Monthly Archives: October 2005

Two Flats Don’t Make A Round

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At least, not without the intervention of some air pressure.

Yesterday was supposed to be a pretty routine day. David and I had planned on going to Nobu for sushi, after having been foiled earlier in the week by the unavailability of parking near the restaurant. The lot was jammed because so many dozens and dozens of baseball fans decided to go to a nearby sports-and-billiards bar. Sushi was “in the cards.”

We made it happen, but not without some difficulties. As I was driving along in my usual pre-work daze, the car started to make an ominous “whumpa-whumpa” noise. The steering didn’t pull to one side or the other, but the “whumpa” kept getting worse. I was in such a state, I couldn’t spot where the emergency flasher button was on the dash – I’ve only been driving the RAV for, what, 5 months? Duh. So I slowed down and kept driving, because it felt like I still had some pressure in the whumpafied tire, and I was only about a half a mile from work. Made it to the near end of the parking lot and walked in from there.

So then before lunch I called Triple AAA – the best automotive investment we’ve ever made, frankly. They advised they’d call my cell when the driver was close, for final directions. Sadly and ungeekily, I was not able to provide GPS coordinates, but I doubt any of their drivers have GPS, anyway.

Just as I was finishing my rather delicious Friday special (it’s either “popcorn” shrimp or “fish and chips” and alternates every week), I got the call from the AAA dispatcher. Headed out to the parking lot and waited for the guy to come in sight. It was a lovely, warm sunny October day, too. Ah, there he came at last.

He had some trouble getting his jack, and then my jack, to work properly with the somewhat-high ground clearance of the RAV. Also, you have to place the jack precisely where the manual says, or jackie no liftie. Finally, he succeeded in getting the thing hiked up high enough and switched out the tires.

The old tire had a chunk of some sort of broken plastic debris with a piece of metal like a jack or a plug-in; it wasn’t sharp but the force of being driven over had given it enough “oomph” to penetrate the center of the tire, right between the treads. Damn, and the tires were new this year, too.

The spare was from the previous set of wheels, and appeared to have plenty of pressure, but as soon as it was put on (sans “VRRR! VRRRRRRR! noises) it went right down to the ground, too. Dammit.

The driver regretted that he didn’t have a little battery-powered air pump on his truck. Well, dammit, why not? That would have been perfect? But no.

So after some grumbling and near-whining along the lines of “I don’ wanna call Triple AAA and wait for them again in the dark and get towed to Sears Tires and ride in the cab with the driver after work,” David and I eventually decided on a reasonable solution.

He came and got me and we went to dinner at Nobu and ate much sushi.

Then the next day, after a really enjoyable morning’s “snooze, snuggle, and play” with Riley, David drove me over to my car with our handy battery-powered airpump. Take that, unprepared Triple AAA driver! It inflated the spare well enough that I could make it to Sears, but I had a few scary moments when I realized the rear door wasn’t securely latched, and the flat tire that was stashed back there kept knocking into it every time I accellerated. Yikes!

But I made it to Sears in one piece and without causing a nasty and totally stupid accident. Dropped it off, got a latte in the mall, and watched shoppers for about an hour, and the job was all done. I had them do an oil change while I was at it.

The total cost? About $22. Turns out the tires were under warranty, a fact the Sears guy verified before they did anything. I only paid for the oil change, something that I’d been putting off doing for at least 3 months.

The shocking, shocking mess in my car, which I’d also been ignoring and putting off dealing with for months was an embarassment when the Triple AAA guy and the Sears guy were doing their respective once-overs, and so after picking up the RAV I got it washed (sort of – the cycle was truncated for some reason) and vacuumed it out, then went home and cleaned out every bit of junk, paper, old cardboard, and congealed mess from every interior surface.

A casualty of this cleaning process: the receipt for the “car wash,” which I had kept aside so I could go into the attached Kwik-E-Mart and request a refund or a do-over with a “real” wash (one that went beyond just the initial rinse, and actually included detergent and… washing). I was vacuuming the front seats when I saw it flutter for a nanosecond in the maw of the vacuum hose before it vanished with a “th-th-th-WUPP!!” So. No do-over for me.

I had a tube of “car protectorant/cleaner wipes” that I’d never used, and by the time I was done, it was about half gone. Then I vacuumed again with the much more powerful shop-vac at home, and sprayed all the fabric with Febreze. Why? Because I’m in the evil, evil habit of buying fast-food burgers for lunch and eating them in the car, which meant the car didn’t smell too good in addition to being full of dust, congealed gunk, discarded boxes I’d never gotten around to recycling, and discarded wrappers and receipts.

Now my car is clean inside and out and is no longer an embarassment.

Plus, it even smells clean! Yayyy!

This task was made a lot more pleasant by the fact that Chicago Public Radio was running a marathon of This American Life stories, plus this week’s new broadcast, which was about a study done a year ago that claimed fairly convincingly that 100,000 civilians had been killed by Coalition forces since the beginning of the war, up to that point.

