It was a video that was supposed to elicit soaring patriotism and real emotions about the Pledge of Allegiance. But to do that, it used fake soldiers and a staged military funeral instead of the real thing.
On Tuesday night, 15-year-old Victoria Blackstone, a sophomore at the St. Agnes School in St. Paul, led the crowd at the Xcel Energy Center in the Pledge of Allegiance. The audience heard her 434-word essay, “Pledging myself to the Flag of the United States of America,” an essay she’d entered in the “Wave the Stars & Stripes” essay contest and won. The RNC turned that essay into a three and a half minute video, a visually stirring montage rolling over Victoria’s words about sharing the Pledge with Americans who have stood at important moments in history.
There’s the Continental Congress…A real WWII vet…Photos of workers at Ground Zero. A close-up of a folded flag presented to a grieving widow at a military funeral… profiles of soldiers swelling with pride in slo-motion.
But CBS News found that the footage of the ‘funeral’ and soldiers is what is called ‘stock’ footage. The soldiers were actors and the funeral scene was from a one-day film shoot, produced in June. No real soldiers were used during production.
The footage, sold by stock-film house Getty Images was produced by a commercial filmmaker in Chicago. Both Getty and the production company, Mr. Big Films, confirmed that the footage was shot on spec and sold to the Republican National Committee.
One of the actors, Perry Denton of Chicago, Ill. also confirmed that he was hired on a day-rate as an actor for the shoot and told CBS News he was surprised to learn the footage was shown at the convention.
One argument would be that using real soldiers in a political campaign video would amount to manipulating the U.S. military for domestic political purposes. As if they don’t already do that anyway…
But they could have easily found usable news footage of an actual military funeral if they wanted to. I don’t think that thought ever crossed their minds. Our armed forces have been nothing more to them then a prop they can use to gain and keep political power. So the difference between a stock actor and a soldier doesn’t come immediately to mind and that’s why nobody questioned the use of actors in that video. We’re all props on their stage as far as the republicans are concerned, every one of us. And in any case, reality is what they say it is.
“I just wanted to take a second to come by and pay my respect and the campaign’s respect to your organization and to your group,” said Schmidt, who many view as the new architect of the Republican Party. “Your organization is an important one in the fabric of our party.”
In his brief remarks, Schmidt weaved in a personal anecdote about his lesbian sister and her relationship to him, his wife, and his children. “On a personal level, my sister and her partner are an important part of my life and our children’s life,” he said. “I admire your group and your organization and I encourage you to keep fighting for what you believe in because the day is going to come.”
The Log Cabin members there in attendance immediately began questioning him on McCain’s record on gay equality, pressing him repeatedly on his stance on same sex marriage. Finally concluding that they’d come there looking to see a leader and they didn’t.
Hahahahaha…. No. Actually, that was a high school student in Concord New Hampshire, speaking directly to McCain himself…
William Sleaster, a student at Concord High School rose to ask McCain a question about gay rights and, ultimately dissatisfied by the answer he received from McCain, told the Republican presidential contender that he’d come looking to see a leader and didn’t.
McCain first answered the high school student by talking about his support for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the military’s policy regarding gays, and about his belief in the sanctity of marriage.
“Discrimination in any form is unacceptable in America today,” McCain said.
“I understand the controversy that continues to swirl around this issue,” McCain said. “That debate needs to be continued.”
Sleaster pressed on. “Do you support civil unions or gay marriage?”
“I do not,” McCain answered. “I think that they impinge on the status and the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman.”
“So you believe in taking away someone’s rights because you believe it’s wrong?”
“I wouldn’t put that interpretation on my position, but I understand yours,” McCain said diplomatically.
Sleaster went on to ask another question about how to help the working class in America, which McCain fielded by talking about the country’s need to figure out education and health care, and to secure the environment.
Sleaster indicated that he wanted to follow up again.
“You have one more? Go ahead you’re doing good,” McCain encouraged.
“I came here looking to see a leader,” Sleaster said. “I don’t.”
The assembled students murmured, and a teacher started to step in.
“I understand,” McCain said. “I thank you. That’s what America is all about.”
…and Homeland security immediately began tapping his family’s phones and intercepting their emails. I sure hope that poor kid doesn’t need any student loans to get himself through college. Anyway…here’s what the Log Cabin members actually did. They…uhm…cheered as Schmidt rose to the defense of Sarah Palin…
“You saw one of the great speeches in the history of political conventions last night by an accomplished governor of a state who has just announced herself as a major force in the Republican Party in her own right, and I think the other side this morning, when you consider the backlash that is likely to occur after all the vile filth that’s been thrown at her, they ought to be sitting on the other side saying, Oh – My – God,” Schmidt said to the cheers of some 50 attendees.
