***Dave Does the Blog

Timing is everything

We go to Britain in three weeks. Twenty-one days. Timing is everything….

We go to Britain in three weeks. Twenty-one days.

Travelogue 3

I took off from the golf course ASAP, on the off chance I could get on the earlier flight. Remarkably enough, the 405 was free and clear from Newport to…

I took off from the golf course ASAP, on the off chance I could get on the earlier flight. Remarkably enough, the 405 was free and clear from Newport to just below LAX. The United lines at the airport weren’t bad. TSA had set up lots of swabbing stations between the switchbacks and the desks, and they checked the bags for Evil Stuff whilst ticket arrangements were being made. Use of the Big X-Ray Machines took place behind the scenes, as at DIA.

I got standby status on the 4:55p flight, so had time to grab a bit at McDonalds. If I didn’t get on the early flight, I’d have time for chili cheese fries over at the diner.

Time passed slowly, but ultimately — huzzah! — I was able to get on the early flight. We taxied to the end of the runway, powered up for take-off, powered back down, powered up, powered back down, and over the flight deck channel on the headphones I could hear them calling an abort to the tower.

Huh?

The crew came on the intercom a minute later to explain that there was a light coming on showning an alignment problem with the landing gear tires. It was back to green, and they were going to give it another try, but if that failed, they’d have to go back to the gate.

Visions of the future flashed through my eyes. We go back to the gate. We sit there three hours, as they try different things. Finally, they put us onto a different plane … I looked around. We were on a 777, and were very full. Not likely they’d have another substitute. … Finally, they put us up in a cheap hotel and promise to fly us sometime tomorrow. Meanwhile, the later flight I would have been on makes it to Denver with no trouble. Just my luck.

Fortunately, we took off with no further trouble, and I enjoyed watching the flight status through my little TV screen, and had an uneventful flight to Denver, and got home in time to go to sleep with Margie (who actually let me sleep in this morning).

Now to catch up with the rest of life.

Hoity, and also toity

The last day of my work trip to SoCal was a golf match (picked up very politely by one of our vendors, who in turn got to ride around with…

The last day of my work trip to SoCal was a golf match (picked up very politely by one of our vendors, who in turn got to ride around with us and discuss business) at the rather fabulous Pelican Hill Golf Course. Located in Newport Coast (which immediately tells SoCalians that it’s going to be tres pricey), it’s a gorgeous course to play on, some holes down overlooking the beach, many with ocean vistas.

Immaculate grounds (though it’s a bit annoying that Friday morning is when all the groundskeepers are out trimming the trees and mowing the rough) and a lovely club house. Very, very nice.

Complementary valet parking, not to mention valeting of your clubs down to the carts. There was a very tasty breakfast snack stand (hot food from the restaurant, lots of muffins and the like) down by the carts, too.

Oh, yeah, the carts. Little coolers with bottled water. GPS systems that tell you how far you are from green center (and other landmarks, like those traps, or the edge of the plateau). Very, very nice.

And when youg get back from the round, your clubs are grabbed to be cleaned and taken back up to the parking lot, and you are handed scented, cold, wet towels to wipe off your hot, sweaty neck and face and hands.

Nice.

Of course, green fees are outrageous. I don’t play places that cost more than I shoot, at least not regularly. It’s not someplace I’d go to on my own; I’m not sure I got five times as nice an experience as when I golf at my local muni course (even though I struggled mightily to get as many strokes out of the game as possible).

Final score: 125 strokes (!), about 15 balls lost (!!), and a good time.

And, boy, am I glad to be home.

Travelogue 2

Well, long days of sitting and conferring, capped by long nights of eating and drinking (Catal, El Torito, and the Boss’ house, over the last three nights). Tired as a…

Well, long days of sitting and conferring, capped by long nights of eating and drinking (Catal, El Torito, and the Boss’ house, over the last three nights). Tired as a dog, but up early today for golf at Pelican Hill (courtesy of a vendor).

Looking very much forward to flying home tonight, to be with Margie and Katherine.

This concludes this blog’s broadcast day …

Rue Britannia

Let’s see. The British government has steadily pushed for the disarming of the British citizenry, pretty much totally disarming the populace. The idea was that the police were there to…

Let’s see. The British government has steadily pushed for the disarming of the British citizenry, pretty much totally disarming the populace. The idea was that the police were there to protect the common folk — no need for self-defense.

Indeed, increasingly British law has frowned on the very concept of self-defense. There have been many, many cases of folks who used force against burglars, or even in cases of assault, who have in turn been prosecuted for doing so.

