Seven years ago this weekend, Valentine’s Day 1997, I traveled from my home in Springfield Illinois to Michele’s then home in Colorado Springs. We had been talking on the phone for over a year after meeting, in of all places, an AOL chat room. During that year we had meet four times, once in Colorado Springs, twice in Salinas Kansas, and most recently in Springfield.
We had talked seriously about her moving to Springfield so we could be together, and this trip was to be the start of that process. When I arrived in Denver she met me at the gate with a heart shaped balloon and a teddy bear. We spent Saturday sight seeing and having dinner out. That evening I played for her what was to become our song, “True Companion” by Marc Cohen. It was how I asked her to marry me. Much to my continuing delight, she said “yes.”
Sunday morning we were both somewhat depressed as I had to return to Springfield and she wasn’t going to move for at least another week. Out of the blue she asked why she could leave her belongings, packed, behind, and come home with me that day. “Home” sounded so good that I said let’s do it.
We spent the rest of the day packing her small apartment into boxes and coordinating with her best friend regarding the movers. After a quick dinner at McDonald’s we packed her office, and she left behind a revised resignation letter saying she wasn’t going to work the last week.
About 9 PM that Sunday evening we started driving east with her car fully loaded, and Abby, her (now our) cat, hunkered down on the floor of the back seat in indignation at the whole proceeding. That night we made it as far as Burlington Colorado before collapsing in exhaustion. On Monday morning I called my office to take the day off and we started the long haul across Kansas and Missouri. In St. Louis we stopped at the airport to collect my car. In the dark that Monday evening we arrived at what would become our first home together.
The seven years that have followed have been fantastic. Once we were together we never looked back. Every day has been a new adventure and with every day I love her more. I’ve discovered so much about myself and grown tremendously as a result of my relationship with this incredible woman.
Tonight we celebrated with a quiet dinner of Arroz con Pollo (our favorite) at home. I am so very happy to have the privilege to share my live with Michele. I love her more today than ever before. If our history together is any indication of our future then the next seven years, and beyond, are only going to get better and better.
Like many of you I watched Tim Russert interview the President on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” Initially I felt that Russert was being soft on Mr. Bush in not following up on his stumbling answers and prevaricating during the hour long broadcast. As the interview drew to a close, however, it became clear that by only asking the questions, and not strongly attacking anything said by the President, Mr. Russert was creating a situation where George W. Bush would stand or fall on his own.
To my eyes and ears he fell badly, and judging by the press coverage there are a lot of people who agree with me. Nearly a year after the initial invasion of Iraq, with hundreds of American solders dead and thousands more wounded, with untold thousands of Iraqis dead and wounded, George W. Bush would now like to change his story. It has been over two years since the terrorist attacks of September 2001, since we invaded Afghanistan to over-throw the government there, and still haven’t quashed al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden is still at large.
This President has betrayed the basic trust his swore to uphold when he took office three years ago. The economy is in shambles, millions have lost their jobs, tax cuts for the rich haven’t had any effect on the average citizen, we are at war in two different countries, and Bush smugly smiles at the camera and tells us in his mind he is right.
For several weeks now, watching the Democratic party slowly implode trying to find a voice and a candidate, I have held the position that the election was Bush’s to lose. That if Karl Rove was smart he’d never let Bush appear in public unless it was tightly scripted and controlled. Sunday’s interview certainly didn’t come off that way. If the stories of Bush’s self imposed isolation from news sources are true, maybe he really doesn’t have a clue how 55% of Americans feel about his presidency. I still feel that the election is Bush’s to lose, but now I feel like he could lose it.
Yesterday I traveled to Chicago to visit with an old friend. The venue for our visit the the International New Motorcycle Show. I have been to this annual event several times in the past decade or so. It’s always filled with crowds of people, glittering chrome, and jewel like machinery.
It is also the scene of another “attraction”, namely comely young women inappropriately dressed and selling themselves as objects. Now I will admit there was a time when I looked at and reacted to the exposed skin and obvious flaunting. Once I was married I went through a phase where I worked hard not to look, and felt guilty when I failed. However, yesterday I had a new experience, one that I think is important in my growing up.
