...when I get carded trying to buy a ticket to Kill Bill or Team America, but I can walk into a liquor store and buy a bottle of 80 proof brandy without getting carded. Apparently the powers that be are more concerned with the underage viewing of R-rated movies without an adult than they are with underage drinking, because if people at a movie theater think that I might possibly be under 17, than there is no way that somebody at a liquor store is going to think that I'm over 30 (the sign on the door says that if you look under 30, you're getting carded).
The whole thing just seems a bit backwards to me.
This was the first time I saw the Stanley Cup in person, it was beautiful. Seeing "Tampa Bay Lightning" engraved on the bottom ring is just awesome.
In an attempt to keep goodwill among fans during the lockout, the Lightning's AHL affiliate Springfield Falcons played a game against the Philadelphia Phantoms at the St. Pete Times Forum tonight. It was fun, but it's still not quite the same. The Falcons lost, they aren't that great of a team, but in the waning minutes of the 3rd period they scored two goals to make the final score 4-3 instead of 4-1. I was kind of disapointed though because my Pennsylvania cousins had told us all sorts of stories about fantastic brawls at Phantoms games, but both teams were way too polite and there was no real fighting. Oh well... The most important thing is this photo below:
Oh, another thing, I was kind of amazed by the turnout for the game, the arena was almost as full as it was back in the old days when the Lightning were horrible, so to turn out that many people to root for a rather bad (strike that, really bad) AHL team shows that things aren't the same around these parts as they once were. Now, they're selling tickets because people want to see hockey of some kind, any kind.
I waited a couple of days to blog this because I was too mad the day it happened and the coherence of any rants would probably have been pretty low.
As I already said, some random guy decided to boycott all Federated Department stores (parent company of Macy's) to try to force them to put "Merry Christmas" in all of their advertising. See the post where I outlined why it's a very bad idea.
The guy behind the boycott is just some random guy out in California with no direct connection with any major conservative group who has a poorly designed website (but "it gets 20,000 hits a day" so that proves it's legit, so says the guy behind it) but who managed to get some guy, Robert Knight, at Concerned Women For America to take him seriously, and since Mr. Knight has plenty of connections with legitimate organizations, it's making it's rounds around conservative circles. Focus on the Family ran an opinion piece masquerading as a news story written by Knight as an online extra to Citizen Magazine, and between Manuel Zamorano the Committe to Save Merry Christmas guy and Robert Knight, it's managed to get mentioned on Fox News and Sean Hannity's radio show.
I sent an e-mail to Knight at CWFA that was similar to my blog post, but a lot more polished, and recieved a response that completely missed the point. However, he forwarded my e-mail to Mr. Zamorano, who then decided on Wednesday to call me up on the phone. I was out shopping when he called so he gave a big spiel to my mom, who kept telling him to just call me on my cell phone, so as I'm driving home from the beach listening to sports radio, my phone rings and it's that guy on the other end. If you want the short version, it suffices to say that my conversation with him convinced me that he's a bit of a kook who shouldn't be taken seriously by the people who are taking him seriously, and that Federated was right in ignoring him--he falls into the category of people who threaten to sue the company over naked mannequins.
The long story is that he told me about how the company ignored the e-mails he sent to the CEO and to the board of directors (what kind of guy expects to be taken seriously if he's not even sending paper letters to heads of corporations?), and that they aren't negotiating in good faith because they wouldn't talk to him (seems to me that the burden of proof for why he deserves a hearing is on him, not the company for ignoring him). I tried to explain that the language he used in communicating with Federated is the sort of language that evangelicals will understand but that corporate types aren't going to get it, but he kept repeating about how it was so obvious and they should just do what he wants and put "Merry Christmas" in the windows of stores and in the advertising. I told him that what the company is hearing is that he's demanding that they ignore and alienate their Jewish and Muslim customers. His response: "well, they're going to have to make a choice." At that point, I tried to respond but he cut me off with a condecending "hear me out, hear me out" (nevermind that he kept interrupting everything I tried to say), and it wasn't until several minutes later that I was able to bring the conversation back to that point. When I brought the conversation back to that and said that the company shouldn't be forced to make a choice between their Christian customers and their Jewish and Muslim customers and that they should be able to reach all of those groups, he then insisted that the company should know that he's not trying to make them exclude those people because he "didn't even mention Jews or Muslims in the letter." That's precisely the point. By his failure to mention people of other faiths and his failure to make it clear that he wasn't advocating exclusionary practices, the message that the company got was that he was doing precisely that.
What really gets to me, and which convinced me that Federated was right in ignoring him, was when he told me "I don't care if the employees say 'Merry Christmas' they can say whatever they want, and I don't care if the stores play Christmas music." Talk about symbolism over substance! Then he has the gall to act apologetic that his stupid little boycott is going to hurt my paycheck since I work on commission, and I told him that he obviously didn't care about the little guy because if he did, he wouldn't be doing the boycott.
The thing that embarrasses me the most about all of this is that conservative organizations have so little sense that they're going along with this guy. People like that make me embarrassed to call myself a conservative. If being a conservative means having absolutely no capacity for discourse or intellectual thought, and means that you have to make up your mind without knowing the facts and then refuse to be pursuaded otherwise when the facts are presented to you, then thank you very much but I'd prefer not to be associated with the term. It's people like them who give the rest of us a bad name.
Stupid evil spammers. They always manage to ruin a good thing. A pox on them and their houses.
A few months back, my sister sold her Volvo to a guy who we discovered, after the fact, was a drug dealer. After they came and bought the car my mom decided to look up the guy on the clerk of the courts website (probably should have done that before, but oh well) and found that he had been arrested for all sorts of things, including several cocaine dealing arrests and grand theft auto. Funny thing is, the house that the guy lives in is one that we would joke was a drug dealer house because the blinged out cars in front didn't fit with the house or the neighborhood. Turns out it really is a drug dealer house.