Now comes the capper. The Metropolitican Police are no longer looking into “petty” crimes that have no obvious clues.

A Met spokesman confirmed that “less serious crimes” would now only be investigated if they were considered to be “solvable using proportionate resources”, or were part of a current crackdown on specific offences. He said: “It might mean that people who have had their bikes stolen from outside a shop might not get any investigation into it. It is looking at the high priorities for crime in the community.”
The Met’s policy document states that when crimes are of a less serious nature and there are no “special factors”, such as a particularly vulnerable victim, they will now be logged but not solved.

Right. The answer, of course, is probably to suggest that people not leave their bicycles outside. Not that that makes your bike safe, since you have no real recourse if someone breaks in after it (except to hope that B&E is something that the Met might move itself to do something about it later on), but since petty thieves now know that they can steal bikes with impunity, they will be more likely to move along to find someone who has committed the negligent act of locking their bike up outside.

The reason for all this, of course, is budgetary pressure in the face of significant crime troubles — exacerbated, perhaps, by all that fine gun control and persecution of those who try to fight back against criminals.

Sounds like we’re visiting Britain again just in time — who knows what things will be like in another five or ten years?

(via Andrea)

Epic battle

USA Today has the article based on the survey I mentioned the other day comparing Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Despite being sent a follow-up e-mail, I wasn’t…

USA Today has the article based on the survey I mentioned the other day comparing Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Despite being sent a follow-up e-mail, I wasn’t actually quoted, and that’s probably just as well, since it’s kind of goofy.

The author clearly is trying to provoke a dispute, and manages to get a few fanboyish comments to sprinkle about (“We will never be dethroned — especially by a movie that has a midget with furry feet as the hero”).

By and large, though, the author seems to come in with a thesis that sci-fi is out, fantasy is in. To that end, the waning enthusiasm over SW is not seen as the fading of a particular franchise, but as indicative of the whole downfall of a genre. (The other example given to prove the thesis is the lousy showing of Star Trek X — no, no franchise fatigue there.) Love of fantasy, on the other hand, is seen as part of the zeitgeist of these war-torn, buffeted-by-events days.

It may very well be there is such a sea change going on, but this particular article is anything but convincing about it.

If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance …

I’ve never read any John Le Carre. Too much, as I understood it, darkness, betrayal and death. It wasn’t so much that I thought that being a spy was glamorous…

I’ve never read any John Le Carre. Too much, as I understood it, darkness, betrayal and death. It wasn’t so much that I thought that being a spy was glamorous and jolly (a read of the actual James Bond books will quite dispel that illusion), it’s just that I really didn’t need to be entertained, or moved, by angst and duplicitousness.

Which is why, in keeping with that theme, Le Carre’s current op-ed piece on how “The United States of America has gone mad” isn’t something that I would have read on my own, save for Andrea’s mentioning of it.

The basic theme is the mantra of the anti-war crowd. Blah, blah, blah, it’s all about oil, blah, blah, Iraq is no worse than other folks, blah, blah, Bush is either an evil greedy bastard genius or else an idiot, or maybe both, blah, blah, blah.

A few items stand out that are worth noting as being indicative of the reasoning that Le Carre uses.

As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded.

Le Carre says this, in different ways, several times. The only actual reasoning or evidence or example that he cites is at the very end.

Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: “Peace is also Patriotic”. It was gone by the time he’d finished shopping.

Good Lord. Someone removed a bumper sticker that they didn’t like. Must have been the Bush Secret Police! No, wait, they would have simply disappeared the author’s friend off to the underground gulags beneath DIA. No, it must have been some Horribly Intolerant Private Citizen.

Impolite, certainly. Even cowardly. But hardly a sign of McCarthyism, erosion of legal dissent, or the jack boots of a Mad America.

Of course, the War on Terrorism, and the prospective War on Iraq, ar emerely smoke screens for the Bushies.

Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place …

Get. Over. It. I thought the Supremes were stupid in their decision, and I rooted for Gore until the bitter end. Bottom line, though, Bush won. Simply repeating “Stolen Election!” like a mantra was getting old in January 2001, and it hasn’t aged well in the succeeding two years.

But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.

How, and in what ways, the American public is being “browbeaten,” or, given the Internet (and the noble efforts of Mr Le Carre) it is being kept in ignorance is not explained. It’s simply enough to simply bandy about words like neurosis and conspirators, and leave it at that.

