This day is not shaping up very well. First off, I’m supposed to be working from home today. But our Internet crapped out at about 5:00 or so yesterday afternoon, and it still isn’t back, as far as I know. They are “working on it,” but have no “ETR”. So I had to get dressed and come in. A bummer, but not the worst thing in the world, right?
Then about half way in, my car radio died. The ABS, TCS, and a couple other idiot lights came on. Then the speedometer stayed stuck at 42, the tach stuck where it was, and the care started shifting very, very roughly.
Eventually, the turn signals stopped working (I have no doubt that the brake light quit, too). As I got closer to work, it became apparent that the car wasn’t gonna keep running, so I pulled into a nearby mall parking lot and stopped – at which point, the car died completely, and that was pretty much that.
So I had it towed to a nearby dealer, who gave me a ride in to the office, and here I sit (brokenhearted). This really blows, and I blame it all on Obama.
Yes, our brush with royalty occurred last night as the President came to town and gave a speech at a high school. We watched a lot of it, but then the satellite receiver overheated and that was that for that. No TV, no Internet. Nothing to do but drink beer (thank goodness I had enough – some might even say, “too much” – of that).
Of course, if you listen to NPR, you’d never know the big ‘O’ was here. Coverage I heard said he gave a speech at UB (one of my alma maters – assuming a place I went to for two years before dropping out can be called an alma mater), then stopped off for lunch in Rochester at a place Chuck Schumer, on his way to Binghamton and Scranton.
They blew us right the fuck off.
OK, so we’re no NYC (or even Buffalo, for that matter), but hell we’ve got more people than Binghamton and Scranton combined. Plus he was here to tout the “Say Yes to Education” program (started here, and now branching out to other cities in NY), where kids graduating from the Syracuse City School District are guaranteed free tuition at one of over 100 private and public colleges.
I guess that’s not important enough to report on, though.
Oh well, I guess I’d better get back to work and see if I get a call about my car. Left my goddamn glasses in it, too.
I have to admit, PJ, having your car behave so badly really sucks. The internet and TV is pretty bad too. I think that butter sculpture is to blame. It certainly looked like something that would do great evil.
Of course, if it wasn’t for the damn Internet being out, I’d be happily working from home today, blissfully unaware that my car was about to have a total meltdown.
If I could have gotten it home, I might have been able to figure out the problem by myself, but being 20 miles away, there wasn’t much I could do.
A conversation with Linda Ronstadt
Linda Ronstadt Has Parkinson’s Disease
Linda Ronstadt Discloses Her Battle With Parkinson’s Disease
🙁
Where Credit Is Due
By GAIL COLLINS
A few months ago, a saleswoman at Macy’s tried to wheedle me into renewing my expired store credit card by offering a deep discount on the towels I was buying. So I dug it out of my wallet, where it was nestled between an expired press pass to the Texas State Capitol and an expired library card from Manchester, N.H., and happily handed it over.
She looked at it, puzzled. “But this isn’t your name,†she said.
The card said Daniel Collins. That’s my husband, who I believe has never been to Macy’s, or bought a towel, in his entire life.
I flashed back to a moment when I was living in Connecticut. I have no idea what year it was, except that it is very possible Richard Nixon was still president. I was in the Macy’s in New Haven when a woman with a clipboard came up to me and asked me if I wanted to apply for a credit card.
“Absolutely,†I said instantly.
She took up her pen. “What’s your husband’s name?†she asked.
I wish I could tell you that I made a speech about equal rights and headed for the door, but I just let her fill out my application. This was an era when women still needed a male co-signer to get credit. In some places, you needed a husband or father to even get a library card.
Anyway, I was proud of being newly married and dumb about the women’s movement. I worked as a reporter in the Connecticut State Capitol, where the male legislators and male lobbyists and male reporters met in a place called the Hawaiian Room to drink. When a female journalist demanded that she be admitted, too, the media was barred completely. The guys in the press room blamed it all on the one woman, who, I am sorry to say, was not me. My only reaction was to wonder why anyone would want to go to the Hawaiian Room, which was in the attic, with steam pipes along the ceiling festooned with limp plastic leis.
I’m telling you all this because on Monday we will celebrate Women’s Equality Day, the anniversary of the 19th Amendment and women’s right to vote. That was in 1920, and there’s no longer anyone around who can tell us what that felt like to be disenfranchised because of your sex. But there are plenty of people who recall the time when women couldn’t get credit in their own name.
Next year, if we’re in the mood, we can celebrate the 40th anniversary of the day that Kathryn Kirschbaum, then the mayor of Davenport, Iowa, was told she could not have a Bank of America card without her husband’s signature.
The great thing about Equality Day is that it works in two ways. We can mull both how far we’ve come and how far we have to go. The one thought feeds the other. The idea of having 50 women in the U.S. Senate, or 250 female C.E.O.’s in the Fortune 500 seems less far-reaching if you contemplate the fact that in the 1960s, a spokesman for NASA said “talk of an American spacewoman makes me sick to my stomach.†Now, one of the two American astronauts on the International Space Station is a woman, and that is so routine that we’re not even aware of her name. (It’s Karen Nyberg.)
