As you may have guessed, I have been far too damn busy to make an update here in the last 18 days. Even now, I’m kinda forcing this one in without having a ton of time to make it, but what the hell, I’ve got to do one.

I did take a long weekend a couple weeks ago, taking Saturday and Sunday (the last two days of my regular work week), September 8 and 9 off from work. I went to the debacle in the Big House that Saturday, watching Lloyd Carr even further implode the Michigan football team with a 39-7 thrashing administered by the Oregon Ducks. This was actually the second-worst ass-kicking (in terms of margin of victory) ever put on Michigan by a visiting opponent, coming in behind only a 34-0 loss to Moo U in 1967, and it could very well be Michigan’s third-biggest defeat ever (that 34-point loss to the Sparties, and the 50-14 loss to Ohio State in Columbus in 1968).

(What should Michigan fans be noticing about the years in which those huge defeats occurred? That’s right, those were Bump Elliott’s last two seasons on the Blue sideline. Elliott is today considered the worst coach in Michigan football history, who took the proud tradition of Yost, Crisler, and Oosterbaan and let it slide into the toilet in his 10 years as coach. That Lloyd Carr is keeping company with Bump Elliott, at least in terms of the results on the field, tells you everything you really need to know about Lloyd. Just as Don Canham did in 1969 when he cleaned house and brought in Bo Schembechler, Bill Martin is going to have to bring in the best person for the job, without regard to whether he is a “Michigan man,” in order to restore any kind of pride in Ann Arbor.)

Having packed for the trip the night before, I immediately set off after the game for Yooperland, to go visit my friend Eric. Making a minimum of stops, I took seven hours and 45 minutes to get there, arriving just before 4:00 am EDT that Sunday. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a ton of time up there, and about all we managed to do was take a drive up to the town of Big Bay and back and visit his family for a bit.

I took a very roundabout route back here from Eric’s place in Marquette, eschewing the most optimal route of M-28, M-77, and U.S. 2 back over to Interstate 75. Instead, I took M-28 east all the way to I-75, roughly eight miles (13 km) south of Sault Ste. Marie, and then took I-75 north into the Soo. Since I wanted to finish off the rest of the Yooper portion of I-75 (see the “Length I’ve traveled” bit here), I proceeded across the International Bridge into Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and drove around on the Canadian side for a bit. I got no hassle at all at Canadian Customs, and only a minimal hassle re-entering the U.S..

Delirious from almost 200 miles (322 km) of two-lane Yooper roads, I decided to skip a planned excursion down a whole bunch of state highways in the northeastern Lower Peninsula; I intended to grab six more counties up that way, but left them for another time. I did, however, exit I-75 at Bay City and follow M-25 east and north just far enough to grab Tuscola and Huron counties, in the Thumb, before proceeding south on M-24. This was in an almost-blinding rain, which had started much farther north (around Grayling), and the ponding on the roads made it a lot of fun.

Finally, at Lapeer, I went east on Interstate 69 to grab the one remaining segment I had previously been missing — roughly 23 miles (38 km) between Capac and Port Huron, in Saint Clair County. From Port Huron, I simply followed I-94 back to Detroit and then I-75 back home, finishing off a 590-mile (950 km) day of driving that took me 12 hours. At this point, I’m up to 70 of Michigan’s 83 counties on my visited list, and I have driven all but three miles of the Interstate system in the state; only Interstate 194 in Battle Creek remains to be driven.

I went to a Detroit Tigers baseball game last Tuesday night, September 11, against the Texas Rangers, with my mother. The local cable monopoly here, Comcast, had sent me two free tickets for signing up with them during one of their recent promotions; I left it to my parents to decide which one of them wanted to go with me, and it was my mother who jumped on it first. The Tigers won 4-1, although as we’ve seen in the last week and a half, it didn’t do a damn bit of good for their (now dead) playoff hopes. I’ll have more to say about that, specifically Tigers closer Todd Jones and the song played when he entered the game, in a bit.

Another week of work ensued, after which I spent most of this past “weekend” (my usual days off of Monday and Tuesday) working on my car. Specifically, I needed to get it polished and waxed before winter’s arrival in a couple months, and I took a good bit of both afternoons to do that. I had washed the car after work last Saturday morning; that’s always fun, with absolutely not a soul in sight at 4:30 am.

As I mentioned a couple paragraphs ago, Todd Jones came into that Tiger game to pitch the ninth inning and get the save. Many baseball teams, including the Tigers, have taken to playing some kind of personalized song for each player as he comes to bat or enters from the bullpen, and Jones’ selection for this season is “Last One Standing” by the so-called “Christian” rock group Mercy Me. This should come as no surprise to longtime readers of this blog, seeing as I exposed Jones as the Christofascist he is way back in 2004 when he was with the Colorado Rockies. I’m not making mention of this to condemn Todd Jones; rather, I’m going to point out how “Last One Standing” shows that Jones and the vast majority of other so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” have everything backwards.

One of the lines in the song, if I recall it right, goes something like, “One who is worthy of all my praise” (speaking of God, of course). Given the definition of the word praise, I see a huge logical disconnect here that shows what “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” really think of their God. Praise is the kind of thing you would give to a small child or a dog when he/she/it does what you ask; examples would be a pat on the head or some kind of treat, which may or may not take the form of food. To “praise” God implies that the one doing the praising views God along the lines of a four-year-old or a shih tzu, not the all-powerful, all-knowing Creator and Lord of the universe.

Instead of “praising” God in the same way we might praise a child, we ought to thank Him — profusely — for the great bounty He has given us, and for His past, present, and future providence for us. So-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” really need to re-evaluate their relationship with God, and realize that they are not the ones who are in the position to be doing any praising. If and when they do this, they will start to realize that they cannot dictate for God what He supposedly “hates” — and they will start following His commands to love His gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender children unconditionally.

That’s all the time I have for tonight. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, mid-“week” (Wednesday-Sunday) updates have been almost non-existent since I started on this shift, and I don’t know if I’m ever really going to get a whole lot of time on those five days of the week. In any event, though, I’m not going to let this totally die.

FIRE LLOYD CARR IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!!!!

FIRE LLOYD CARR IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!!!!

FIRE LLOYD CARR IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!!!!

You have to have heard by now, but this past Saturday, Lloyd Carr’s Michigan football team opened its season by allowing the biggest upset in the history of college football: a 34-32 victory by Division I-AA Appalachian State University at Michigan Stadium. Don’t even be fooled into thinking that this was a close game that went back and forth several times, either; ASU had either an 11- or 14-point lead for much of the second and third quarters, and it took a miracle just for Michigan to grab a 32-31 lead about halfway through the fourth quarter.

The Michigan defense, the back end of which was already an acknowledged weak point of the team, just didn’t show up to play at all. ASU scored touchdowns on three consecutive second-quarter drives to take a 28-14 lead, with help from at least one Michigan turnover. A trio of field goals, two by Michigan and one by ASU, would bring it to 31-20 by the mid-point of the third quarter, before Michigan scored a touchdown in that quarter’s waning moments to make it 31-26.

Unlike a lot of people, I won’t even fault Carr that much for attempting two-point conversions on both of Michigan’s second-half touchdowns. You can say that the first attempt, late in the third quarter, showed some lack of faith in the offense; why should it be really critical to bring the score within three points (31-28 had it succeeded) with a whole quarter left to play? There was a valid reason for the second two-point try, though, namely that Carr wanted to force Appalachian State to score a touchdown to win. That failed conversion, though, left Michigan up by only one point with roughly seven minutes to play.

Frankly, when Carr goes, defensive coordinator Ron English needs to lose his job as well. His defenses have now given up 108 points in Michigan’s last three games — 42 to Ohio State last year, 32 to USC in the Rose Bowl, and now 34 to ASU. Furthermore, they have shown a distressing inability to do anything to stop a spread offense, and with another spread team (Oregon) coming in this weekend, one has to wonder if Michigan won’t be still looking for its first victory against Notre Dame in two weeks. I will be attending that Oregon game on Saturday, perhaps with some kind of “FIRE CARR!!!” paraphernalia like a sign or a paper bag over my head, and definitely substituting “FIRE CARR!” when the band plays “Let’s Go Blue.”

I still have some things to do on this Labor Day here, so I’m going to have to cut this one a bit shorter than I would like. That said, this update serves to let you all know that I’m not dead yet, despite 19 days away from this site.

I am preparing to begin another week of work in a little bit over 12 hours. Last week was reasonably uneventful, save a situation at one of our stores where I had to split the smallest trailer compartment a whopping three ways. What with all the re-positioning of the truck inherent in splitting one trailer compartment among three underground storage tanks, that unload took well over an hour and caused my entire night to run past 11 hours.

