It's amazing how an ill-informed commenter can change my mood from ambivalent to doing the ten man keyboard tapdance in the blink of an eye. Check out this comment I just got from Tammy:
Let's take this one step at a time. First I don't believe that my thoughts, as expressed here, were what inspired Tammy to sign that petition, but if she says so then I won't argue. Now it's the "close-minded jerks" comment that got me.
It hurt my feelings.
For a second.
Then I remembered the old adage that most people who use the term close-minded have rarely considered the other side of any position they hold. That's not the belief they hold, and therefore it's wrong. No need to listen or consider. If Tammy had read this site carefully, she would have seen that the post she commented on was a deconstruction of some points another commenter made regarding my solicitation for signatures for the petition opposing gay marriage.
In other words, I considered the points and elaborated upon the reasons I disagree with them.
Tammy should try this exercise sometime. It's simple. If she disagrees with what I say here, fine. Address what I say with a well thought out refutation. It reflects much better on the author than, say, calling someone a jerk. (Not to mention you avoid that little hypocrisy thing when you call someone close-minded.)
Okay, Tammy goes on to say plenty of Americans feel differently than I do, no argument there. I still stand by my statement that themajority of Americans oppose gay marriage.
She then goes on to say that I don't believe all God's creatures should be treated equally or be shown love. First, let's dispense with the love point. Show me one place where I mentioned love in my posts discussing the gay marriage issue and I'll give you a dollar. I did mention love in the post about my car, but who couldn't love my cougar. Perhaps Tammy believes that the way to show my love for homosexuals is to always concede their every wish. Sorry, but anyone who would agree to such conditions really would be a jerk.
So let's talk about equal treatment. Or lack thereof. The truth is that this isn't about equal treatment. It's about special treatment. Homosexuals look around and what do they see? Special treatment for all kinds of groups--"minority" subsidies for small businesses, race-based government scholarships, tax benefits for married couples... Well, who wouldn't want in on that action? So the very powerful homosexual lobby started working on the matter.
It's that simple. Homosexuals see a benefit and they want a piece of it. I've already spelled out why I don't think they should be entitled to it, so I won't reiterate that here. I just have one more thing to say to you, Tammy.
Man, I love my car and I love driving. Here's a picture of what it looks like:
The only difference is that I don't have any sticker on my back window.
Oh yeah, and THE SUNROOF IS BROKEN.
I brought it to the dealership, they said it'd be $220 just to check out the problem, and the repair would probably total about $1,200.
So I started checking online. I found some stories like mine, so I decided to call Mercury to see if I could get them to help pay the repair bill. No deal.
I don't know what else to do, but I recommend that everyone who has had this problem visit this site and the one above to put your name on the list. There should be a recall, and creating a verifyable list of people who've had this problem might be the best way to encourage that to happen.
My post soliciting signatures for the petition to oppose gay marriages arose the ire of some people, as evidenced in the comments. I had no doubt that it would.
The complaints listed by jimbo are typical of those voiced by liberals regarding this subject. Let's take a look at them.
1. I would just like the ability to visit my partner in the hospital if he's sick...
This is a non-issue. Friends and family are already allowed to visit people in the hospital when they're sick. In certain cases, only the immediate family may be allowed visitation. To allow for such cases, individuals could easily obtain documentation that would provide for such a circumstance. In the meanwhile, homosexual lobbyists could work to create standard procedures for the ease of this procedure.
2. share health insurance benefits
Many companies already allow for this situation. Homosexual lobbyists should concentrate their efforts at the state and federal level to try to ensure that procedures are put into place for this to be required everywhere.
3. be the beneficiary of my partner's life insurance should he pass on
This is a legal matter, and I believe it can be settled by going to a lawyer and making the designation legal. Write up a will while you're there, why don't you.
4. and the ability to gain tax breaks for partnerships (as you can).
Ah, finally the true grievance comes out. Homosexuals want all the benefits that come along with marriage, including those provided by the state. Here's where I disagree. I feel that a society is composed of a group of people who, at least in the majority, feel the same way about various issues. Those things that are good for the society are encouraged, while those things that aren't are discouraged, or at least not rewarded.
