Here’s the last batch of finalists for our Valentine’s Day Poster Contest!   What a great group of entries we had this year!   Let’s give them all a big hand and a Valentine’s Day Consolation Prize…

The winner will be on display starting at midnight, Valentine’s Day!   You should probably have something else to do that day…

Here’s another batch of worthy finalists.   They didn’t quite make the grade…but all deserve honorable mention….

I think I have time for just one more batch of finalists.   The winner will be declared at the stroke of midnight, Valentine’s Day!   You may want to be busy with something else just then…

Well at least I’m not to this point yet…

Valentine’s Day — it’s not so much about love

LONDON (Reuters) – Eight million Americans admit they send themselves Valentine’s Day gifts — they may feel lonely and unloved but at least they will get something nice.

Swell.  But I can get myself something nice any day of the week too, and I already know that I love me.  I bought myself a nice Mercedes-Benz back in October and if that’s not a proof of love I don’t know what is.

I’ll buy myself a nice birthday cake when I have to, and that’s about it.  I did that for years until last year, when my friends give me a really nice birthday party, and I’m here to tell you a cake from your friends, beats out one you bought for yourself by light years.  If I can’t have the real thing on Valentine’s Day, then I reckon I’ll just stew in my juices and sulk.  I’m an artist…I do a good sulk.

Which reminds me…it’s almost time for me to post another round of finalists in The First Annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest!  Stay tuned…

Jamaica has a bit of a PR problem…

Gay Men in Jamaica Attacked by Mob

Last week, in the Jamaican town of Mandeville, three gay men were attacked in their home by an angry mob of approximately 20 people who had threatened them with violence days before if they did not leave the community.

After the incident, two of the attacked men were hospitalized, one with serious injuries including a severed ear, an arm broken in two places and a damaged spine, while another man is still missing and feared dead. This is only the latest in a wave of attacks on gay men in notoriously homophobic Jamaica.

According to a Human Rights Watch press release, the attack on these men echoes another incident in the same town on Easter Sunday, April 8, 2007 when approximately 100 men gathered outside a church where 150 people were attending the funeral of a gay man.

According to mourners, the crowd broke the windows with bottles and shouted, “We want no battyman [gay] funeral here. Leave or else we’re going to kill you. We don’t want no battyman buried here in Mandeville.”

Several mourners inside the church called the police to request protection. After half an hour, three police officers arrived but did little to calm situation, opting instead to commiserate and laugh with the menacing mob until several gay men among the mourners took knives from their cars for self-defense.

Jamaica to tap into religious tourism

Jamaica plans to tap into the thriving market for religious-oriented tourism to invigorate the island’s sagging economy, government officials and business leaders said.

A new convention center, to be built by 2009, will attract some of the millions of travelers who attend religious conferences outside of their home countries, said Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett. The global religious tourism market is an $18 billion-a-year industry with some 300 million travelers, according to the Colorado-based World Religious Travel Association.

Hey mon…I have a plan…you know…let’s go after the hate market…

Of course, the flaw in this grand plan is that the hate market, at least here in America, doesn’t much like darkies either.  But if you shine their shoes and call them "Massa" they’ll at least tip decently. 

Good for them!

Danish Papers Reprint Muhammad Cartoon

(AP) Denmark’s leading newspapers on Wednesday reprinted a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked deadly rioting in Muslim countries two years ago.

The papers said they wanted to show their firm commitment to freedom of speech after Tuesday’s arrest in western Denmark of three people accused of plotting to kill the man who drew the cartoon, which shows Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse.

The drawing by Kurt Westergaard and 11 other cartoons depicting Muhammad enraged Muslims two years ago when they appeared in a range of Western newspapers.

It’s worth remembering that the cartoons in question barely got noticed until a Lebanese-born Muslim living in Denmark, Ahmad Akkari, began waving them around the middle east, in a dossier into which he’d inserted a number of cartoons that the Danes didn’t print, including one that portrayed Muhammad as a pedophile, and a photograph of a Danish man wearing a pig mask, taken during a Danish pig calling contest, that Akkari had re-captioned as being a photo taken of a Dane mocking Muhammad as a pig.

