Shack Attack

Another Random Fancy from the “You Just Won’t Believe This” Department:

Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) signed 20 new laws in April including a bill that immediately repealed Florida’s 148-year-old ban on cohabitation. The Pillow Police are bereft.

§ 798.02 Lewd and lascivious behavior. — If any man and woman, not being married to each other, lewdly and lasciviously associate and cohabit together, or if any man or woman, married or unmarried, engages in open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior, they shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082 or s. 775.083.

Unmarried couples, polyamorists, and RWBs1 shacking up in Florida can now rest easy that their living arrangement is not breaking the law, thanks to the state’s Republican governor and co-sponsor Rep. Rick Stark (D-Weston).

Couple in BedThe law made it a second-degree misdemeanor for an unmarried man and woman to “lewdly and lasciviously associate and cohabit together.” It has been on the books since 1868.

Because of its wording, §798.02 never applied to same-sex couples. Or goats.

The offense could be punished by up to 60 days in jail or a $500 fine.

Rep. Stark reported that police rarely, if ever, enforced the statute but that’s not true. Nearly 700 people were charged under the Florida law between 2005 and 2011 and 104 people faced charges in 2011 alone. (In 2005, Michigan’s cohabitation law was used to restrict visitation rights for a divorced father. The Virginia law was used to revoke a woman’s daycare license because she was cohabitating in the 1990s.)

I’ve always been proud that nearly 10% of Florida’s 46,105 sworn officers and state’s attorney investigators were part of the famed Panther’s Pillow Police.

Five conservative Republicans opposed repeal. Obviously conservative Republicans have a vested interest in continuing the Pillow Police. I haven’t quite figured out why, when eleven of this country’s 100 most dangerous cities are in Florida. Maybe they need the $500 fines to balance the budget.

Ironically “Virginia is for Lovers” waited until 2013 to repeal its cohabitation ban. 25 Virginia legislators — 21 Republicans, three Democrats and one independent — voted against the repeal. They needed the fines, too. Yeah, that’s it.

The unbelievable part of this story is that Florida was still one of three states with laws to prohibit unmarried cohabitation; Michigan and Mississippi remain.


1 Roomie With Benefits

 

Giving Thanks

Thanksgiving is a patriotic holiday, sandwiched as it is between Veterans Day and the “official” beginning of the Christmas Shopping season.

Pilgrims, Progressing SouthI’ll come back to the sandwiches.

Everyone not living under a rock knows that Thanksgiving Day is America’s primary pagan festival, celebrated to show thanks, gratitude, and love to the gods for a bountiful harvest on a New England day that fields have been barren for weeks and are now mostly covered in snow. This holiday has moved away from its religious roots and is now a time to participate in the largest single slaughter of fowl in the universe.

Thanksgiving at Stanbridge Station, PQHere in the States, we mark Thanksgiving Day on the fourth Thursday of November each year. Our Canadian neighbors celebrated it six weeks earlier, on the second Monday in October. The snow falls earlier on Canada’s by-then barren fields. We saw one of those neighbors across the canal again the other day. She was still pleased to get two thanksgiving meals; she was less pleased to cook two thanksgiving meals.

Our collective memory of the holiday is sort of wrong. In American as Pumpkin Pie, Plimoth Plantation tells us that

Prior to the mid-1800s, Thanksgiving had nothing to do with the 1621 harvest celebration, Pilgrims or older immigrants. Thanksgiving started as a traditional New England holiday that celebrated family and community. It descended from Puritan days of fasting and festive rejoicing. The governor of each colony or state declared a day of thanksgiving each autumn, to give thanks for general blessings. As New Englanders moved west in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, they took their holiday with them. After the harvest, governors across the country proclaimed individual Thanksgivings, and families traveled back to their original homes for family reunions, church services and large meals.

SWMBO will have a houseful of girlfriends in my little house today. Likewise, I expect to have a “traditional” Thanksgiving meal this year as Nancy and I wander over to celebrate and over eat with all of Dagne’s children. I reckon we’ll all have a turkey with bread (not oyster, thank you very much) stuffing, cranberry sauce, smashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes, cole slaw, and pumpkin pie for dessert.

That basic menu has remained unchanged for a couple hundred years but that’s all the older our menu is. The three-day pig-out of 1621 at Plymouth (the “First Thanksgiving”) may have had ducks or geese, but yes they had no potatoes, and bananas were equally scarce. No apples. And no pumpkin pie. Likely no turkeys who were wily even then.

I don’t care. I shall have pah.

I AM™ a lucky boy lucky. My family is scattered across a couple thousand miles but we are all speaking to each other. I didn’t get skunked by the Russian used car dealer from whom I escaped without buying a truck and I did not get four inches of snow yesterday. Citizens “Insurance” says they will cut my premium in half if I can just prove my storm shutters meet code. Next week, I shall have white meat turkey sandwiches slathered with mayonnaise on good crunchy sourdough bread for lunch every day of the week. Most important, I have been blessed by friends.

I am thankful my children, my grandchildren, and my great-grandchildren are happy, healthy, and will be well fed again today.

I am thankful Anne is finally in South Puffin and will be here all winter.

I am thankful for Anne and for Nancy, two loving, caring, beautiful ladies. I am blessed.

People decorate for Halloween and for Armistice or Remembrance Day and for Christmas but Thanksgiving, not so much. Ben Franklin thought the turkey should be America’s bird so I’m thankful to have found a big inflatable turkey in a local yard for this week.

And I have pah!


ahh, supper


This column has mostly appeared before because being thankful goes on year round.

 

Giving Thanks

Today is America’s primary pagan festival again, celebrated to show love to the gods for a bountiful harvest on a New England day in which fields are now mostly covered in snow and which George Washington proclaimed as a day of thanks as a national remembrance.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor, and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me ‘to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness’.”