Anyway, after selling the car it was all good until about a week or so ago when my mom got a letter in the mail from a towing and recovery company informing them her the 1989 Volvo 240 DL that was registered in her name was going to be sold at auction unless the towing fees were paid and that if the auction did not cover the fees, a lien would be placed on all other vehicles registered in her name. Turns out that said drug dealer didn't bother with switching the title over to his name, and when he was arrested several weeks later on an outstanding warrant, the car was impounded, and since the title was still in my mom's name, she's the one who got the bill. It all finally got straightened out yesterday when my dad had to go down to the title office and make some sort of statement that the car had been sold back months ago, but it's not the sort of thing that you want to have happen.
So, your word of warning for the week is to watch out and try to avoid selling your used cars to drug dealers.
The other night at work, I was talking to this guy who I work with, and somehow or other the conversation got around to whether or not I had ever done anything rebellious or something. He had this idea that I'm some sort of paragon of virtue because I don't drink (well, I do drink, just not on regular occassions and not in binge quantities) and I don't smoke (I think it's nasty, and besides even second hand smoke makes my asthma go crazy) and whatever else it is that I don't do. Anyway, what I don't generally advertise because it tends to be too hard to explain (here I am saying that I don't generally advertise it but am broadcasting it on the internet to the entire world) is that I sort of have a juvie arrest record in two states. I'll let that sink in for you all...
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Yep, you read that right, I have a juvie record in two states. I suppose that I ought to tell you what it's for. When I was almost 13, I was arrested for blocking the door of an abortion clinic in Port St. Lucie, Florida. I was one of those "radicals" who was involved with Operation Rescue. On two other occassions, I also got detained and released into the custody of my parents without being charged for violating an injunction that said that certain people and organizations could not go within 30 feet of a particular abortion clinic in Melbourne, Florida. I wasn't named on the injunction, but that didn't stop me from getting led off by the cops who were arresting anybody who was prolife. The next year, I was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama for "protesting without a permit" because the city dug out an old civil rights movement era law that made it illegal for more than 30 people to gather in one spot without a permit and then selectively enforced it on only one side of the street--the side I was on.
Again, back to the original point, somewhere in the conversation with the guy I work with, I mentioned that I have a juvie record and even though it's for the sort of things that it's for, he was seriously impressed because he didn't think that I, of all people, would have a criminal record. He thinks it's really cool that I've not only been arrested, I've been arrested more than he has and in multiple states.
So, there you have it, I'm a juvinile criminal. Are you impressed?
< evil smirk >
So, there's this group out there that calls itself the "Committee to Save Merry Christmas" which has a website at savemerrychristmas.org, that is calling for a boycott of all Federated department stores because they don't say "Merry Christmas" enough in their advertising, they say "Happy Holidays" or "Seasons Greetings." They picked Federated to boycott, even though everybody else does the same thing, because Federated is the parent company of Macy's, and everybody knows that "Macy's" was synomyous with "Christmas" because of movies like that totally secularized Miracle on 34th Street that attributes to Santa powers that only God has. I don't know why people want to hearken back to that movie if what they're concerned about is that Christmas is a Christian holiday, because that film isn't exactly Christian. This whole thing about getting mad that they don't say "Merry Christmas" enough is just yet another proof that people are just way too easily offended.
The whole Save Merry Christmas boycott is misrepresenting the company's position as though they're refusing to acknowledge Christmas or have a completely secular holiday presentation. The stores play Christmas music (and have been playing it since September), and it's not just sanitized secularized Christmas music, it's blatantly Christian Christmas music. They sell Christmas cards that are more Christian than a lot of the ones that I've seen in Christian bookstores, including ones with John 3:16 and John 1:1. The ornaments we sell are all "Christmas ornaments" (including obviously Christian ornaments like crosses) the trees are "Christmas trees," and, in all of the years that I've worked there over Christmas, I've never heard anyone suggest to employees that we shouldn't wish people a Merry Christmas. Everyone was shocked to find out that we were the target of a boycott because if any store makes a big deal about Christmas, it's us. If people are looking for a store to boycott, they should boycott Target (which I happen to be doing, even if nobody else is), because they won't even allow Salvation Army bell ringers outside their stores--I think that's a prime example of profit margin being put ahead of the reason for the season.
What is particularly problematic about boycotting a company like Federated is that virtually all of their sales people work on commission. Unlike a boycott of a big box retailer where all you are impacting is the bottom line, this boycott directly harms the little guy, the sales people who need the money they earn from commission to pay their bills. This boycott isn't just going to impact stock prices and corporate bonuses like most boycotts, it's taking money directly out of my pocket and the pocket of the other sales people, yet we have absolutely no say or influence in the decisions at corporate. This whole thing frustrates me because it's a no win situation. No matter what, somebody's going to get offended--some customers will get upset if I tell them "Merry Christmas" others will get upset if I say "Happy Holidays."
Also, I think that in this situation a boycott is counterproductive. Federated believes very strongly in diversity, and that belief in diversity could have been used as an advantage if someone had come to the company and said, "look, we know that you believe in the importance of diversity, and the generic 'happy holidays' advertising is glossing over the diversity that exists rather than embracing it," I'm pretty sure that they would have listened and included more "Merry Christmas" advertising. Instead, they see the boycott as people trying to force them to ignore their Jewish and Muslim customers, and as a result they're digging in their heels. Boycotts have their place, but this is a situation where they didn't even try to catch flies with honey, they just went straight to the vinegar.