I’m here in Disneyworld now.  Turns out they do have Internet in all the rooms, but they charge extra for it.  I should have guessed.  They do everything possible here to make sure you have a great time, but nothing is free.  In fact, most of the extras here are pretty expensive.

There is shopping everywhere, and they make it Real Easy to buy stuff.  Your room key is also your part tickets and it can be used to buy anything here.  It all just gets billed to the room.  The advantage I suppose is that makes it real easy to see the what the whole trip cost you.  I’m basically putting everything, and I mean everything, on the Disney Card, so none of it gets mixed up with my day-to-day expenses back home.  But the disadvantage is it’s too easy to spend with a one card does it all thing.

I got in very early.  Check-in time wasn’t supposed to be until 3PM today but I got into Orlando early last night, and stayed at a hotel across the street from one of the entrances.  I’d reserved a room at the Caribbean Beach resort, which is one of the middle-tier resorts here, and instead of waiting until 3 I decided to at least tell them I was here.  So I headed into the park.  The roads here in Disneyworld are really twisty and it’s easy to get yourself mixed up, even though there are signs everywhere.  I wasn’t sure Traveler’s nav system would work in the park so initially I didn’t bother with it.  I might try it later.

The Caribbean Beach resort is gated.  I suppose all the motels inside the enclave are.  There was a lone guard manning the post, and he gave me a friendly greeting and asked for a photo ID and if I was checking in.  My name was on the clipboard in his hands and he gave me a big Disney welcome to the park smile and told me to go up to the "Customs House" to check in.  This is Disney, so I don’t check in at the lobby.  I am in the Disney Caribbean, and I must go to the Customs House.

So I go over to the "Customs House" and park and as soon as I get out of the car it almost hits me that I’m really down in a Caribbean Island town.  Disney let it be said, does it well.  I think part of the saving grace of putting the thing here in central Florida is you can almost make it seem like a lot of other places in the world.  They had the flora and fauna almost pat.  Except for the central Florida forest underneath it all.  But I was impressed. 

I walked up to the registration desk and they had all my information right there…including everything on my park passes and special events and such.  The lady gave me my one card does all Disney card thing and said my room was actually ready, even though it was 9:30am which was almost six hours from the scheduled check-in time. 

They put me up in Barbados (did I mention this is the Caribbean Beach resort?), and gave me a map to locate my room.  The rooms are scattered around in about a dozen or so small two-floor buildings all made to look like Caribbean island architecture…sort of…Disneyfied…  So I drove over to my building and almost lost my way again…the roads inside the enclave are Really, Really twisty, and it was staring to get a little scary.  I never get lost.  Never.  But I was getting all turned around in here.  Eventually I found it.  However, when I got to the room, my one-key-does-everything didn’t do the one thing I needed it to do just then, which was open the door.

So I walked back over to Customs House to get a new one.  The walk was actually shorter then the drive (I told you the roads here are very twisty).  They gave me another key and that one didn’t work either.  So they had to send a serviceman to fix my lock.  Initially they thought the battery in it was gone, but when he got to my room he had to take it all apart and replace the guts of it basically.  So here I am checking into Disneyworld for the first time ever in my life, unpacking my car and hanging up my shirts while a guy is pounding on my door lock to get it fixed.  My first magical experience.

The room is nice though.  Very nice.  No fridge or microwave though, which you’d expect in a room at this price level.  But I have never seen a room at this price level that was so spotless and tidy.  Nothing, not one thing, was out of place.  Matter of fact, that’s the way this entire enclave is.  I have never been anywhere it was so spotless and neat. 

While the repairman was fixing my door, I took a walk around the Caribbean to get some lunch at Port Royale.  I walked over to Aruba and then to Jamaica, and rather then go all the way to Trinidad took a bridge over the Caribbean, hopped a Cay, and landed on Old Port Royale Centertown.  The little Cay was cute, and had dozens of little nooks and crannies with hammocks and beach chairs and sandy play areas where couples or families could duck out of the crowds and have some quiet time alone.  I wondered what it would be like to take a boyfriend with me on a walk through there someday. 

There are lovely little white sand beaches scattered all around the Caribbean, with beach chairs and hammocks laid out invitingly.  But there are signs all over warning you not to swim in the Caribbean.  If you want to get wet in the Disney Caribbean, you have to use one of the swimming pools. 

After lunch I continued walking from Old Port Royale to Martinique and then back to Barbados.  Having thus walked entirely around the Caribbean, and not being too greatly fatigued afterward, I think I’ll take a run to Downtown Disney.  I’m doing Epcot later for dinner, and then going to the Magic Kingdom for the special Christmas party.

More later… 

A few images from South Of The Border, where I spent the night last night.  I love that place.  Besides the fact that all its motel rooms have their own carports, which make it easy to unpack the car for the night and repack it the next morning, it’s delightfully pure tacky roadside Americana…

I seem to get the biggest kick out of photographing amusement parks in their off season.  It’s like…when all the people are gone you can hear the all the fiberglass and wood structures speaking for themselves…

I’m in Orlando now…at the Radisson just outside the entrance to Disneyworld.  My Disneyworld hotel reservations aren’t until tomorrow, and check-in time is 3PM.  Not sure if my Disneyworld hotel will have Internet or not.  If not it may be a while before I post here again.   