In this update from November 9, 2005, I remarked on the thirtieth anniversary of Michigan’s best-known maritime disaster — the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior. We are approaching another anniversary of a major transportation disaster in Michigan: tomorrow will mark 20 years since the August 16, 1987 crash of Northwest Airlines Flight 255 on takeoff from Detroit Metropolitan/Wayne County Airport in Romulus.

It had been a hot Sunday afternoon in Detroit, and thunderstorms were developing perhaps 20 miles (32 km) from Metro — though not right over the airport itself — around sunset. The weather, however, was not a factor in the accident; instead, a terrible error by the flight officers in the cockpit proved fatal for 149 of the 150 passengers and all six crew members. The McDonnell-Douglas MD-82 had been delayed leaving its original departure point of Tri-City Airport (now MBS International Airport) in Saginaw, MI, and due to late-night noise restrictions in effect at the final destination of John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, CA, there was something of a rush to complete the intermediate stop in Detroit and move on to the next stop in Phoenix, AZ.

This rush to get off the ground caused the crew, led by 57-year-old Captain John R. Maus of Las Vegas, NV and 35-year-old co-pilot David J. Dodds of Galena, IL, to neglect to complete the pre-takeoff checklist. A critical part of the checklist was to ensure that the MD-82’s flaps and slats, on the trailing edge of the wing, were extended so as to allow the wings to generate enough lift to get the plane airborne. It was discovered soon after the crash, by National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators, that the flaps and slats were in their retracted positions.

Without its flaps and slats extended, the plane behaved exactly as any knowledgeable pilot would expect it to do — it took forever to begin its takeoff roll, and almost immediately upon leaving the runway, it went into a stall condition. (“Stall” in a fixed-wing aircraft means that the wings are unable to generate lift for the given airspeed. It can be caused by banking the plane’s nose upward too far, or as in this case, by failing to properly configure the wings for the maximum lift required at takeoff.) Witnesses saw the plane bank uncontrollably, first to the right and then almost 90° to the left, before it struck three light poles in the Avis car rental lot, the Avis building itself, and finally an earthen berm on the east side of nearby Middlebelt Road just south of Interstate 94. The impact occurred at 8:46 pm EDT.

A massive fire, fueled by the plane’s load of jet fuel, erupted upon the MD-82’s final impact. Debris from the plane more or less exploded outward from the scene, killing two motorists driving on I-94 and injuring five more. Rescue efforts, which were initially stopped by the huge fire, would be further hampered later in the evening as the aforementioned thunderstorms moved in and began a downpour in the area. Miraculously, one survivor would be found: Cecelia Cichan, a 4-year-old girl from Tempe, AZ, who lost her parents and 6-year-old brother David in the accident.

Contrary to a popular myth that developed in the aftermath of the disaster, Cecelia Cichan’s mother Paula did not cover her daughter to protect her from burning debris; they were actually found a few yards apart, Cecelia alive and Paula dead. Cecelia wasn’t totally unscathed, though; she needed to undergo two months of skin-graft surgeries at the University of Michigan Hospital to treat severe burns she suffered in the crash. By nothing more than the grace of God, as far as I’m concerned, Cecelia Cichan did survive; she was eventually adopted by an aunt and uncle from Birmingham, AL, and would go on to earn a psychology degree from the University of Alabama in 2006.

Now using the family name of Cichan-Lumpkin, having added her aunt and uncle’s surname to her own, Cecelia has had zero contact with the media in the 20 years since the crash of Northwest Flight 255. Her aunt and uncle, for obvious reasons, wanted her to have as normal a childhood as possible given the circumstances, and they kept the media away during the rest of her childhood — and I can’t say I blame them. I would be fascinated to hear what Cecelia remembers of that horrible night twenty years ago, and how she came to adjust to it, now that she is an adult, but that may very well never happen.

One other reasonably famous figure in the crash of Northwest Flight 255 was Nick Vanos, a reserve center for the Phoenix Suns NBA basketball team. He was vacationing in Michigan with a friend during the off-season after his second year in the NBA, and was heading back to Phoenix aboard 255. Vanos’ death in the crash would impact the Suns’ late-1980s fortunes dramatically, as they were counting on him to further develop into their center of the future.

In 1994, a memorial would be erected a handful of yards from the crash site, at the corner of Middlebelt Road and the on-ramp from Middlebelt to I-94. The black granite memorial bears a poem entitled “Final Flight” and the names of the 155 passengers and crew who perished in the disaster. There is a web site for the memorial which can be visited here. To this day, Northwest Flight 255 remains among the deadliest air disasters in American aviation history.

Later today, specifically at 4:00 pm EDT, I go back into work after having had what amounts to a five-day weekend. Last Friday, the lead driver in our crew, who was the one training me, decided to turn me loose after I had spent two weeks with him; however, because I had already worked nearly 50 hours for the week, under company policy I could not immediately move to my new, permanent shift (nights Wednesday-Sunday). For that reason, I had to take Saturday and Sunday off, and I guess you can say I moved into the new shift at the beginning of its “weekend” on Monday. From here on out, unless I take an unpaid day off or paid vacation time, that will be my shift — 4:00 pm to 4:00 am Wednesday through Sunday.

This isn’t horrendously different from the other truck-driving jobs I have had in the past, but there are a few pretty significant differences. Because (a) Michigan lacks a hard gross-weight limit in its law, and (b) we never leave the state, we are not restricted to 80,000 lbs. (36,227 kg) as truck drivers in forty-odd other states are. With our trailer having six axles, we can run at a maximum of 130,000 lbs. (58,967 kg), and when fully loaded, the truck is not far short of that limit.

Of course, you can probably imagine how a 130,000-lb. truck with liquid cargo handles and drives. Any piss-ant little incline, even a 2% grade less than a quarter-mile (0.4 km) long, costs the truck a significant amount of momentum; on the other side of that coin, you have to be careful of downgrades that 80,000-lb. truck drivers would think nothing of. One must also exercise care with the steering, particularly with lane changes; since the cargo is liquid, it can slosh inside the trailer, and if enough force is applied through the steering wheel, the liquid can move violently enough to put the whole rig on its side.

The other big difference I have had to get used to is dealing with lift axles, or axles that can be raised and lowered on and off the road as needed. Two of the six axles on our trailer have this capability; one is the rearmost one, immediately behind four fixed axles that are always on the ground, and the other one sits by itself near the mid-point of the trailer. These must be lowered to the pavement in order to legally carry the weight we do; however, it is impossible to make most turns — other than long, sweeping freeway-speed curves — with these axles down. (The one at the mid-point of the trailer would essentially be dragged sideways; at high enough speeds, it just keeps the trailer going straight no matter where you point the tractor, and that leads to a jackknife.)

There is a switch on the dash that raises and lowers these lift axles. As the previous paragraph suggests, they must be raised before entering into 90° turns, clover-leaf freeway ramps, and even some of the tighter curves on non-clover-leaf ramps; then they must be lowered again once the truck is straightening out after the turn. (Of course, this only applies when the truck is loaded; in fact, you never want to put the lift axles down with an unloaded trailer. Lowering the lift axles when unloaded could put enough vertical force on the trailer to uncouple it from the tractor, and then you’re really in deep shit.)

I’m half-asleep as I type here, so I think I’m going to have to call it a night on this update.

You are reading the first update I have ever made from my new apartment. I signed the lease here 15 days ago, on July 14, and began moving in here in earnest later that week. A couple of the rooms in here are still disaster areas because of all the shit I haven’t yet put in its permanent storage places, but I’m making slow progress on that front.

I have also finished with the first week of my new job, which I started last Monday. In case you haven’t been reading this in the past, I am now hauling fuel for a truck-stop chain, servicing five of its southeastern Michigan locations. At some point when I have more time, I’ll probably have more to say about that.

Unfortunately, a full day of shit to do beckons, so my first update in 11 days must end almost as quickly as it began.

It’s now official — my four years with Shaffer Trucking, Inc., of New Kingstown, PA, have come to an end. My mother and I spent about nine hours yesterday making a trip to their Columbus, OH terminal to return what used to be my assigned truck to them; I led the way down there in the truck, while she followed me in my car. After I turned the truck keys and a few company-provided locks into the shop, we did lunch and then another visit (for me — it was my mother’s first) to Ohio Stadium and some of the campus of Ohio State University.

I would drive the car back from Columbus, making sure to take advantage of the (relatively) cheap gas in that state down south; I paid $2.989 per gallon just south of the state line, saving close to a quarter off the average price in Michigan. With this trip, I have now put over 1,100 miles (1,770 km) on that car in less than two weeks of owning it. Thankfully, I bought it instead of leasing it, so I don’t have a mileage cap to worry about, although I guess this will bring up my first oil change that much faster.