In America, where all men are equal in His sight, if not in one another’s, the Bush family numbers one President, one ex-President, one ex-head of the CIA, the Governor of Florida and the ex-Governor of Texas.

For the record, Le Carre either ignorantly or intentionally makes three people sound here like five, like there’s some vast Bush dynasty (unlike, say, the Kennedys or the Roosevelts in their day). George H.W. is both the ex-CIA director and the ex-Pres. Dubya is the President and ex-Governor of Texas. Jeb is the Florida Governor (God help them). Whether Le Carre doesn’t realize this, or is simply intentionally trying to distort the truth, doesn’t speak well in either case to the rest of his meager “facts.”

Care for a few pointers? George W. Bush, 1978-84: senior executive, Arbusto Energy/Bush Exploration, an oil company; 1986-90: senior executive of the Harken oil company. Dick Cheney, 1995-2000: chief executive of the Halliburton oil company. Condoleezza Rice, 1991-2000: senior executive with the Chevron oil company, which named an oil tanker after her. And so on. But none of these trifling associations affects the integrity of God’s work.

One can certainly question the Bush Administration’s energy policy, or even whether its various members background in the oil industry gives it a distorted view of such matters.

On the other hand, Rice is the National Security Advisor, not the Secretary of Energy. Bush’s experiences with Arbusto (“Shrub”) sound to have been something less than Evil Big Business in nature. And what involvement in the oil industry has to do with the Bushies being any better or less able to do what is right is only sneered at here, not intelligently argued.

I could go on, but basically Le Carre doesn’t like Bush’s policies, is willing to imply any number of malevolent and/or crazy motivations to him, and contributes little to the debate over Iraq (or to the debate over what he calls “poor mad little North Korea,” those darned crazy kids) than a tired, and not terribly coherent screed.

I’m usually not impressed when actors get on their high horses about public policy issues, not because they shouldn’t be free to express their opinions, but because their uninformed opinions are usually not worth listening to. It seems that writers of fiction are not immune to that state, either.

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, Lileks does a sight finer job on the above article than I do. With statistics.

Nothing but Net

After recently opening up access to the Internet, Hussein’s regime has changed its mind. Evidently massive PsyOps spam from the US, the equivalent of dumping leaflets over the countryside, has…

After recently opening up access to the Internet, Hussein’s regime has changed its mind. Evidently massive PsyOps spam from the US, the equivalent of dumping leaflets over the countryside, has inclined Baghdad to block all access to e-mail.

Meanwhile, China has decided to block access to Blogspot, a free blogging site.

Birds of a feather …

Travelogue

Left at the virtual crack of not-yet-near-dawn to head off to the airport. Dark and cold and lonely, but warmed by a nice kiss from my sleepy wife. They’re no…

Left at the virtual crack of not-yet-near-dawn to head off to the airport. Dark and cold and lonely, but warmed by a nice kiss from my sleepy wife.

They’re no longer doing security inspections at the entrance gates to the garage parking at DIA. Interesting. I parked over on the west side, for the first time in a while, then picked up my suitcase and my golf clubs — er, Friday team-building implements — and headed for check-in.

Little tables have appeared next to the ticket counters, where polite TSA folks swab your checked luggage for traces of whatever.

For whatever reasons, though, I got routed into the Inspection Line at the main security line. Wanding and shoe scanning and belt unbuckling and the like, while someone checked out my cable-ridden briefcase. No harm, no foul, and a decent amount of politeness made it harmless.

I was too early for anyplace to be open to snag a bite. Instead I sat there at the gate, and watched the inanity of CNN American Morning. Yeesh. How smugly self-amused can ostensible journalists be?

The flight itself to LAX was simple enough, and I dozed a bit, read a bit. Hitting the ground, I ducked over to a McDonalds to grab some breakfast, then off to the office.

A long day of valuable meetings, followed by dinner at Catal (hey, Downtown Disney has 3 hour free parking), and too much wine and pastis, neither of which is conducive to actually getting assignments done when one returns to one’s hotel room.

And on a completely unrelated note, I’ve noticed an amazing number of younger men shaving their heads. I blame James Carville.

Writing on the wall

The biggest hurdle that folks have to getting a Palm has usually been the use of Graffiti, the handwriting recognition system in the PalmOS. While the example at the right…

For a good time ... The biggest hurdle that folks have to getting a Palm has usually been the use of Graffiti, the handwriting recognition system in the PalmOS. While the example at the right shows that it’s not exactly rocket science to figure out how to write words in Graffiti, it was always something that critics and competitors bitched about (even while those competitors dealt with their own handwriting recognition problems).