Akkari’s activities in the middle east arguably helped get the Danish embassy in Lebanon burned down.  When Israel later began attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon Akkari decided the Danes weren’t such bad folks after all and he hot-footed it back to the nation he helped rouse passions against, via his Danish residency and passport. Nice guy.

The sweet irony of angry mobs rioting and burning down embassies over a bunch of cartoons depicting Islam as a violent fanatical religion was, of course, lost on the protesters.  That kind of thing will reliably go past zealots of any faith, or none.

As I write this it’s a sheet of ice out on my front porch and sidewalk, and street.  We got some sleet that turned into freezing rain here in Baltimore city.  And if the city got it for sure the suburbs did too.  So when you hear them report that Maryland extended its polling hours this election day because of bad weather, they weren’t kidding.

I’d rather have three feet of snow then a eighth of an inch of ice.  If it’s like this tomorrow morning I may have to take the day off.  You can’t even walk to work when the streets and sidewalks are iced up.

…is already closed to new entries.   Sorry.   But that sense that you’ve been left out is all part of the fun!   Here are some of the finalists…

More worthy finalists tomorrow.   Which will be Valentine’s Day Eve!   The winner (which, in the spirit of things, was already chosen before the contest was announced) will be shown on Valentine’s Day.   You may not want to look…

…it turns out there’s some truth to the bromide that right wing nutcases are sexually frustrated dweebs who just need a good lay.  From Der Spiegel…

Lack of Women in Eastern Germany Feeds Neo-Nazis

The problem has been well known for years: Ever since the mid-1990s, young Eastern Germans have been fleeing the region due to a lack of economic opportunity, hoping to find jobs in the western part of the country. Some 1.5 million have already left the region — roughly 10 percent of the population of East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell. Even worse, most of those who leave are under 35 and many of them have above average education or training.

But according to a new study released by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, there is another problem that accompanies the migration. Since 1991, more than two-thirds of all those who have left Eastern Germany have been women. The result is that in many towns in the region, there are simply not enough to go around — some places are missing up to 25 percent of their young women. Even worse, the young men who stay behind are often poorly educated, unemployed and frustrated — perfect fodder for neo-Nazi groups looking for members.

"In general," the study finds, "right-wing radical parties receive more votes in those areas where the most young women have left."

…

The study comes on the heels of a report that right-wing violence rose in Germany in 2006, with many of the neo-Nazi-related incidents occurring in Eastern Germany. Additionally, the neo-Nazi party NPD has seen increasing success at the polls in Eastern German states. In state elections in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the NPD captured fully 7.3 percent of the vote, meaning that the right wingers now hold seats in three German state parliaments, all of them in former East Germany.

The study recommends a greater focus on educating the region’s young men, but admits that solving the problem is a difficult challenge. After all, there is no one to turn to for advice: nowhere in Europe is the disappearance of women as severe as it is in Eastern Germany.

"The lack of women in former East Germany has no equal anywhere in Europe," the study says. "Even Polar regions in northern Sweden and Finland, where young women have for years been leaving in droves, don’t come close to the problem in Eastern Germany."

I don’t think education is going to do anything for those guys except make them smarter neo-Nazis, and who wants that?  You want to make this world a better place?  Universal education would help…sure.  Feeding the hungry helps.  Creating jobs and opportunities for economic improvement helps.  Working for peace and reconciliation helps.  But nothing, Nothing, will do more to make this world a better, more peaceful and secure place, then making sure that love has a chance to take root and grow, in every heart.  Yet we persist in isolating the lonely…turning away from their misery…blaming them for their own loneliness…  You just need to get out more…

You see it in every totalitarian state, in every theocratic pest hole, in every babbling right wing crank who just can’t seem to get enough of waging war on their neighbor’s private lives.  The war on sex…which is a war on human intimacy…which is a war on love…which becomes a generalized war on all humanity, on everything that a human being can be.  When love dies inside of a person, the void that’s left is all too often filled with the only thing left to fill it with.  Hate. 