Speaking of the car, I have a few things I wanted to mention about it. The first two things are reasons why I’m glad I got rid of my old Saturn: I measured 31.2 highway miles per gallon (7.54 L/100 km) on today’s trip, which practically equals the highway mileage that Saturn got but with twice the power the Saturn had; and when I checked the oil dipstick, I found that I have not burned a drop of motor oil. (In 1,100 miles, the Saturn would have burned at least a quart (1 L), if not more.) Additionally, on an unrelated note, my Ohio certificate of title and a check from Brown Hyundai to the Michigan Secretary of State (for my sales tax) showed up in yesterday’s mail, so I can get the car registered and obtain a Michigan plate later today.

I am also making further progress on my move to a new apartment. The other big task I have to do later today is rent a U-Haul truck, so that I can get everything in one trip and be done with it. I am basically looking to have the place at least minimally livable by tomorrow, so that I can concentrate on adjusting my daily routine in order to be into work at 4:00 am EDT next Monday. I won’t have a lot of stuff to start — I’ll have all of two chairs in the whole unit, and I’ll be sleeping on an air bed — but as money starts flowing in and I get a little further into the job, I’ll start visiting furniture stores and better equipping the place.

All right, I’d better get this posted and get to sleep. I’m going to have a crazy next few days here.

As I write tonight, I have just been watching the soon-to-end Major League Baseball game between the Detroit Tigers and the Seattle Mariners; when I left it, it was 6-3 Detroit, with the Tigers batting in the top of the ninth inning. The only reason I mention this is that watching a couple innings of the game has exposed me to perhaps the greatest, most hilarious display of stupidity yet from Fox Sports Detroit color analyst Rod Allen. During Detroit right fielder Gary Sheffield’s at-bat, Allen referred to home plate as being “six foot, six inches” from the mound, instead of the correct distance of 60 feet, 6 inches (18.44 m).

Rod Allen’s struggles with the English language are the stuff of legend, I tell you. During a July 3 telecast of a game against the Cleveland Indians, Allen told us that legendary former Tigers radio voice Ernie Harwell would “narwate” a series of between-inning pieces about patriotism during the July 4 game. (He should have said narrate, of course, and I would bet he probably had the text for that promo right in front of him.) A few days later, he referred to the team’s website as “Tigers dot gom,” apparently inventing a new top-level Internet domain in the process. What else can you expect, though, from a former player whose greatest career moment was chasing a Japanese pitcher who had just hit him with a pitch all the way into the outfield?

We’ll now move from dumbass baseball announcers to Christofascist terrorists. Three such terrorists were put in jail — where they belong — Thursday morning, after shouting down a Hindu chaplain who was trying to give the daily prayer in the U.S. Senate. This just goes to prove exactly what I said about so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” in my June 25 entry: that their mantra is “freedom of religion for me, but not for thee.” Thankfully, so-called “Christians” seem to be busy making attacks among themselves lately, what with “fundamentalists” asserting that Catholics aren’t Christian and Pope Benedict XVI retorting that non-Catholic churches “suffer from defects”; at least the rest of us normal people might get a break from their anything-but-Christian behaviors for a while.

All that aside, it looks as though today will be the day I will move into an apartment in preparation for my new job, which will start a week from this Monday (July 23). I am going down there to sign the lease, get the keys, and begin moving in later today; additionally, I will have to be there for Comcast to install my new cable TV, high-speed internet, and phone service. The actual moving of my stuff from my parents’ house to the apartment will probably come later, maybe Sunday or Monday.

I spent a good bit of yesterday preparing for this move. Two things I had to do before they would even print up a lease contract were obtain renters’ insurance and set up electric utility service in my name; both of those are now done, with the renters’ insurance having cost me a mere $137 for a year. Also, I have all the various cashier’s checks for move-in and Comcast installation ready to go; it’s just a matter of handing those to the appropriate people later today.

I have to be up early to take care of all this shit, so I’d better be going for now.

In case you haven’t already heard, I did it on Thursday. My old Saturn now belongs to Brown Hyundai in Toledo, OH, and I now own a 2007 Hyundai Sonata SE purchased from them. I couldn’t really get the deal I was hoping for on the negotiation end, but I did manage to screw the bank somewhat on the financing end; I got the dealer to remove some “extended warranty” that the bank apparently wanted to force on me because of my credit history. By removing that nearly $1,800 unnecessary addition to the loan, I cut my monthly payment from the $380-something range to $349. (Since Hyundai’s bumper-to-bumper warranty on that car is five years/60,000 miles (96,561 km), and my loan is five years, why the fuck do I need the warranty extended?)

They gave me a choice, basically: don’t ask for much more than $250 off the sticker price, or we’ll knock your trade-in down by $500. Supposedly, they claimed they could only do $1,000 on the Saturn if I asked for any more off the MSRP, and I suppose there’s a bit of validity to that when you keep in mind that every other dealer appraised that Saturn at $1,000; the additional $500 for that was claimed to be an enticement to do the deal. I wasn’t thrilled with the deal, and was definitely thinking about walking away from it, until their finance manager agreed to ditch the extended warranty — that helped a lot, by cutting almost $40 off the monthly payment.

I actually have the car into the shop today to fix a few issues I’ve noticed in the first four days of ownership. The most pressing issue is a switch that tells the alarm system when the hood is open; for some reason, it seems to be incredibly hyperactive, setting off the alarm randomly. I’m getting that fixed, having the parking brake adjustment checked (it seems a bit loose), and having the A/C refrigerant charge checked (it did at best a middling job of keeping up with yesterday’s 95°F (35°C) heat). Also, I’m having them activate an option to automatically lock the car doors once I first exceed 20 km/h (12 mph); this is available but deactivated from the factory, and a dealer must hook up their scan tool to activate it.

One of the places I drove the car yesterday was an apartment complex in South Rockwood, MI, just across the Monroe County line. This would be literally a 10-minute all-freeway drive from where I should be starting work fairly soon, and I wanted to tour a unit and ask some questions. I’m not exactly comfortable with the nearly $900 monthly rent for a two-bedroom unit (they’re out of one-bedrooms at the moment); but you do get a ton for $900, including all kinds of in-unit storage, in-unit washers and dryers included, private entryways, and vaulted ceilings. I think I’ll check out a couple places in Monroe, 10 miles (16 km) farther south, tomorrow; these other places are cheaper, but probably not quite as nice.

Well, the plan of attack looks like moving into a new place later this week or this weekend, and then returning my current company’s truck to Columbus, OH on July 17. After that, the new job should start.

I’m now back home again, and will probably never again have to head out to the road with the company with which I have spent the last four years. Since I know all you stalkers out there have been waiting with baited breath to find out where I’ve been working, you’ll find out soon enough, whenever this new job turns from a 99% certainty into an ironclad 100% lock. It’s a matter of passing a D.O.T. physical and drug screen, which I will take care of later today; after that, they’re ready for me to start whenever I’m ready to start.

My health situation from last week has drastically improved, I’m quite glad to say, but I still wouldn’t call it much better than 95% or so. The diarrhea is long gone, and the pain has gone from frequent and moderate-to-severe down to occasional and very mild; but every now and then, things still feel just a little bit tight and bloated on my left side. There are a couple of very good developments, though: I’m not having to take Imodium at all now (a stark contrast to last week when I couldn’t function without it), and any release of gas or shit now seems to relieve what little pain is there (again, that wasn’t the case last week). No matter, though, I will be seeing a doctor in Ann Arbor at 2:30 pm EDT this afternoon; whatever this was needs to stay away, not just go away for a while, and that’s what I plan to accomplish with that visit.

After that doctor’s appointment, I will probably be headed down to Toledo, OH. If everything works out — I am going to be pretty demanding in what I expect, so we’ll see — I will be the proud owner of a new steel-gray 2007 Hyundai Sonata SE before I head back home. After looking at almost every Hyundai dealer in the metro Detroit area, and others as far away as Columbus, OH, I’ve basically settled on a unit we found last month when I visited Brown Hyundai in Toledo. I gave up on finding one in a decent color with the sunroof and six-disc CD changer, so I’ve settled on one that has my one must-have option: a power driver’s seat. (I just can’t get the mechanical seat low enough to the floor to comfortably fit inside the car — I did test-drive a couple with mechanical seats.)

Again, this is not yet an ironclad lock on the car, either. First, I’m going to insist on taking that unit for a short test-drive to see if I can find anything obviously wrong with it; it will have to pass that test first. After that, I’m going to drive the hardest bargain I can on the price, although given some of the research I’ve done, I would consider $20,000 to $20,500 out the door to be an acceptable deal. (“Out the door” here means the price after subtracting Hyundai’s $2,000 manufacturer rebate and adding tax, title, and license.) Finally, I’m going to force them to do something I should have insisted upon when I bought my old Hyundai Elantra in 2001: they are going to show me in writing that the financing is fully approved and 100% in force before I leave the lot, or I will be walking out and driving my Saturn back home.

