Leelanau Whippersnapper
The Northwoods Is No Place For A Pink Flamingo
Updates and Reflections
May 10th
What a busy fucking month! So for those of you not in the know, I’ve spent the past several weeks actively pursuing buying a house while at the same time putting in over 50 hours a week at work! Talk about stress. There is a lot to do and a LOT to think about. At this point in the game I’ve decided, along with the advice of my Realtor, to put things on hold until June. I had a few things that I had to clean up on my credit report and at this point it’s a waiting game for my score to reset. Should happen within a month and then I should be able to get my financing in order. So, stay tuned. Sarah and Brian, you might get to lend a hand helping ME move this time. You owe me one from your stint in Jackson! Christopher can help too.
In other news, I’ve recently become a HUGE fan of the Musical Sitcom “Glee”! I have pretty much fallen in love with this show for a couple of reasons. Primarily, this show pretty much sums up my entire High School career minus some of the glitz and glamor. In addition to that, they have taken and re-done a whole shit load of some of the most popular songs from my adolescence and then combined them with some pretty spectacular show tunes. I would not be a qualified gay man if I did not melt over a good show tune and the kids in this show hit the mark every time. I imagine, had I actually gone through and finished school, this is the sort of choir I’d be directing at this point in my life. At the very core of the show though it is about a high school Glee club filled with geeks, nerds and a couple of jocks from the football team mashed together to demonstrate the complete drama of high school, and the triumphs of each of the kids as they work through that difficult time in their lives. I relate especially well to Kurt, a kid struggling with his sexuality (he is openly gay) and a kid not afraid to excel using the upper range of his voice. In the clip below (sadly there is no video, just audio), he is singing a duet with one of the leads in the show (Rachel) singing the incredibly awesome ”Defying Gravity” from the musical Wicked. I can’t help but remember my experiences with my good friend and regular duet partner Rachel as we both swam through the cesspool of adolescence together. It is VERY rare that I get sucked in to shows like this but this one has really hit the mark for me and I’m sure many other choir geeks out there in the world. I hope they can get a few more seasons out of it before it runs it’s course. Enjoy.
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This is Not A Hate Crime
May 7th
You be the judge. How might you have voted had you been seated in the jury box? I think you know my answer and it’s not what the jury said. (note, the black screen at the start of this is part of the video).
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Say What?
May 3rd
54 million Americans over the age of 18 do not believe in evolution.
And this is acceptable?
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I’ve Had It
Apr 28th
Ok, I know I rant and holler and bitch and whatever else all the time about Charter, my Internet provider and yet I continue to use them. Well, I’ve finally had it with them. I won’t say where I’m getting the connection right now to write this blog post but it’s not coming from Charter, all I’ll say is there are some pretty dumb ass people living around me. So, likely this next Tuesday I will be making phone calls to AT&T, Verizon, and any other DSL service provider I can locate in town to see what kind of deals I can get for Internet. Any way I look at it, the new service I find will mean shittier speeds meaning I won’t be able to watch as much video in as high a quality, and I won’t be able to download things as fast, I won’t be able to stream music as flawlessly and it will just all around suck donkey balls. The cable TV is going away entirely at this point, perhaps if I decide that I really do need TV in the future I will get satellite service. The folks down at the Charter office are going to get an ear full from me, I’ll say my peace and just be done with them forever. I suppose if living up here means being able to sit on a boat in the summer, it also means putting up with the fact that this town is not set up for geeks like me who actually understand how to utilize technology to our advantage rather than just putz around looking at porn and reading blogs. It’s no wonder at all to me why there are no significant tech companies located in Northern Michigan. They would simply collapse given the lack of understanding people have about the Internet and how it works and how it could work SOOOOOOO much better up here than it actually does. Charter has this region by the balls and they are not going to let go for any reason. My best choice is to rid myself of their horrendous services before it just drives me fucking nuts.
To top off my day today, I came home and received a summons for Jury Duty. This is just the qualification questionnaire at this point so I’ve not actually been selected but shit, this could not be a worse time to have to do that. I am buried up to my eyes at work right now and my team is a mess mainly because of their inability to live up to my standards. I’m pissed off at most of them right now for various reasons and they know it which makes working with them rather tense at times. All I want them to do is do their fucking jobs. I want them to work the hours I schedule them, sell things to people when there are people there to sell to, and put stock away when there are no customers. The job could not be simpler. I can’t leave them for a single day without walking back into a disaster. Thank GOD it’s just an internal one and they are so far not pissing off customers. The sad thing is, most of them are so comfortable in their positions that they don’t understand they can be replaced at the drop of a hat….for that matter so can I. 300 applications a week STILL coming in from people looking for a job. It’s unbelievable how big the prospective employee pool is at this point but yet, those who are applying? Out of 300, maybe 5 are potential candidates AT BEST. When you aren’t even qualified to work as a stocker in a big box store there is a problem not only with the economy but with the entire job pool. I digress. So lets all hope I don’t get called to sit on a jury right now. I really just don’t have the time or the patience to put my life on hold in order to determine someone else’s fate.
I have been able to do a little photography lately. So click on over to leelanauphotography.com and take a look at the gallery. I’ve been adding to it recently.
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Teabagging for White Men
Apr 20th
Well, good luck getting this video to play for you but it’s worth the wait if you have the patience. It’s a popular video and YouTube is being slow. Here are the Teabaggers, in their own words on Tax Day 2010. Below the video some rather telling stats from a recent poll regarding the makeup of the Teabagger movement. Pretty much confirming what I already knew if you ask me.