Not in a Hallmark mood this year…

Via Atrios…  According to this actuarial life table, having reached the age of fifty-four, and being male, I can reasonably expect to live through another 24.77 valentine’s days. 

Oh look…here comes another one…

As I’ve said before, I will vote for whoever the democratic candidate is this coming November.  But I’m still pretty much agnostic about the two leading contenders.  I don’t think either one of them will be great on gay equality.  But I’m actually starting to warm a bit to Obama, in spite of Donnie McClurkin, and here’s why…

I drove for two hours yesterday to Bangor with my sister and daughter to see Barack speak in Maine. I figured it would be interesting to see a candidate speak, when Maine is typically forgotten. We made the mistake of getting there about an hour before the doors opened to the Bangor Auditorium, as the population of the city had increased by a third for his speech. We waited in the longest line I had ever seen in my life for almost two hours. We met some wonderful people, many younger and surprisingly many quite a bit older.

After all of that waiting, we were only a few hundred feet from the auditorium when we were told that the main room had filled to capacity as well as the overflow room. Just when we were ready to turn back, we were told that Barack would speak to us outside, and would do so FIRST.

So imagine a scene like the stump speeches only read about in books, people jostling on snowbanks, climbing fences, trees, even each other in the calm cold that was Maine yesterday to hear and see Barack, for only a few minutes. And did he deliver…

Now, that’s a class act.  But also, he’s taking no votes for granted.  He’s making sure that everyone who comes to hear him, gets to hear him.  That’s good.  If the democrats are going to win back the white house, they’re going to need a fighter.  A grass roots, carry the fight right to the streets fighter.

That letter to Salon.Com ends with this…

Hillary speaks of worries about Barack being a likable guy, same as George Bush. She’s right, and also dead wrong. Likable they both can be, yes. But George Bush is the man who drinks you under the table, then drives you all home and thusly off a cliff.

Er…not quite.  Bush is the guy who will drink you under the table, then walk out leaving you stuck with the tab, then expect you to call him up the next day and thank him for having drinks with you.  And if he doesn’t get that phone call you’ll be on his shit list forever.

So after I returned that flimsy Edsal Steel shelving, I drove to Costco, filled up Traveler’s tank on their wholesale gas, and then bought my next, and probably my last restaurant size roll of plastic wrap.  I’ve no idea now how much the old one cost, but it was made by Reynolds and the box says it was two-thousand square feet.  Since it was a foot wide, figure that’s two-thousand feet long.  The new one is Costco’s house brand, Kirkland, cost about ten bucks and it’s also a foot wide and three-thousand square feet.

Heh…my packrat gene is screaming at me to keep the old box for posterity.  But it’s worn and tattered with age and probably not good for storing anything else now, and I don’t want to end up as one of those solitary old men with a house so full of random junk it’s got pathways you have to navigate between the piles.  I hate clutter, and that probably keeps the packrat urge in check.  Somewhat.  And I know which side of the family I got it from.  When I was going through mom’s things after she passed away, I got into the cabinet under the kitchen sink and swear to god I think she never threw out any little glass bottle or plastic tub she ever bought.  I knew what to expect of course when I opened those doors.  I grew up with it.  And you know her fridge was just packed full of leftovers, in little glass bottles and plastic tubs.  But she grew up during the great depression, so it probably all seemed very practical to her.  One thing I swore when I moved into my own place was that I would never eat leftovers again. 

I’ve tried over the years to limit my packrat gene to hardware.  And books.  I’ve got tons of books here and I’ve read nearly all of them.  I probably don’t have to visit a hardware store ever again in my life for nuts and bolts and washers and screws.

My twenties were a period of time where I wandered from one low paying job to another, while I was trying to make a living as a freelance photographer.  I did a lot of warehouse work in those days, and various Manpower temp jobs.  In the process I think I’ve put up more generic utility steel shelving in my life then Carter has pills (as my mom used to say).  I’ve put up a fair amount of wood shelving too, including the Ikea particle board and veneer bookshelves scattered all over Casa del Garrett.  Which is all to say that, dazed and confused though I am about a lot of things, I pretty much know how to put together shelving. 

