Category Archives: Random Access

Random Access, the op-ed.

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

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In Charlotte, Vermont, in 2008, a school got hammered to take down its candy cane decorations because a grinch there says they have an overt Christmas message. Federal Reserve examiners in 2010 told a hometown bank that it must remove crosses, Bible verses, and Christmas buttons because they could be offensive. The Fed says the Christian paraphernalia violated federal bank regulations. This year, the owner of a New Jersey business faces thousands in fines because he installed a 40-foot tall inflatable Santa Claus on his retail store rooftop. CANDY CANES and SANTA! The Menorah and the Glitter Moon and Star for Ramadan probably stayed up at the school, though.


christmas bird

Every radio station has defaulted to Christmas music. I’m surprised we haven’t lost that, too. I don’t particularly like Christmas music but my radio has an off switch. I don’t have to listen to it if I don’t want to.

I was raised in a family that was Quaker on one side, Presbyterian on the other. I may not be as organized now as I was when I reached the age of accountability and joined the Presbyterian church but I am still a Christian. And, of course, a WASP.

You don’t have to be either.

Tomorrow is the day Christians celebrate the birth of the Christ child and the meaning of Christianity. It was a pretty big day before the stock exchange took it over.

It doesn’t mean Do unto all the other religions, then cut out. Unless you are a Member of Congress.

Here’s the thing. If you offer food to the monks on Vesak, Buddha’s Birthday, I will honor your commitment to the poor. If you celebrate Diwali, the Festival of Lights, I will honor with you the victory of Lord Ram over the demon-king Ravana. If you fast during Ramadan when the Qur’an was revealed to Mohammad, I will honor your patience and humility. If you celebrate the most solemn and important of Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur, I will honor your atonement and repentance. If you light the candles of Kwanzaa, I will help you honor your heritage. And if you are a lib’rul atheist, I will not proselytize.

That maybe the most important message.

Not one American soldier in Afganistan has forced any man, woman, or child to convert to Christianity at the point of a gun this year.

You don’t have to be a Buddhist, a Hindu, Islamic, a Jew, a Kwanzaan celebrant, or an atheist. It is time, on this Christian holy day, to let Christians be Christians.

My right to impose my own beliefs stops at my property line (or the end of my nose when I’m out in public). The Charlotte, Vermont, grinch’s right to his own idiocy stops at pretty much the same place. It is time to stop accepting that “politically correct” credo and start honoring the true message of Christmas.

Scythian philosopher Anacharsis wrote in the 6th century BCE, “Wise men argue causes, and fools decide them.”

Peace.

This column originally appeared on Christmas Day, 2008. It required very little updating.

Shooting Motive Puzzles Investigators

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Most of the kids in Newtown, Connecticut, were born in 2006 not long after the 21st Century began. Many of them would have seen the turn of the 22nd Century.

From the Daily Beast to the Violence Policy Center, special interest groups, editorialists, and politicians lined the Sunday talk shows to politicize the murders in order to … well, you already know, don’t you?

Mr. Obama came under increased pressure this weekend from Democrats to lead the charge to ban guns.

CBS’ Bob Schieffer wonders if this is the tipping point so we finally try to ban guns.

Rep. John B. Larson (D-CT) released a statement Saturday that “to do nothing in the face of continuous assaults on our children is to be complicit in those assaults” in his effort to ban guns.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) promised immediate action on gun control.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), the author of the Brady Bill who just three days ago worried that the fiscal cliff will hike milk prices to $6 per gallon, has joined with Michael Bloomberg to make 16 ounce drink cups illegal. And to shrink the size of handgun clips.

The killer who triggered the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history got off lucky. His quick suicide was far less than he deserved. No, I will not publish his name.

But I have two teeny little niggling questions:
(1) Isn’t there a fiscal something-or-other out there that we’re supposed to worry about? and
(2) What about the other people killed this year? Don’t they count, too?