Vile filth…??? You mean…like this…?
Like…this…?
This…maybe…?
That kind of vile filth? Meanwhile the Log Cabin cheered for the lady who tried to eliminate domestic partner benefits in her state by referendum when she couldn’t get it via the courts, and told the Eagle Forum in a 2006 questionnaire that her No. 2 priority as governor would be "preserving the definition of ‘marriage’ as defined in our constitution." They cheered.
If sixteen year old William Sleaster had been there to see it, he might not have bothered challenging McCain on his gay rights positions. If we don’t stand up for ourselves, no one will stand with us.
The Log Cabin Republicans: Breathing new life every election year into Truman Capote’s saying, that a faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room.
A SENIOR clergyman has threatened to quit rather than work alongside the man who could become the UK’s first openly gay bishop because he says homosexual acts are “sinful and wrong”.
Canon Peter Jones said he would consider his position should the Dean of St Albans, Dr Jeffrey John, become the new Bishop of Bangor.
And just so you know he isn’t motivated by anything as sordid as mere hate…
Mr Jones, who is married to health visitor Susan and has two grown up children, added: “I’m not against homosexuals as people, but people who engage in homosexual acts or people who teach that such acts may be acceptable.
We don’t hate the person, only the act… But if if an "act" is all you can see in the sexual intimacy between same sex couples, then you are beyond hating the person. You don’t even see the person. Hate has already done its work on you. It has turned homosexual people into nothing. It has taken loving same sex couples and turned them into strange two-legged beasts who merely copulate. It has turned their love for each other into an act. And now the enemy can no longer be just the act, but the meaning that underscores it.
Dr John, 55, and his long-term partner the Rev Grant Holmes became civil partners in August 2006, but he claims to be celibate.
Celibate or not, they are a couple, and your enemy isn’t lust, it isn’t sex, it isn’t moral relativism. The enemy now is love. Which is why it has to be an act. "…people who engage in homosexual acts or people who teach that such acts may be acceptable." Acts. Acts. Acts. Homosexual sex isn’t what offends you. Homosexual sex isn’t what you are striking out at there. You are not denying that sex is moral between same sex couples, but that love plays any role in their intimacy. That’s why it has to be an act. By calling it such, you are throwing a dagger at the hearts of loving same sex couples and hoping for blood. You are trashing their garden. You are spitting on their hearts, because the heart, not the sex, is what offends you.
Hate has done its work on you. You are beyond hating the person. You are beyond hating homosexuals. You have taken that one critical step past the edge of the Pit and you have fallen in. The enemy isn’t sex. The enemy now is Love.
There probably isn’t any going back from this place. You’re done. By all means, return the stole to someone who is fit to wear it.
You Knew What He Was When He Clawed His Way Back Into The Senate With Republican Support
So…Joe Lieberman, the Last Honest Man In The Senate, gives a speech at the GOP convention, in which he says, among other things…
When others were silent, John McCain had the judgment to sound the alarm about the mistakes we were making in Iraq. When others wanted to retreat in defeat from the field of battle, when Barack Obama was voting to cut off funding for our troops on the ground,
John McCain had the courage to stand against the tide of public opinion and support the surge, and because of that, today, our troops are at last beginning to come home, not in failure, but in honor!
To support the charge, the McCain campaign has cited Obama’s vote of May 24, 2007, against an appropriations bill that included funding for the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (and passed, 80-14).
So was that a vote "to cut off funding for our American troops on the battlefield"?
Not primarily.
Obama was fighting at the time for a requirement that President Bush begin to bring the troops home from Iraq. The bill in question did not include such a requirement, and that is why Obama voted against it. Obama said at the time that he wanted to fund the troops, he just didn’t want to fund the particular military strategy that the bill would enable.
“We must fund our troops," Obama said at the time. "But we owe them something more. We owe them a clear, prudent plan to relieve them of the burden of policing someone else’s civil war."
Clearly Obama wanted to provide funding for the troops — just not the president’s military strategy.
If, by voting against funding for a strategy he opposed, Obama voted to "cut off funding for the troops," then so did almost every Republican in the Senate — and Lieberman himself — when they voted against a $124-billion appropriations bill on April 26, 2007, that would have funded operations in Iraq and Afghanistan but also required Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq. (McCain missed the vote on that bill, which passed 51-46 and was subsequently vetoed by Bush.)