Casa del Garrett is full of shelving.  There are bookcases everywhere, both free standing and bolted onto the walls.  I’ve added the occasional shelf to the kitchen cabinets where I thought they were needed.  There’s wall shelving in the basement, where I keep my winter supplies, and little glass shelves where I keep my favorite bottles of sugary cordials by the bar that I’ve modified slightly to suit myself.  This afternoon, I attempted to put up some new steel shelving in the basement, in a corner that I’ve needed to organize for some time now.  I say ‘attempted’, because I ended up buying what must be the worst piece of junk I’ve ever seen in my entire life.  Which kinda impresses me in a way, because as a fifty-four year old American, I’ve seen a lot of junk.

The corner in my basement where the dryer and the sump pump live is an odd one.  I’ve been fussing with it ever since I bought the house, never quite knowing what to do with it.  Eventually it began to accumulate a bunch of other things I didn’t know quite what do with either, mostly tools.  In one spot I kept all my tall yard tools…various rakes, shovels, and such, and the wide utility bristle broom.  These were all kinda piled together in the corner and getting one particular one out of the pile was getting to be a chore.  Next to that was a spot where I’d been stacking up power tools in their plastic carry cases.  Some of them, like the grinder, didn’t have nice carry cases so I left them in the boxes they came in.  On top of the grinder box I had two rubbermaid storage bins full of various things.  One bin holds all my extension cords.  Another some darkroom equipment that I seldom use anymore, mostly relating to the enlarger I don’t have anymore.  Next to that, was the big box my leaf vacuum lives in between seasons.  I had the miter saw stacked on top of it. 

So that was an area of the basement that needed organizing.  What kept me from doing it was that all the dimensions there were odd.  Most ready made shelving comes in 36 or 48 inch widths and I had only one chunk of space of 30 inches and one of 22 to work with.  Additionally, the circuit breaker box and electricity meter is near the middle the wall and the water pipes and shutoff valves to the bathroom on the other end toward the bathroom.  I couldn’t build shelving over either of these, and I couldn’t put anything over the spot in the floor where the sump pump was.  Every time I stopped to think of ways to organize that space, I’d get bogged down trying to resolve all the odd dimensions I had to work with, and I’d just put it off some more because there was always something else to do around the house.  I could have easily built some custom wooden shelving, but I didn’t want wood next to the dryer, which is gas.

What finally got me motivated was sometime during that night last Thursday the bathroom toilet sprung a small leak where the water feed connects to the tank.  A small trail of water then spread from the leak out the bathroom door and toward the sump pump.  Which is good…that’s where leaking water is supposed to go in the basement.  But along the way it seeped into the cardboard boxes where my leaf vacuum and grinder live, which made the bottoms soggy enough that they collapsed under the weight of the bins and the miter saw stacked on top.  I came downstairs yesterday morning to get some things out of the dryer, only to see the miter saw and the Rubbermaid bins tumbled onto the floor, the leaf vacuum box on its side, the grinder’s box sagging to one side, and water seeping out from the bathroom door.

Good morning sleepyhead!   So the first thing on the agenda was finding out where the leak was coming from, and then turning off the water to the bathroom.  It’s…disturbing…how much water can result from just a small drip drip dripping leak over just a few hours.  The previous owner had installed these really nice ball valves on the lines leading into the bathroom in the basement, so shutting off the water to the bathroom wasn’t a problem…I didn’t even bother with the toilet shut off valve.  Those ball valves are nice…at some point I want to replace all the shutoff valves in the house with them.  Once the water was off I moved everything out of the area and mopped it all down.  I spent a few minute checking the miter saw and the grinder for damage.  They looked okay.

I put a bucket under the toilet tank by the water feed and flushed once to empty the tank, then disconnected the water feed and removed the old fill valve and let the remaining water drain out.  I checked the area around the inlet to make sure the tank hadn’t cracked on me, which thankfully it hadn’t. Then I took a quick trip to Home Depot for a new fill valve, and a flexible water line to replace the solid one the previous owner had installed between the toilet shutoff valve and the tank.  The only flexible water lines in Casa del Garrett are the ones I’ve installed since moving in, and that’s basically the second floor toilet.  Eventually I want to replace every final connection to every faucet with flex line too because it makes things easier to work on.

