My voice in Washington

If you’re not from Georgia’s 4th District, you may not have heard of Cynthia McKinney... but those of us around here have. She’s back in the news for slugging a Capitol police officer who had the gall not to recognize her. Her “official” statement makes it all sound like a big misunderstanding, sung to the tune of Kum-Ba-Yah. More telling, though, is the statement she released yesterday. Apparently it matters that the police officer was white.

And for those of you who have no idea who this woman is*, let’s take a moment to revisit what dear old dad Billy McKinney said in 2002. Apparently she comes by it honestly.

*Lucky devils.

For the budget-minded grandmother or queen in your life

Has anybody else checked out Grower’s Outlet in Loganville? It’s a tiny property wedged in behind a QT on a dead-end street, but they’ve got the best prices on plants. Here’s their current inventory, and here’s their latest ad. If you need plants in bulk, this is the place to buy them. I’m afraid to go on the weekends. It’s crazy enough at lunchtime during the week.

You're gonna love this one

Jerry Taylor, city manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma, went to the city’s website to make some changes. He finds an error message on the website and mistakes it for a hacking attempt. He sends a nasty e-mail to a CentOS support worker, who tries his best to correct the problem for Taylor, but Taylor won’t have any of it. He even threatens to contact the FBI.

Original story here. Follow-up story here. And the original e-mail exchange here. Go ahead, it’s worth the click.

Bloody flowers

This is gonna be the gayest post you’ve read all day. Deal.

So apparently the powers that be really liked my flowerbed the way it looked last year, because they’re doing everything they can to stop me from overhauling it.

Since I really can’t start planting anything ‘til the county shows up to fix the driveway, I’ve been spending my time planning what’s going to go there. I’ve sketched out the shape of the flowerbed, and I’ve made little color cut-outs of different plants that I can move around on paper until I’m happy with the way it looks. I’ve considered plant heights, so that I don’t stick salvia¹ in behind a bunch of lantana where it will never be seen. I've considered colors too, because I don't want my flowers to clash with each other.

Yes, I’m obsessing about it. But it’s been so scraggly for so long that I want our neighbors to really really notice it this year.

Anyway, I found a plant in a garden catalog this year that I’d never seen before, and it was so striking I planned a lot of the flowerbed around it. It’s called Japanese Blood Grass: a vertical, deep-red to burgundy grass that grows to about 24” tall. I’ve never seen it before, so I prepared myself to order it². I showed the picture to hubby, and he didn’t care for it. And I thought to myself, screw you, I don’t care what you think, I’m ordering it anyway³.

So I trot my happy ass into my friendly neighborhood Home Depot Landscape Supply Company^{4, 5} yesterday to inquire about ordering these. How long, how much, blah blah blah. And I know they can get it, because the place where I found it is a Home Depot catalog. The guy I talked to had never heard of it, so he picks up the phone to call someone in another store.

Turns out this plant is a relative of bamboo and is so invasive that it now shows up on the Federal Noxious Weeds List (Imperata cylindrical). They can still get it for now, but it’s technically been banned.

Good thing I haven’t bought any other plants yet, because I’m quite literally back to the drawing board.

¹Did you know the English word for salvia is sage? I didn’t.
²Something I never, ever do.
³Something else I never, ever do.
⁴By contrast, something I do all the time.
⁵Do y’all have these where you live? It’s like Disneyland for gardeners.

Richard Peck would be so proud

OK, I had some lame spring breaks when I was a kid, mainly because I was working around my dad's shop. And even when I wasn't working, we never did huge spring break trips. But I don't think it ever crossed my mind to spend my spring break at Wal-Mart.

Beards

Vanna White will tell you never to throw away belts, shoes, or scarves because they always come back in style. Apparently the same is true of facial hair. And doesn't that beard look good on George Clooney?

Playing in the dirt again

OK, apparently there’s some government conspiracy to keep my lawn torn con-damn-pletely up. It started last fall, when a county water line developed a leak under the corner of my property. After a couple days watching water trickle out of the curb and run down the gutter, I came home to find a backhoe parked in my yard and the street in front of my house covered with mud. And it happened just as the Zoysia grass was going dormant, so I haven’t been able to re-sod. There’s been a huge gaping muddy hole there ever since.

Then a few weeks ago we got notice that the county needed to do replace water lines leading to everyone’s meters, so last week they dug up the area between my meter and the street. And in the process, they drove something across the corner of my driveway and broke up the concrete. Normally this wouldn’t be such a big deal except I’m trying to landscape the flowerbed beside the driveway and I don’t want to go any further until they repair it (sometime in the next couple of weeks). At least they’re coming back to repair it, and this time they re-sodded around the meter.

Then Tuesday night, I came home to find one of these...