Mother Jones reported that, “Since 1982, there have been at least 62 mass murders carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii.” 43 people were slain in other mass murders in 2012 alone. And the year isn’t over yet.

Since 1982, there have also been at least 90 commercial airline crashes that killed people in this country alone. I didn’t total how many thousands died. Heck, 445 people have died so far this year in commercial aircraft accidents around the world. That includes the Allied Air flight on June 2 that overran the runway and hit a bus. All four in the crew survived but 12 people on the bus died. And the Ozark Air Lines flight that struck a snow plow at Sioux Falls Regional Airport. The driver of the snow plow was the only casualty there.

Dammit, we need to ban commercial air travel is what!

There were 32,367 motor vehicle deaths last year. Cars kill more people than bathroom accidents (341 people drowned in baths and showers in 2000).

Don’t you think we need to ban cars? And probably bathrooms?

The War on Terror has taken 4,977 American lives since 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq alone.

How about a ban on terror?

On average, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends in this country every day. In fact, 1,247 women and 440 men were killed by an intimate partner in 2000. 50% of the men who frequently assaulted their wives also frequently abused their children.

We probably need to ban intimate partnerships.

The mad bomber of the Bath School “disaster” in 1927 killed 38 elementary school kids, most in the second to sixth grades, plus two teachers, four other adults, and the bomber himself. It remains the deadliest mass murder in a school in U.S. history. And a truck bomb made of fertilizer and diesel fuel killed 168 people and injured over 800 in the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. No, I will not publish those murderers’ names, either.

Maybe we stick a plug up the back end of cows to eliminate fertilizer.

Newtown was one nut with a gun.

The number of crimes involving handguns in the UK has more than doubled since the ban on the weapons that passed after the Dunblane massacre, from 2,636 in 1997-1998 to 5,871 last year. The United bloody Kingdom.

It is already illegal to shoot people, even if you didn’t mean to. Connecticut and New York have about the toughest gun laws in the nation. This is the second mass killing in Connecticut in two years.

Puzzled investigators. Huh.

We don’t need more laws. We need more answers.

In fact, as the earth gets hotter, I’m surprised no one has noticed the direct correlation between mass murder and Global Warming. Or between mass murder and nutcases who dream about killing people.

Sunday Drivers, Two Wheels or Four, More or Less

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Unibridge TourIf two guys ride one wheel each, are they really riding a bicycle-built-for-two?

“No,” Liz Arden said. Emphatically.

Sunday drivers — four wheels: We headed West along the Overseas Highway until I saw an interesting house in the distance on Middle Torch. Drove past it; it was interesting but not particularly photogenic. Jogged left and right and left and right and tested the shocks up and down over the frost heaves on Dom Road on Big Torch Key. Saw a plot of land reserved for theme camps out past the end of the power lines and took a bunch of pictures of dead mangroves. I didn’t photograph the thank-you-ma’ams.

We honked and waved as we passed a couple of guys from Brooklyn riding unicycles near the South Pine Channel Bridge but, since we didn’t go looking for Key Deer this time, we didn’t see them on the No Name bridge to No Name Key. I hope they had pizza for lunch.

Fat Albert played peek-a-boo with the clouds. I photographed a homeless fellow living large on Higgs beach as well as a couple of weddings on Smathers beach.

Unibridge TourSunday drivers — two wheels: Keith Nelson and Robert Hickman arrived in Key Weird by unicycle yesterday. Their six-day performance art project commemorated the 100 years of the Flagler railroad bridges and the brand-new Heritage Trail system.

Mr. Nelson and Mr. Hickman pedaled along U.S. 1 from Key Largo to Key West on one wheel during their Unibridge Tour. They said the road quality was the worst in the 6-7 miles leading in to Key West but the Seven Mile Bridge quickly became the scariest part of the trip. It rained, their unicycles are taller than the railing, and traffic passed at 55 or 60 mph. Thwap thwap THWAP!