While I was at Home Depot I wandered around the shelving area.  Now I really wanted to get that corner around the dryer and sump pump under control.  Over the years I’d let it become a clutter that I had to wade through whenever I needed something.  Just getting out the big broom usually meant taking several other long yard tools out of the stack first, just to get to it.  While I was looking around Home Depot I saw just the thing: a really neat looking yard tool organizer made by Black and Decker, that looked like it would fit in that area nicely.  It was only twenty bucks. 

Then I spied some shelving that was just the right size: Thirty inches wide and not 36.  So I brought a box of that home too.  It’s this shelving I want to warn you about.

As I said at the beginning of this, I’ve built a lot of steel shelving in my life.  This stuff, made by Edsal, is just plain junk.  When I got the box back home and opened it I saw a collection of cheap steel stampings that, when you fitted them together, simply would not stay together. 

Note that the propaganda on the box says the "Unit holds up to 1,000 pounds!"  Sure sounds like they’re telling you this thing can hold a lot of weight.  And here’s what’s supposed to hold all that weight:

That’s it.  That’s what you get.  A bunch of cheap steel stampings and four 1/8th inch pieces of particle board. There are little tabs on the uprights, and groves on the cross members you’re supposed to fit together and, as the instructions say, lightly tap into place until they lock. 

Except they don’t lock together at all.  The cross members kinda loosely hang over the tabs…

I tried for hours to get the pieces of that thing to stay together long enough that I could fully assemble one section (you’re supposed to bolt two sections of this thing together (!), one on top of the other, to get the advertised height) and they just wouldn’t.  Look closely at that joint.  There are two fatal flaws in the design that I can see.  First, the groves on the cross beams don’t seat all the way down on the tabs.  At least, not with the "tap" that the instruction manual says you give them.  In fact, you can take a hammer to this joint pretty forcefully and the cross beam still won’t seat fully.  But look more closely.  Notice that the end of the cross beam doesn’t fit right up into the corner of that upright.  There’s a small gap there, between the end of the beam and the corner of the upright.  That allows the beam to move slightly along that axis, even after it’s seated as far as you can get it to seat in the tabs.  If it sat snugly in the corner it might not be so bad, because it couldn’t move then.  But I still wouldn’t want to load this thing with a thousand pounds of anything.

Some steel shelving uses x bracing you attach to the back of the shelves to add rigidity.   As near as I can tell, Edsal expects the particle board shelves you lay over the beams to provide enough rigidity to the unit that the beams won’t wiggle out of their tabs.  But they don’t.  The entire unit can still flex and twist enough that sooner or later one of the beams wiggles free and then the entire thing collapses.

I never got it put together.  After a while I started trying to out think the poor design of the thing, and that led me to determine that I’d have to drill holes in it so I could bolt the damn thing together, and then add some additional bracing in the back of it or else I could never trust it to hold anything.  I was seriously considering doing that, but I eventually realized I was letting my pride get the better of me.  I didn’t want to admit I’d just been taken for a sucker.  I’m not normally that trusting of what I see on the box.  But I never expected in my wildest dreams to open a box of basic utility room steel shelving that was this utterly pathetic.

For kicks and grins, I did a google search on Edsal steel shelving, and came across these customer reviews over at Amazon of the 36 inch wide model…

Awful

Complete junk – The other 3 reviews describe the issues perfectly. I had to use duct tape to hold the pieces together.

… 

Junk!

This product has got to be one of the most poorly designed that I have ever tried to assemble. While boltless design may sound appealing, the slide-in tabs are not built to fit the piece that must be locked into it. Therefore, one is required to wedge, bang, or pry open the tabs so that they may be large enough, but once you get the pieces to fit together, the opening is far too large for it to stay secure. So then you try to bang it closed. Very sketchy. The whole piece wobbles, falls apart at random moments throughout the assembly process, and the cardboard shelves are flimsy, full of splinters, and cheap. The whole experience was frustrating, right down to trying to fit all the pieces back into the box so that I can return it.