I’m hitting the road for Orlando in a little bit, so posting will suddenly become very light, probably until next Wednesday.  I have a bunch of stuff in the queue to put up here, including a really nice photo from the Pasadena Anti-Prop 8 protests sent in by a reader.  But I just want to get away now.  The price of premium gasoline is now hovering around the two dollar mark here in the Baltimore area, and I can see it going lower elsewhere.  So while I have a chance I’m going to take it.  I want to be on the road. 

I’m throwing my cameras and my bags into Traveler and I’m heading out.  I’ll be spending a long weekend in Disneyworld, trying to de-stress and remember what it was like when life seemed limitless and fun.  Hopefully I’ll come back home with a better attitude.  I just want to get away.  I want to be on the road. 

If I post at all in the coming days, it’ll be mostly dispatches from the road if anything.  Maybe with a few pictures.

Talk with you more when I get back…

The problem with his world is that too many people are getting an education…

Educated Catholics have sown dissent and confusion in the Church, claims bishop

The Rt Rev Patrick O’Donoghue, the Bishop of Lancaster, has claimed that graduates are spreading skepticism and sowing dissent. Instead of following the Church’s teaching they are "hedonistic", "selfish" and "egocentric", he said.

…

Bishop O’Donoghue, who has recently published a report on how to renew Catholicism in Britain, argued that mass education has led to "sickness in the Church and wider society".

"What we have witnessed in Western societies since the end of the Second World War is the development of mass education on a scale unprecedented in human history – resulting in economic growth, scientific and technological advances, and the cultural and social enrichment of billions of people’s lives," he said.

"However, every human endeavor has a dark side, due to original sin and concupiscence. In the case of education, we can see its distortion through the widespread dissemination of radical skepticism, positivism, utilitarianism and relativism.

"Taken together, these intellectual trends have resulted in a fragmented society that marginalizes God, with many people mistakenly thinking they can live happy and productive lives without him.

"It shouldn’t surprise us that the shadows cast by the distortion of education, and corresponding societal changes, have also touched members of the Church. As Pope Benedict XVI puts it, even in the Church we find hedonism, selfishness and egocentric behavior."

Emphasis mine…so you know he’s not just talking about Catholics there.   The problem is simple.  How do you convince people that you’re better qualified to run their lives then they are, when they have brains enough to see right through you?  You can’t.

Religion doesn’t necessarily have to be an enemy of the human soul.  There is spirituality that seeks to nurture the best within us…that "better angel", and councils us to embrace our human nature, understand both its limitations and its potential, its darkness and its light, and treat them both with care and humility.  There is spirituality that encourages us and reach for the higher ground within, while acknowledging the Pit we are all vulnerable to.  But that is different from spirituality that teaches us to hate ourselves, so that others can rule over us.  Religion isn’t the only thing that can attack our souls in that way, but religions like that are out there and we have to watch out for them because they are poison.  But not all religion is poison. 

Ayn Rand said that all we need, all we should ever look to, is reason.  But we are rational beings, In Addition To everything else we are.  The modern brain is all that which makes us unique from the other animals of planet Earth, and also all that which we share with them, and have for hundreds of millions of years.  We are indivisible beings of intellect and beast, mind and body, present and past.  It is how we were created.  By one legend, risen up from the dust of the earth.  But the dust of the earth was already very old, unimaginably old, when we took our first breath and opened our eyes.  We are that vast unknowable past and the present both.  We are matter and spirit combined.  You can’t divide us down the middle without killing the human within.  We are human, precisely because we are all of these things.  We need spirituality that teaches us to treat ourselves, treat our human nature, with care, understanding, and a little humility.

But some religion, arrogantly, greedily, tries instead to pit one part of ourselves against the others, and in the process it rips our humanity apart.  Take away our minds and we become useful puppets, perhaps.  But take our minds from us and the spirit within withers and dies.  The mind needs the spirit, the spirit needs the mind.  Without one or the other we become ghosts.  Empty, tortured, soulless ghosts.  Just right for tyrants to leach their power dreams from.  Mr. O’Donoghue’s complaint isn’t that people are more selfish, it’s that they are less gullible.  When you earn your living teaching people to hate being human, so they will give you money in exchange for being forgiven for being human, you need a lot of gullible people. 

The Peter Lindsay at the Atlanta Journal editorializes thusly…

When we think of what governments should legitimately do —- provide police and fire protection, build roads and lighthouses, defend borders —- the idea of sanctioning marriage immediately sticks out as an anomaly, all the more so for those who wish to keep government’s activities to a minimum.

…

Unlike religious bodies, however, governments need to tread cautiously. That fact is especially true in America, where religious and moral commitments are widely viewed as private matters. This is not a partisan claim: Conscientious members of both parties would surely reject the idea that we can use the state to foist our deeply held beliefs on our fellow citizens.

And yet, affirming through law the sanctity of heterosexual marriage does just that. In essence the state is anointing an “American way” of intimacy, and it is difficult to imagine how the real American way could be any more imperiled.

No, no, no.  You don’t get it.  Conservatives like to Claim they’re in favor of limited government, but as we’ve see for the past eight years, when they’re in power that’s not exactly the kind of government you get.

This isn’t rocket science.  All it takes, is a little historical perspective.  Conservatives started yap, yap, yapping about limited government, around the time of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s.  More to the point, around the time the hated Warren court started knocking down racial segregation laws.

