Justice marches on.

One of my favorite singer/songwriters, Dottie Rambo, died early this morning when her tour bus ran off the road and hit an embankment. I just stumbled across the news story and it has completely floored me.

I almost went to see her earlier this year when she was going to perform at the Kentucky Opry, but backed out at the last minute. That’s a decision that I will always regret.

Dottie’s song “He Looked Beyond My Fault And Saw My Need” will always be one of my favorites. Although it seems that most people aren’t familiar with her, she wrote over 2,500 songs that were performed by Dolly Parton, Elvis Presley, Whitney Houston, and many others.

Rest in peace, Dottie.

After arriving home from work yesterday, I went through my usual routine of gathering the mail and coming inside to unwind after a long day. Thursdays are Alan’s day off and he was next door visiting the neighbor. As I stood at the kitchen table reading the mail, I heard a loud “glug-glug” noise coming from the direction of our water heater. I immediately turned my head to see a pool of water spreading across the floor in my direction and panicked, seemingly incapable of making a decision on the course of action that I needed to take.

I’ve heard of water heaters exploding and causing tremendous structural damage (see photo), so my first instinct was to flee the scene. As I ran towards the door, I distinctly remember thinking about the potential demise of my cats from the pending appliance bomb, but I quickly decided that self-preservation was in my best interest and ran outside and across the yard to the neighbor’s house. Alan was still laughing hours later about the look on my face when I yanked open the door and announced, “The house is flooding!”

After turning off the water, cleaning up the mess, and assessing the situation, we realized that purchasing a new water heater would be necessary and headed off for the nearest home improvement store. Twenty-four hours later, Alan is under the house rerouting water lines so that we can install our latest purchase.

Even though this experience is far from pleasant, I am utterly thankful for four things.

1. It happened while I was home from work, thereby preventing extensive flooding and damage to our house.

2. We just got the incentive check from the IRS and were able to cover the unexpected expense. It does make me a little suspicious that Bush was somehow responsible though, since I intended to pay off debt with the money but had to spend it on improving the economy, just like he intended. Darn Republicans.

3. This was the perfect opportunity to move the water heater from its incredibly inconvenient location (cramped under a kitchen cabinet and wedged between our refrigerator and the wall) to a more appropriate and safer place (the utility room). It will now be sitting on a concrete slab so that leaks won’t be so potentially catastrophic.

4. Our neighbor allows us to use her shower, so going without hot water for a couple of days isn’t as terrible as it sounds.

So, even when experiencing these little “joys” of home-ownership, it’s easy to see that there is plenty to be thankful for.

God and Google are the only ones who know why some of these search strings resulted in traffic to my site, but here they are for your viewing pleasure…

flamingo toilet paper stand

Do flamingos even use toilet paper?

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Marrying one’s self could result in a really messy (and bloody) divorce on down the road.

we had grill out with friends gay friend

Well, wasn’t that wide of you?

Is Holding Your Breath Bad for You?

That depends on how long you’re holding it, my dear.

homophobia is gay

I agree. Totally.

hairy camels in Oregon City, Oregon

I have no witty response for this one, but I thought it was cool.

Vacuum cleaners used as male sex toys

Ouch!

homophobic emoticons

why are sailors gay

Must be something in the water.

jack nicholson don’t waste a hardon

So I’ve heard.

From the archives:
Interesting Search Engine Terms #1
Interesting Search Engine Terms #2

Bill Moyers took approximately six minutes of his latest broadcast to address the thousands of letters that were received in response to Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s appearance on his program a little over one week ago. Here is the transcript of his powerful and thought-provoking words, or you can watch the video below.

I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam, “Who’s telling the truth over there?” “Everyone, he said. “Everyone sees what’s happening through the lens of their own experience.” That’s how people see Jeremiah Wright.

In my conversation with him on this broadcast a week ago and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage. Over 2000 of you have written me about him, and your opinions vary widely. Some sting: “Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American hating radical,” one viewer wrote. A “nut case,” said another. Others were far more were sympathetic to him.