Homosexuality is not good for a society in my opinion.
The truth is that most people in the US agree with me, and that's why it has never been encouraged. However, now with our all-tolerant society, everybody's afraid to oppose anything, regardless of how ridiculous or harmful it may be. Thus the idea of homosexual marriage has a foothold.
However, in order to be a truly accepted, and encouraged, part of our society, homosexuals feel that they need to have the government acknowledge their marriages. Nothing could be further from the truth. The real issue here has to do with money. Tax benefits are designed to go towards activities we, as a society, want to encourage. The arts for example, or charity organizations. And don't forget families.
Do two homosexual people a family make? No they do not. Sorry, but our society does not want to encourage some union between two men or two women, to make some twisted form of the "nuclear family." Enough damage has been done by the proliferation of single parent families (exacerbated by the effects of welfare). Enough is enough.
This man is not about to back down or be silenced. In May, Mr. Cosby shocked the black community in America by challenging them to take responsibility for their own actions.
Apparently the bad publicity has not deterred him, because he's at it again. In a speech Thursday, Cosby once again called the black community to look in the mirror for both the cause, and solution, to their problems. Although his words are being labeled an "attack" by many members of the press, it is high time that a successful, prominent role model for the black community said what would get anyone else labeled a racist.
Hooray for Bill Cosby. May courage such as his never fade from the hearts of the American people.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. --Martin Luther King Jr.
This is the first time I've ever written to you, but I think this issue is important enough that I felt compelled to do something.
I believe strongly that marriage should remain an institution between a man and a woman only. This country and, indeed, society itself relies upon the strength of families. Children are always better off when they're raised by their natural mother and father. This country's movement toward acceptance of some sort of family unit that is centered around a homosexual couple is something that I do not feel should be allowed to continue.
I sincerely hope that you will vote to support a Constitutional Amendment that will serve to ensure that the definition of marriage is not changed. Our society must stop being badgered into acceptance of everything. Some things are wrong and we need to remember how to stand up for those things that we hold sacred.
Thank you for your time.
The US Senate will vote on this issue during the week of July 12. I sent this letter in an e-mail to senators Sarbane and Mikulski. I hope that everyone who feels that marriage should be between a man and a woman will do the same.
And do it now.
It only takes a few minutes to send an e-mail. Feel free to copy mine if you don't have the time to write your own.
If you need the contact information for your state's senators, check here.
In case you may have missed it, I deleted a picture of my sister and the adjoining comments yesterday. It was at her request, because she felt I slighted her political party. I assured her that I felt that the sarcasm was pretty obvious in what I had written, but I took down the post anyway.
I've had several negative episodes with this sister (I have three others) over the years, but this one disappointed me a bit more than in the past. Essentially, I believed that she had gotten beyond her deep feelings of aggression toward me, but I suppose it is difficult for an old dog to learn new tricks.
Her feelings were clearly conveyed by her attempt to label my supposedly insulting words as signs of my passive-aggressiveness and rudness. How typical, she told me. Well.
I suppose I shouldn't have been so surprised, but I tend to forget that people are not always honest. Also, old disagreements or arguments are not always laid to rest by both parties at their resolution.
The really odd thing is that what I wrote isn't so dissimilar from the problems she pointed out with her party the last time we talked about it. I suppose she can criticize, jokingly or not, but out of my mouth it's an insult. If I'd have known that she still bore animosity toward me, I wouldn't have written what I did. You live and learn.
On a happier note, here's an inspiring article that I ran across today discussing the seemingly unique notion that Americans should be grateful for what we have in this country. I definitely agree.
I know all the ways to do it. Don’t make eye contact, walk with a purpose, never let them see you sweat.
But sometimes they get you anyway.
Skoo me. C’n I get fiddy cent? You gotta metro ticket I c’n have? Hey can you he’p me get somp’n to eat? How about a smoke then?