That was when limited government gained their favor.  When government was busy telling black people where they could and could not eat, where they could and could not live, what schools they could and could not get an education in, and who they could and could not marry, big, invasive, intrusive, all powerful government was just fine with them.

You look at the old guard today and what do you see?  If they’re old enough, you usually see a segregationist.  That’s not hyperbole, it’s a fact.  They’re the ones who fought tooth and nail against racial equality, and when Johnson signed the civil rights act, bolted in droves to the republican party.  The young bloods of the movement grew up after those battles had been fought, so none of them have a history of standing in front of school house doors or ranting against race mixing.  But scratch most of them and you’ll find the same pusillanimous attitudes toward race their philosophical fathers had.  And the grass roots are still living back in the segregated fifties.

Isn’t it staringly obvious that if none of this were true, republican party conventions wouldn’t be so goddamned white?  The joke at the last convention was that you only saw black people on the convention floor after the show was over and the clean-up crew came out.  All this rhetoric about limited government came about, after the federal government stopped being their race cop, and started tearing down all the "whites only" signs.  Then they suddenly saw the value of limited government.  Or more specifically, government that was too weak to assure that the darkies could share in the American Dream too.  When they say they want to get government off the people’s backs, what you have to understand is by ‘people’ they mean white people.  Rich white people.

Ronald Reagan didn’t begin his campaign for the white house in the town where three civil rights workers were murdered,  with a speech on "state’s rights" accidentally.  And what Reagan began once he got into the white house, George Bush devoted himself to with gusto.  George Bush Was the climax of the American conservative movement.  The government he ushered in, of privilege, theocracy and cronyism, was Exactly the government they had dreamed of, ever since Earl Warren’s supreme court issued Brown v. Board of Education. It wasn’t what they’d advertised to the rest of the nation, but by the time Bush was ushered into power by enough conservative supreme court justices, they figured they had a racket going whereby they could mouth platitudes about limited government for the rubes, while dog whistling to the grass roots and that would keep them in power indefinitely.  It was going to be Karl Rove’s permanent republican majority.  The only problem was, the morons had eaten their own dog food about deregulation. 

Deregulation was never about freeing up the potential of the marketplace.  Like everything else about their limited government rhetoric, it was about getting government off the backs of the greedy so they could pillage to their heart’s content.  The sense of divine retribution here, comes from seeing how thoroughly they’d bamboozled themselves into thinking it would actually work…that a marketplace with no rules would actually have a different outcome then an implosion of worthless paper, backed by even more worthless paper.  The shock of seeing it all come crashing down in a whirlwind of fraud and deceit is pitifully real.  They seem to have forgotten for a moment, that they’d set out to line their own pockets with other people’s retirement money, not grow an economy. 

So…you’re surprised at how many "limited government" conservatives voted to write gay couples out of one state constitution after another are you?  You’re surprised at how many "limited government" conservatives want to enshrine their religious and moral beliefs in the constitutions of every state in the union are you?  Wise up. 

Wise up.

The republican bubble popped last election day, because it was always hollow inside.  They never wanted limited government.  What they wanted was an America where they were king and the rest of us knew our place and how they liked their shoes shined.  When government started treating all Americans equally, they set out to deliberately wreak it.  Limited government was their hatchet, by which they meant to do that.

Just curious…is there any other theme park in the world that spits out seven pages of legalize along with your one page of reservation info?

I’m still not finished with the pencils, but I decided to switch gears for a bit and do the inking on the pages that are finished.  I have three pages inked and scanned in now, and I hope to have the whole pencils and inking part done by Tuesday.  That’ll just leave the Photoshop part, which is where I touch things up a tad and add the word balloons and stuff.

Then…I’m going to Disneyworld.  For a few days.  A co-worker invited me to hang out with him and his family while they’re down there and with gasoline prices being what they are now I wanted to go Somewhere on my vacation after all.  My initial plan when I blocked out these two weeks of vacation was to just stay home and work on A Coming Out Story and take care of a few household chores.  But I need a change of scenery severely.  This has been a stressful year for me, and particularly in the days surrounding the election.  I’ve been so…angry…after Proposition 8.  I’m actually looking forward to immersing myself for a few days in a fantasy world where there’s nothing but blue sky and happy times all around.  I’d book a week in Pleasantville right now if I could. 

In lieu of that, I booked a room inside of Disneyworld at one of their onsite hotels and got a "park hopper" pass, which basically lets you wander around the entire enclave.  Otherwise your ticket only gets you into one theme park at a time.  I’ve never been to Disneyland in California yet, but Disneyworld is so friggin’ huge you can actually disappear into it and not come back out for days.  Which is my plan this time.  Last time, I just stepped a toe in, and wandered about Pleasure Island for an evening.  This time I’m just going to immerse myself in it.

For the first time in my life, I just want to leave the world behind.  At least for a while.  All my other travels have been about exploring the world…or at least the part of the world I can get to by driving down some random highways.  Now I just want to get far away from it.  I want to see if I can recapture, for a moment, what it felt like back when I was a kid, and the life I had ahead of me looked so wonderful…so full of promise…

When I get back I’ll finish up the artwork on episode 11 and get it posted.