Many of you have asked for some rational explanation for Wright’s transition from reasonable conversation to shocking anger at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I’m not a psychologist. Many black preachers I’ve known — scholarly, smart, and gentle in person — uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course I’ve known many white preachers like that, too.

But where I grew up in the south, before the civil rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else; a safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed. I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched. Or if my great-great grandfather had been but three-fifths of a person in a constitution that proclaimed, “We the people.” Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Connor, and Jesse Helms. Even so, the anger of black preachers I’ve known and heard about and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic.

That’s not how Jeremiah Wright came across in those sound bites or in his defiant performances this week. What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory words is an attack on the America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle, forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them, and that Wright himself has a record of honored service in the Navy. Hardly anyone took the “chickens come home to roost” remark to convey the message that intervention in the political battles of other nations is sure to bring retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the particular savagery of 9/11, but to understand that actions have consequences.

My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes, people are understandably seething with indignation over Wright’s absurd charge that the United States deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being. But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a study that deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into believing that they were being treated, while actually letting them die for the sake of a scientific test. Does this excuse Wright’s anger? His exaggerations or distortions? You’ll have to decide or yourself. At least it helps me to understand the why of them.

But in this multimedia age the pulpit isn’t only available on Sunday mornings. There’s round-the-clock media — the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help — people who for their own reasons set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn’t running for president with the man in the pew who was.

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering Catholic-bashing Texas preacher who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee’s delusions, or thinks AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell said the attack was God’s judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass. Jon Stewart recently played a tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the oval office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy; this is wrong — white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t.

Which means it is all about race, isn’t it? Wright’s offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn’t fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone’s neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettle some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship.

Politics often exposes us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this, this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said “beware the terrible simplifiers”.

Nothing like a kitty smile to make everything seem right in the world.

If
By Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master,
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man, my son!

Today is International Respect for Chickens Day, which “celebrates the devotion of hens to their chicks and also deplores the suffering of motherless chickens on factory farms.” The photo to the right shows a rescued chick being fostered by her new mom.

And… today is my 34th birthday. Since I’m nearing middle-age, I think I’ll go ahead and start planning one heck of a mid-life crisis. I think I’ll get pec implants, a red convertible, and a hot, younger guy. Well, I’ve already got the last one covered, but the bigger chest and sports car sounds pretty good.

Have a great day, everybody, but please don’t eat any loving chicken mommies for lunch!

I just watched a very powerful documentary about abortion entitled Lake of Fire. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything that moving and it’s going to take a while to digest it. If you think you know your personal position on abortion, take the time to watch it. I guarantee your views will be challenged.

Although I’ve always been mostly pro-choice, I will admit that watching actual procedures and seeing the mutilated fetuses made me question my own beliefs. In fact, my pro-choice point of view almost seems at odds with many of the other beliefs that I hold dear. Why is it that pro-lifers usually support the death penalty, while those who are pro-choice are often against it? Strange.

There were a couple of statements made in the film that really stuck with me. One was that abortion is a token issue for Republicans, much like Social Security is for Democrats. Republicans get elected because of their stance on abortion, so one commentator asked if Republicans would really want to see abortion abolished. What would that do for their political ambitions?

The other statement was one made by Cardinal Joseph Bernadine, who adopted a philosophy known as the “Seamless Garment of Life,” which “holds that issues such as abortion, capital punishment, militarism, euthanasia, social injustice and economic injustice all demand a consistent application of moral principles that value the sacredness of human life.”

There isn’t an easy answer for the important question of whether or not legal abortions should be provided, and this documentary doesn’t provide that answer, but it does give the viewer lots to think about.

Today marks the third year that Alan and I have been together. We met 36 months ago for our first date, which consisted of a viewing of The Interpreter and dinner at Olive Garden. While the food was great, the movie wasn’t that good, but it didn’t matter because it was impossible to concentrate with his leg brushing up against mine. We’ve been practically inseparable ever since.

He is my knight in shining armor, my fairy tale prince, my better half. I don’t know how I got so lucky.