Help me, help me, help me. I just gave a guy 52 cents on the way back from lunch because I liked the way he was playing the saxophone. When I got across the street, this lady asked me to give her some money. I said no, but what I really felt like saying was that she should start trying to do SOMETHING for the pity money she continually asks people to hand out. If she can’t afford a musical instrument, get a squeegee and wash people’s windows, like the guy at the end of the 395 exit ramp onto Pennsylvania Avenue. Or look for a job walking around all day wearing a sign for a store. There are hundreds of ways to contribute at least a little bit in return for the handouts she gets.
Sometimes I think about how the Irish have a reputation for their generosity toward beggars. I think such attitudes and traditions relate to a memory of a not too distant past when a majority of the people were in a similar state. Unfortunately, as Ireland has found, when this type of activity is reinforced by positive results, it often becomes a problem that’s exacerbated by lazy, rather than truly needy people.
I work next to the main train station in Washington DC, and if I don’t take the Metro into that station, I usually park down the street next to the DC Greyhound bus station. Both places are magnets for freeloaders. On average, I get two requests for my “spare” funds every day. If I gave money to everyone that asked for it, I’d soon find myself out of a home. And I wouldn’t even have the satisfaction of smoking all the crack it bought.
Do you think Michael Moore's got it tough? You should read this story about one man's struggle to protest against his school's left-leaning version of history. (Via Pints)
My uncle Jack Foran sent a note to my sister, who forwarded it to me containing the items below. I finished my Stephen King book yesterday and today picked up the James Joyce's Ulysses study by Stuart Gilbert again. This time I'll finish Joyce's work.
June 16 is Bloomsday, the day in 1904 when the events of James Joyce's Ulysses supposedly happened. There is an annual Buffalo Bloomsday celebration which involves a public reading of Ulysses, at the Irish Classical Theater downtown, that is, readings by a large number of volunteers of chunks of the book, from beginning to end, and related festivities and food and drink. This year's was kind of an extra special celebration because this is the centenary of the 1904 original date. I'm always a part of this event and usually the first up. I give what is called the invocation, which is in reminscence of the invocation to the muse at the beginning of an epic poem (because Ulysses is really an epic, like its original predecessor the Odyssey, and when we read it aloud, as epic poems were recited aloud, it becomes one truly. So this year for the invocation I recited the first lines of the Odyssey.) I'm not really the very first speaker. There is a kind of major domo, Laurence Shine, who introduces me, and then all the regular (Ulysses) readings and readers, and provides explanations and commentary as needed. The first reader of the regular readings is always Dr. Jim Warde, an Irish-born physician in Buffalo. Well, it happened that Jim's mother just died, about a week after mom, also at the age of 95. So after we both had done our bits, Laurence stopped the proceedings to note that both of us, Jim and I, had lost our mothers recently, and dedicated the evening to the two mothers. So mom was a patroness and honoree of the 2004 version Buffalo Bloomsday celebration. I thought that was pretty great, and just wanted to pass this information along.
------------
Obituary for Helen McCarty Foran
Helen McCarty Foran, who was born in 1908 in a residence above a tavern her father ran on Seneca Street in the First Ward, died in Lake City, Minnesota, June 1. She and her older sister, Kay, and younger brother, Pete, were orphaned when their mother died in the flu epidemic of 1918. Several weeks earlier, their father, who had been tending the mother in her illness in addition to trying to keep the tavern, had succumbed to a heart ailment. The three children had been enrolled at St. Monica’s School, but then, following the decease of the parents, through the generosity of an uncle, Joe Schaff, who later became head of the Simon Pure Brewery, were sent to Stella Niagara boarding school in Lewiston. Summers they lived with an aunt, Carrie Schaff, in Lancaster. Following Stella Niagara, Helen McCarty worked briefly as a secretary in a legal office, and then trained as a nurse and worked at Providence Retreat and Sister’s Hospital for several years before marrying Dr. John Foran, a dentist. The couple had five children, Mary (now Reardon), Jack, Helen (now McMenamin), Kathy, who died as an infant, and Ann (now Johnson). They lived in Buffalo for a few years and then on a farm in Clarence Center until the Blizzard of ’77, when Helen and her husband, who had recently suffered a stroke, were marooned in their remote farmhouse without heat and electricity for more than two days before being rescued by snowmobilers. After that near-fatal episode, they moved to Florida. Following the death of her husband in Florida, Helen moved to Minnesota, where her daughter Mary resided. Private services were held in Lake City. Interment will be in Florida.