I’m told that the Hyundai dealer in Livonia, MI which sold me that 2001 Elantra is now out of business, although a different Hyundai dealership now exists in the same building. They pulled that trick on me: the day I went in there and said I believed I could do $1,500 down and $300 per month, they rushed the whole sale through and had me take delivery before actually getting the financing approved. Granted, I was all too happy to take delivery immediately, given the shit my parents were pulling on me with cars at the time, but that’s a dishonest and sleazy way to do business.

Only a week and a half later would they bother to inform me that I actually had failed to qualify for financing on that Elantra. They did this to put me in a trap and invoke a clause of the purchase contract that they never explained: if you are denied financing, you owe them something like $200 per day plus 50¢ per mile from the point at which you took delivery. At this point, my two choices were: (a) return the car and owe them about $2,500 I didn’t have at the time, or (b) hog-tie my father into co-signing the loan. We followed option (b), and the rest was history.

The gist of this story is that I will not allow Brown Hyundai to do the same thing to me. If they’re not willing to show me ironclad, already fully-approved financing, in writing, before I leave the lot, then they can shove that car up their ass. I’ll also be having them return the $200 deposit I have down on that particular unit, and that will be the end of my dealing with them. I hope it doesn’t come to that, of course, but no matter what, my ass will be covered first and foremost.

Assuming we can work a deal that I like, I will be trading in the Saturn for this car. They appraised it when I visited them last month, and will give me $1,500 for it. Yes, I probably could do better selling it on my own, but I think I would be hard-pressed to do much better than the low $2,000 range — 90% or more of potential buyers will see its manual transmission and say “thank you very much, have a nice day.” Frankly, I don’t see that as being all that terrible of a trade-off — that is, sparing myself the hassle of selling the Saturn privately while forgoing maybe an extra $700 above the dealer’s trade-in offer.

Obviously, today is going to turn out to be a busy day, but I’m going to change gears a bit at this point and talk about yesterday — the Fourth of July. By now, I know you’ve heard about His Fraudulency King Chimpy the 43rd’s pardon of convicted criminal and traitor Irving Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby, who was only given 2½ years in prison for a crime (giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies, a.k.a. treason) for which 18 U.S.C. 2381 specifies anywhere from five years to death. Not even Richard Nixon had the contempt for the rule of law to pardon his co-conspirators in Watergate; this is truly a new height (or low?) in Rethuglican criminality.

July 4 has now been rendered a meaningless date by this action of the 43rd Reich. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Paine, Franklin, et al., probably can’t even spin anymore in their graves; they have to be completely worn out from six and a half years of the 10,000 RPM to which Chimpy has driven them. I’m dead serious — Independence Day doesn’t mean shit anymore. The fireworks and flags are nothing more than an empty, false “patriotism” that Reich-wingers want us to believe is right up there with Mom and apple pie, but given Chimpy’s latest loud “FUCK YOU!” to everything America used to stand for, the only thing worth celebrating anymore is getting the day off work. Seriously.

I’m going to leave you for tonight with that sobering thought.

At the moment, I’m about to try eating dinner for the night — it remains to be seen if it will cause me any more problems. So far today, I’ve managed to avoid any kind of huge diarrhea attack, so that’s a good sign. I do still have a bit of pain, but even that’s not nearly as bad as yesterday, much less Friday.

I tried a little something different last night: instead of waiting for the diarrhea attack to start before I took Imodium, I decided to make a sort of “pre-emptive strike” and take it about two hours after eating. This seems to have reduced the pain and kept the diarrhea from coming back, and I will probably do it again after this meal.

Well, once I do that, I’m off to Grand Rapids to deliver this load tomorrow afternoon. After that, I should be headed home.

I don’t know what the hell is going on, but for the better part of a week now, I’ve been feeling pretty sick. I would say this started last Sunday night, with a bad attack of diarrhea that continued into Monday morning and early afternoon; since then, I have seemed to have recurring diarrhea attacks almost like clockwork — every night somewhere between 3:00 am and 6:00 am EDT. I keep a number of over-the-counter remedy type products here with me in the truck, including Imodium for diarrhea, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping it at all.

Yesterday in the wee hours of the morning, it got really bad. I think I had to make four runs to the restroom in a span of just five hours, and I had some severe abdominal pain and mild to moderate nausea to go along with it. The pain seems to have been focused on a couple of places; its most common location is on my left side, in the middle-to-lower part of the abdomen. When it was getting bad, I also had pain on my right side, roughly mid-abdomen or thereabouts.

A few things I have noticed is that not eating, or at least not eating as much as usual, seems to eliminate or reduce the symptoms. I only ate once yesterday, having meat loaf and mashed potatoes (a fairly bland meal), and this morning’s attack was not nearly as bad as yesterday’s. Suspecting that it could be irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) from some of the reading I’ve been doing, I took two things right after this morning’s attack: another dose of Imodium to stop the diarrhea and the out-of-control intestinal contractions that cause it, and fiber tablets for their generally beneficial effect on the intestines. I had pain pretty bad for about 15 minutes after taking those, but it quickly subsided and I could go right back to sleep.

Speaking of sleep, that’s about all I’ve felt able to do in the last couple of days. I slept almost the entire day yesterday, and I probably slept 14-15 hours last night and into today as well. Then again, the pain and non-stop diarrhea kept me up all night Thursday into Friday; it got so bad that I called for an ambulance to take me to Methodist Hospital here in Gary. They couldn’t find anything in blood tests or on a CT scan, so they released me about six hours later, figuring I just have “some kind of intestinal bug.” I don’t believe them, because I don’t think a bug would go on this long, but whatever.

I did call earlier in the week to make an appointment with the Taubman General Medicine Clinic at the University of Michigan Hospital about this; that is set for 2:30 pm EDT on this upcoming Thursday, July 5. Obviously, I hope this does go away before then, but if not, I’m going to tell them I want answers — and I don’t care whether that means two days in the hospital for tests. I can’t afford to have this illness, or whatever it is, as an ongoing problem as I hopefully start a new job sometime in July. If nothing else, if this is a permanent problem, I need to be put on some kind of medication so that I can carry on a reasonably normal lifestyle and not have to be running to the toilet all the time.

Well, if this doesn’t cause me any more terribly serious problems, I should be headed home with my next load. I have to go get it from a drop yard in Romeoville, IL, which is down between Chicago and Joliet, and take it from there to Grand Rapids, MI for a Monday afternoon delivery. Hopefully, in the intervening 15 days from then to July 17, I’ll (a) be cured of whatever this abdominal shit is, and (b) be preparing to start the new job.

I’m waiting to get into the shop here to have a couple things done. The truck is due for its regular 15,000-mile (24,140 km) scheduled service, and one of the doors on the trailer I have right now has most of its inside seal torn away. (That could be a problem if I had to haul a frozen load with this trailer.)

As I promised, I’m coming back tonight to finish up my review of the documentary film Jesus Camp. Part 1, and an explanation of a few things you need to know to understand most of the review, can be found here; and part 2 can be found here. In tonight’s part 3, I will be covering some of the more interesting deleted scenes.

Deleted Scene #6: “Rachael Saves the Neighbor.” In this deleted scene, we are introduced to Holly, a neighbor of 9-year-old Rachael Elhardt (one of the primary subjects of the film). We learn at least two more very important lessons about so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” from this scene. First, Holly points up the tendency “Christians” have to repeat lies enough to the point where they become “truth,” when she talks about how Rachael says “the same thing eight times in the day.” Later, when Rachael admits that “my parents are dealing with [Holly’s] parents, and I’m dealing with Holly,” we see that the mantra of so-called “Christians” is the highly un-American view of ‘freedom of religion for me, but not for thee.’

Deleted Scene #7: “Levi Fasts For God.” We find out that so-called “Christians” think absolutely nothing of ignoring sound medical advice in their quest to abuse and indoctrinate their children. Twelve-year-old Levi O’Brien tells us that he has been fasting for three days — three whole days! I won’t exactly hold up the Catholic Church as a paragon of sound medical science, given what they did to Galileo in 1633, but at least their suggestions for fasting are far more reasonable than what Levi’s “fundamentalist” church appears to condone.

Catholics are only expected to fast for one day at a time, on two separate days six weeks apart: Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. On top of that, Catholics don’t expect still-growing children, who need the nourishment more, to participate; only those between the ages of 14 and 59 are expected to participate. Even the Ramadan fast performed by Muslims only covers the period between sunrise and sunset, and again, in general, children under 14 are not expected to participate.

I can’t believe that Levi’s parents would condone, permit, or require such a thing out of their children. As I said, allowing a 12-year-old to carry on an unbroken fast for three days flies in the face of sound medicine and good health. Seriously, the Missouri Department of Social Services should thoroughly investigate the O’Brien family of St. Robert, and any so-called “religious” leaders who advocate what Levi is doing, and prosecute them for child abuse.