PalmSource, the OS/software spin-off from Palm, has announced that Graffiti is dead — long live Graffiti 2, based on the Jot engine, which will allow more “natural” and traianable strokes. PalmSource denies that the decision was wholly motivated by Xerox’s copyright infringement suit over Graffiti, but says that was a factor.

Only problems — I’m going to want to wait until Jot is solid, which means for a while, as vendors (Sony and Kyocera, so far) include it in the version of PalmOS they ship, and get it right. I was hoping to replace my Palm Vx this year some time, but I might need to wait longer than that.

Oh, well …

Eyes have it

If you haven’t taken a gander at the New, Improved, ***Dave Does the Blog design, please do. I’ve got at least one data point that says there are problems with…

If you haven’t taken a gander at the New, Improved, ***Dave Does the Blog design, please do. I’ve got at least one data point that says there are problems with the CSS 3-column approach I’m taking, and I’m trying to figure out if it’s an isolated problem or not. Thanks!

UPDATE: The design is not completely finished, obviously, but the basic structure is. Unless it’s not working well.

UPDATE 2: Stan, I changed something. Is it still goofing up for you?

UPDATE 3: Yes, I realize this is tied into the odd way that IE5/Win does widths and DIVs and boxes. I also am under the impression that I have the kludge in place to work around it, but that’s not always working …

UPDATE 4: While I always welcome aesthetic judgment, I’m most interested in whether there are (obvious) formatting problems, stuff overlapping between columns, etc.

“Better than Goofy?”

More about the dark side of Goofy’s home life than you ever wanted to know….

More about the dark side of Goofy’s home life than you ever wanted to know.

Steel

I mentioned a few weeks back how scrap steel from the WTC is going to be used in the construction of a new amphibious assault ship, the USS New York,…

I mentioned a few weeks back how scrap steel from the WTC is going to be used in the construction of a new amphibious assault ship, the USS New York, to be launched in 2007. I opined that it was a very clever idea, showing a fine sense of irony, a statement of strength in defiance of those who attacked us.

Evidently, though, some folks are crying foul over this, aghast that American war-mongering arrogance is beating plowshares into swords, building a new death machine out of the remains of a human tragedy.

There is something fundamentally wrong about turning the ashes of murdered people into a warship. Making the building of that warship an $800 million dollar pork project for Trent Lott’s home town just compounds the indecency.

Give me a frelling break.

First of all, if someone wants to buy some of that scrap metal and use it to build a large peace memorial, more power to them. We can then debate over which use is most likely to avert war.

Short of that, is it simply better that the metal be left to rust away, clogging a landfill? Or that it be used to build washing machines and automobiles? Do we need to certify that none of those washing machines are going to be put at military bases, or that none of the cars will be driven by employees of the Dept. of Defense, or other undesirables?

Secondly, guessing games over what the dead of the WTC would have “wanted” to be done with the steel (as well as, hypothetically, some of their own organic matter) is useless. My guess that some of them would be pleased as punch that it would be put to such a use is as silly as others’ guesses that some of them would be aghast. For that matter, I suspect all of them have more important things to consider than what’s happening to their unrecovered earthly remains, and the remains of the building they died in.

Fortunately, there are some saner heads commenting on this.

I can’t help also be struck by the seeming presumption that, somehow, military hardware is singularly, inherently, evil, rather than mere inanimate object, able like any other to be used for good or ill, for the saving of lives or the unnecessary wasting of lives, unable to decide on its own, or take on any moral value of its own, but only a tool to be used at the choice of humans whose future actions we cannot predict and know not of.

Amen.

Weekend Update

Well, it was a very, very busy weekend. A good kind of busy, to be sure, but ……

Well, it was a very, very busy weekend. A good kind of busy, to be sure, but …

Continue reading “Weekend Update”

Ladies of the Ring

Sexism and the Lord of the Rings. There’s been a lot of ink (virtual and otherwise) spilled on that. How marvelous to find that the latest example is … ……

Sexism and the Lord of the Rings. There’s been a lot of ink (virtual and otherwise) spilled on that. How marvelous to find that the latest example is …

… written by a woman, Barbara Ellen, who wonders why women are enjoying the LotR movies. Or at least wonders about why men are wondering that.

Aside from that “They’s good movies” thing, of course. Because, natch, that’s not an Appropriately Profound Answer.