...sitting in my heretofore-well-established bed of English Ivy. Parked there. As in we’ll be back tomorrow to use this monster, but for now we’re just looking for a place to leave it overnight. Nope, it’s not on the big gaping muddy hole, it’s next to it. I mean, we wouldn't want to minimize the damage, now, would we? These are both on the front corner of our yard, and since we’re the first house in the subdivision¹, the gaping muddy hole and the barren ivy wasteland now compose the first impression for anyone coming to visit any of my neighbors. This particular bit of landscaping was done by the phone company², who drove over a landscaped traffic island causing more muddy ruts and leaving a trail of dirt on their way out of the neighborhood.

Ah, spring.

¹Which is not completely unlike being the only gay in the village.
²Why yes, that would be the phone company that I fired 18 months ago. No, no, this is the one we fired before we fired Vonage.

Legal review

Next up, Eugene Volokh in the National Review Online has a very good analysis of the various states' efforts to keep Fred Phelps from annoying mourners in his attempt to cash in on First Amendment lawsuits. It's definitely worth reading.

And I'm still not sure why more people aren't asking about the death of Debbie Valgos.

A Way With Words

OK, it's Friday, which means it's time to clear some things out of my brain and make room for the weekend. First up, Jonah Goldberg is usually worth reading for his political ideas, but even more so this week for the phrase "that thespian carbuncle of bile." Check him out here.

Now it all comes clear

When I wrote about Fred Phelps and his roving band of inbreds demonstrating at the funerals of fallen soldiers around the country, I noted that several states were considering legislation to limit their protests. I did not realize at the time that Georgia was one of those states.

First, a little housecleaning. In that post, I claimed Phelps was an attention-whore. The only other explanations I’d heard at the time didn’t seem plausible to me: that he was gay and closeted (and incredibly self-loathing), or that he was just a whack-job. But none of these really made sense. Sometime shortly afterward, I stumbled across comments posted to this thread by a user named El_Camino_SS at 2006-02-21 08:34:10 AM. You can search or scroll through to find the original. A couple of excerpts from his argument (emphasis here is mine):

Fred Phelps does not believe what he is doing. This is a scam. It's a business. They travel the country, set up websites telling you exactly when they'll be there, and using the most inflammatory statements all over the place, just to get someone to violate their rights for profit. Then they sue the military, the police force that was to protect them, and everyone that is around them for money. This is a sham, and it is a trap to get people sued. Every member of his family is an attorney. Phelps does not break the law. What he does is try to make you break the law by trying to punch your sensibilities about everything you hold dear, and then sue you and everyone municipality around him to the max...

His boards are laminated on hardwood, because he pulls them out of trucks at least five times a week...

The most telling tale about all of Phelp's behavior is the schedule he keeps, and the company he keeps as well. The parties sometimes split up and go to two seperate state funerals to maximize the profitability of them. There are, at maximum, twelve members to the party. They never stay more than thirty minutes (I assume they realize that someone will do something to them the MOMENT they come out of the vans, and really, after that, they get their camera shots to cause the outrage for the next stop, and then they move on) to maximize their profits, because time is money, and really, they're not interested in the message, because they're just interested in the lawsuit....

See? It’s a brilliant ploy, and we’ve all been falling for it. And it’s even borne out by Phelps’ own words:

"I want congress to pass a law that says I can't picket so we can immediately get it to the nation's attention in one gulp,"says Fred Phelps, Pastor of Westboro Baptist Church.

Of course that’s what he wants, so he can file a fat, federal, First Amendment lawsuit. Be sure to tell all your friends.

At any rate, it concerned me that Georgia and other states were considering legislation to keep him from disrupting these funerals. It’s the price of free speech, no? But a couple of issues have changed my mind on this.

1. The Georgia bill does not prevent anyone from demonstrating. It merely creates a 500-foot buffer so that he’s kept a small distance away from the family.

2. I went back and re-read the First Amendment to see what it says. (I fully recommend that everyone partake in this exercise from time to time.) And one word in particular jumped out at me:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

His purpose is not, and has never been, peaceful. His purpose is to create a disturbance so that he can cash in.

And my purpose? To make sure everybody has heard about Debbie Valgos.

Care and Feeding of Your Introvert

In 2003, Jonathan Rauch wrote a partially tongue-in-cheek essay for The Atlantic called Caring for Your Introvert: The habits and needs of a little-understood group. It continues to draw more traffic to their website than any other article and led to a recent interview with Sage Stossel, another introvert and senior editor for The Atlantic. If you’re an introvert, none of the information in these two pieces will surprise you. If you’re an extrovert, you may understand the concept of introversion, but you probably don’t comprehend it. Or as Rauch wrote:

...someone you know, respect, and interact with every day is an introvert, and you are probably driving this person nuts.

I remember going to restaurants as a kid and watching older couples eat dinner together in near-complete silence, and I remember thinking, “What a shame that those two old people are so unhappy that they don’t even want to talk to each other.” Then, as I got older and fell into my own long-term relationship, I realized quite the opposite: part of the joy of growing old together is that you don’t have to entertain each other 24/7. The line that Rauch quoted from Waiting for Godot summed it up beautifully: Don't talk to me. Don't speak to me. Stay with me.