The website “Iraqi Body Count” makes it only 30,000 up to now. Either way, that’s an obscenely high number.

Even rounded up.

Anyway, I listened to several stories on the car radio as I worked industriously in the driveway at home. The sun shone bright and warm, the little bitty yellow leaves from the locust trees blew in and out of the car’s open doors, and I contentedly wiped away grunge and yak and pfaff from every surface I could reach.

So in spite of the fairly crappy beginning, it’s been a pretty good weekend so far.

Evangelicals Neither Monolitihic Nor Neolithic

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Evangelicals working to break stereotypes – The Clarion-Ledger

Evangelicals have been pushing President Bush, an evangelical himself, to lead the charge on reducing foreign debt owed by Third World nations and to fight poverty and AIDS in Africa.

The debt-relief effort has been driven by the Rev. Rick Warren, author of the enormously popular book, The Purpose-Driven Life. Warren, pastor of the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., has been mobilizing evangelicals to work on the debt issue.

Warren and others are pushing “The ONE Campaign (www.one.org),” which seeks “to make poverty history” by allowing countries with heavy debts to spend money on social needs instead of interest payments. Warren also has created a separate “P.E.A.C.E. Plan,” to work on poverty and AIDS in Africa.

This is a positive development, as far as I’m concerned. The world needs as many different kinds of people to get involved with making poverty history, or working on related issues like eradicating disease or debilitating parasites.

I ran across several different stories in the last two days about parasites, for example. The Gates Foundation has given a lot of money to help eradicate parasitic worms in Africa (the Guinea worm) and they’re working with the Carter Center (yes, THAT Carter) to fight river blindness in the Americas.

Although it doesn’t specifically say so on the “about” page of the Carter Center site, I’d guess that the Carters walk the walk that their faith demands, and don’t just talk the talk like some other faith-based President I could name.

George Takei Emerges

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From Sci Fi Wire — The News Service of the Sci Fi Channel: George Takei “comes out” of the closet, but muses that it’s more like an emergence:

“It’s not really coming out, which suggests opening a door and stepping through,” Takei, 68, told the magazine. “It’s more like a long, long walk through what began as a narrow corridor that starts to widen. And then some doors are open, and light comes in, and there are skylights, and it widens.”

This is a beautiful metaphor. I also hope that there’s a large cheering crowd to welcome him; it seems that way, as many other bloggers have talked about Takei’s announcement in a positive way, almost in a congratulatory mood.

Later in the Sci Fi Wire story, he goes on to say,

“I’ve not had a good experience with one sibling,” Takei said. “And I won’t be specific, because it’s still a problem. My mother, initially, had some adjustments to make, but she got to like Brad very much. She got Alzheimer’s, and it got very difficult for her, so we moved her in with us. Brad was wonderful. He was a saint. It’s very difficult when you’re dealing with someone with Alzheimer’s. And some of the stages were … horrific. And Brad helped throughout that. She was with us for the last four years of her life. And I owe so much to him.”

In spite of the struggles he’s had with family, his partner has been there with him all the way. It makes me sad to think that he and his partner Brad can’t marry, and make their partnership and family status complete.

PANnameh! PANameh-uh-uh-uh-UH-uh

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The recaplet by the wonderful Miss Alli is up for the most recent episode of TAR8:

Television Without Pity | Season 8 Episode 5

The race heads out of New Orleans to Panama, where for the entire first half of the episode, absolutely nothing occurs to affect anyone’s placement that is the result of anything other than pure luck. Finally, after several bunches and unbunches that have nothing to do with anyone’s performance, there is one significant decision in the form of both the Paolos (in first place) and the Gaghans (in last place) deciding it is most advantageous to go for the Fast Forward, in which bungee jumping will be involved. By the time the teams reshuffle, the Gaghans are tighter on the Paolo tails than you’d think, but they’re still beaten to the FF, and DJ and Mama have a disconcerting bungee jump together, leaving the Gaghans to scramble back into the mix. But scramble they do, until they manage to catch up to the Gabbleskis at a baseball roadblock. When Sharon takes forever to get a hit and Papa Gaghan smacks one out of the park without too much apparent difficulty, the Gaghans once again pull their fannies out of the fire and finish in second-to-last place, while the Gabbleskis are predictably saved by the season’s first non-elimination round. You don’t necessarily want to know how, but this is also the episode where we discover that the Gabbleskis brought a large quantity of really, really impractical underwear.

Some of which appeared to be worn as headgear, but on second glance it turned out to be some sort of mosquito netting.

My only quibble with that was the eerie and disturbing way teh evil Weavers kept moving up, but that may have been entirely due to the bad luck of everyone in front of them. Yeah.