Mr. Nelson swallows swords and juggles as the Clown Price of the Bindlestiff Family Circus. Safer than the Seven Mile Bridge. Mr. Hickman is an associate professor of sculpture and art at Hunter College, New York.

They completed the trip as part of Sculpture Key West’s 17th annual exhibition. The show runs through March 2013 at Fort Zachary Taylor Historic State Park and West Martello Tower.

Mr. Hickman wanted to exhibit a rock sculpted by the highway. He started the ride pulling the rock behind his unicycle but it built up friction in his tire. The heat exploded the tire so they cut it loose about Mile Marker 30 and kept on going.

Everyone sets up at the southernmost point or at Mile Marker 0. Not me. I ran the motor drive about four rolls worth at Mile Marker 1 for the two unicyclists.

Now it’s time to get back to work.


Unibridge Tour

This Flagler Bridgesbridge across Spanish Harbor from Bahia Honda is one of my favorites in the Keys. It’s worth a trip here before the remaining railroad bridges fade into the green waters.

Cyber Monday Is Back! One Day Only! Shop Now!

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home depot spam
Woo Hoo!

Anne got spammed this morning. For whatever reason she gets email from Home Depot and I don’t. Today, they sent “Cyber Monday savings.”

Cyber Monday savings return!
Add HomeDepotCustomerCare to your address book.
View as a web page | Forward to a friend.
Ensure that you get the emails you want from The Home Depot.
Local store prices may vary from those displayed. Products shown as available are normally stocked but inventory levels cannot be guaranteed. Prices valid through 12/3/2012.
Please do not reply to this email.
To customize the settings for your profile and subscriptions, click here.
NOTE: All offers may not be available in all areas. Products on homedepotdotcom are currently only available for delivery to street addresses in the 48 contiguous United States. Select parcel items can ship to Alaska & Hawaii. We cannot ship to APO/FPO, P.O. Boxes, or U.S. Territories. Prices are in U.S. dollars and are subject to change without notice.

I don’t wanna shop now. See, I’ve done my part for the economy this year. I spent almost my entire $423 right here last weekend.

The average shopper took advantage of “door buster deals” over the Thanksgiving break to spend $423, up from $398 a year ago, while total spending reached an estimated $59.1 billion, according to the National Retail Federation. The average person spent $172.42 online during the same period, or approximately 40.7% of their total Black Friday spending.

We counted on our fingers and figured out that my television here was 17 years old. I bought it (on super sale, of course) from my store-owner friend, Christy, when Sears decided to put all their independent stores out to pasture. It was a top-of-the-line RCA then but it has a few foibles, not the least of which is a purple haze that covers people’s faces in one screen quadrant some of the time. It has performed flawlessly since I got back here to South Puffin but I figured the time had come.

Likewise, my cordless drill works perfectly. Of course, it has a very limited life left because the charger stopped after charging the batteries one last time. I can’t find a replacement for that charger anywhere.

And then there are two of the Uninterruptible Power Supplies we use to keep the juice flowing. After all, we can’t lose electricity right in the middle of these stirring phrases or during a stunning upset in the National Hockey League playoffs.

Oh wait. There are no hockey games this year.

The UPS under the desk is still in warranty but the 1987 model that powers the audio/video center is out-of-pocket.

The new television, cordless drill and light, and the UPS totaled up to about $422 but that doesn’t count the camera lens and hood I bought online.

Do you suppose it still counts since I wasn’t buying anything for Christmas?

In the It Figures Department, yesterday I trash picked a 32″ Sharp television at the lovely, new, yellow house a couple doors down on the other side of the street. It came with a genuine Sharp remote and a review that says it has “spectacularly bright and vivid color images and dramatic stereo sound.” I couldn’t find a manual on line. It’s a slightly curved CRT but probably has a better picture than the new LCD. Oh well.

I really snatched it up because it came with a truly nice and almost big enough TV stand for the new flat screen. I wanted a small table as a temporary measure until I can build-in the new A/V cabinet. This will do pretty well and I can keep it to go back under the new-to-me Sharp in the guestroom.