What part of honor involves lying through your teeth Joe?
When Did You First Notice That Puditry Had Become Just Another Word For Propaganda?
From Talking Points Memo… Peggy Noonan, Chuck Todd, and Mike Murphy get caught actually speaking their minds over a live mike. Problem is, what they really thought wasn’t quite the same thing as what they were telling their NBC audience they really thought…
Chuck Todd: Mike Murphy, lots of free advice, we’ll see if Steve Schmidt and the boys were watching. We’ll find out on your blackberry. Tonight voters will get their chance to hear from Sarah Palin and she will get the chance to show voters she’s the right woman for the job Up next, one man who’s already convinced and he’ll us why Gov. Jon Huntsman.
(cut away)
Peggy Noonan: Yeah.
Mike Murphy: You know, because I come out of the blue swing state governor world: Engler, Whitman, Tommy Thompson, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush. I mean, these guys — this is how you win a Texas race, just run it up. And it’s not gonna work. And —
PN: It’s over.
MM: Still McCain can give a version of the Lieberman speech to do himself some good.
CT: I also think the Palin pick is insulting to Kay Bailey Hutchinson, too.
PN: Saw Kay this morning.
CT: Yeah, she’s never looked comfortable about this —
MM: They’re all bummed out.
CT: Yeah, I mean is she really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?
PN: The most qualified? No! I think they went for this — excuse me– political bullshit about narratives —
CT: Yeah they went to a narrative.
MM: I totally agree.
PN: Every time the Republicans do that, because that’s not where they live and it’s not what they’re good at, they blow it.
MM: You know what’s really the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is no cynicism, and this is cynical.
CT: This is cynical, and as you called it, gimmicky.
MM: Yeah.
What’s worth paying attention to here is now nobody out linking to this transcript is even bothering to bring up the fact that this is not anything like what these people are telling their viewers when they think the mikes are on. It’s all just a big belly laugh. Everyone just takes for granted now that pundits don’t tell the truth. Everyone just takes being manipulated by the major news networks for granted now. And to top it off, they’re bellyaching here about McCain being cynical. Well thank God for cynicism Murphy, or you and Chuck and Peggy would have to find real jobs.
HE KISSED him briefly in the stands and gave him his Olympic bouquet. Later, outside the glowing blue Water Cube, Matthew Mitcham and his partner, Lachlan Fletcher, firmly embraced, both shedding tears. Next it was his mother Vivien’s turn to hold her golden boy, and more tears fell.
…
Carefully nursing Mitcham’s Olympic bouquet, Fletcher spoke of the incredible journey that the diver had taken to the top. Fletcher has been the one constant over the past two years.
He was his rock when Mitcham retired in his late teenage years suffering anxiety and depression. He watched him become a stunt diver at the Sydney Royal Easter show, supported his fight back into the sport and now to win Olympic gold.
"It’s been so up and down," Fletcher said. "When I first met him, he was pretty unhappy, he wasn’t liking the diving in Brisbane at all, he didn’t want to do it, wasn’t happy being there.
"It took a lot for him to retire and stop doing it because it had been his life for so long. He wanted to try and be happy again. He took time to do normal things that people do.
"Then after five or six months he started to really miss it again and he had the opportunity to dive with Chava [Sobrino, his coach]. He started that and loved it ever since, every second of it, which is great to see him happy all the time."
What NBC didn’t want you to know: Not that Matthew Mitcham is gay, but that he loves, and is loved, and that relationship nurtured and sustained him when he was beaten and down, and brought him back, all they way to the gold. Love does that. What NBC didn’t want you to know wasn’t that Mitcham is gay, but that love does that for gay people too. To know that, is to see republican gay bashing for what it is. Not a principled moral stand, but a crime against humanity.
What you have to understand about the entire gay rights struggle is that this is what was taken away from us for so very, very long, and what the haters are Still trying bitterly to take away from us. Not sex, but love. Vital, nurturing, sustaining, intimate human love. The love that makes us whole, that completes us, that empowers us to reach beyond ourselves to the best within us. That is what was taken from us for so many human generations. That is what we of the post-stonewall generations have been fighting to take back. Our human status.
When the U.S. Supreme Court nullified the sodomy laws the screaming from the hate pews afterward wasn’t about gay couples having sex, but fear the courts would now let them get married. It was the first thing they started yapping about. When bigots like Orson Scott Card say that a homosexual’s highest allegiance is to the society that gives them access to sex, he’s not describing what we are but what he sees us as being. Not human. Humans love, not-humans only have sex. And you can rip the heart out of not-humans, because they don’t feel any pain.