A note for my friends: when we cook dinner for you at our house*, and I disappear late in the evening to start cleaning the kitchen, it’s not because I care more about the plates than you. It’s not because I wish you would go home. It’s because I’m perfectly content saying nothing, and you’re in capable conversational hands with my hubby. And if I ever fall asleep at your dinner table, please take it as the highest compliment, because it means that I’m very comfortable with your company.

My name is Ben, and I am an introvert.

*Please note that we never have more than 10 or 12 people MAX over for dinner. I’m actually more comfortable with 4 or 6. And as you may have gathered, the one event I dread every year is the Christmas party that we give our friends, co-workers, and clients. Because I know that I’m going to be on-stage for 6 hours or more. And hubby doesn’t understand why that bugs me.

A little chlorine, please?

In case you're wondering, this is the gene pool that I crawled out of 16 years ago. Behold the seductive power of Pelham, Georgia.

I'm dying for a Twix bar over here...

...and there aren't any in our vending machine. If I walk down to the next floor to get one, will I burn enough calories to enjoy it?

In which the Normans go back home

My, wasn’t I ambitious? It turns out that it may be humanly possible to achieve all the goals I set for myself, but only if you don’t care about having any chance at any social life whatsoever. With that in mind, I’m officially marking one of my goals off my list. French, for me, is done.

At this point, I speak and understand it as well as I ever did, so I can’t say that I’ve failed. And I did make it to the end of Pimsleur Level II. But I don’t see much point in continuing to practice, seeing as how it’s not really a language I want to speak. If we end up going to Paris next year (dates set: June 24 to July 1), I’ll brush up a little before we leave so I can at least ask where the toilet is located. Outside of that, my traveling companions will just have to find another translator.

And it’s pretty much official: Rob and I will be taking German classes next month at the Goethe Institut. Now if we can just do it without going out for ein bier oder drei after class and totally blowing our diets...

More cuteness

OK, so the cookie thief got disqualified for being a sock puppet. This should fill your need for authentic Friday afternoon cuteness.

Spiffy Redefined

Alright. I’ve been pretty lax about this for the last week or so. Not for lack of material – for lack of time. Let me see if I can catch up a little.

Sunday, Hubby and I went down to Spiffy Hall to hear Paul Jacobs play the big Rufatti organ there. It was our second trip to see him there and the first for our friends Jim & Steve. If you have any interest at all in organ music, you owe it to yourself to find him in concert, somewhere in your area. Truly. He's worth the drive. Obviously I can’t play any of his recordings for you here, but these quotes from his bio should give you an idea of his abilities:

Paul Jacobs came to national attention as a concert organist in 2000 when he twice performed the complete organ works of J. S. Bach in 14 consecutive evenings, in New York City and Philadelphia. Later in the year he trumped that achievement by performing the complete works again in a spectacular 18-hour, non-stop marathon in Pittsburgh.... [He] has memorized the complete organ works of Brahms, Franck, and Duruflé, much Messiaen, most of Bach, and a vast range of other organ literature.

He was appointed chairman of the organ department at Julliard in 2003 at the age of 26, making him one of the youngest faculty appointments in the school’s history. And unlike some other performers, he lives up to the hype. He’s not only computer-precise in his playing, he’s musical. And he’s personable, and he makes it look so very effortless. We heard him play the snot out of Max Reger’s Fantasy and Fugue on "Wachet auf! ruft uns die Stimme.” When he finished, hubby turned to me and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that piece before.”

And I responded, “That’s because nobody else can play it.”

I’ve been all week trying to find a good recording of it, but I think I’ll be disappointed in anybody else’s performance. If nothing else, I know they don't take it at the blinding tempo he used.

And on top of everything else, near the end of the concert, he ‘fessed up that he had forgotten his organ shoes in New York City. He played the entire concert in his Gold Toe socks.

By the way, I thought the faux marble technique at Spivey Hall was a little on the tacky side... until last summer when I realized the Katholische Hofkirche in Dresden got exactly the same faux marble treatment.

This SHOULD be cause for celebration

Well, after promising myself that I’d post something every day, I’ve been quiet for nearly a week now. Time to fix that, and this time I’ve got good news.

At my weigh-in on Saturday, I achieved two notable milestones. I’ve officially lost 40 lbs (42 and change, actually), in just about five months. And my fully dressed weight, including shoes, is under 200 lbs now. It’s a big enough change that the picture on my work badge doesn’t quite look like me any more. I was a real porker. And wouldn’t you know it, I’ve still got a spare tire.

I’m not sure how much longer to push it. Crystal has told me (twice now) that I’ve lost too much. So has Theresa (she’s also on WW). And last night, even hubby asked me when I was going to stop. I really don’t think I’m in any danger of become anorexic, but I’m not quite ready to stop just yet. According to the BMI, that infallible tool created by the National Institutes of Health that only compares your weight to your height, I’m still freaking overweight. 25.2. And I’m using my all-starkies, post-pee, no-shoes, early morning weight to calculate that one.

Bunny stealing a cookie

Because you didn't think it was possible to be cuted to death, did you?