Deleted Scene #9: “Off to Iraq.” About three-quarters of the way through the scene, 10-year-old Tory Binger tells us that her father, George, is going to go serve the whims of American oil companies in King Chimpy’s imperial disaster in Iraq. However, she seems to think that Iraqis’ desperate need of food and water is not nearly as important as their “desperate need of Jesus.” Her father confirms this, saying, “I kinda see this as an all-expenses-paid missionary trip.”

Aside from my amazement at all the excuses Reich-wingers, Rethuglicans, and so-called “Christians” have come up with for this “war,” I am outraged that my tax dollars are being spent for George Binger to go spread the false, Satanic “fundamentalist” interpretation of Christianity in Iraq. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that this is George Binger’s justification for the “war” and his service therein, what with the billions of dollars that have been bilked from American taxpayers and illegally funneled to Halliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater, and numerous other gigantic corporate Chimpy contributors, but that doesn’t make it any less outrageous, anti-Christian, and un-American.

As if that’s not enough, I’m sure the Sunnis and Shi’as are just thrilled to have George Binger over there pushing Jesus on their children. They already view our illegal invasion and occupation of their country as a Western, “Christian” plot against the Arab world and Islam, and he is just serving to further inflame them. George Binger bears almost as much responsibility as George Bush for the success of al-Qaeda’s recruitment efforts — and he admits in this scene to being just as guilty of treason against America.

Deleted Scene #14: “Changing the Culture.” Here, a number of children from the Lees Summit, MO area visit a so-called “women’s clinic” in nearby Independence, right next to a Planned Parenthood clinic. (So-called “Christians” do this a lot in their anti-woman, anti-freedom crusade against reproductive rights — they set up these so-called “women’s clinics” as close to an actual abortion clinic as possible, in order to deceive women and delay their Constitutionally-protected access to reproductive health services until the pregnancy has progressed too far. You can read more about that here.)

One boy admits why so-called “Christians” really oppose abortion: “They’re killing an army of God!” Supposedly, though, it’s all OK because, as the clinic director claims, “Jesus is here.” At least the clinic director admits the truth when she calls these children “extreme” and “radical” — they are likely to become the next abortion-clinic bombers at the rate they’re going! And I thought we were supposed to be fighting terrorism, not supporting it? This scene lays out their entire battle plan against America!

In summary, I have to say that Jesus Camp is exactly the kind of movie that is needed in our time. With the future of American democracy and the Constitution’s guarantees of freedom hanging in the balance, every patriotic American really needs to watch this film. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady are true American patriots for bringing this film and its message to us, and we ignore Jesus Camp at our peril.

Greetings to one and all from the carpet capital of the world. I’m stopped here for a bit before I head into Atlanta, about 90 miles (145 km) south of here, to make my 3:00 am EDT delivery.

My primary reason for making this update is to let the world know about quite possibly the most unsafe, cruel-to-animals display of driving I have ever seen. Ordinarily, when drivers of cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs do stupid things, I just chalk it up to the apparent IQ-reducing effect that tractor-trailers seem to have on the drivers of other vehicles. People go completely stupid in the head when they’re anywhere near a truck for some reason; I’m not sure why that is, but I don’t think there can be any other explanation for the kind of behavior I see all the time.

Like I said, usually if people do stupid things like cut me off to get to their exit ramp at the very last possible second, I just figure that it’s an occupational hazard — and I certainly don’t come here to publicize that stupidity most of the time. This incident, however, is going to get publicized because of the cruelty to animals that was involved. It occurred approximately a half-hour ago (6:30 pm EDT today), about 20 miles (32 km) north of here in Ringgold, GA.

As you may know if you have ever driven Interstate 75 just south of Chattanooga, TN, there is a fairly long hill that crests near the State Route 2/Battlefield Parkway exit (Exit 350), about five miles south of the Georgia/Tennessee state line. I was in the right lane, and with roughly 23,000 lbs. (10,433 kg) in the trailer, I was ever-so-slightly slowed by this climb — but I was still doing every bit of 60 mph (96 km/h). Some asshole (who, as I would shortly see, needed to exit I-75 at S.R. 2) apparently decided this wasn’t good enough for him, and he passed me to my left.

We were at least up to the point where the deceleration lane to the off-ramp began breaking off from the right lane, when this dumbfuck came flying right over in front of me and then almost as quickly whipped across the gore area to reach the off-ramp. He was pulling a horse trailer with his white Chevy pickup truck bearing Tennessee plates, and there was a pair of white horses loaded in it. I watched as these 1,000-lb. (454 kg) animals were literally thrown from one side to the other inside the trailer!

What was even worse than that was what probably happened to the dog this asshole had put on top of a tool box in the truck bed. This was a fairly small dog, and it looked as though it was tied to something either inside the truck or in the bed. If the horses, which were 25 times the dog’s size, were getting thrown around so violently, I can only imagine what had to happen to the dog. I sure hope that was all worth it for this asshole to get around me — he just couldn’t sit behind me for half a mile (0.8 km), knowing he was using the next exit, and jump off the freeway from behind me!

So again, to sum up, if you were driving a white Chevy pickup truck, with Tennessee plates, and exiting I-75 at Exit 350 in Georgia at 6:30 pm EDT today, your dumb fucking faux-“Christian” (because almost everybody in Tennessee claims to be one) ass should be prosecuted for three counts of cruelty to animals. Or if you know anybody who matches this description, you really ought to turn them in. Ordinarily I’ll just put up with such stupidity from other drivers, but the danger this asshole put his animals in, just because he had to get around that truck, calls for a little exposure and revenge.

Speaking of so-called “Christians,” I’m finally getting around to part 3 of my review of the documentary film Jesus Camp. I left the DVD at my parents’ house for about a month when I headed out to the road, in order to give them a chance to watch it; but I have it back now, and perhaps tomorrow, while this truck goes in the shop for a regular scheduled service, I’ll cover the deleted scenes and a few other things as well. Until then, drive intelligently around trucks, and don’t do anything cruel to animals like this asshole from Tennessee did.

I’m not yet hired into the new job, unfortunately, but we did take several steps forward on that path yesterday. As I mentioned in my last update, I had an interview with their hiring manager yesterday afternoon; I would say that went quite well, with a number of questions asked and answered on both sides. He also had me fill out some of the forms that are always required when starting a new job, such as the W-4 tax withholding form and I-9 citizenship verification form.

It looks like the next step is for them to conduct a background check; however, the person who I’m told is responsible for that is — guess what? — on vacation this week, and I’ll probably have to wait as much as two weeks to know anything about that. I swear, people being on vacation are quickly turning into the bane of my existence, but I’m going to do whatever I have to do — even if it means exercising the proverbial patience of Job — to get this position. Anyway, once the background check is done, only a drug test and D.O.T. physical would then stand in the way of starting employment with them.

The hiring manager told me that I probably ought not expect to start there much before mid-July, given the time needed to do the background check and a few other things. That actually won’t be all bad for me, because I have set things up with my current company so that I will be at home from July 3 to July 17 — my usual seven days per month of unpaid time off, plus the week of vacation time I have remaining. I’m envisioning a scenario where I return this piece of shit truck to my current company’s Columbus, OH terminal at some point near the end of that period, just before I start working for the new company.

(Of course, half the reason this truck is such a piece of shit is the dumbfuck mechanics the company employs at our terminals. I’ve got a serious air leak from the engine fan clutch again; a company shop supposedly “fixed” that back in February, but as I’m finding out now, they obviously half-assed it. This is just one of the many reasons I can hardly wait to hear the words “you’re hired” from the new company.)

While driving through Cleveland, OH today, I tuned in Newsradio 1100 WTAM for a while. Perhaps you’ve heard about the case of 26-year-old Jessie Davis of North Canton, OH, who went missing from her home in that town an hour south of Cleveland about a week ago, just before she was due to give birth to her second child. Obviously, it would make sense for “Cleveland’s only news radio,” as WTAM bills itself, to cover the story. However, their half-hourly news reports went well beyond covering the story, and into the territory of what I would call flogging it to death.

This pattern of flogging missing-white-woman stories to death is really starting to get on my last nerves. The FAUX “News” Channel is STILL reporting the Natalee Holloway story, some 25 months after she disappeared in Aruba, despite the fact that she is almost certainly dead if she hasn’t turned up by now. On a more local note around my Michigan home, the TV stations spent much of this past February similarly beating the hell out of the story of Tara Grant, a successful 34-year-old businesswoman who would be found dead and dismembered in early March. Any time there’s a missing white woman, it seems, the media is all over it even worse than flies on shit.

Let me state for the record that I have no problem with merely reporting the stories of missing white women as news. I’m getting sick and fucking tired, though, of the media turning every such case into a seven-ring circus that would put Barnum & Bailey to shame. Seriously, do we really need WTAM to create “bumper” audio bits consisting of somber music, with an overly dramatized, deadly-serious voice-over intoning “The Disappearance of Jessie Davis — Continuing Coverage on Newsradio 1100 WTAM”? Does it add anything to the story for WXYZ-TV (channel 7 in Detroit, ABC affiliate) and WDIV-TV (channel 4, NBC) to create full-screen graphics with Tara Grant’s picture, superimposed “TARA GRANT DISAPPEARANCE” text in huge capital letters, and similar over-dramatized music, to be shown three times each newscast as they lead into the story? What do we gain from the twice-daily press conferences given by law enforcement?

