Brought to your courtesy of Joe.My.God.
Comedy writer and cabaret performer Shelly Goldstein sends us her fun Poppins-fied take on marriage equality. You’re all at home now, c’mon, follow the bouncing ball and sing out loud.
J.P.
Retro.
The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles unveiled the new license plate design slated to start appearing on vehicles in April 2010.
All vehicles in New York will be transitioned to the new license plates over a two year period, replacing plates that debuted in 2001. The official word is that the current plates are losing their reflectivity and were only guaranteed to last for five years anyway. Unofficially, the extra $25 fee to buy the new plates (which you must do to renew your registration) will add a lot of money to the Empire State.
The new design harkens back to the plates used prior to 1986 and will feature the states official colours with blue characters on a gold background.
The official name of the plate series is the “Empire Gold Plates.” Motorists wishing to keep their existing plate number will be required to pay an additional fee. Like the current plate series, NYSDMV will not identify which county you are from by the letters in the plate number, opting to start with “AAA1000” and moving on from there.
I like the fact that there are no fancy graphics on this plate series and that it appears that a huge amount of money was not spent on the design of these plates, since the Empire State is experiencing an unprecedented fiscal emergency.
The official press release from NYSDMV is here.
Chimney Bluffs State Park.
Yesterday we decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather and go for a drive. One of the guys I work with, who appreciates being out in nature as much as I do, told me about a state park that we had never been to before and how different it was from other parks along Lake Ontario and how it was just a beautiful place. So amongst our travels I decided to scout out and introduce Earl and Jamie to Chimney Bluffs State Park.
My friend was right, it is gorgeous.
Chimney Bluffs State Park doesn’t offer any camping facilities nor does it offer swimming (though it seems like it would be a great place to swim). There is a very small picnic area and one building with bathroom facilities. Other than that there’s a bunch of hiking trails and a beautiful shoreline along Lake Ontario.
It seemed to get warmer the closer we got to the lake, so we walked up and down the rocky and pebble covered shore. Due to my timing we got there a little later than planned, so we didn’t venture to the end of the park boundary. We are planning that for a future trip.
If you click on the photo above you’ll probably find more shots from the visit on my Flickr page.
Being Sick In America.
The United States is the only country in the industrialised world without universal health coverage. The result: 47 million Americans are uninsured. If they fall ill, they can count on no one but themselves.
An important video that every American should watch.
US President Barack Obama is fighting for health-care reform that would provide health insurance for every American. But Democrats have been trying — and failing — to overhaul the system for more than 75 years.
The current system leaves 15 percent of Americans uninsured and countless more under-insured.
Perhaps surprisingly, the uninsured are not always the unemployed. Many small-business owners and employees are in charge of getting their own health insurance. They are left to deal with private insurance companies which often refuse to insure patients who have serious illnesses.
According to America’s National Academy of Sciences, 18,000 Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance.
Source: France24. Link: http://www.france24.com/en/20091002-reporters-united-states-america-health-care-reform-barack-obama-insurance
Champion?
I was just asked how to spell styrofoam. I responded simply:
“S-T-Y-R-O-F-O-A-M”. STYROFOAM.
I think I expected applause.
It suddenly occurred to me that when someone asks me how to spell something, I suddenly go into this grade school spelling bee mode and I spell out each letter clearly and distinctly, as if I was facing a panel of five or six teachers that were hanging on each letter I blurted out. I then end the spelling by repeating the word I had just been asked to spell.
I don’t recall every being in a spelling bee in elementary school. I played a few tuba recitals and was the narrator of the elementary school production of “Jackie And The Beanstalk” (it was the 70s, it was weird) but a spelling bee? Not so much. I remember scoring a 100% on most every spelling test. Maybe I blocked out the bad parts.
Now that I think about it, I’m pretty definitely sure I wasn’t in a spelling bee. I remember an “enrichment fair”, where my table was devoted to UFO sightings and alien abduction incidents. I remember writing up a narrative about the Betty and Barney Hill abduction on ditto paper with my mother’s manual typewriter and printing off handouts to go along with the models of UFOs I made, based on descriptions from eyewitness accounts. I was the only one in my fourth grade class that was in “Enrichment”, which was the code word for the oddly-whispered “gifted program”. My mother thought I would be ostracized when I was the only one that left the classroom a couple of times a week for Enrichment. I guess the fact that I was already a one-man freak show was the reason I was in Enrichment in the first place. It was worth it. Besides, I got to see hunky Mr. Rayburn. I always liked him. I wanted to marry him but I knew I couldn’t do that back then. Heck, I couldn’t do it now if I wanted to either, come to think about it.
But a spelling bee? Nah. I never had a chance to be in one of those.
4 a.m.
It’s 4 a.m. and I am wide awake. Not only am I wide awake, but I’m feeling very rested. I feel like I could take on the day today without a care in the world and have a really good day. I am hyped up, amped up and ready to go. But in the back of my mind I’m wondering if I would fade before noon.