The state has hired a private lawyer to represent Gov. Sarah Palin’s office in the Legislature’s investigation into the firing of former Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan. The lawyer already has challenged whether lawmakers even have authority to oversee the inquiry.
The attorney hired to represent Palin, Thomas Van Flein, is challenging the authority of state Sen. Hollis French, a Democrat and former state prosecutor, who is project director for the legislative investigation. Here’s his take on the matter…
"Our concern is that Hollis French turns into Ken Starr and uses public money to pursue a political vendetta rather than truly pursue an honest inquiry into an alleged ethics issue," Van Flein said in an interview.
Oh really? While the sight of a republican spokesdroid for Sarah Palin saying publicly what everyone who was paying back then already knows about the Ken Starr investigations, it’s a mistake to take that as an admission.
This is not your father’s republican party. It’s the party of president junior, the most miserable failure of a man you ever met who can see himself as a glorious president and war leader. It’s the party of James Dobson Gary Bauer and other religious right leaders who can thunder about sexual morality and family values and come rushing to the defence of Palin’s pregnant and unmarried teenage daughter. It’s the party of CEOs that champion free markets and capitalism one moment and then bribe congress into locking down markets, stifling emergent technologies and handing out fat no-bid government contracts. Republican doublethink would make Orwell’s jaw drop, let alone Goldwater’s.
They knew Starr was engaging in a political vendetta. They have always known that. But Starr was conducting an honest inquiry into an alleged ethics issue. They have always known that too. They have always known both those things. If you think that’s a contradiction, you’re still living in the reality based community, for which they no longer have any use…
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
That wasn’t just the heart of the Bush Presidency, it was a glimpse into the heart and soul of the movement conservatives who now dominate the republican party, both secular and Christianist. Reality is whatever they wish it to be, at the moment they need it to be that. When they need it to be something else, then it becomes that thing too. Never mind facts, never mind science, never mind God Almighty Himself. They create reality. And when it comes crashing down on their thick heads, they’ll keep right on creating new realities that deny everything they hate because they cannot cope with it, just like every other tinpot tyrant who ever spent his list furtive moments alone in a bunker somewhere, while the world burned all around him.
This is why we need to pry their hands off the levers of power come November. It’s not the economy. It’s not the Supreme Court. It’s not the war. It’s the reality stupid. The ship of state needs pilots who don’t simply wish away the iceburgs.
It takes work. You have to be patient, and you have to have a lot of resolve. Nerves of steel actually. When he says he’s going to have some free time in two weeks to chat with you, what you need to understand is that’s a sign of affection.
There’s a humorous list going around the web here and there titled, You Know You’re German If… What’s interesting about this list is that it’s been written, passed around and added to, by Germans. There are various versions of it floating around, and I would highly recommend anyone aspiring to be friends with a German to study them carefully. Let it be said they know how to laugh at themselves. Here’s a few items that absolutely apply to a certain someone I know…
-You feel like a fish out of water in unstructured organizations and foreign countries.
-Being spontaneous is at 3 weeks notice.
-The concept of small talk still puzzles you.
So…two years ago, after almost thirty-five years of searching for him, I finally found my old high school crush again. This is the guy who is the object of my affections in my comic series A Coming Out Story. And because I’m still in the middle of telling that story, there are a few major plot points I don’t want to give away (although I guess I just now did give one away…the fact that we haven’t seen each other since my high school days…). So I have to be vague about some of this. And also, I don’t want to embarrass him by naming him here. But just so you know, we’ve been chatting ever since, on the phone, and via email and post cards.
Post cards, largely because it took me over a year to get him to give me an email address. And that was because, as he said, he is "more into nature then technology". Or…according to the list…
-You separate your trash into more than five different bins.
-You have gotten splinters from environmentally friendly toilet paper.
-You’re the only one recycling not just bottles and cans but also light bulbs, water filters, batteries, printer cartridges
-You complain about people that just sit in their car with the engine running
But most American kids of my baby boomer generation actually don’t use personal computers all that much as adults now either. A Pew Foundation study some time ago put the figure at somewhat less then fifty percent of my generation who use computers on a regular basis. His job doesn’t require him to sit down to one everyday, and apparently he hasn’t much use for them in his home life either. I get the sense he doesn’t much touch one other then for the occasional emails he sends my way.