Frankly, the media circuses (or is it circi? ) that surround all of these white-woman disappearances actually do a disservice to women, by reinforcing anti-woman Reich-wing political framing. FAUX “News,” the original and best example of Reich-wing insanity in the media, pioneered this pattern of flogging missing-white-woman stories to death with the Holloway case, because they realized it supported ultra-conservative attitudes toward women. Fundamentally, Reich-wingers believe that there are only two kinds of women: pure, virginal maidens who know their place “below” men and can’t possibly enjoy sex outside of giving the man his pleasure, or slutty whores who can’t keep their legs shut and do nothing but have abortions all the time.

By flogging these stories to death, and particularly the Holloway one, Reich-wingers paint these pretty missing white women as the first kind of woman: the pure, innocent victim. Of course, if these women were to turn up alive after only a few days, having just decided to go out and enjoy themselves and get away from it all (even if their actions weren’t sexual in nature at all), Reich-wingers would trip over themselves painting them as the other kind of woman — the “evil” kind. This kind of framing of missing-white-woman stories by the Reich-wing media (and also by more balanced local media outlets, who just ape the FAUX “News” framing because it gets ratings) is disgustingly sexist and chauvinistic right down to its very core, with its assertions that (a) only women who submit themselves to men are good and (b) women who have any kind of independent streak are Satan incarnate.

That doesn’t even begin to get into the more subtle, but still visible, racism inherent in these media circuses. Although I don’t remember the woman’s name, largely because her story was buried by the Tara Grant one, there was a black woman from Detroit who went missing around the same time Grant disappeared. WXYZ, at least, gave her story a minimal amount of coverage, devoting a grand total of maybe two or three 45-second slots on their newscasts to it; however, WXYZ’s coverage of the Grant disappearance — probably at least 3-5 minutes per newscast, for a month’s worth of newscasts — dwarfed any coverage that this black woman’s disappearance received.

I’m not necessarily going to accuse WXYZ-TV of overt racism for their comparative treatment of these two stories. Rather, what they are guilty of doing is emulating a truly racist, anti-woman, homophobic, disgusting media outlet — FAUX “News” — in a desperate hunt for higher ratings and the resulting higher advertising rates and profits. As I said above, the Reich-wingers at FAUX “News” aren’t as dumb as we would like to believe they are, and they came to realize that flogging the Natalee Holloway story to death shot their ratings through the roof. Like the bunch of lemmings they are, local media outlets have simply copied the FAUX “News” formula in their own quest for higher ratings or circulations.

I told you I wasn’t going to shy away from making my usual controversial entries, and this one is no exception. Like I said, I have nothing against pretty white women, and if and when any of them go missing, it absolutely should be reported as news. It just ought not be blown way the fuck out of proportion to other news, as media outlets throughout the country have become wont to do in the last few years.

All right, everybody, enjoy your longest day (sunrise to sunset) of the year and first day of summer. I’ll be on my way to Erie, PA tomorrow morning, and Atlanta, GA for Sunday.

I am on my way toward Buffalo, NY with my current load; it picked up yesterday afternoon on the outer fringes of the Chicago metropolitan area, and I’m stopped here for the night at this point. I am figuring on being in Buffalo late tonight.

I don’t have a ton of other news to report, but I do have an update on the job situation to pass along. When I called the hiring manager the other day, he told me that the next step in the process is to conduct a face-to-face interview. He told me to let him know once I could establish where I would be able to have a couple hours free; so once I was able to figure out how this trip would look, I called him to suggest a meeting here in the Toledo area this afternoon. About five hours ago, he got back to me saying he would be here at 1:00 pm EDT this afternoon.

I’m hoping there’s not too much more between me and getting this job. As I learned the other day, during the aforementioned phone call, my gross salary would be virtually doubled by taking this new job — I could be grossing over $60,000 per year if everything works right. Granted, it sounds as though I’ll be working five 12-hour days per week to pull that off, but then again, I’m easily putting in more than 40 hours of actual work each week in an over-the-road job. I’m not sure why I didn’t try to do this two years ago.

Well, I’m keeping this update short, just like the last one, but maybe I’ll be back to my old long-winded, controversial self once I’m not trying to juggle ten things at once. Cross your fingers for me on this interview, and I’ll be back to see you all later.

Today, I hope, is the day that I find out I have a new job. The hiring manager I was talking to a week and a half ago should be back from his vacation today, and I will in all likelihood be giving him a call if I haven’t heard from him by this afternoon. Wish me luck.

This past Thursday, Ruth Graham, the wife of Christian evangelist Billy Graham, died at the age of 87. Unlike what happened to Jerry Falwell a month ago, which is what will happen to many so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” when they die, Ruth Graham has been invited into the presence of the Lord in heaven. Like her beloved husband, who isn’t in the greatest health himself and may join her with the Lord before long, she embodied what it truly means to be a Christian — displaying Christ’s love to everybody to the best of her ability, avoiding self-righteous condemnation, and leaving judgment to God.

Christians would do well to ignore the Satanic ramblings of the likes of Pat Robertson, Peter LaBarbera, D. James Kennedy, James Dobson, Tim LaHaye, Gary Bauer, Donald and Tim Wildmon, and Fred Phelps, and everybody else who repeats their garbage, and instead emulate the example of Billy and Ruth Graham. They have shown that the most effective evangelism is that which does not condemn, bind, deceive, or always insist on its own correctness; rather, they actually lived the values of the Gospel and let their own example do the persuasion.

Even on the few occasions where Billy Graham has strayed from the Gospel, for example when he told an audience in 1993 that he believed AIDS was a judgment of God, he has admitted his error and sought forgiveness. It’ll be a cold day in Falwell’s permanent residence when you see that kind of behavior out of almost any other “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” — Graham’s own son Franklin, all too sadly, included. If Franklin Graham does not repent of his deeply sinful statements and beliefs that “Islam is an evil, wicked religion” and that homosexuality is “outside the parameters God created,” then he will be joining Jerry Falwell instead of his parents when his time comes.

I don’t have a ton of time to write much here tonight, but I did need to stop in and refresh a week-old entry. Hopefully, in a few days, I’ll be between jobs and will have more time.

I once again find myself having allowed 12 days to pass between updates here, as I prepare to head back out to the road later today. However, if events progress as I am hoping next week, this could be the last time I will head back out for another few weeks with my current company. I shall explain that, and anything else interesting that has happened lately, with the rest of this update.

From May 30 to June 4, I found myself running a total of three loads: the first one from Columbus, OH to Edwardsville, IL, just north of St. Louis; then a return trip to Columbus with a different load; and finally, a re-power of a load from the company’s Columbus terminal to Perrysburg, OH, near Toledo. There wasn’t much interesting to report there, except for some updates on road construction in various places; perhaps the one I’m most glad about is the impending completion of the Veterans’ Glass City Skyway in Toledo. This project, which has bedeviled Michiganders trying to reach the Ohio Turnpike for a whopping five and a half years now, will be complete with the dedication of the new fixed-span bridge carrying Interstate 280 over the Maumee River on June 23.

After getting home last Monday, June 4, I spent much of the next couple days hanging out with my friend Marc. He came over to the Detroit area for dinner on Monday night, and I headed out to Ann Arbor for dinner, poker, cribbage, and Xbox football on Tuesday. I got back home very late Tuesday night (technically Wednesday morning), after making quick midnight runs through a couple of car dealerships to check what they had in stock. (I’ll get to that more in a bit.) Also, I began the process of applying for yet another job, and this one actually is looking pretty good at this point; I’ll talk about that now.

This new job possibility would have me hauling fuel for a large truck stop chain, apparently being based out of one of its locations. From what their web site claimed, I could be making $50,000 per year to start, and best yet, this job would have me home every night and on the weekends. It would obviously require a tanker endorsement on my CDL; I took care of going to the Secretary of State this past Wednesday to add that endorsement, as well as the double/triple-trailer one. (I can now drive any road vehicle you can imagine, except a school bus — those require separate endorsements for some reason.) I submitted the online pre-application Wednesday night, and after receiving the “real” seven-page application via e-mail, I faxed that in on Friday. The hiring manager seems to be on a week-long family vacation now, but I am expecting to hear from him a week from today.