Cyber Monday is back!

Woo.

It’s Always All About the Sex

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I live on an island of 700 people. I have spent most of my life in towns or townships of fewer than a few thousand. Very few. I’m used to my neighbors usually knowing that I wear yellow pants when I mow and what I had for breakfast yesterday morning.

“If you can’t pee off your front porch,” Joe Rainville once told me, “you don’t have enough land.”

I can’t do that here although I’ve never had any difficulty in North Puffin, nor on the former farm where I grew up. On the other hand, most regular readers and all of my neighbors know the details of my love life, my eye surgery a couple of months ago, and the color of my shorts today (blue).

I may be a bit unusual.

Still, in this day and age when peeps tweet about the quality of their morning poop, sext their cow-orkers, admit to NY Magazine “Yeah, I am naked on the Internet,” and blog about the in-laws from hell, abortions, their abusive parents and jailed kids, and going broke over and over and over again, maybe not all that unusual.

survey signThe conservative blogosphere (unrelated to Faux News favorite politician, “our Blago”) is all atwitter this week about how nosy Florida is about at your house. The conservative blogosphere is nutso about sex.

The Department of Health here has asked some 4,100 young women for intimate details of their sex lives. State officials said the survey will help them understand women’s need for and approach to family-planning services.

This may be the cheapest survey a government ever ran. Officials who say the survey determines women’s need for and approach to family-planning services gave participants a $10 CVS gift card. The state spent $45,000 on the 46-question survey over the last couple of months.

If that includes the $41,000 worth of gift cards, I want these folks to do all my future marketing surveys.

Participants were asked how many men they had sex with over the last year, whether a man ever poked holes in a condom to get them pregnant and how they felt emotionally the last time they had unprotected sex.

782 women have returned completed surveys.

“Some of the questions are incredibly offensive and invasive,” a male Broward County a political consultant, told the Sun Sentinel. Did I mention that the conservative blogosphere is nutso about sex?

The survey uses questions that already appear in other surveys in use nationally, state Surgeon General Dr. John Armstrong said. Not to mention appearing in most issues of Cosmopolitan. The magazine also “gets to the bottom of your intimate sex questions. Nothing (and we mean nothing) is off limits.”

Florida was perhaps gentler.

  • How did you feel emotionally when you had unprotected sex?
    The question delved into the mysteries of whether the women were trying to get pregnant, in the “heat of the moment and just went with the flow,” or found the man attractive and “thought it would be nice to have a baby with him?” Sounds like something family-planners need to know.
    They also asked if respondents felt “powerless” or “emotionally connected with [a] partner during sex.”
  • How old were you when you first had sex?
  • The last time you had sex with a man did you do anything to keep from getting pregnant? If not, why not?
  • Has a sexual partner ever ”Physically forced you to have sex?” or ”Hurt you physically because you did not agree to get pregnant?”
    That gets right to it. Unless you are a rug-chewing Republican with odd notions about rape.
  • How much do you weigh?
    OK, even I know better than to ask that.

I reckon I could come up with more intrusive (and less statistically useful) questions.

  • What date did you rob your last bank?
  • How often do you use crack cocaine?
  • Have you had gastric bypass surgery?”

“It’s really important to emphasize,” Dr. Armstrong said, “that we want people to be informed so that they can manage their health.”

I could wish the sampling methodology gave me a better sense of statistical accuracy about the answers so I could generalize it to the population. This survey reeks of problems with respondent motivation, honesty, memory, self-selection bias, and the simple ability to respond. Still Dr. Armstrong got it exactly right. We need people to be informed.

782 women have returned completed surveys.

Florida’s Gov. Rick Scott, unusually reactive to the blowing winds, is “glad to hear the department has stopped using it.”

Maybe if they had called it a Health Survey instead of a Sex Survey. Or asked Cosmo to run it…