The Right Way: Smear Tactics

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Candidates Who Play Anti-Gay Card … might not be doing as well in the next election cycle as they expect:

Here’s a press release from Ron Grignol, the Republican challenger for a House seat in the 43rd District in southeastern Fairfax near Fort Belvoir: Del. Mark Sickles, a Democrat, “sent a mail piece deliberately misleading the voters” by showing Sickles cradling a toddler in his arms. “The problem is Mark Sickles does not have a child or a family.”

Grignol notes in the release that he indeed has children, which he says helps him understand how to improve schools, while Sickles “feels he needs to mislead voters.”

Curiously, while Grignol’s Web site shows him with his two daughters, it is silent about his own family status. He is divorced, something he does mention in his campaign speeches.

Oh, the hypocrisy. Of course I don’t fail to note that “not having children” equals “gay” in the minds of what another Republican calls “a small, vocal minority” in the party. He knows, because they smeared him with a lie about an endorsement from a Washington “gay” paper in his party’s primary. Now he’s endorsing the Democratic candidate in the race, against the Republican that did the smear job. Nice.

Fortunately, a coalition of Virginia clergy and religious leaders has come out (heh, heh, etc.) to issued an appeal to candidates not to appeal to sexual prejudices. As of press time, one of the most vocal “anti-gay” candidates had not responded to the request.

White House Schadenfraude

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The happy news just keeps coming. Are things finally starting to unravel at the White House? Are they completely dysfunctional now? Are the more principled, more reality-based members of Congress finally realizing there’s no profit in supporting a morally bankrupt White House? Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of unprincipled lying pocket-lining bastards.

First, a selection from the Washington Post’s “20 most emailed articles” for today:

Bush Aides Brace For Charges
Vice President For Torture
Harriet Miers Withdraws Nomination
In Ottawa, Rice Seeks To Temper Bitterness About Bush Policies
What Rice Can’t See
Grand Jury Hears Summary of Case on CIA Leak Probe

And some other links to WP articles, showing things are starting to most definitely not go the White House’s way:

Wage Provision To Be Paid Again
The High Price of Homeland Security
2,000th Death Marked By Silence And A Vow
How A Lobbyist Stacked The Deck
DeLay Indicted In Texas Finance Probe

And that’s just from the Washington Post…

UPDATEBush campaign fundraiser indicted
UPDATE: NPR Q & A | Miers Withdraws, What’s Next?
The White House Cabal
Hard Line Conservatives Don’t See Bush As One Of Their Own

Miers: Yer OUTTA here!

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Okay, so Harriet Miers has resigned. And now Charles Krauthammer is going to be insufferable to his friends and enemies, because he correctly called dibs on how the White House could “gracefully” get out of the nomination Nina Totenberg called a “disaster.”

Nina dished some dirt; apparently in the WH coaching sessions for Miers, they couldn’t even get her to speak up loud enough to be heard; let alone get her to answer questions in a manner that would reassure Senate Judicial committee members as to her fitness. A previous story filed by Ms. Totenberg had detailed that “she’d flunked the exam” regarding the questionnaire, and that the courtesy visits to senators had not gone well at all and would be stopped. They speculated then that her prep sessions weren’t going well, and that the White House might well have had to ask for a postponement of the hearings.

Of course, this frees up a spot for someone who’s not only a well-qualified federal judge, but well and truly palatable to the anti-choice, anti-privacy, anti-feminist religious Right. Which means the Democrats will probably open their big mouths without thinking it through, look stupid, and screw any chance of stopping the anti-choice train.

Something Bunny This Way Comes

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For about a week and a half we’ve been trying to make our schedules mesh with Steve and Ruth’s so we could all see Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

I heard an interview yesterday on the BBC World Service program that WBEZ now runs at the time I have lunch… I’ve learned all kinds of odd and interesting things in the weeks since the program change, and now I’ve learned that in Portland (in Dorset, England) it’s such bad luck to say “rabbit” that advertisements and posters for the film had to be modified.

Locals prefer the term “underground mutton” or “furry thing.”

The interview was conducted with a local; his dialect sounded a lot like what happens when you talk like a pirate, but softer and with fewer colorful salty seagoing expressions.

He explained to the interviewer why the movie production company had to re-do all its posters and practically re-title the film – in Portland, “rabbit” is an extremely offensive and inauspicious word.

It all goes back to a tale of bad luck and a death at the local quarry back hundreds of years ago. It was decided that the Devil was behind the bad luck, and that teh evil must be burned out. As luck (or something) would have it, the first thing they saw when the flames were lit was an escaping bunny. Aha! It was the Devil! Never mention its name!

Over the years, the local fishermen also picked up the prejudice against little Peter Cottontail; since many local men worked in both industries it soon became common for sailors to refuse to go out in their boats if they saw a rabbit near the shore.

And so that’s why if you’re sitting in a pub in Portland with a few locals, do NOT ask them to adjust the rabbit ears on the telly. They’ll probably throw you out for uttering such a socially unacceptable and unlucky word.

So anyway maybe this weekend my husband David and I will finally get to see “Were-Rabbit.” Er, I mean “Were-BUNNY!”