Everyone is asking — well, lots of men, anyway — why so many women are raving about Peter Jackson’s trilogy.

I haven’t heard one man — or woman, for that matter — asking this. Of course, maybe my man friends aren’t real men. Or something.

You can understand their confusion. Thus far with The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers it’s been Nerd Nirvana all the way.

Maybe the women I know are nerds, too. Nah.

Of course, I know a lot of “normal” folks who have enjoyed the movies. Oh, they must be nerds, too. At least the men. The women … well, we must read on to find out why they’ve enjoyed them.

All those lovingly recreated Middle Earths, Helm’s Deeps and Enchanted Forests. All those hobbits, wizards, elves and orcs. The fact that the best clinches you’re likely to see are when orcs grapple with elf warriors on quasi-medieval battlefields. None of this sounds particularly conducive to making the chardonnay pound fly out of the average woman’s handbag. I’m pretty sure that Jackson didn’t look through his lens at shots of Gandalf battling with Sauron, their beards fluttering in the wind, their nighties billowing around their knobbly knees, crabbing to each other about ultimate power, and think: “Chicks are going to go crazy for this’. Yet women everywhere, including myself, are going crazy for it.

Because, of course, women are only interested in what are marketed as “Chick Flicks.” Only interested in Austinesque, Notting Hill-style romances. Nary a Hugh Grant to be found in Middle Earth.

Never mind that there are plenty of women who enjoy the battle scenes. Or the bucolic splendor. Never mind that, at it’s heart, LotR isn’t about manly grunts and severed heads, but about deeply romantic things. Nah, folks must be crazy.

As crazy as Peter Jackson, who obviously never considered what women would think of his movie. I mean, why run the risk of running off his main demographic target, nerdly males?

So, what’s the appeal? Contrary to male opinion it isn’t all just a terrible misunderstanding. Women don’t see the words “Lord” and “Rings” in the title and think they’re going to see some Tolkien chick flick in which some lucky girl gets married to a hairy-footed hobbit.

Yeah, that’s been the confusion amongst all my male friends. Uh-huh.

Because actually, guys, women have heard of the books, even though we probably didn’t bother reading them, having had much more time for Max Factor than Tolkien when we were teenagers.

Right. No sexist stereotyping here. Move along …

Movies such as The Lord of the Rings are a good way to spy on men, see within the most primitive areas of their psyches — all those yearnings for transcendence, nobility and majesty that still tickle away deep within the male soul. In this way, Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings is not so much a sex symbol as a human symbol, a male-decency symbol. And, as any woman could tell you, that’s always sexy.

Right. Women are going to see LotR because it’s a way for them to know what the heck is going on with men. Especially all those nerdly men who are so much into it. Because they’re the target demographic of all those women out there. Of course.

Jackson is actually lucky we’re still in the market. Considering the level of swill aimed at them, it’s a wonder that women bother to go to the cinema at all. While the guys get Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects, all the women get is patronised. Sometimes you get a semi-decent chick flick, a Bridget Jones’s Diary or a Kissing Jessica Stein, but mainly it’s “Kissy-kissy, boo-hoo, hurrah, he loves me, the end’.

Never mind that I know of a number of women who enjoyed Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects. That’s an aberration. Never mind that I know of a lot of women who also like the “Kissy-kissy, boo-hoo, hurrah, he loves me, the end” style of film. That’s just pap. Never mind that I know some men who like crappy chick flicks and women who like crappy blow-em-ups. And women who dislike the former and men who dislike the latter. Out of the way, here, I’m making a Deep, Artistic and Sociological Point Here.

Above all, though, The Lord of the Rings is just Gladiator syndrome all over again. Gladiator was the last “male” movie to hit the female spot, proving that women were just as interested as men in complicated themes such as glory, honour, destiny and valour, and, you know, the “big stuff” of life.

Imagine that. Once they set aside their Max Factor, women are sort of like men. How deep.

Where men go wrong is that they think that just because they were more likely to read The Lord of the Rings as spotty adolescents, just because they’re genuine fans, they own the concept for life. And in some ways you can sympathise. Having done their time with Tolkien, and been mocked for their sins, they must resent female interlopers barging in when it’s all been laid out in nice easy form.

Yeah, all the guys (including those beyond their “spotty adolescence”) I’ve seen at the LotR movies have been glaring at the gals who are intruding on their private male fantasies. Not.

What was once a safe boys’ locker room has been forced open. It has been invaded by lots of annoying “instant experts” in skirts suddenly thinking they know what they’re talking about, when they haven’t paid their dues and can barely tell their Aragorns from their Legolases.