I have an ear bug replaying over and over. This time it’s Reba McEntire’s “I’m A Survivor”, the version used for her television show “Reba”. Lucky me, I even have visuals to go along with it.
I’m up and around writing in my blog during this little episode of insomnia hoping that it will somehow make me sleepy and I’ll be able to finish my night’s sleep. I’m sure this little ditty of a blog entry has made someone, somewhere fall asleep.
Tabulate.
So Earl and I just got back from doing our civic duty and voting in the local elections. There were two referendums on the ballot: one was for New York State to turn some land over to one of the power companies so they could put a 48kV powerline along Route 56 somewhere in the North Country, the other was to allow prison inmates to work for not-for-profit organizations.
There were many choices on the ballot for the smattering of offices we were voting for. Many choices were the same vertically – the same person was running on Democrat, Republican, Independent and Conservative ticket. Some choices didn’t have a Democrat running at all. I did make choices in all elections though.
When we walked into the Town Hall we instantly knew something was decidedly different from previous voting experiences. There was no sound of levers being ticked, no crunching of the big red handle opening the curtain and locking in your vote. No. All the ceremony is gone. You now sign in, are handed a score card, instructed to fill in the square completely in a black, felt-tipped pen and sent to a bank of cubicles that really don’t afford any privacy. Gone are the days where no one else was allowed in the voting booth with you. Gone are the days when you cast your vote in confidence and felt like you were making a difference with the pull of a lever. Gone are the days when your vote was confirmed with the swing of the big red lever and a woosh of the curtains.
You now fill in squares with a black pen and take your scorecard to a big electronic machine and feed it into a document scanner. The LCD screen tells you that your vote is registered. There isn’t even a beep nor is there a Happy Mac icon congratulating you on being a good American.
I asked every election official that I had contact with if they liked the new voting machines and if it made their work any easier or more efficient.
It was a “NO” on all accounts. This is a waste of the taxpayer’s money. In the 1980s the local Super Duper (grocery store) didn’t replace their large, hulking mechanical cash registers until they broke down and were no longer functional. And when it was time to replace them, they did it one at a time. New York State should replace these machines one by one as they start to malfunction, giving the voters a choice between the old and new machines until the old machines are no longer viable.
I’m a geek. I am a certified geek. I have many documents saying how geeky I am. I’m even considering a geek tattoo.
I HATE HATE HATE HATE electronic voting. I don’t trust the voting machines. I don’t trust the companies that make them, I don’t trust the programmers that program them and I certainly don’t trust that they’re going to scan my black dot correctly and accurately. They do NOT make the process simpler for the voting citizen and they are not a step in the right direction.
I feel like voting has gone from a participatory to a spectator sport. I am not comfortable with this at all.
Bad move.
Geared Up.
Awake
So I should be sleeping right now. But I’m not. Sunday nights are always a rough night for me to sleep. It’s just always been that way. I don’t know why.
I started falling asleep around 10:30. That’s when my pager went off for the first time today. It was a false page: I received notification that a customer’s service was down and then two minutes later I received a notification that it was back up. In the meantime, I checked and saw that the service never went down. How I enjoy false pages. It was just a reminder from the on-call gods that I am still on call and will be for 8 1/2 more hours.
I think that’s why I’m keyed up. I feel great. My body is (seemingly) back in sync with Mother Nature’s clock, courtesy of the end of that damned Daylight Saving Time. I relaxed by going for a spin in the Jacuzzi earlier. Earl made a great Sunday dinner for us and I was able to resurrect an old computer and turned it into an iTunes server for the house. Things are good. I feel like it’s been a good weekend, despite the electronic tethering to the house.
I should be sleepy now. But I’m not. I have Lady Antebellum’s “Lookin’ For A Good Time” running through my head. Perhaps I’ll look up the video on YouTube and see if watching the video will stop the music playing through my head.
Yay! I found the video on YouTube, even though embedding is disabled by request.
Halloween 2009.
So it’s Halloween 2009. Since I’m on call for this momentous occasion I really don’t have a photo of a snappy costume to show off this year. This will probably lose me some gay points but I can deal with the pressure. Since I’m home tonight no one will point and stare. There might be some whispering but that’s fine by me.
I am proud to say that Earl and I are maintaining our record of the number of trick or treaters with the festivities this year. We are maintaining having ONE trick or treater in the past 13 years. One apartment and two houses; doesn’t matter, we’ve had one beggar bang on our door and that was the son of one of Earl’s employees who was brown-nosing. Lit up carved pumpkins be damned, no one treads on our door step. We didn’t even bother to buy candy this year. I figured if someone knocked on our door we’d poor some cake batter or kitty litter into their bag. That’d certainly get the neighborhood talking.
Earl and Jamie are off to the bowling alley for some cosmic bowling. I considered joining them but that would be way too tempting for the On Call Gods of all things Pager and some telecommunications catastrophe would have happened, so here I sit typing in my blog, burning CDs for the car and watching reruns of “Reba” (great show, by the way). To spice things up a little bit I am looking forward to the school clock collection shutting itself off for an hour so that the end of Daylight Saving Time can be captured properly.