Something needs to be done to fix this system…

Toyota Claims Ownership of Fan Wallpapers

Toyota, one of the biggest car companies in the world, is often a name synonymous with quality. There is even a philosophy of doing business, called “The Toyota Way”, which emphasizes that the right result will come from the right process, and that solving the root problems brings the organization the greatest benefit.

This ‘Way’ is probably not communicated to its lawyers in great detail, which is why Desktopnexus, a site that provides desktop backgrounds, has been contacted by them. In perhaps one of the most wildly arrogant demands in DMCA history, Toyota’s lawyers are demanding the withdrawal of all wallpapers that feature a Toyota, Scion, or Lexus. The site’s owner, Harry Maugans contacted Toyota to clarify. He was told that all images featuring Toyota vehicles should be removed, even images with copyright belonging to others.

Speaking to TorrentFreak, Maugans said: “Their lawyer, Garrett Biggs, told us that if we wanted them to specifically identify their images, we would have to pay for them to do so”. Maugans also said he was afraid it would come to a lawsuit, fearing the attrition effect that is so common now in copyright disputes. Toyota, with cash assets of over $23 Billion can surely afford to spin out the legal costs in an attempt to bankrupt the site – the same strategy that is often used to ‘encourage‘ a settlement in RIAA cases.

Yet, Toyota has also been cagey. These demands have not been sent in the form of a DMCA notice. While sending such a notice would require the takedown, it also requires that the person sending the notice legally certify that they are legal representatives for the copyright holders at issue. Making a false statement is ‘punishable under penalty of perjury‘, which is not taken lightly in US courts.

This is a multi-billion dollar corporation, basically using the legal system to grind a small website owner into dirt.  A good faith legal challenge would contain specifics about what which images were infringing and which ones weren’t.  This is about corporate arrogance, less then greed, because there is no way Toyota is suffering financial loss from a fan website that is putting up wall papers for the use of other fans.  It’s not even like the RIAA sending out takedown notices.  At least what’s being illegally copied in that case is the actual product.  A web site that allows people to freely upload and download their own photographs of automobiles isn’t stealing anything from Toyota.  A Toyota copyrighted image, yes.  But Toyota is telling them to take everything down, or be either billed or sued into oblivion.

I have a suggestion.  How about people upload their images of broken down or wreaked Toyotas instead?  Maybe Toyota would like it if all anyone ever saw of their products on the Internet were images of broken down, rusted, junked abandoned or wreaked ones instead.

And just to get my digs in…I looked at a Lexus back when I was thinking about trading in the Accord.  I looked at two different Acura models, the new Accord, the Lexus ES, and the (then) new Mercedes C300.  I’d have bought any of the Acura’s before I’d have bought the Lexus.  Yes, the Lexus was the more sumptuous of the lot, but that cushy comfort came at the expense of everything else an autombile is supposed to be, including road feel, performance and handling.  It Looked nice.  And it felt nice too.  Until you sat in the Mercedes and right away you noticed how much more solid the German car was.  The Mercedes, the Accord and both the Acura’s ran rings around it on the highway, and I have never experienced anything like the Mercedes at high speeds, or on twisty backroads.  And mine’s only a ‘C’ class.  A Lexus sedan is worth the money, only if you care more about the upholstery then the way it drives.

Via Scientific American…  It’s not only our brains that make us stand out from the rest of the critters here on planet Earth.  Brains actually receive a lot of pre-processed input.  Turns out our auditory system has a few neat tricks of its own too…

Why Dogs Don’t Enjoy Music

Anyone with normal hearing can distinguish between the musical tones in a scale: do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. We take this ability for granted, but among most mammals the feat is unparalleled.

This finding is one of many insights into the remarkable acuity of human hearing garnered by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, reported in January in the journal Nature.

…

The study revealed that groups of exquisitely sensitive neurons exist along the auditory nerve on its way from the ear to the auditory cortex. In these neurons natural sounds, such as the human voice, elicit a completely different and far more complex set of responses than do artificial noises such as pure tones. In this mixed environ­ment humans can easily detect frequencies as fine as one twelfth of an octave—a half step in musical terminology.

The vexing question is: Why? Bats are the only mammal with a better ability to hear changes in pitch than humans do. Predatory species such as dogs are not nearly as sensitive—they can dis­criminate resolutions of one third of an octave. Even our primate relatives do not come close: macaques can resolve only half an octave. These results suggest the fine discrimination of sound is not a necessity for survival.

More likely, the researchers speculate, humans use their fine hearing to facilitate working memory and learning capa­bilities, but more research is needed to explore this puzzle.

I have a strong hunch about that.  It isn’t memory and learning.  It’s communication.  Speech.  Try this sometime while listening to people around you chatting: try to ignore the words and just listen to the sounds of the voices as if you were listening to birds, or dogs or some other animals.  Humans have an Amazing range of vocalizations.  You think birds are good at it, but compared to humans birds are johnny one-notes.  Think of how much information is conveyed by tone of voice alone, in a conversation. 

Consider the sentence "The cow jumped over the moon".  A human speaking those words could convey astonishment or indifference or anger or fear simply by how they inflect the speaking of that string of words.  Just by slightly changing the inflection on the word "moon" you can change the sentence from a statement into a question.  It’s not just cadence.  It’s tone.  The better you can decode tone, the better you can tell what other people mean…how they feel…the better you can grasp what is being said.  And not only that, but the greater becomes the potential bandwidth of communication.  Because now information can be carried by both words and tone of voice.