…..

Worst EVER

These shelves won’t even support their own weight. I’d hate to see what might happens if a person actually tried to store something on them. I have fairly extensive experience with this type of inexpensive metal utility shelving and these are BY FAR the worst Ive ever tried. No matter how well you seat the boltless "fasteners", the unit sways and twists uncontrollably. A close reading of the instructions reveals that the shelves must be attached to the wall to work (this despite the clear picture of a free-standing unit on the box). Additionally, the 1/4 inch(!) particleboard shelves are weak like cardboard (but heavier), and do nothing to support the structure of the frame. The last straw is the complete lack of a crossbrace which might work to keep the thing square. What a total waste of time and energy. On the plus side, disassembly is a breeze since it falls apart on its own. :D

…

Four big NO votes on American Inventor..!

"Close, but no cigar" describes this attempt at a "boltless" shelving unit. It’s nice not to have to worry that there’ll be enough nuts, bolts and washers in some plastic baggie, but the reality of it is an extremely frustrating experience.

The tabs are poorly designed- both tabs on an end of the horizontal supports are exactly the same length. This means that BOTH tabs have to be started perfectly AT THE SAME TIME, to make them slide in. If one tab was slightly shorter, you could start one, then the other.

If the tabs are bent AT ALL, they won’t line up properly and either won’t slide into the slots, or will poke out to the outside instead of properly sliding all the way through the slot. Either way, it means taking the joint apart and bending the tabs until they slide in.

The problem with that is that there is NO positive locking of the tabs once they finally DO get through the slots. This means the end you struggled with for 10 minutes may pop out while you’re trying to deal with the other end. Trying to remove one end to re-align the tabs is likely to disloge BOTH ends, making you start completely over. The weight of the shelves and the items on the shelves will hold the tabs and slots together once you get that far, but during assembly it’s a recipe for extreme frustration.

There’s more wrong with the desigh, but you get the idea… I never wished so much for a plastic baggie full of nuts and bolts.

So I’m not the only one who is a tad displeased with the product.  This crap should have never made it out of the drawing room.  Somebody in management should have laughed in the face of the "engineer" who brought them this thing.  You’re joking…right?  Hahahaha…good one…  Now get back to work…

I’m taking the shelves back to Home Depot in a little while.  I’ll let you know what happens there.  Basically, I’ll settle for a store credit.  But I’m going to strongly urge them to get word back up the chain of command there, that this stuff is dangerous.  Somebody manages to actually get this shelving together and actually tries to load it up with a thousand pounds and they’re going to get hurt.

[Update…]  Home Depot cheerfully accepted my return, no hassle…

Me:  Hi…I bought this here yesterday…

She: Yeah…I think I sold it to you. 

Me:  Right…yeah…you were working the register…

She:  (cheerfully) So what’s the problem hon…?

You gotta love Baltimore folks.  I explained the issues I had with the shelving and she took the merchandise back, scanned in my receipt and issued me a credit.  So that’s that.  Hopefully word percolates up the ranks that this stuff isn’t worth selling.  Somebody gets hurt when one of these collapses under weight and you just know the lawsuits will go flying…

Via Cute Overload.  If you’ve ever attracted chickadees to your feeders, you know how they are…

Chickadees man…they’re like that.  I get scolded in the winter months when I go outside and there isn’t anything in the feeders.  And then I get sassed on the way back inside after I’ve filled them up again.  But they’re lots of fun to watch. 

Attract them with sunflower seeds, and a feeder that they can hang off of, but larger birds can’t.  You’ll hear them before you see them, their distinctive deedeedee call coming from here and there in a nearby tree.  If you watch carefully you’ll see them flit from one branch to another, getting closer and closer to the feeder.  Then they’ll dart in like little arrows, grab a seed and fly back to a nearby branch.  They put the seed between their feet and whack it a few times with their beak and then pry out the innards.  Then it’s back to the feeder for another one.