As you can probably guess, though, I couldn’t even get that done with my hypocrite father getting in the way. He keeps telling me that I need to “move forward in life” or some such line, but when I ask him to use his fax machine as part of doing just that, he stalls, bullshits, and hems and haws about it. That ended up costing me $11 I didn’t really need to spend, because I had to go to a Kinko’s to fax that application. Furthermore, I’m getting really pissed off with him making statements of his own opinion and then attributing them to my mother; he did that again here. “You know, your mother said she’s gonna be really nervous with you driving tankers,” he claimed she had said; when I asked her, I found that he had left out a vital bit of context.

As she so eloquently pointed out, it seems to be part of the job description of being a mother to worry about the well-being of one’s children. Of course she’ll be worried about me hauling fuel, she said, but it’s not as though she doesn’t see a major truck accident a thousand miles away from where I am at the time and worry about me anyway. One of my uncles is semi-permanently living in India, doing business there, and despite the heavy personal security his company provides for his family, my grandmother still worries about him every time she hears any bad news from the subcontinent. To the extent that this is just a sincere concern for the offspring’s well-being, and doesn’t turn into actively holding back one’s adult-age children, this is a normal and positive reaction. It turns destructive, though, when a parent does like my father did here and refuses even the smallest assistance.

Given the good prospects so far on this job, I came thisclose to pulling the trigger on a new car deal this past Thursday. Since I really couldn’t find Hyundai Sonata SEs with the option package I want at dealerships around metro Detroit, and since I had business to do in Monroe, MI anyway, I paid a visit to Brown Hyundai in Toledo. I kinda let them twist my arm into filling out a credit application; they came back saying that if I put $4,000 down as I plan to do, I would have payments of roughly $355 per month. They offered $1,500 for my Saturn, which surprised me (a lot higher than I expected); that would have cut the payments to about $325. I told them I wanted a day to think about it, despite the fact that they were being extremely pushy to make the sale right then and there.

After talking to a bunch of people, mostly including my mother, Marc, and several other friends, I decided that I probably ought to wait until I hear that I’ve been hired into the new job before I do anything. I mean, I don’t think pulling the trigger on Thursday would have killed me, even if I got stuck in my current job for the next five years; but I wouldn’t have a ton of room for huge unexpected expenses, like my appendectomy from last year. I could have found enough room in my budget in both 2005 and 2006 to make 12 payments of $325/month, by removing all of my huge one-time expenses for those years from the equation, but I wouldn’t have had a whole lot more room than that.

From Friday onward, not a whole lot of interest has happened. Last night, I returned to the truck, and it looks as though my first load back out will pick up tomorrow in southwestern Michigan. From there, I will be headed to Norfolk, VA.

At the moment, I am in between loads — I just finished with a delivery here, and I am waiting on dispatch to send me some load offers. This comes on the heels of a tough 540-mile (870 km) trip that I didn’t even get to start until about this time yesterday afternoon; I ran through basically every bit of my available hours to pull this one off.

In this update, I’m going to do a little bit of “public service” that was partially inspired by a thread I recently found on the USENET newsgroup alt.autos.hyundai. Some residents of the eastern United States, making their first road trips to the Mountain West region of the country, may be surprised or even horrified (“Oh, shit! I just really fucked up my car!”) when they notice the octane ratings on many gasoline pumps in that region. This would be particularly true of motorists who are familiar with the contents of their vehicle’s owner’s manual, and in particular its specification that fuel with a minimum octane rating of 87 (assuming it merely requires regular unleaded) must be used.

In the eastern part of the country, and even in many parts of the West Coast states, the three gasoline grades one will usually find are 87 (regular), 89 (mid-grade), and 93 (premium). However, in some areas of the West — I would think especially in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada outside Clark County (Las Vegas), Idaho, northern Arizona, and the western two-thirds of Montana — regular is 85 octane, mid-grade is 87, and premium is 91. Why, you’re asking, are the grades all two points lower — are they trying to screw up your car, or to “force” you to buy the more expensive mid-grade?

Actually, it has to do with how your engine works at the higher elevations (generally above 4,000 ft./1,219 m) in these areas. The air at higher elevations is thinner than it is around sea level, and this has a number of important effects on physical and chemical processes; one non-automotive example of this is that water boils at 203°F (95°C) in Denver, CO, instead of at 212°F (100°C) as it does at sea level. What this thinner air does in your car is reduce the absolute compression that is produced in each cylinder, which in and of itself reduces the chances for knocking (sometimes called “pinging”) and obviates some of the need for octane. (Octane, chemical formula C₈H₁₈, is one of thousands of hydrocarbons obtained from crude oil; it is used in gasoline because of its resistance to the self-ignition under pressure that we call engine knocking or pinging.)

(Wait a minute, car buffs are thinking, are you saying car makers are lying about their compression ratios? Not at all — this is where the difference between absolute and relative compression comes in. If your car’s compression ratio is, say, 9.5:1, that’s a measure of relative compression, i.e., volume at the bottom of the piston’s travel vs. volume at the top of its travel, and that never changes. Absolute compression is a measure of what kind of pressure the air-fuel mixture can exert on the cylinder walls, and that varies with outside air pressure, which itself is inversely proportional to elevation.)

For this reason, your engine doesn’t need quite as much octane in fuel at higher elevations. This is why you’ll find 85, 87, and 91 octane fuels as the three gasoline grades in the Mountain West, despite car makers’ usual specification of 87 octane (if the car only requires regular) or 93 octane (if it requires premium, like my friend Marc’s new Evo does). These lower-octane fuels are perfectly safe for your car, as long as you’re going to be staying at higher elevations (above 3,500-4,000 ft./1,067-1,219 m) until you have to fill up again.

That said, if you’re headed into lower terrain, make sure to fill up with your usual 87/89/93 octane gasoline at some point before you get into the lower-elevation area(s). Some of the lower-elevation parts of the West include most of California outside the Sierras; much of western Oregon and western Washington outside the Cascades and/or Olympic Mountains; most of southwestern and south-central Arizona, including the Interstate 8 and Interstate 10 corridors, Phoenix, and Tucson; and the Interstate 15 corridor through most of Nevada and into Arizona and extreme southwestern Utah, including Las Vegas, the incredibly scenic Virgin River Gorge, and St. George, UT. If you’re going there, or leaving the high country to head back east across the Plains, don’t let yourself get too far below 3,000 ft. (914 m) without putting some higher-octane gas into your car.

Thinking about this deal with gasoline octane ratings in the West has sort of gotten me on another (totally unrelated) automotive “public service” kick: the sales pitches by tire retailers encouraging you to “Nitro-Nize your tires!” or some similar line. These tire shops make a number of spurious claims about the use of nitrogen gas to inflate tires in lieu of air, chief among them that it increases fuel economy (lie), makes tires last longer (minimal evidence at best), and holds pressure and prevents leaks better (lie). They also make claims that, while true, have no bearing on the regular operation of passenger-car tires; for example, they always keep pointing to the use of nitrogen in tires on airplanes and race cars.

All of this is just marketing hype designed to get you to spend as much as $50 to have the perfectly good air in your tires vacuumed out and replaced by nitrogen. Let’s face it: the relationship between tire inflation and fuel economy has to do with vigilantly maintaining proper pressure, not what you fill the tire with, and a tire with a leak is a tire with a leak, regardless of what you put in it. Pure nitrogen’s lack of water vapor vis-à-vis compressed air may help to reduce inside-out corrosion of wheels/rims and the tire’s steel belts, but (a) this is really not a problem with most modern wheel and tire designs, and (b) only minimal evidence exists to support this hypothesis. You’ll probably wear out the tire from driving it long before corrosion could really become an issue.

As for the race-car and airplane statements, we’re talking about tires that are subjected to far more cruel and unusual punishment than a passenger car could ever hope to dish out. Race-car tires may have to run in excess of 200 mph (322 km/h) for more than an hour at a time, without stopping. Airplane tires are repeatedly taken from the ground to 35,000 ft. (10,668 m) altitude, where the outside air pressure is one-fifth that at the ground, and back; and upon landing, they are accelerated from a standstill to well in excess of 100 mph (161 km/h) almost instantly. I mean, if you regularly subject your car to such treatment, then by all means fill your tires with nitrogen — but I somehow doubt your tires will ever see anywhere near that kind of stress.

I have a much better idea for keeping your car’s tires properly inflated than spending $50 on nitrogen. I suggest you instead spend $1.69 on a tire-pressure gauge at AutoZone, Pep Boys, NAPA, or whatever your favorite auto-parts store is, and take two minutes to check your tire pressures at least every other week. If your pressures are a little low, find your nearest gas station with an air hose and fill it to the recommended pressure with air — which is already 78% nitrogen by volume anyway. This will do everything the nitrogen-pushers claim you need nitrogen to do, and it will save you a shitload of money relative to falling for their sales pitch.

(It occurred to me after originally posting this that many people may not be aware of how to find the proper recommended pressure for their tires. Do NOT go by what is stamped on the sidewall of the tire — that is the absolute maximum cold inflation pressure the tire is designed to handle, and unless you’re regularly packing your car with so much heavy shit that it is loaded well over its gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR), your tires will be seriously over-inflated at this pressure. Over-inflation is almost as bad as under-inflation; with over-inflated tires, you’ll wear out the center of the tread well before the edges, and your handling will go all to hell because your contact patch with the road is reduced.

