m going to grab a camera and go for a drive while the sun is out. Maybe down to my old hometown Rockville and wander around a bit.
The Trick In Art Is Knowing What To Keep And What To Throw Away…
…like my first try at egg nog for instance. It wasn’t…wonderful. Oh it isn’t horrible either…but the recipe I used called for Way too much booze in retrospect, and for some reason the ingredients mixed up a tad flavorless. You could tell it was rich…I used the best milk and eggs and cream I could find at Whole Foods…but it didn’t have much egg noggy flavor. Or maybe the smell of the booze was just overpowering it. My nose isn’t all that great at the task of smelling stuff anyway. So I tossed it and I’ll spend New Year’s Eve at the drafting table with the last of the store bought I have here at Casa del Garrett.
It’s okay…my first attempts at beer batter fish frying didn’t work out either, but I kept on tweaking and tweaking some more and now it’s a neighborhood and co-worker favorite.
Saving grace is I taught myself how to separate eggs and fold ingredients. Not that hard really…I’d just never done it before. I have long narrow fingers so I started out by dumping the contents of an egg into the palm of my hand and letting the white drip between my fingers into a bowl. The other method is to shuffle the yoke back and forth between the two halves of the shell you’ve just opened, letting the white drip off in the process. But the egg in the hand trick works for me like a charm. I’ve never held a yoke in my hand before. Felt…odd…
If you’re out to party tonight, instead of the usual crap, spend some extra bucks on the really good stuff, and savor it instead of just sloshing it down. You’ll drink less and enjoy it more and probably end up spending about the same amount of money you would have for the cheap stuff you always buy just to get yourself drunk. Life is short…live it within your means but live it well. Don’t settle for crap.
You Knew Maintenance Was Going To Be A Tad Pricey When You Bought It
I got a card the other day, ostensibly from Mercedes-Benz USA, telling me that an update to Traveler’s navigation system was available. If I ordered Right Now, said the card, I could get it at a reduced price. I say ostensibly because the card actually came from the company that makes the nav software, not Mercedes-Benz USA, and they got my name completely wrong. There is no Joseph Sciametta living here that I am aware of. Not even one of the usual misspellings like Garret or Ganet or Garnet, but Sciametta. And ‘reduced price’ is two-hundred dollars. Swell. I hate to think what the list price is.
So I call Mercedes-Benz USA customer support and make sure they have my name right in their system, which they do. The cards were mailed out with the return address as a post office box somewhere in Orem Utah, but MBA headquarters and customer support center is in Montvale New Jersey, and the navigation software is made by Navteq which is located in Chicago, so I’m guessing the mailout job was farmed out to some third party outfit in Utah whose people were too busy making sure proposition 8 passed to get the mailing list right. The 800 number on the card went to the sales office of the nav software company, and the web address seems to be registered to an anonymous re-direct service. If this had come to me via email I’d have assumed it was some sort of phishing scam.
I had an idea that the nav software update was out there though, because there was plenty of chatter about it on the Mecedes online forums. One thread, asking if it was worth the price, turned into a DVD swapping party. Someone got the bright idea to buy the DVD, install the updates and then pass it around. The users formed a kind of chain letter queue, and as one person got the DVDs they would install the update and then mail them to the next person on the list. I don’t know if any money was changing hands over this…I only skimmed the thread for information about the update, not how to get it. Look…if you can buy a car like this it isn’t as though you can’t pay for the upkeep too. It’s really unattractive for someone who can afford a Mercedes-Benz to be thieving the software for it. But then, I have to keep reminding myself that not all the guys on the online Mercedes forums actually bought their own cars. Daddy’s little boy and all that. The downside to owning anything that’s above and beyond in quality and craftsmanship is you’re in the company of all the shallow louts who own one for its status symbol value and nothing more.
So I went to my dealer and bought the update from them. The two parts department guys there both know me by sight now and it’s a pure pleasure talking to them. They are both Mercedes enthusiasts like me and pamper their own cars completely. I got my DVD set and headed home. For a moment I thought I might just pop the DVD in and do the update then and there. Good thing I didn’t. When I got it home I discovered that it typically takes two and a half hours to update the nav maps. Oh…and the Gracenote database.
Two and a half hours??! What am I supposed to do…run the engine for two and a half hours or drain the battery? The nav system in my C300 is on an internal 20 gig hard drive…not a separate DVD player as it is in some cars. So it wasn’t just a matter of popping out one DVD and popping in another. Which is good because a single DVD only holds about four and a half gig on it. The hard drive system in the Mercedes allows for more detailed maps and you don’t have to swap disks if you take a drive from one coast to the other as you do with some cars. But updating the software means copying over all that data. So I went back online and checked the forums for anyone who had done it on battery power alone. I didn’t want to kill the battery updating the nav software, but at the same time I didn’t want to be ilding the engine for hours at a time either.
