Gonna have to remember that one
From Joe McNalley's Blog:
Visited the Apple store on 5th, and shot a pretty typical up looking view of the spiral staircase there. Liked the graphics of it, until of course an Apple employee stepped up and told me I couldn’t shoot up at the stairs cause somebody might be wearing a skirt. Now in Manhattan the array of people who could be potentially wearing a skirt is widely varied, so I could understand their concern. But really–all you see are the bottoms of shoes. Do I look that desperate? The guy who complained to me musta had the nuns.
"Musta had the nuns." I like that. Oh, and don't you think someone had already thought of that which is why the glass is frosted? Sounds to me like someone can't think of any other reason to be looking up . . .
It boggles the mind (mine anyway)
A couple of weeks ago at church my pastor said something that really resonated with me. He said, "The most important thing in the world is God's glory." Isn't that true? So no matter what I'm doing I need to be 100% that I am bringing glory to God because that's why he made me!"
Stumbled onto this while surfing photographer web sites. I just don't get this. Doesn't that make God sound like a narcissistic prick? Isn't it a grander vision of God to believe he made you for no other reason than to be yourself and give you the opportunity to learn and grow?
I could be wrong, but I kinda think the harder thing to do is to set someone you love free to be who they choose to be rather than to try and exert absolute control over them and try to make them into something you want them to be.
Why is it we seem to endow God with the worst qualities of mankind rather than the best?
American Express are bastards
Saturday evening I got a phone call. It's from an 866 number so I let it go to voice mail. Well, it's AmEx saying they've made an important change to my account and I needed to call them back right away.
Curious, I log into my account to find that my available credit had gone from something over $10,000 to $15. Needless to say, I was pissed. It wasn't so much that they had cut my credit line (again), but they had cut it so low that the next month's interest charges (in the neighborhood of $30) would have pushed the account over the credit limit and ding! over limit fee! and ding! penalty interest rates!
So I called them to find out what the hell and demand they at least raise it $200 to cover coming interest charges and some charges I had made that day. (Did I mention the call came at 5:25pm?) They insisted my only recourse was to make a second payment this month to cover the coming charges. Never mind that I had already posted a payment for this month (a week early). Never mind that it was 10x more than the required minimum payment. Never mind that it was almost 2x more than charges I had actually made to the account this month.
To add insult to injury, they tried to blame me. "We have concerns about your ability to repay the balance." Bullshit. Since when have credit cards of any kind been about repaying the balance? As long as you make your monthly payments and don't go over your limit, they don't care. In fact, that's the f---ing business model! This is not about me. This is about them throwing a credit card at every Tom, Dick and Harry with a mailbox and following up with "convenience checks" to what? Encourage people to run up a balance. This is about them making bad investments and shitty business decisions and suddenly not having the assets to cover all the loans and generous credit limits they've been handing out for the last ten years.
I get it. They have their balls in a vice and they need to get their outstanding loans more in line with the current value of what assets they have left. I get that a credit line counts against their balance sheet, even if it's not currently in use. If they had cut a few grand off my limit like they did last year, or even if they had only left me with a few hundred dollars, I would have just rolled my eyes and gone on paying off the card. If they had been willing to listen to reason from a customer who has a long and excellent payment history, I would have been fine. If they had even taken the time to tell me the available balance stated on the web site included authorizations that had been made on the account, but which had not yet cleared (ie. the charges I had made that day) and a small payment of $20 would be sufficient to keep my account from going into penalty status, I might have been mollified. But no. Not only did they try and get me to pay off half the balance of the card (if I could afford to do that, don't you think I would??), they deliberately set up a situation that would have pushed my account into penalty status if I hadn't been paying attention, or hadn't received the phone call, or had been away from the Internet or for any other reason been unable to make an extra payment.
They also didn't choose me because of their "concerns about my ability to repay." They chose me because they knew they could probably squeeze me for some extra cash. If my credit rating was already in the toilet, I'd have nothing to lose by telling them to go to hell. If I didn't have an excellent payment history, they wouldn't have risked my not being able to make future payments. Essentially, they did this precisely because I'm a reliable customer.
Bastards.
From “The Onion”
If God Had Wanted Me To Be Accepting Of Gays, He Would Have Given Me The Warmth And Compassion To Do So
. . . It's a simple matter of logic, really. God made me who I am, and who I am is a cold, anti-gay zealot. Thus, I abhor gay people because God made me that way. Why is that so hard to understand?
Compassion, tolerance, understanding, basic decency, the ability to put myself in another person's position: God could have endowed me with any of those traits and yet—here is the crucial part—He didn't. Why? Because the Creator of the Universe wants me to demonize homosexuals in an effort to strip them of their fundamental human rights.
. . . So unless our almighty Lord and Savior decides to change His mind about my ability to empathize on even the most basic level—which I find highly unlikely—then everyone is just going to have to accept the fact that I'm going to keep on hating homosexuals. And I know that He will fill me with the strength to remain mindless and hurtful in the face of adversity.
You can find the rest here.
HT: MoHoHawaii
Not A Good Year For My Youngest
Earlier this year, my youngest daughter lost a good friend to leukemia.
Last night the bus she was riding in, on her way home from a marching band competition, crashed when the driver "passed out." I put that in quotes, because those are my daughter's words. I haven't heard any official news as to what happened to the driver. But given that it was only around 8:00pm, that they had been on the road less than 30 minutes and that my daughter said the driver seemed fine when they left, it does seem unlikely at this point that the driver fell asleep.
One of the staff tried to regain control of the bus . . . and was the only person to lose her life in the crash. According to the evening news, no one else's injuries were serious enough to require they stay overnight in the hospital. My daughter is shaken up and has a severely bruised leg that will require she be on crutches for a few days while it heals. All things considered, relatively unscathed.
We may never know how much of a difference the staff member's efforts made, if any. There is a very real possibility things could have been much worse had she not been trying to help. So my heartfelt condolences to her family for their loss, and my heartfelt gratitude for the life and health of my little girl.
Update: The Trib is reporting today that three students were admitted overnight, and they are calling the situation with the driver a "medical episode."
Concise if somewhat inaccessible
There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender… identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.
No idea where this comes from. Found it on a boy blog I follow. I suspect it's not original to the author of the blog. I see sentences constructed like this and know they are inaccessible to a large segment of the population. It's not that they couldn't understand it, but a first parsing doesn't bear fruit so they just check out. In the past I've found it necessary to translate statements in Ivory Tower Speak to be more accessible to my clients.
On the other hand, I think of right-wing buffoons like Beck and Limbaugh and have guilty fantasies of an aneurysm cause by intellectual overload to their atrophied and addlepated brains.