Thing was…back in high school, when I learned that both his parents were German, I wasn’t sure if that was how he identified himself. He was born in Brazil actually, and came here to the U.S. when he was still very young. He spent both his middle school and high school years here, attending the same high school I did. Back then, he seemed to identify more as Brazilian then German. For the longest time I thought he was your usual light skinned Brazilian, with a family tree that maybe went back to Portugal or maybe Spain. In high school he spoke English very well, with only the very slightest hint of an accent that I could never quite place. I figured his native language was probably Portuguese. He was also in the Spanish Honor Society back then. When I found out from one of the other kids about his German heritage I was surprised. He never told me. But there may have been a reason for that.
When I finally located him again, I still wasn’t sure how he identified. He’s spent most of his life now here in the U.S. But he still goes by this Brazilian nickname he always did back in high school. So as he and I began to chat once more after all these years, I kept wondering. I wasn’t sure how to go about asking him. The thing about cross-cultural relationships is they’re so damn full of landmines. The last thing I wanted to do was offend him in some way, or perhaps bring up old memories he didn’t want to revisit. I knew next to nothing about his family life, because he always politely deflected my attempts to ask him about any of it back when we were kids…which I respected back then despite my intense curiosity, because I was completely twitterpated and if he didn’t want to talk about it I wasn’t going there.
Back when I was a kid, I had this very fragmented view of Germans and Germany. There was all the World War II history I grew up learning. The rise of Hitler and fascism in Europe. When I first saw newsreel footage of a Nazi book burning, it completely shocked me. I was such a little bookworm back then. The sight of piles of books burning struck me as an attack on the human identity. Then came the newsreel footage of the death camps.
On TV and in the movies, Germans were either cold, calculating, weaselly Nazis who loved to torture people or big fat buffoons with a stereotypical Hollywood German accent. It was either…
…or…
So that was what my history classes and Hollywood were teaching me about Germans. But in my day to day world there was all the good stuff that came from Germany. When I was a teenager one of my uncles came down for a visit driving his new Mercedes-Benz 220D. I’ve written about that before, and how that car completely blew away everything I thought I understood about what a good car was. Mercedes-Benz instantly became my new dream car then. And when I got the camera bug, I quickly learned that some of the best photography equipment came from Germany. Carl Zeiss lenses…Leica cameras… When I was 17 I splurged a month’s pay from the burger joint I was working at to buy a lovely Rodenstock lens for my enlarger. I was both overjoyed and appalled at the results. Overjoyed because my prints took on an absolutely razor edged sharpness under that lens. It was magnificent. Appalled because that damn lens revealed every tiny flaw in my negatives. That lens told me I wasn’t nearly as good as I thought I was. But that was okay…it meant I could grow. And I did.
Back before high school, mom bought an absolutely lovely German made cabinet hi-fi. It was built from solid mahogany and not only did it sound as good as it looked, it had a radio with FM stations and Shortwave too! I became utterly fascinated back then with that short wave radio and would listen to it for hours, tuning in BBC, Radio Netherlands, Radio Johannesburg and so on… This was before there was an Internet…before cell phones…before 24 hour cable news…back in the days when my world effectively ended at the horizon. With that shortwave radio I could hear the world speaking beyond the horizon. I never found any English language German broadcasts, but because of that short wave radio I grew up with the knowledge that there was a world out there beyond our boarders, and that it was fun to listen to.
So on the one hand, there was Hollywood’s German, and the German of my history class lessons…and on the other there was the Germany that made the best cars and radios and hi-fi and camera equipment. I’d heard they drink their beer warm, but I never liked beer to begin with. I heard they were obsessive about organization and record keeping. I heard there was this really neat highway over in Germany where there were no speed limits. But I never really thought about or questioned any of what I knew, or thought I knew, about Germans. It was all just floating there in the background. And then there was the guy I massively crushed on back in high school. He was so damn beautiful. But also hard working, decent, good-hearted. But he always accentuated his Brazilian birthplace. So maybe he really wasn’t all that much German. For years I wondered about it, never really thinking about what I actually did and did not know about Germans.
So I found him again, and annoyingly, the completely twitterpated high school boy came rushing back out of me, like I was still 17, and I found I Still couldn’t ask him so many things I’d wished I had over the years. But we talked and talked over the months, and as we did I began to get the sense that his German heritage had come more to the foreground over the intervening years. Then last Christmas he sent me a card with a lovely handwritten Christmas greeting…first in German and then in English.