In a very disturbing and possibly politically-motivated move, the US announced today that we would no longer pursue immunity from the EU's pet project, the International Criminal Court. Think this isn't a big deal? Well, the reasons the US hasn't signed onto the ICC yet are many, but this is the one that resonates the most to me:
the ICC is an institution of unchecked power. In the United States, our system of government is founded on the principle that, in the words of John Adams, "power must never be trusted without a check." Unchecked power, our founders understood, is open to abuse, even with the good intentions of those who establish it.
Everyone instinctively feels that any international court would be a good thing, but there's no doubt that such an institution could be misused for political purposes. With today's current events fresh in everyone's minds, it should be obvious to everyone that it would take little effort to get together enough support to start going after Americans.
I consulted with my sister, but between us we couldn't figure out what issues of extradition and jurisdiction would arise if such a court decided to prosecute an American when we didn't agree. It also seems that there should be more involved with the decision to participate in such a court, like a vote of the Senate and the endorsement of the President. After all, this ICC would effectively become a part of our own court system, one that is in some ways higher than the Supreme Court. I'm sure I'll be able to read more that'll clarify this in the next few days.
The one bright spot is that the US is not left completely without recourse. We still provide most of the support for the UN peacekeeping missions...
So one more lame music lineup bites the dust. Lollapalooza 2004, which was planning to dazzle attendees with such sensational musicians as The Polyphonic Spree and Le Tigre, has been cancelled, due to lack of interest. To be honest, there were some relatively popular acts on the lineup, but no one that was a must-see. The Pixies? Better left forgotten. Sonic Youth? Not so young anymore. Morrissey? Okay, I'm slitting my wrists now.
I used to go to the HFStival every year with my friends. Like Lollapalooza, it's a big collection of bands that play over the course of a day. For the most part it's fun, and the HFStival always had a better lineup than Lollapalooza's had for a while. (Some bands from this year: The Cure, The Violent Femmes, The Offspring, Cypress Hill) I stopped going because of two reasons--the headline acts only played for about 40 minutes apiece, and I started getting tired of having to (literally) spend most of my time in the mosh pit trying to keep the 8-12 year olds near me from getting crushed. Of course I'm getting older, but the age of people at the concert was going rapidly in the opposite direction. How any parent can let their pre-teen child go to such an event, supervised or not, is beyond me.
I am planning one outing to a huge, multi-day music event this year, however: the Austin City Limits Festival. Yes, the Pixies will be one of the headlining acts, but I think that others, like Sheryl Crow, Ben Harper, Jack Johnson and Ryan Adams can make up for that. The best part? One of my cousins lives in Austin, so I've got a place to stay for free. Plus, one of my other cousins will be coming down from Minnesota as well. Should be a good time.
All too often in life I find myself missing the chance to fully experience the moment I’m currently experiencing because of my attempts to do or think about too many things at once.
For example, my father calls me most days while I’m at work. He has a long commute and a lot of children, so he uses his return trip to check in with us. Of course I’m at work when he calls, so I’m usually in the middle of something when the phone rings. Sometimes, without thinking about it, I try to keep doing my work while my dad talks. I usually remember what he said, and I pay attention enough to provide the answers that keep his conversation going, but I don’t really contribute much. I’ve found that I usually feel bad later on that I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to really connect with my dad for those few minutes. Having gone through this a few times, I now try to drop the other things (which I can pick back up whenever I’d like) and pay full attention to my father while he and I have the chance.
This is a lesson that I’ve found applies in lots of areas in life. It takes a conscious effort, but the rewards make it worthwhile. Essentially, this is an extension of the principle that one should only spend time worrying about what can be controlled. (An idea expressed quite well in the Serenity Prayer.)