While it is easy for this curmudgeonly writer to kvetch about the corruption and thievery stretching from here to Washington or to fret about the desk I write at, those are just everyday irritants and (thankfully) I know how to fix them.

I am thankful my grandfather at age 94 decided to live out his very good life in the Keys.

I am thankful I have the ability, the tools, and the wherewithall to fix the roof of the house my grandfather and parents lived out their very good lives in the Keys in.

I am thankful I started my life as an engineer and am now spending some of it as an artist.

I am thankful that Anu reminded me of a word and a writer (The Tontine by Thomas B. Costain) I have enjoyed since I started eating turkey at the grownup table.

I am thankful we will have friends here today.

I am thankful my children, my grandchildren, and my great-grandchildren are happy, healthy, and will be well fed again today.

I am thankful Anne is here today and will be here tomorrow.

I am thankful for Anne and for Nancy, two loving, caring, beautiful ladies. I am blessed.

And I have pah!


This column mostly appeared last year because being thankful goes on year round. The original Thanksgiving Perspective is here.

 

Vacated

I’ve been (mostly) on vacation this last week. Oh, I took care of a couple of client problems and I did some webwork but mostly I worked on my tan and irritated SWMBO and the fair gekko.

We went to Vegas to poke around Fremont Street (the “old” casinos) and to see . In between we went to the Circus Circus amusement park and took in a couple of circus acts and I spent a dollar in the only slot machine I could find with a handle. I took 300 or so exposures from which I’ll get a bunch of snapshots and half-a-dozen salable prints.

Vegas Snapshot
I really, really want a backstage pass to . The Cirque du Soleil’s coming of age story of a young man and a young woman features phenomenal stages. Oh. It has 80 artists and is a “gravity-defying” ballet of music, acrobatic feats, Capoeira dance, puppetry, and martial arts. The Los Angeles Times wrote that it “may well be the most lavish production in the history of Western theater. It is surely the most technologically advanced.”

The two moving stages and five smaller lifts and platforms float through space. The Sand Cliff Deck, their largest moveable platform, measures 25x50x6 feet and weighs 50 tons. It moves up and down 72 feet, rotates 360°, and tilts from flat to 100°, all on a vertical gantry crane and four 75-foot-long hydraulic cylinders. This is material handling design heaven, baby.

On the other hand, we did get a backstage pass to the Hoover Dam. The Bureau of Reclamation had shut down the hard hat tours of the power plant and inner tunnels after 9/11 but they do guide visitors through the power plant and the passageways within the dam itself.

It should come as no surprise that most of the hardware looks like it came from the railroads. Except for the leaning power towers. Likewise, it should come as no surprise that about a quarter of the visitors on most tours are engineers. We had a mechanical (me), three EEs, and an engineering tech who does the real work. No Civil Engineers, though, despite the gazillion (<==technical term) tons of concrete floating free between the walls of the Colorado River.

It should come as a surprise that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has its own police force.

A quick kvetch about the prices. It cost $7.50 to park near the downtown casinos but parking was free on the Strip. Circus Circus’ Adventuredome 5-acre indoor amusement park offers the yellow Loco and the pink Canyon Blaster roller coasters. Pink, a double-loop, double-corkscrew, literally shook the building (for the record, a roller coaster is just another big package delivery system). Each was $10 per ride, though. We passed on the $60 Kobe hamburger with truffles. The Hoover Dam dimes and quarters visitors, too. $10 to park. $30 for a tour. And, of course, lots of different people giving lots of different directions. “Sit here.” “No, stand there.” “Sit on the Group W bench.” “Go to the observation deck.” “No, go to this video.” My National Parks pass didn’t work there, either.

You RockAt the other end of the price spectrum, we did eat at Ellis Island (the original pub was opened in 1967 by Frank Ellis) where we missed the nightly karaoke but sampled the in-house microbrewery. We were running a little late for so they seated us in the bar with a nice bunch of other diners. The microbrewery sold me a $2 pint of a pretty decent American IPA. I shall say little about the boilermakers other than to note that they make one with Jägermeister and their own old fashioned “real brewed” Root Beer.

In Phoenix, the Windsor neighborhood bar and restaurant is right next door to an ice cream and candy shop. We took a trip down memory lane with the “penny” candies. That’s a place I’ve visited before (we were aghast that penny candy could cost more than quarter gasoline) but the food was great.

I’ve done a lot of walking. Time to change my feet.

 

Giving Thanks

Today is America’s primary pagan festival, celebrated to show love to the gods for a bountiful harvest on a New England day in which fields are now mostly covered in snow and which George Washington proclaimed as a day of thanks as a national remembrance.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor, and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me ‘to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness’.”

While it is easy for this curmudgeonly writer to kvetch about the corruption and thievery stretching from here to Washington or to fret that my truck needs new brake lines and my little house needs new shingles, those are just everyday irritants and (thankfully) I know how to fix them.

I am thankful I have a white truck. Not to mention a (topless)(white) car. And that Anne has white car.

I am thankful my grandfather at age 94 decided to live out his very good life in the Keys.

I am thankful I started my life as an engineer and am now spending some of it as an artist.

I am thankful we will have friends here today.

I am thankful my children, my grandchildren, and my great-grandchildren are happy, healthy, and will be well fed again today.

I am thankful Anne is here today and will be here tomorrow.

I am thankful for Anne and for Nancy, two loving, caring, beautiful ladies. I am blessed.

And I have pah!


Ben Franklin thought the turkey should be America’s bird so I’m thankful to have found a big inflatable turkey in a local yard. The original Thanksgiving Perspective is here.

ahh, supper