You have to picture this: There I am, sitting down reading this lovely little Christmas card he sent me, and suddenly every stupid, ignorant German stereotype I ever grew up with came rushing back to me and laughed in my face. All the stupid Nazi jokes…all the cardboard Hollywood Germans I ever saw on TV… I felt so embarrassed.
And I had an idea then why he presented more as Brazilian then German back in school. He probably got teased a lot for being German back then. The more I pictured it, the more I heard myself as a kid laughing and re-telling all the German jokes I learned from the other kids and I just felt so ashamed.
Is this how straight folks feel when someone close to them comes out as gay? Now I can’t even watch my all time favorite movie, Casablanca, without cringing the moment Major Strasser comes on screen.
So I’ve been making an effort to learn more about the German folk and their culture. But mostly their ways. I pay attention to what English language German newspapers and magazines there are online. Spiegel ran a series a couple years back, The Germans Explained, for Americans and other foreigners visiting Germany for the 2006 winter Olympics. It’s an interesting read. This from the article titled, Brutally Honest, Have You Gained Weight?
Personal invitations of all kinds are to be taken at face value. "We’re having a party, please do come," means "We’re having a party, please do come," and not "We feel rude not inviting you in front of these other people, but surely you’ll have the grace not to show up." Similarly, "Come over to my house and we’ll have tea," means that you should start planning a date and time for that pleasant event. It is not to be confused with the Anglo-American "We should get together sometime," which means "I hope I never see you again."
Yes means yes and no means no. If you ask whether you can share someone’s table (or borrow a pen, or get a ride) and that person says yes, that’s the end of it. Even if the person does not smile or tell you to go right ahead, you do not have to ask again. Germans will be perplexed when you insist: "Are you sure? I won’t be bothering you, will I? I’ll just take this little corner and be done in a minute." For heavens sakes, they said yes already, and it’s not like you’re asking them to donate a kidney. Just sit down.
“I never, ever got involved in sport,” said Winston Churchill wisely. Not so, Sporty German Male. Oh no, he loves it. Running around Hamburg’s Alster when you fancy going shoe shopping, or forcing you to go Nordic Walking on a Sunday morning when you’d still rather be under your duvet stuffing yourself with scrambled eggs, Sporty German Male laughs in the face of blubber, Wiener Schnitzel and chips.
My one brief encounter with Sporty German Male included a doomed mini-break to Mallorca. Stretched out by the swimming pool in my bikini, I asked: “Do I look fat in this?” Sporty German Male looked confused. “Of course not, Liebling,” he said. “If you were fat, my sweetness, you would not be here!"
I browse the online forums here and there where they gather, and at least a little English is spoken. And I’m finding that I’m actually coming to like them. I’m making a few tentative steps at learning German…mostly so I can read it. I doubt I’ll ever be in a place where I hear it spoken a lot, and without that there’s just about no possibility of me really learning the language very well. If I can just learn it a bit I’ll be satisfied. Then I can hear them speaking in their own voices.
-You call an afternoon stroll "Nordic Walking".
-You always fold your Tetra Pak before you throw it in the appropriate bin.
-You eat a cold dinner at 6pm.
-You can tell at least one Manta joke.
-Your childhood diet consisted of Alete and Zwieback. Your college diet consisted of Miracoli and Döner.
-You have your ‘feierabend’ at 1730hrs – the world can burn down.
-You expect chocolate in your shoes on December 6th.
In the meantime I am trying hard to be the friend to him I was too shy to be back when we were both kids (there goes another plot point…). If he was another American kid, and he told me that in two weeks he’d have time for a chat, I’d think what he was really telling me was to bug off. But he’s German, he has always called when he said he would, and what you have to see in that isn’t that he’s pushing me off for two weeks but that he’s making time for me. Over and over again in the past two years I’ve run smack into his "time management", and no kidding, that’s exactly how he refers to it. I’ve found in conversation with him that he’s got his life organized in a way I would find absolutely suffocating. But that seems to be a German thing, it’s where his comfort zone is, and if I want to be his friend I have to adjust to it. It’s work. I have to be patient. But I have a lot of resolve. And the signs look good. Very good actually. Here I am after three and a half decades crashing back into his well organized world and he makes time for me.
So I just now put up a new gallery of shots I took at Ocean City, New Jersey yesterday. Labor Day weekend kind of snuck up on me this year, and I hadn’t made any plans at all. I had a lot of housework I could do, but I could just let the weekend slid by without doing Something. So I thought of going to Ocean City.