From the Huffington Post today (as well as in many newspapers around the country):
A recent New York Times/CBS poll confirmed the obvious: Tea Party activists are overwhelmingly white, male, conservative, lower-income, and GOP-leaning. Nearly all passionately believe that President Obama is shoving the country to socialism. All lambaste the federal government for giving the company store away to the poor. The poor in this case are blacks. That race lurks perilously just beneath the surface with Tea Party activists is beyond dispute. To many the equation is government programs equal hand outs to undeserving blacks and the poor and that in turn equals money snatched from the pockets of hard working whites.
Read the Rest of the scathing poll here and learn many of the rest of the reasons that you should abstain from teabagging.
HERE is the actual Poll the was conducted.
And HERE is the New York Times article.
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It Continues…
Apr 18th
and each time I run across a story like this it will be re-posted and linked to on this blog until such time as it stops happening. Obama recently signed a Presidential Order stating that any medical institution receiving Medicare/Medicaid funds must not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, those who do, will lose their funding. The goal was to make head way at preventing this sort of thing from happening. We’ve seen 2 stories like this now in 2 months and thousands more go unreported and untold. For you heterosexual married rereads of this blog, what might YOU do if your spouse landed in the hospital for whatever reason and despite your marriage (and the rights you have through that marriage to make medical decisions for your incapacitated spouse) were told not only your directives were unimportant, they also had no legal bearing. Think about the things you take for granted.
Clay and his partner of 20 years, Harold, lived in California. Clay and Harold made diligent efforts to protect their legal rights, and had their legal paperwork in place—wills, powers of attorney, and medical directives, all naming each other. Harold was 88 years old and in frail medical condition, but still living at home with Clay, 77, who was in good health.
One evening, Harold fell down the front steps of their home and was taken to the hospital. Based on their medical directives alone, Clay should have been consulted in Harold’s care from the first moment. Tragically, county and health care workers instead refused to allow Clay to see Harold in the hospital. The county then ultimately went one step further by isolating the couple from each other, placing the men in separate nursing homes…
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Teabagging for Jesus
Apr 17th
Pay special attention to the last part of this important video:
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When Your Writing is Validated
Apr 11th
it feels nice. This follows my post and comments the other day of the Ugly Betty Videos. Check out the link, the author is about the same age as I am. This is from the Independent Gay Forum, a conservative blog where Andrew Sullivan has been a regular contributor. Primarily gay libertarian perspectives on social issues.
Sometimes we don’t notice our victories until long after a battle has been won. Over the last couple of years, gay marriage has secured territory most people didn’t even realize was contested, and its loss will be far more devastating to gay marriage opponents than their victories in all the court cases and all the elections in the world.
I’m talking about sweetness.
Our opponents demonize us — sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly, but viciously and relentlessly. Their chief weapon is sex – ours, not theirs — overlaid with a self-righteous piety that is funny when Dana Carvey does it, and wrongheaded no matter whose pursed lips it leaks out of. But while everyone from the Pope on down has been focused on the inherent disorders and immorality of homosexual sex, another front in the gay rights battle opened up: Gay teenagers in love.
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When Will We Learn
Apr 10th
Well, another long day at work and I’m home now, eating noodles and vegetables and reading blogs. Those of you that follow this blog know that I enjoy politics but one thing that I enjoy more is amusing myself with America’s stupidity. I’m a pretty rational person. I think things through, I ask questions, I read, I learn and I don’t take things for granted. True, that may not have been the case in a few ways for those of you that knew me as a dumb-ass 20 year old but things change, people do tend to grow up….eventually.
I came across this little tidbit on the web tonight and wanted to share it. Americans LOVE their entitlements! Good lord where would we be without Medicare and Social Security, and soon Healthcare. We love things that are handed to us on a silver platter but god forbid we be fucking rational about it. Let’s talk about taxes and how exactly the Federal Government (the provider of Entitlements) gets money. The primary revenue stream comes from us. We are tax payers, we dump a certain amount of our income into the Federal Pot so to speak throughout our working lives. This is supposed to pay (among other things) for the entitlement programs that exist and that people just can’t live without! We all know that today, our Federal Government is in a tight spot. The budget needs to be balanced so what happens? We cut things that are “unnecessary” out of the budget so funds can be allocated appropriately. Trouble is, NOBODY (or at least only a very few people) is willing to cut things out of the budget. Take a look at the graphic below.
Take a look at those numbers. These are all things the Government spends money on, yet hardly anyone feels they should receive lower federal funding than they are already currently getting! In the areas above, the biggest percentages only account for 3% of the Federal Budget according to the survey! So you could cut them out entirely, and gain nearly nothing! So, we want our cake and we want to eat it too! Sounds like America.
So, how do we balance the budget? As much as I hate to tell you this, the ONLY way to balance the budget is to increase revenue and that means YOU HAVE TO RAISE TAXES. Yes, I know, shoot me now, I get raped every week by the government taking large chunks of money from what I willingly earned by busting my ass at work for 12 hours a day. But guess what, I am one of the few that would be willing to increase my tax contributions in order to live in a country that is actually solvent and actually spends appropriate dollars on appropriate programs for it’s citizens. Trouble is, there aren’t very many people like me. Only 5% of the people polled in this survey said that taxes needed to be raised. The Chairman of the Fed knows what is necessary, even President Obama knows that taxes have to be raised but NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR THAT. I can only hope that someday, the people of my generation will come to understand reality a little better than the boomers have over the past 30 years while we grew up. We must either reduce the size and scope of the federal government OR we must raise taxes to pay for the things that we so badly want. It is right there in black and white. What are you willing to do?
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