I called my sister Maureen this morning and left a message congratulating her and her husband on their 7th anniversary. When she called back, she told me that when she played my message, an old message marked for deletion was played first, which was from my late grandmother when she called my sister in an effort to get in touch with my mom. Maureen told me she re-saved the message, and that she’d get to listen to it again in 30 days and decide once again what to do with it. These are the types of events that clarify the importance of each shared experience in our lives.
I wasn’t sure why I wanted to talk about this subject when I started but, as often happens, it became clear to me as I drew out my ideas via the keyboard. I drove up to my parents’ house Sunday to see my dad on his day. I knew all along that they had just sold their house, and that they’re planning on moving to Mobile, Alabama as soon as they can. It seems like an odd location choice to me, when most of their children are around the greater Washington area, but maybe that’s why they want to get out of town. I was driving along, thinking not about their impending move, but rather about the fact that I wouldn’t have any reason left to visit Hanover, Pennsylvania again after July 31, when it hit me—in a fairly short time, I won’t be able to see my parents without hopping on a plane.
I felt like the ground had dropped out from under me for a moment.
It was just a temporary feeling, but the shock of it made me realize that I should take more advantage of the proximity of my parents while I can. Easier said than done, of course. I proceeded, upon arriving at my parents’ house, to spend the entire time there changing the brakes on my car. Oh well. I’m sure I’ll get to see them plenty when I help them move later next month.
It's always a shame when those people who have been so close to us during certain stages in our lives disappear for one reason or another. One person moves away and you lose touch, or you get into a squabble which you realize later amounted to nothing of consequence. One of the things I like the most about the internet is that there's really no reason for such things to happen anymore. Web-based internet addresses rarely change, so there's always an easy way to stay in touch with your friends no matter what happens in your lives.
Too bad the internet wasn't around ten years ago. Still, even for those people lost relationships that pre-date the internet, there is hope. Free people searches are getting more and more accurate, (which, in itself, is pretty scary in a way) giving us the opportunity to track down those long lost friends.
I recently had some success with this myself, when I decided I wanted to look up my old friend David Heatwole. We were the best of friends for a number of years, but then we both moved (repeatedly) and lost track of one another. Well, I found an e-mail address registered to his name in the area I last knew him to be, and took a chance. It turns out he'd moved again, but the e-mail address was the same, so my effort was a success. It was great to catch up with him online, and I'm planning on giving him a call this weekend to do more of the same. By the way, Dave is an artist, and you can find some of his current work at this site.
It was 100 years ago today that James Joyce met his wife. The day and its events so touched the young writer that he decided to use that date for his renowned masterpiece, Ulysses. Well, I guess that people have been celebrating Bloomsday for quite a while, but this year it's extra special, being the centennial anniversary. Ireland is holding extensive events for the next few months, and countries around the world are recognizing this amazing book in various ways:
Look around, there's sure to be something going on in your town, too. Someday I'll have to actually finish reading the book myself, so I can enjoy a well earned Guinness on Bloomsday.
If there's one thing I hate, it's bringing my car into the shop. I recently got a recall notice on my Cougar (fuel pump) and I figured I'd get them to check out some other things while it was there. By the way, I brought it to the Academy Ford dealership on Route 1 in Laurel.
I was hearing a slight squeaking when the car first started moving. They checked it out and said the entire front brake system needed to be replaced--pads and rotors. The cost? $90 for labor, $90 for the pads and $170 for the rotors. To give you an idea of how much of a ripoff this deal is, replacement rotors are $25.88 from Advance Auto Parts. Brake pads? $29.98
I also asked them to check out my sunroof, which seems to have come off its track. They told me that it'd cost me $220 just for labor to check out what was wrong. If I need a new gear, $350. If I need a new motor, $900. I found the sunroof motor online for $305.90
The worst part about all this is that I can fix both these things myself. I just never have the time. These jerks are used to taking schmucks to the cleaners mostly because they don't know any better. I suppose that ignorance is bliss to most people, but I feel good about being able to sniff out a rip-off artist at work, even if I have few other options.
To make myself feel better, I wrote a letter to the shop telling them I felt that they were trying to rip me off, quoting them the lower parts prices. I'm sure it won't change anything, but it made me feel a little better.
Now if I could only get my sunroof to open again...