Tone is the first language we have.  Human infants don’t do words.  They do coos and gurgles and squeals and cries.  A human sitting not far from a baby knows exactly how it’s feeling by all the little non-verbal vocalizations it’s making.  Is it content?  Is it delighted?  Is it curious?  Is it upset?  Does it need its diapers changed?  It needs to tell you these things and it can’t if it has to use words it hasn’t had time to learn yet.  But as we grow older, we don’t discard the language of tone.  In fact, it grows and develops along with us.  We learn to use it better…more deftly…just like we do our verbal languages.  How much is conveyed by lovers to one another, simply by a sigh?  And the longer a couple has been together, the more intimately they learn each other’s tone signals.  Like music, how the words are spoken goes right to the heart.

That’s why we evolved the more highly attenuated detection of tone.  It’s a communication thing.  The bigger brain needed it.  Words alone weren’t enough.  And I’ll bet this is why music affects us so profoundly, yet so irrationally.  Recall this from the article… 

In these neurons natural sounds, such as the human voice, elicit a completely different and far more complex set of responses than do artificial noises such as pure tones.

Music isn’t pure tones though.  Not even minimalist scores like those of Philip Glass.  A gathering of instruments in an orchestra, or even a single instrument playing a melody all by itself, produces a complex layering of tones that I’ll bet hits those neuron in just the same way.  It Is communication, but a different kind.  It’s communication that goes right past the logical analytical brain with its ear for words, to the heart, which listens to tones.  Tone was the first language.

The stereotype of our pre-human ancestors is that they communicated in simple grunts and barks.  Perhaps.  But even without language yet, those vocalizations may have carried a lot of information in them simply by tone alone.  Language evolved from those vocalizations, and gave them more precision, because the growing brain needed that.  But as our capacity for language developed and grew, so did our capacity to decode tone, because that was also a channel of communication.  But they’re different channels.  The logical rational brain likes words.  The emotional intuitive brain responds to tone.  When interacting with others, the one who can decode both those things best has a big advantage. 

So Orpheus probably didn’t tame the savage beasts by the sound of his lyre, because the beasts are mostly tone deaf.  But the beast within…yeah.  Absolutely.  Here’s an experiment: Humans that are tone deaf, or who have difficulty decoding tone…how well do they interact socially?

[Edited a bit more then a tad…]

I was at a local Office Max the other day looking for a few household office supplies, when I noticed that the cordless phone set I bought with my credit card "bonus points", that sold for ninety bucks at Costco, was selling for one-hundred and forty there.  Wow.  And I hadn’t had to shell out anything to buy them.  Well…other then the fraction of a cent extra my credit card company is adding to every dollar of charge I put on the card to support the bonus point plan that is.

I’d come there looking for Dymo Label Maker tape…the old plastic stuff in various colors with an adhesive backing.  I actually have several rolls of the stuff here, that I’d bought cheap in the 1970s, that I was hoping to use for…I dunno…the rest of my life maybe.  But it turns out the adhesive degrades over time I guess, because the labels won’t stick to anything anymore.  So I went out to buy some new and discovered of course that my 1970s label technology is so…1970s.  Now it’s all some sort of electric imprinted tape stuff.  Bleh.  I like my colored plastic labels.  But Office Max wasn’t selling that stuff anymore.  I think I can order it online though.

I picked up some other things on my list and walked to the cashier and that was when I noticed how low budget things were getting in that store.  The sales isles were nicely stocked and well kept, but the front of the store by the registers looked desolate, and the employees manning them ragged and depressed.  Boxes of returned or damaged goods were scattered around, inventory was haphazardly tossed here and there.  There was only one person manning a checkout line that was pretty long, and the other employees you could see were all wandering around indifferently with other chores, completely ignoring the long line.  The store had maybe three-fourths the staff it should have had to keep things running smoothly and the ones that were there were all simply overworked and you could tell that beyond the breaking point was their normal day. When a person is depressed, you see it in their disheveled clothes and you see it in their disheveled faces.  I’ve seen this before in other retail stores that were on the verge of going belly up.

It’s a vicious circle that starts when management decides to treat its workers like they’re just another expense they can cut to the bone.  I’ve worked in retail and it’s hard work for low wages as it is.  Time was though, back when I was a kid and labor still had some clout in this country, that service workers could at least make a living wage.  Maybe not the greatest of one, but at least you could get by.  A small apartment, a cheap second hand car maybe.  A forty hour work week could get you a basic living, and if you wanted more you could take night courses.  At least you had enough free time to recover from your week before you had to get back to the grind.  Nowadays that’s nearly impossible on a service wage.  My mother raised me on the wages of a basic clerical job and what impresses me about that looking back was that was in a time when the glass ceiling ruled and women made only a fraction of what men did for the same work. 

But that was pre-Reagan America.  There is simply no way mom could have made a home for us doing that kind of work today.  Service workers are hurting bad, and the result is you walk into a store or office and the atmosphere reeks of despair.  How management expects to attract and hold on to customers in that kind of environment is beyond me, other then the obvious fact that they’re morons who should be the first ones out the door when layoffs…excuse me…Downsizing…happens. 