To find your correct tire inflation pressure(s), open your driver’s door and look on the pillar behind the door opening for the “tire placard.” Usually, this will be a white sticker that will list your original-equipment tire size, a front tire pressure specification, and a rear tire pressure specification which may or may not be different. I’ve found in my experience that it’s not a big deal to ignore different front and rear specs and inflate all four tires to the higher spec (usually the front); but I would caution against going much more than 3 psi (21 kPa) above that specification in any tire.

Finally, when you’re checking your tire pressures, DON’T FORGET about your spare tire as well. I know it’s inconvenient to get to in a lot of cars, pickups, and SUVs, but the last thing you want to do is find that your spare is dangerously low if and when you have a flat. If you have a “donut” spare, like most cars do, you’ll find its recommended pressure on your tire placard; if you have a full-size spare, like most trucks and SUVs do, inflate it to the same pressure as the other four tires.)

Let me note for the record that putting nitrogen in your tires is not dangerous or unsafe in any way. You’re certainly not going to harm your car at all to put nitrogen in your tires; the only harm, which as I have shown is a completely unnecessary one, is to the contents of your wallet. It’s just a marketing gimmick — just another way for tire shops to make money off the unsuspecting, gullible hordes. Hopefully I’ll prevent somebody from wasting their money by posting this.

Well, it took dispatch a while, but it looks like they’re sending me back to the suckiest place in the universe — Columbus, OH — to get my next load. With that, I’m off to go drive the 140 miles (225 km) from here to there.

Before I start with this update, I just want to remind everybody that this is Memorial Day here in the United States. This is our day to remember and thank those who have fought for our country, in both heroic causes like World War II and disastrous mistakes like Chimpy’s current oil “war.” Our soldiers’ sacrifices are worthy of the same honor and respect, no matter how noble or despicable the emperor president who sends them into battle or the stated reason for the action might be. Remember that while you’re out in your back yard barbecuing today.

I have a bit of a follow-up to my May 23 update, in which I thoroughly destroyed the “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” talking point about those who voice their Godly disapproval of Jerry Falwell types somehow being “God-haters.” Specifically, I have a bit more to say in response to two of Satan’s most loyal servants, Peter LaBarbera and Stacy Harp, who kept repeating the aforementioned charge in recent entries on their blogs. Since Harp did so largely as an epithet without any kind of logical support whatsoever, this is directed mostly toward LaBarbera, whose reason for positing such an absurd claim about God’s dearly beloved gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender children was essentially that “homosexuals hate God because His Word condemns their lifestyle” or some similar male-cow excrement.

To even begin to deconstruct this insanity, we must for a moment assume that I actually did accept the “fundamentalist” interpretation of the six supposedly anti-gay passages in the Bible as true. Even if this were the case, my disagreement would be a respectful one with no hatred whatsoever — I still couldn’t bring myself to accept that a loving God would create people knowing that the nature He gave them would be as “sinful” as “fundamentalists” claim. There is no hatred of God involved here — there is simply a disagreement with “fundamentalists” as to how the Bible ought to be interpreted. Their approach is literal, all the self-contradictions be damned; I believe that the interpretation should always conform to the loving, inclusive example of Jesus, even when that contradicts the text.

I would have no major problems whatsoever with so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” if they would simply state their position and be done with it. I can accept the fact that they read the Bible in a way different from the way I read it, and I would simply have a respectful disagreement with their views. The problem comes in when they practically spend every waking moment forcing their views on the rest of the world. When they push for constitutional amendments that deny us the more than 1,100 legal rights and responsibilities of civil marriage, when they demonize us to the point where they create an entire culture of fear, and when they mock Godly efforts (such as hate-crimes laws) to erase this culture of fear as “special rights,” they cease to be Christian anymore, and instead become Christofascist terrorists.

Yes, my much greater enmity — and according to Luke 20:20-26, God’s as well — is upon those who have undertaken a 30-year campaign of lies and propaganda to enshrine their twisted interpretation of God’s Word into law. When we as a society spend more time writing and enforcing laws that restrict what one can do with one’s reproductive organs than we spend trying to help the millions of starving, needy people in our midst, we anger God and dishonor His Word. When we dismiss the perfect love that two same-gender people have for each other as “disgusting” and “sinful” and work to deny equal rights to such couples, we are actively screaming “FUCK YOU, JESUS!” through our actions.

If I can be accused of any sort of hatred, it is not at all for God — it is instead for the lies and fabrications spread by so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’.” What I hate is the reprobate sin of these so-called “Christians,” not the people who are guilty of it — it’s just like they always say, love the sinner and hate the sin. For some reason, though, so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” leaders — probably in an attempt to further inflame hateful passions in their flocks — fabricate a non-existent hatred of God out of this righteous hatred of their anti-gay lies and propaganda, simply because it suits their un-Christian agenda to do so.

The aforementioned passage from the Gospel of Luke commands Christians to “render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and render unto God what belongs to God.” This means that Christians must respect the firm division between church and state, and not try to mix the two as they are doing with their current anti-gay and anti-choice campaigns. Furthermore, their attempt to force their views on everybody else runs afoul of Jesus’ command in Luke 10:10-11, which tells them that when they are not welcomed in a place, they are to leave that place and let God handle it — not condemn the place or issue earthly threats to it.

If Christians would simply begin to observe these passages in the Gospel, I think they would find GLBT audiences to be much more welcoming. We’re not stupid, and when we see the hypocrisy they countenance by ignoring these words of God, we rightly resist their un-Christian advances. They, of course, take this as some kind of “persecution,” because their self-righteousness doesn’t allow them to see it any other way — totally neglecting the fact that all righteousness flows from God. Yet another passage from Luke, this time Luke 18:9-14, is educational here.

I don’t yet know what I’ll be doing after I get this load taken off my trailer here. I do know that I’m supposed to be back home on Saturday, assuming the company doesn’t fuck that up somehow. Anyway, enjoy all your barbecues, and I’ll be back here in a while with the next installment of Larry’s Phat Page.

I’m now headed toward northern Virginia, specifically the Washington, DC “exurb” of Manassas, with my next load. I’m a little bit surprised they’re actually going to take this load on Monday, when just about everybody else has the day off, but whatever — I’ll deliver it whenever they want it.

I seriously don’t even know why I bothered to vote last November anymore. I thought the Democrats would have learned something from the mandate the American people gave them to end the war, but we have come to find out this week that we would have been just as well off voting to keep Rethuglicans in the majority. Cowering in fear of Rethuglican attack ads, they voted to strip the latest Iraq oil “war” supplemental funding bill of any timetables or other requirements to end this disastrous charade. The lack of spines was most pronounced in the Senate, where only 10 of the 49 Democrats (along with Democratic-aligned independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and three semi-sane Republicans) voted to actually support our troops by bringing them home.

FUCK YOU, DEBBIE STABENOW.

FUCK YOU, CARL LEVIN.

You are both traitors who have just decided to preserve our highly successful recruiting efforts for al-Qaeda. As Iraq grows more deadly by the day, you have now assumed moral culpability for the deaths of Michigan soldiers — and I will be doing everything I can to make goddamn fucking sure that Michigan voters know about it. There really is no difference between you two and Rethuglicans.

I mean, seriously, Debbie Stabenow, you were elected to the Senate to represent THE WHOLE FUCKING STATE, not just the raving war-crazed lunatics in Ottawa County. We sent you back to Washington last fall to do your part in bringing this disastrous mistake to an end, not to do exactly what your opponent Michael Bouchard would have done. Now we find out that a vote for you basically was a vote for Bouchard. I have half a mind to hand your ass to you in the primary in 2012 — if I’m still in Michigan by then, that’ll be the first time I’ll be old enough to run for one of the state’s Senate seats.

Unfortunately, next year when Carl Levin is up, I’ll still only be 28 and therefore too young (the Constitution stipulates that Senators must be at least 30). He deserves a primary challenge just as much as Stabenow, though, and any primary opponent to Levin has now earned my vote. Levin may have been a decent Senator for the 1970s, when he was first elected; but his positions on a number of issues, especially his repeated shilling for the backward-looking American auto industry, has left him so painfully behind the times that he really ought to be put out to pasture. If he is the Democratic nominee for the Senate from Michigan in 2008, I’ll either sit it out or write myself in again, like I did in the 2006 gubernatorial election — not giving a shit that I would be constitutionally ineligible to hold either office. (Michigan governors must also be 30, according to our state constitution.)

Given the hour, I sort of have to make this update a little bit of a “hit-and-run” compared to some of my more recent longer updates. Enjoy your Memorial Day, and I’ll probably be back after the holiday.