After reading a few nav system update threads I got the impression that the battery would be fine. The day was mild and the weather called for dropping temperatures and rain and snow later in the week. So I reckoned better now then later. Because I had to leave the key in the ignition the entire time, and I only have street parking, I took out my steering wheel lock and popped out the valet key from the ignition key/dongle thing. I’ve said this before I think, but Traveler’s key isn’t a key exactly so much as a computer dongle that talks to the onboard computer whenever I stick it in the dashboard key slot. But there is a small physical key hidden inside of it that you can pop out, and use to lock/unlock the glove compartment and the driver’s side door. With that key in hand, I could put the dongle in the ignition, turn on Traveler’s Command system and leave the car while the software updated, locking the driver’s side door behind me. For extra protection I put the wheel lock on too.
The update came on two DVDs. You put the first one in the disc 1 position in the cd/dvd changer carousel and it starts the update program. First it checks to see if it’s on a system that’s compatible with the update. Then you get a prompt asking you to continue. You click "OK" using the armrest Command function knob and then a progress bar comes up on the screen and some jazzy music plays in a continuous loop. I muted the sound to save on battery life some, but I don’t know how effective that was because the sound system is still powered up even with the mute on. But I thought it might help save on battery life a bit and I was worried that two and a half hours of running the Command system would drain the battery, even though the folks online said it didn’t. After about fifteen minutes I came back outside to check on it and everything seemed to be going fine. A half hour later I came back out and saw that the video display had closed back up.
Ack! The car had shut off power to the Command system to protect the battery. The DVD instructions had warned me that might happen, and said if it did to just turn on the motor and let the process resume. I was hoping that wouldn’t happen because I didn’t know whether or not I could trust the update to resume gracefully. But now I had no choice. I started the engine and the video display popped back out. When I saw the boot up screen I thought for sure I’d have to start the whole thing over again. But the update program started back up, found where it had left off, and resumed. I breathed a sigh of relief and let the engine idle for a while before coming back out and turning it off again. For the next two hours I periodically started up the engine, let it run for a bit, and then turned it back off again while the nav software updated. Eventually a prompt came up asking for the second DVD to be inserted. Problem was, the first one wouldn’t come out.
The instructions say to just press the disk eject button above the disc slot. But that button did nothing. I tried turning off the Command system and then turning it back on. All that happened was I got the disc 2 prompt again and the eject button still did nothing. I thought about it for a moment. The disc 2 prompt didn’t have an "OK" button on it, but I thought it might be waiting for me to respond anyway. So I clicked the Command function knob as though there was an "OK" button there on the screen even though there wasn’t, and the prompt promptly went away. The disc changer screen came up asking me to select a disc to eject. I ejected disc 1 and inserted the second DVD and shortly after that the update finished. So the map updates and Gracenote database update consisted of slightly more then a DVD’s worth of data.
I started the engine and turned on the nav system, checked the local map and a few functions. Everything seemed to be working normally. The folks online say the new maps have a lot more detail in them, with more points of interest indicated. I’ll take a drive and explore the new maps later in the week. The nav system is one of those things I never really thought I’d want until I actually had one and now I don’t want to be without it. Just the other week I was wanting to go to a different Costco from the one I normally go to, because that one was out of something I wanted. Instead of printing out a bunch of MapQuest maps and directions I just grabbed a street address off of Google and plugged it into the nav system and let it take me there. Even when I’m driving somewhere I’ve been before, like to visit my friend in Stroudsburg the other day, I use the nav system to warn me a few miles in advance of when my turn offs are coming so I have plenty of time to get into the correct lane. It’s really helpful. I can just pay attention to the traffic around me and let the nav system voice tell me what lane I need to be in, and what exit to take.
A Federal Way megachurch won approval Monday to add a helicopter takeoff and landing area, called a helistop, on its property.
…Gimme that old time religion…
It will enable Pastors Casey and Wendy Treat of Christian Faith Center to shuttle by air between the 15-month-old Federal Way church and its Everett campus.
…Gimme that old time religion…
Federal Way hearing examiner Phil Olbrechts granted the helistop with limits: no more than four landings and/or takeoffs a week, no flying over adjacent residences, no takeoffs or landings after 10 p.m., and no night-time flying.
…
Church spokeswoman and board member Debbie Willis said Christian Faith Center has no immediate plans to use the helistop.
“We’re happy that it went through,” Willis said. “We’re glad to have the option if we need to at some point.”
According to the Times Square Alliance, one out of five people don’t have anyone to kiss on New Years Eve, and more people kiss their pets than their friends that night.
Among the many kisses I’ve never had is the Stroke Of New Year’s kiss. The only boyfriend I ever had never thought to give me one of those when he could have…which should have told me something now that I think of it…
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