I do a lot of bulk shopping at Costco, and one thing you notice about them is their people are not just busy but Engaged with it.  I never feel like I’m walking through someone’s eviction pile when I shop there, unlike say the Office Max I was just at.  Costco isn’t Bloomingdale’s, its isles are sometimes cluttered and it does have long lines but that’s because they have lots of customers who buy tons of stuff.  It’s actually pleasant shopping there.  Costco tries hard to pay a living wage to its people.  And Wall Street is constantly bellyaching about it.  I read one jackass investment columnist who said that Costco treats its employees better then its investors.  But Costco makes money and that’s better then Wall Street can say about itself these days. 

Via SLOG…  A sign held up at the East Lansing Michigan protest…

H8 Is Easy…Love Takes Courage

I also like the ones I’m seeing that read "Separation Of Church And Hate"…

The more people look at what happened in California, the more the vast scope of Mormon involvement in anti-gay politics, both in terms of money and organizational prowess, becomes known.  In this article in Today’s New York Times, the bottom line is made perfectly clear: without the vigorous support of the Mormon church, Proposition 8 would have failed.  The Mormon church wrote its will into the constitution of the state of California though lies and stealth, and lots and lots of money that its members were ordered to contribute…

Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage

As proponents of same-sex marriage across the country planned protests on Saturday against the ban, interviews with the main forces behind the ballot measure showed how close its backers believe it came to defeat — and the extraordinary role Mormons played in helping to pass it with money, institutional support and dedicated volunteers.

“We’ve spoken out on other issues, we’ve spoken out on abortion, we’ve spoken out on those other kinds of things,” said Michael R. Otterson, the managing director of public affairs for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormons are formally called, in Salt Lake City. “But we don’t get involved to the degree we did on this.”

…

Jeff Flint, another strategist with Protect Marriage, estimated that Mormons made up 80 percent to 90 percent of the early volunteers who walked door-to-door in election precincts.

The canvass work could be exacting and highly detailed. Many Mormon wards in California, not unlike Roman Catholic parishes, were assigned two ZIP codes to cover. Volunteers in one ward, according to training documents written by a Protect Marriage volunteer, obtained by people opposed to Proposition 8 and shown to The New York Times, had tasks ranging from “walkers,” assigned to knock on doors; to “sellers,” who would work with undecided voters later on; and to “closers,” who would get people to the polls on Election Day.

Suggested talking points were equally precise. If initial contact indicated a prospective voter believed God created marriage, the church volunteers were instructed to emphasize that Proposition 8 would restore the definition of marriage God intended.

But if a voter indicated human beings created marriage, Script B would roll instead…

…

…the “Yes” side also initially faced apathy from middle-of-the-road California voters who were largely unconcerned about same-sex marriage. The overall sense of the voters in the beginning of the campaign, Mr. Schubert said, was “Who cares? I’m not gay.”

To counter that, advertisements for the “Yes” campaign also used hypothetical consequences of same-sex marriage, painting the specter of churches’ losing tax exempt status or people “sued for personal beliefs” or objections to same-sex marriage, claims that were made with little further explanation.

Another of the advertisements used video of an elementary school field trip to a teacher’s same-sex wedding in San Francisco to reinforce the idea that same-sex marriage would be taught to young children.

“We bet the campaign on education,” Mr. Schubert said.

They lied through their teeth and they threw a torrent of hate and Mormon church money into it and they steamrollered over the rights of devoted loving couples so they could become gods in their own universe someday.  And now they’re upset that people are taking the fight back to them.

Mr. Ashton described the protests by same-sex marriage advocates as off-putting. “I think that shows colors,” Mr. Ashton said. “By their fruit, ye shall know them.”

And just what would you do, you gutter crawling bigot, if someone cut your ring finger off?   Laugh it off?  Shake the other guy’s hand?  No you wouldn’t.  But you expect us to roll over and play dead because we’re homosexuals and homosexuals don’t have feelings, and homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.  There is no reason for us to be angry with you, because you didn’t take anything sacred away from us, because we don’t feel love the way you do, because we’re not human like you are.  We’re Satan’s followers, and we don’t have human emotions like you Future Gods In Training do.

Fruit…did you say?  Fuck you Ashton.  I’ve got your fruit right here.  You sow poison in the earth, you get poison back out of it.  Now eat it.  Or as another gay man, James Baldwin once said…

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

Baldwin wouldn’t have been allowed in one of your churches, even if he wasn’t gay, because according to your…prophets…black people were cursed by God and that’s why their skin is black.  Your church has been elevating the cheapshit prejudices of its barstool prophets into holy writ for generations and now and a reckoning is long overdue. This isn’t your private universe, it’s the United States of America and it belongs to all of us, not just you White And Delightsome Gods In Waiting.  The United States of America is not your private universe, and you are not gods, however highly you might think of yourselves.  So fuck off.

And the unsurprises just keep on coming.  You know the old story about how so many right wing anti-gay warriors turn out to have gay children?  Phillys Schlafly?  Alan Keyes?  Charles Socarides, late of NARTH?  Recall how the man who spear headed California Proposition 22, which was the first swing at same-sex marriages back in 2000, Pete Knight, turned out to have had a gay son?  