And the guys I know all resent it, horribly. They sullenly shut up when gals start talking about LotR. They glower, and pout, and suggest that the womenfolk ought to retire to their parlor and talk about sewing and recipes and John Cusack movies, and leave the menfolk to smoke their cigars and drink brandy and compare their knowledge of elvish poetry.

Which planet, exactly, is Ms. Ellen from?

Still, all those miffed men out there had better get used to it. Females are on to this Lord of the Rings thing now. We want in, and there’s very little you guys can do about it. Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.

Oh, no! Women who are reading and watching the same geeky, nerdly, off-beat genre stuff that I am! Gads! Run for the playhouse, guys! Those slimy girls are after us!

Obviously I hang out with the wrong sort of folks, male and female alike.

Feh.

It sounds to me like Ms. Ellen is herself confused by this whole thing, and desperately trying to understand why all her chicky friends are abandoning the normal snarky conversation in the Ladies Lounge for discussions about LotR. In the process of trying to explain it away, she manages to insult both women and men.

Heck, maybe she’s not sexist after all, if she can manage that.

(via Andrea)

And half a step back

In the battle between 2.4GHz 802.11b (“Wi-Fi”) wireless communication and 2.4GHz spread-spectrum digital phones, the phones win hands down. “Win,” as in, “Trash the signal of the other.” (Yes, I’ve…

In the battle between 2.4GHz 802.11b (“Wi-Fi”) wireless communication and 2.4GHz spread-spectrum digital phones, the phones win hands down. “Win,” as in, “Trash the signal of the other.”

(Yes, I’ve bitched about this before.)

Well, I’d finally decided to invest my birthday present from my wife (“camera replacement”) into a new 5.8GHz phone system. But she did me one better, since 5.8GHz is still limited in availability and extortionate in price. For a mere pittance, she found a 900MHz system that does 95% of what we wanted — two handsets, call-waiting at the sofa and the base station, integrated answering machine. It’s a crappy little Uniden thang, but it will tide us over until something better comes along.

It’s missing some nice features of the old Sony — running through the Caller ID info as it played the corresponding answering machine message, for example — but it’s got one small advantage, since it’s a cordless phone at the base station as well as at the remote station.

More importantly, it’s 900MHz, which means my Wi-Fi connection is safe, and I don’t need to mutter nasty things under my breath when people call and knock me offline or lock up my machine.

The more things change …

Okay, I admit that I don’t get it. Like Reen, I don’t understand the difference between cohabiting domestic partnership, complete with ceremonies and alimony and child support and full legal…

Okay, I admit that I don’t get it. Like Reen, I don’t understand the difference between cohabiting domestic partnership, complete with ceremonies and alimony and child support and full legal protection — and marriage. This article really doesn’t explain it — but it should serve as a shot across the bow of conservatives who don’t think that such domestic partnership arrangements — whatever the genders involved — are turning into just what they feared: de facto marriage, recognized as such by society and the courts.

Car trouble

*Sigh* Back in the fall, I was thinking to myself, “Hey, the van should be paid off in the spring or so — we can start looking for a replacement…

*Sigh*

Back in the fall, I was thinking to myself, “Hey, the van should be paid off in the spring or so — we can start looking for a replacement for the Saturn.” And then, to my surprise, we got the title for the Sienna in September. Huzzah!

So I’ve been going along, making those New Car Plans since then.

We continued to have the money pulled from Margie’s paycheck direct to the account that the old loan had been pulling from, basically so that we could save for the down payment. Last night I saw a statement from the credit union, and decided to read it for the first time in a while (since that was the only activity there), to see how much we’d saved.

Uh … what’s this? Money’s still getting pulled into the new loan account. And … money is still being paid from that account, and there’s a balance still showing.

Hmmm.

So I call the credit union, explaining I have a nice, signed title cert to the van, and WTF.

Hmmmm.

Their records show it was a five year loan, which doesn’t sound right (I thought we went for a shorter loan, 3 or 4 years — I figured it was a 3 year when we got it “paid off” at the end of 2002).

They have no idea why they sent us a signed title cert, and would like it back very much, thank you. (They mentioned this, very politely, serval times.)

What they can’t explain is why their records show that auto loan is actually for a 1997 Accura, which, needless to say, we’ve never had.

Hmmmmmm.

They’re going to call us back. And, maybe, I won’t send back that title cert quite yet.