Ocean City is where I went with mom on her summer vacations, back when I was a young teen. I’d been taken to a variety of east coast beach towns when I was small, but in my early adolescence we settled on Ocean City, and went back year after year. And OC is where most of my best memories of vacationing by the seashore are. You can see some of the shots I took way back in the 1970s in Gallery Three – The Shadows and Light Sessions.
It was probably too late to reserve a room at the beach…and anyway I am saving for a couple trips I want to take later this year…One to Key West on New Year’s Eve, and the other to Disneyworld…maybe…during the week the Hubble servicing mission launches. Disneyworld could end up costing a lot, and for sure Key West will as the rates just go through the roof there that week (as I found out last year!). So I have to save for all that. But Ocean City New Jersey is only about a three and a half hour drive from Casa del Garrett. So yesterday morning I basically just jumped in the car with only my Canon digital SLR and a zoom lens and drove to Ocean City for a day trip.
It’s a short drive…first up I-95 to the Delaware Memorial Bridge, and then basically follow US Route 40 almost to the coast. At Harding Lakes you take road 559 to Great Egg Harbor Bay and across to Ocean City. It’s one of those Jersey Shore barrier island beach towns. From the north end of the island you can see the Atlantic City Casinos, which I’ve never had the slightest urge to visit. Ocean City has a nice beach, a great boardwalk and a friendly atmosphere…in part I’m convinced because it is one of the few "dry" beach towns on the east coast. Meaning they don’t serve alcohol there and you can’t buy it in any store. I think that probably keeps the rowdiness factor down. If you really want it, you can buy it at the huge liquor store right across the bridge on the mainland and bring it back, and drink to your heart’s content in your room. Just don’t take it outside or go wandering around drunk because you Will get noticed by the police.
When I got there I drove to my OC point of reference…the Port O Call hotel, which is a really nice 60s design six floor hotel right on the boardwalk…the only high rise they ever allowed to be built there. This time I wasn’t getting a room…my plan was to just find a parking space and stroll the boardwalk with my camera for the afternoon, and maybe take in a good boardwalk restaurant. At first it looked like I might not be able to find any street parking at all. Most of the streets near the beach are lined with individual guest houses, many of which have little to no parking of their own. So everyone parks on the street. When the guest houses are full, so are the streets. I drove up and down for a while, and then went to where the all day lots are, and as it turned out, there were spaces available there after all. It was twenty bucks for all day parking…but that was a lot less then the cost of a room and the boardwalk would provide all I needed for the day in terms of food and drink and clean restrooms.
Now I know I can have a good time at OC for an afternoon on the spur of the moment with just my camera and a few bucks. The only drawback was that I didn’t want to go home and kept putting it off until late. So consequently I didn’t get back until very late. But for just the cost of gasoline and parking and beach food it was worth it.
I may go back on my birthday week. I asked around and it turns out nowadays the boardwalk doesn’t start closing down until October. The big Wonderland amusment park at the north end of the boardwalk doesn’t close for the season until October 15th.
From Our Department Of Credit Where Credit Is Due…
The Log Cabin Republicans have launched a website highlighting prominent republicans who are against California’s Proposition 8 (the ballot initiative that will amend the California constitution to ban same-sex marriage)…
A new Log Cabin Republicans website aims to highlight Republicans who are against Proposition 8 – California’s constitutional amendment which would once again ban gay marriage in the State.
The recently launced website features quotes, bios and interviews of prominent Republicans who oppose Proposition 8 including: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mary Cheney, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, Redondo Beach Mayor Mike Gin, comedian Dennis Miller and Desperate Housewives Producer Marc Cherry. Councilpeople from various cities are also included.
Many Small Worlds, All Driving Past One Another On The Interstates…
I took a daytrip to Ocean City, New Jersey yesterday. More about that later. Anyway…I’m driving up I-95 to Delaware when I see a shiny silver Toyota SUV up ahead, with a bunch of soap lettering all over its windows.
Aha…thinks I…someone had a wedding. Well…not exactly. As got closer I was able to read some of it…the part that was on my side…
Wow…Just Wow!
You Jerks!
I Need Better Friends!
I was in the far left lane and the SUV was in the middle lane. I tempted to slow down and get in the right hand lane to see what was written on the other side, but thought better of it, and just kept on going.
I’ve been trying to figure out that SUV’s story ever since. I can see getting pissed off at your friends. But covering your car with it too? You don’t just drive up to a friends house, honk the horn and wait for them to come to the window and see I Need Better Friends. Do you?