Isn’t it interesting how so many of the most vitirolic gay haters have gay children of their own?  Like…they’re punishing their kids, by waging war on the entire gay community?  Like…all of us have to bleed, because hating their own flesh and blood just isn’t good enough?  Isn’t it so very…unsurprising…that 67 year old Gary Lawrence, Mormon, California State LDS Grassroots Director, and prominent organizer of the Proposition 8 campaign, has a gay son?  Surprise, surprise, surprise.

It’s worth remembering in the wake of Proposition 8, that Mormon abuse of their own gay children has been well known for some time now.  If you thought it was tough growing up gay in a Southern Baptist household, just listen to the stories of gay Mormon kids.  And…(Via Pam’s House Blend), like all the children of the anti-gay culture war, this particular son has his own heartbreaking story to tell…

Matthew Lawrence, 28, of Santa Ana, California is just one of approximately 500 people who have contacted Signing for Something ( http://www.signingforsomething… )in the last few days to announce his resignation from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because of the Mormon Church’s handling of and involvement in the gay marriage issue.  Matthew is gay and is the son of Gary Lawrence, 67, who is the “State LDS Grassroots Director” for the state of California.  (See http://yesonprop8.blogspot.com… ).

Matthew Lawrence, in an e-mail interview with this diarist, said that although he is “extremely upset and frustrated” with his family and that he has “cut off communication with them,” that “at the end of the day, I do love them.”  The elder Lawrence was also the Mormon Church’s point man for the Prop 22 campaign in 2000.  Matt says, “I love my family so much, but it’s hard to not take this personally.  We had a brief falling-out over Prop. 22, but that got mended.  But two anti-gay initiatives in eight years, it’s impossible not to feel attacked.”

Matthew was particularly hurt when “my father said that opponents of Prop. 8 are akin to Lucifer’s followers in the pre-existence.”  (Printed in Meridian Magazine online, and reported in the Salt Lake Tribune http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_… and other newspapers). Matthew’s plea to his father and others is “We can all agree to disagree and respect each other’s informed opinions and decisions, but don’t put me and Satan in the same sentence please.” 

“This issue isn’t about gay marriage,” writes Matthew. ” This is about certain religious factions that believe homosexuality is disgusting, immoral and wrong and needs to be stamped out. . . .  It’s a problem to be ‘fixed.'” Matthew writes that his family sent him to multiple counselors during his youth, and even sent him to live with relatives in Utah which he writes was an attempt to “straighten me out” by living with what he describes as “homophobic cousins.”  He said while in Utah it wasn’t unusual for his cousin to call him a “faggot” at school and that his “aunt and uncle did nothing to discourage his behavior.” 

…don’t put me and Satan in the same sentence please.  Is this too much to ask?  Never mind the gay stranger down the street who wears horns every time you set eyes on them.  Never mind that same-sex couple you can casually condemn to eternal hellfire because they’re not part of your own family, but someone else’s, and it’s always easy to toss someone else’s children, someone else’s loved ones, into the fiery lake for all eternity.  Is it too much to ask you to stop demonizing your own children?  Is it too much to ask you to stop putting your righteous knives into their hearts too?  They want your love…they Need your love.  Can you stop putting them side by side with Satan in your eyes?  In your hearts?  At long last, is this too much to ask?

I only have a couple major revolving credit cards.  I generally don’t like them, but they’re handy when traveling and for upgrading the hardware here at Casa del Garrett.  One of my cards has been pushing their "bonus points" schemes at me for years now, and I’ve never really bothered keeping track of how much of that stuff I’ve accumulated, since I figured sooner or later it would all just disappear back into the promotional void from whence it came.

Basically, every time you use that card you get some "bonus points", that supposedly you can use to buy things from their "bonus awards" catalog.  Okay…I’m old enough to be familiar with the concept here…

The Giant Food stores nearby when I was a kid gave those things out, and the Super Giant department store further down Rockville Pike had a Top Value Stamp redemption store on site.  The way it worked was, every time you bought something at Giant, or any place that gave out Top Value Stamps, you got stamps along with your change and receipt.  The more you spent, the more stamps you got.  You then took your stamps home and filled up your stamp books with them…thusly…

Those are the 1-stamp stamps.  There were also larger 10-stamp stamps, that you could stick on the beginning of a row to "fill" it. 

It was a promotional gimmick, designed to secure customer loyalty.  Another store down the street might have cheaper prices, but they didn’t give you stamps.  So if you were working on getting something from the stamp catalog, you kept buying where you got the stamps from. 

Say…you were looking to buy yourself a nice new camera or projector…

It’s kinda hard to read there…but note the prices are in "books"  That’s how it worked, basically.  Or…say you were pestering your mom for a new bike…

So 24 books would get you a neat Huffy Dragster and be the envy of all your friends.  So long as you didn’t tell them it was a Top Value Stamp bike or then you’d get mercilessly ridiculed.  And a mere 12916 books got you the Italian motor scooter. 

The big recession in the early 1970s killed off a lot of the old big suburban department stores and the stamps seemed to vanish along with them. I think people figured out they weren’t really saving any money buying things with stamps.  It was kinda fun when the economy was doing okay…but when jobs suddenly became scarce and incomes went down people watched their money a lot more carefully.  But I still have a few things here at Casa del Garrett that mom bought with those Top Value Stamps back in the day, including the clock radio I’ve had at my bedside ever since I was in third grade. The clock still works, but the radio needs new tubes.  Yes…I said tubes.