I found the displays of women in provocative ways to be rather sad and pathetic. That society has told women of a certain physical class they are nothing but objects of desires is extremely destructive. The men who are attracted to these displays aren’t seeing the scantily clad women as a person, they are only seeing that person as the physical personification of their internal fantasy tape. Once that tape reaches it’s conclusion the person ceases to exist.
It is sad not only for the women who have fallen victim to a society that wants its baser needs met through the subjugation of physically pretty young women; it is sad for the men who allow themselves to be swept along in the tide of poorly expressed emotions aimed at these women.
We need, as a whole society, to examine the self image and worth values we transmit to our children, male and female. We need to raise our expectations for self image and personal value out of the gutter. If we do not, we are doomed to continue the cycle of violence and degradation against people that we all decry, but are all morbidly attracted to as well.
From Cindy Richards of the Chicago Sun Times:
You can, and should, read the entire article.
Presidential Appointee George W. Bush announced his budget recently. Here’s what the Chicago Sun Times had to say about it, in part:
Tax cuts for the wealthy come first – before jobs, before schools, before health care, before poverty, before the war on Iraq, before dealing with the deficits. Bush proposed these tax cuts when the economy was soaring and the budget was in surplus. He demanded them when the economy tanked and the budget went into deficit. He insisted on them even as he led the nation into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And now, with record deficits, a jobless recovery, costly and endless occupations, he wants only to make them permanent.
“With schools inundated with record numbers of students, Bush won’t even keep his own promise to fund his education reforms. With university tuitions soaring and community colleges getting cut, he abandons his campaign pledge to increase Pell grants. His much-advertised community college budget doesn’t even make up for what has been lost.
Bush devotes less than 3 percent of his budget for education. Educating the next generation is less important to the president than providing for the inheritances of the next generation of wealthiest Americans.
We do not need another 4 years of “compassionate conservatism” in the White House or in America.
Register to vote if you haven’t already. Participate in your State’s primary or caucus. And, unless you are one of those people pocketing the benefits of Bush’s tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy, vote for regime change right here in America next November 2nd.
It has been six days since Justin Timberlake ripped the snap-on portion of Janet Jackson’s costume away exposing her breast and pierced nipple for all of one second on national television. It has been six days of innuendo, accusations, and the highest levels of hypocrisy.
Several thoughts occur:
Over at Maniacal Rage there is a new posting, Bush Will Do Whatever He Wants.
I couldn’t agree more with every thing Garrett Murray says about Herr Bush. From the day he was appointed to office he has operated exactly like a spoiled little rich kid. He openly admits that he doesn’t read newspapers, and it appears that the circle of advisors he listens to is increasing small.
Make sure you participate in the electoral process this year.
For the month of January 2004 I got 7,275 spam messages. Midway through the month I started using Command-C’s SpamSieve. So far I have been very pleased with SpamSieve.
I trained the corpus with my December spam, and all the good messages I had archived in my mail folders. While there were some false positives and false negatives initially, within days SpamSieve was catch 98.5 percent of my spam. The recent upgrade to release 2.1.2 has made the process even better as now the mail identified as spam moves automatically to my Spam folder. Over all SpamSieve filtered 4,932 messages for my in January. 1,250 were good and 3,682 were spam. Mostly due to my training there were 60 false positives and 14 false negatives for an accuracy of 98.5%.
My corpus has a ratio of 2,459 good messages to 6,967 spam messages, or 74%. There are a total of 231,020 words in the corpus.
The major benefit to using SpamSieve has been the elimination of some 60 inbox mail rules. Now I let all my mail stay in my inbox and archive only the ones I want to keep. Before I was using rules to sort my mail into folders as a way of separating the good from the spam. SpamSieve’s Whitelist has already identified 150 address variations that I want to receive mail from.
All in all I am very pleased with SpamSieve and I am looking forward to reaching an accuracy of 99 percent, at which point I’ll start automatically deleting mail in the spam folder after a weeks time.
For those of you who are aware of, or follow, the whole SCO/Linux mess, Cannot find Stolen SCO Code in Linux will provide a chuckle.