Monday is also the anniversary of the 1970 women’s march for equality in New York, which almost no one expected to be a very big deal. The New York Police Department had only given the marchers permission to use one lane of Fifth Avenue. “Then more people came and more people came and we spilled over, and we took over the entire avenue,†recalled Robin Morgan, the feminist author and activist. “And that was the moment your heart really sang. People were hanging out windows. I kept yelling: ‘Join us!’ †And some of them, Morgan said, did just that.
Parades are great. For a long time, the drive for suffrage was seen as a depressing slog of petition-gathering by middle-class clubwomen. Then the parades started, and the movement belonged to everyone.
“We did not eat our little lunches in lobster palaces, but out in the street in front of lobster palaces. We stand for plain living and high thinking, that’s it,†a marcher told The New York Times during the equality parade in 1912.
That comment does seem a tad reverse-snobby, but the mixture of socialites and factory workers, marching for one cause, sent a message. It also sounds as though it was a lot of fun. After the march ended, a woman The Times identified as “Miss Annie S. Peck, the mountain climber,†stood on a chair, “waved a Joan of Arc flag, and told her audience that this was the banner that she had planted 21,000 feet above the sea on one of the highest peaks of the Andes.â€
There don’t seem to be a lot of parades planned for Monday, which is probably all for the best. Once a parade becomes an annual institution, it becomes less about a political point and more about the afterparties. But we are going to have one heck of a time in 2020.
Tom Christian, great, great, great grandson of Fletcher Christan and one of the 51 permanent residents of Pitcairn Island, has died.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/world/asia/tom-christian-descendant-of-bounty-mutineer-dies-at-77.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
Julie Harris, Celebrated Actress of Range and Intensity, Dies at 87
🙁 :gate:
Wow, I can’t believe she was 87. I will forever picture her as a young woman.
I found a great new show last night.
Family Tree, Christopher Guest’s new mockumentary, with, from left, Hugh Sachs, Chris O’Dowd and Tom Bennett
Searching for Roots, Finding Characters ‘Family Tree’ on HBO, Directed by Christopher Guest By MIKE HALE Published: May 10, 2013
Absolutely great show. Got better with every episode. Really hoping they get a second season. If you’ve never seen Chis O’Down in “The IT Crowd”, you should watch it.
That’s funny. I immediately wondered if it was IT and IT it is! I wonder why you might like it. :spank: I am gong to see if I can grab all 4 seasons today.
British cult hit ‘The IT Crowd’ to return for finale special
Got ’em.
I’ve started it and am enjoying- thanks guys. Have you seen Lillehammer with Little Stevie? I can’t wait for the next season. Should be out soon. (Netflix)
Thanks for that reminder. Another series I need to pick up on.
Yeah, I’ve been waiting for Season 2 to come out. Whenever I see Stevie Van Zandt with his Silvio Dante puss, it cracks me up.
LOCAL HERO
I was reading the bog when I heard sirens and commotion out front and Mr FK shouting to me as he was locking our front door. A police car had t-boned and trapped a car across the street and the suspect was attempting to flee with Policeman chasing behind with a gun. They ran across our lawn and the policeman took the guy down. They struggled on our lawn and Mr FK ran outside and helped. The bad guy was trying to break free. What I didn’t know was the gun was a taser and the guy had been tasered, but was fighting like a dog nonetheless. He was trying to grab my husbands eyes and kicking him in the ribs, fighting both he and the cop…on our lawn. The cop yelled for me to call 911, which I did. It took 3 more cops to get this man to stop. Mr FK said he had grabbed the guys middle finger and was pulling it backwards trying to get the guy to stop grabbing his face. Finally the other officers were able to get this bad man in a police cage. The ambulance folks checked out my hero. He was quite bloodied up. He’s ok but has cuts and bruises all over. He said he’s pretty sure the guy was on drugs.
The police found a gun under the guys front seat, wads of cash and drugs. oh, and a hood ala bank robber. Don’t know who he is, but I’m certainly glad he’s off our streets.
Evidently when they were all still on the ground subduing the guy, one of the cops told the bad guy to let him cuff him. The bad guy said, “I can’t – that guy has my finger.” Heehee.
They carted the bad guy off in the ambulance eventually.
Quite the Sunday!
:joe:
Holy crap!
Glad you and Mr FK are Ok
Mr. FK must have the action attraction. :omg:
Fer sure. My neighbor said he grabbed his wife and hit the floor in case there were guns fired. My husband? He made sure I was ok and then ran towards it all. 🙄
Not sure how that spanking emo got up there and you can’t edit replies 🙄
When I was working for the big national distribution company some of my best friends were in IT. Even when my job went away, they remained friends and helped me out when others went their own ways.
Katherine Parkinson was also in a series or two of Doc Martin – another British show I highly recommend.