When the credit card companies started pushing their "bonus point" thing at me I just shrugged it off.  Been there…done that.  At least the stamps were finger candy.  We East African plains apes love our finger candy.  But those "bonus points" have kept right on accumulating, and just last week I got another one of their bonus award catalogs and while I was fixing dinner, decided to browse it for a bit while waiting for my soup to heat up.  My eyes lingered on a nice Panasonic cordless phone set with caller id digital answering and 3 remote handsets.

For the past couple years or so I’ve been really wanting to get rid of the absolutely terrible Motorola cordless phones I have here.  I’m usually better at judging the quality of the stuff I buy but I really got taken by Motorola that time.  I regretted buying those things I think from the first day I installed them. The volume controls do nothing…the answering machine doesn’t respond to commands while it’s playing a message or answering a call…the handsets don’t hold their charge for very long and the battery life indicators lie through their teeth…the sound quality is horrible…  I could go on… 

So for almost a couple years now, whenever I’ve walked into any electronics stores, I’ve found myself wandering over to the cordless phone shelves and pondering whether it was worth it to just buy new ones.  I’d look at this model and that, and almost start walking to the cashier with a set, only to put it back and walk away again because I was determined to get my money’s worth out of the damn Motorolas.

So I’m looking at these cordless phones from Panasonic in this bonus points catalog thing and just for kicks and grins I decided to see how much of that bonus point stuff I’d managed to gather over the years.  

Turns out…quite a bit.  Enough to get a nice flatscreen TV if I wanted.  But the TV I have works just fine thank you.  It may not be HDTV ready…but I barely watch TV any more these days anyway.  There were some nice digital video cameras, but I’m a still photography kinda guy.  And there was tons of the usual junk.  But…jeeze…if I already have enough points to get a nice new cordless phone set, then it’s not like I’m spending any new money to replace the Motorolas I despised…

So I decided to bite.  I logged onto the redemption web site and cashed in some of my points for a new cordless phone set, that would have cost me about ninety bucks had I bought them at Costco.  They were waiting for me when I got home from work this afternoon and I’m charging the batteries now.  It’s a Much nicer set then the Motorolas, and I didn’t have to spend any money to get them (I realize the cost to me was folded into my use of that card over all these years…).  Which is good because, ironically, with the economy being on the edge that it is, I’m trying not to use my credit cards much now.  I’m in a pay cash or do without mode for the time being.

It still feels…I dunno…fake somehow.  Insubstantial.  Unreal.  I mean…the new phone set is real enough.  But these damn bonus point things are just…not even there.  They’re something theoretical.  Virtual.  Am I that old I need something in my hand to believe it has some value?  Even the damn credit cards in my wallet are Something.  My bonus points were never anything more then a number on my monthly credit card statements, that I never really payed any attention to because it seemed beside the point…the point of the statements being how much I’d spent and where and how much I owed.  Points?  Points?  Right…sure…whatever.  No "points" have ever crossed my palms, but somehow they are there.  Out there.  Somewhere.  The new phones are Nice.  But somehow some part of me inside is still left wondering what exactly it was I just spent to buy them.

[Edited a tad…]

If you think it’s only marriage they want to take from us, you are sadly mistaken.  Note this exchange in the chamber of the U.S. Supreme Court, buried within a legal debate about monuments in public parks…

Justices Grapple With Question of Church Monument as Free Speech Issue

WASHINGTON — The hypothetical questions were flying at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, and that was not a good sign for Summum, a small church that wants to place a monument to the Seven Aphorisms of its faith near a Ten Commandments monument in a public park in Pleasant Grove City, Utah.

The questioning suggested that the justices were finding it hard to identify a principle that would compel the city to accept the Summum monument without creating havoc in public parks around the nation.

The justices start tossing out various examples of what can and cannot be excluded…and then this comes up…

Would it be all right, Justice John Paul Stevens asked, for the government to exclude the names of gay soldiers from the Vietnam memorial?

This was rhetorical on Stevens’ part.  Stevens is one of the sane justices on the bench.  But its prime fascist  jumped on it gleefully…

Mr. Joseffer had to be pressed to answer the question about excluding the names of gay soldiers. In the end, he said the First Amendment’s free speech clause, at least, places no limits on whom the government chooses to honor.

Justice Scalia agreed. “It seems to me the government could disfavor homosexuality,” he said, “just as it could disfavor abortion.”

This wasn’t even about homosexuality.  This was just an aside from Scalia…nothing more.  But dig it.  If the government wants to exclude the names of gay soldiers, who gave their lives for their country, from the Vietnam memorial, that would be fine by Scalia.  And never doubt it, this would also be fine with Roberts, Thomas and Alito.

There is no bottom here.  There is absolutely no bottom here.  You could say that gay people are to the religious right, as Jews were to the fascists…but that would be ignoring history.  In fact, gay people died right alongside of Jews in the concentration camps.  There were not as many of us, and it was harder to systematically round us up because gay is not an ethnicity.  We have always been, and always will be a diaspora…many of us hidden from view.  But we were just as hated back then, and clearly, sickeningly, frighteningly, we are just as hated by them now. 

If the day ever came when these modern day fascists achieve enough power to do with us as they have always wanted to, it will be a race to the bottom of the human gutter, and there is no bottom.