Who are those messages for really? Why on the car and not somewhere else? Did he actually put those words on his car for his friends to see, or was it more like a scream at the whole wide world? Or was the SUV owned by a friend he was pissed off at, and he scribbled his anger all over it? I tend to doubt that because it was being driven on the Interstate with all the other traffic going to Delaware and possibly the beach and it wasn’t paint it was soap which could easily come off in the wash. I don’t think the driver was in any hurry to wash any of it off, which is why I think he was the one who put it there. Another detail is that the words weren’t on the front windshield or driver’s or passenger’s side windows. Only the back windows. But…why make your own car bear that message?
I reckon I’ll never know. But I’ll be thinking about it for a while. I know what it is to want to just want to shout at the top of my lungs I Need Better Friends! I could have made that a bumper sticker after Bush weaseled out a second term with the help of a few (ex) friend’s votes. Nobody breaks your heart the way friends can.
Oh For Heaven’s Sake…Hey Dave…Go Get Me That Boilerplate Apology Form Willya…
NBC, suffering a torrent of bad publicity for closeting gold medalist Matthew Mitcham during its broadcast of the Olympic men’s diving events, has now issued an apology…
"We regret that we missed the opportunity to tell Matthew Mitcham’s story. We apologize for this unintentional omission.”
Practically the minute Bush stole the 2000 election, our national news media have happily reduced themselves to stenographers, jotting down whatever comes out of the white house PR office. They cheerfully swallowed all the lies that led to the Iraq war, looked the other way as his henchmen blew the cover of a CIA agent for political revenge, and ignored one republican corruption scandal after another. The slow steady relentless erosion of our civil liberties is something the TV talking heads just can’t be bothered to pay attention too. Here’s what’s going on during the Democratic convention, via a Dave Barry column that’s both funny and sad all at once…
7:48 – Through intense effort I manage to surge maybe eight feet, where the path is blocked by a TV network that has set up a platform on the floor so its reporters can report on the convention by talking to each other with their backs to the actual convention. There is huge excitement in the surge as people catch glimpses of both Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer, who are, in this environment, the Beatles. The surgers all stop, whip out cell phones and take pictures of the backs of the heads of people who are taking pictures of the backs of the heads of people who might actually be getting direct visual shots of Anderson and Wolf. It is a lifetime convention memory.
So…reporting from the middle of the democratic convention, in the last days of one of the most destructive presidencies ever…a president who has all but publicity torn up and crapped on the bill of rights, the Geneva Convention, and Habeas Corpus among other things….most of the TV news media chatter is about…themselves. Its like the process of electing a president is all about them. Its like nothing Bush has done over the past eight years to destroy our constitution matters a whit to them.
So the following cheered me up…somewhat. Of course they’ll never do this sort of thing during the republican convention…
Police in Denver arrested an ABC News producer today as he and a camera crew were attempting to take pictures on a public sidewalk of Democratic senators and VIP donors leaving a private meeting at the Brown Palace Hotel.
Police on the scene refused to tell ABC lawyers the charges against the producer, Asa Eslocker, who works with the ABC News investigative unit.
A cigar-smoking Denver police sergeant, accompanied by a team of five other officers, first put his hands on Eslocker’s neck, then twisted the producer’s arm behind him to put on handcuffs.
A police official later told lawyers for ABC News that Eslocker is being charged with trespass, interference, and failure to follow a lawful order. He also said the arrest followed a signed complaint from the Brown Palace Hotel.
Eslocker was put in handcuffs and loaded in the back of a police van which headed for a nearby police station.
Video taken at the scene shows a man, wearing the uniform of a Boulder County sheriff, ordering Eslocker off the sidewalk in front of the hotel, to the side of the entrance.
The sheriff’s officer is seen telling Eslocker the sidewalk is owned by the hotel. Later, he is seen pushing Eslocker off the sidewalk into oncoming traffic, forcing him to the other side of the street.
It was two hours later when Denver police arrived to place Eslocker under arrest, apparently based on a complaint from the Brown Palace Hotel, a central location for Democratic officials.
During the arrest, one of the officers can be heard saying to Eslocker, "You’re lucky I didn’t knock the f..k out of you."
Eslocker was released late today after posting $500 bond.
Schedenfraude. It’s like German chocolate cake for the soul…
"A Brabus Maybach," he said, as she turned her head in time to see him give the wheel a little pat. "The firm of Brabus extensively tweaks the product of Maybach, to produce one of these."
-From chapter 17 of Spook Country by William Gibson
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