Category Archives: Opinion

Best Cup of Joe in Forsyth?

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Brian Leon has a post about the coffee situation here in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County.  He points out that the Moby's in the Liberty Plaza building is under new management and is now called the Sands Coffee House.  He also writes about Confluence Coffee House in his neck of the woods near the intersection of Peters Creek Parkway/150 and Old Salisbury Road in South Winston, and he seems to like it quite a lot.

This got me to thinking: what's the best coffee shop in Forsyth?  Yes it's a highly subjective question, and I also think that it depends on what you're looking for and what particular mood on any given day, so maybe a better question is "What is your favorite coffee shop in Forsyth and why?"

Anyone that knows me knows that I L-O-V-E coffee so I'm going to sacrifice here and do my own research.  If you know of a great place to get a cup of joe just let me know and I'll check it out, and some time in the next couple of weeks I'll publish a guide to the great coffee joints in Forsyth.  I'll also write up each experience as they come along.  Yep, it's a sacrifice.

Hating the Setup CC and the Red Exclamation Point!

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There are lots of things to find annoying in the world but one that has really crawled under my skin of late is the over profligate use of the CC in emails.  Nothing irks me more than when a bunch of people are CC’d in an email  before said email is sent to the "To" person to deal with directly. I think we’ve all probably been there: someone sends you an email and CCs your boss, your bosses boss and potentially your spouse and lover.  In it they request something and make it sound like this is at least the 20th time they’ve asked you for whatever it is and you haven’t responded to any of those first couple of dozen requests.  The truth is that this is the first it’s been mentioned and the "From" person is just being an ass and trying to make you look bad.

I get just as annoyed being one of the CCd people.  I already deal with enough email to choke a horse so I don’t really need to know if one of my friends or associates is being asked to provide a phone number for some schmo and simply must reply ASAP.  Why involve me?  If the "To" person doesn’t get back to you then pick up the damn phone and bug him until he does.  If that doesn’t work then call his boss.  Either way, leave me out of it.  Oh, and if you think you’re going to get results by applying some sort of peer pressure then you’ve got another thing coming.  All you’re accomplishing is making me and the other 20 people you CC’d think you’re an annoying little twerp at best, and at worst an inconsequential gnat who doesn’t merit a response from my respected colleague.

Then there’s the use of the ! on every damn message you send.  Ever hear of Chicken Little?  When every thing is a ! then how am I supposed to know when you send me something that’s truly !-worthy?

Yes, I’m cranky today, but believe me when I say I have a good reason.  If you want to know why then send me an email with a ! and CC everyone in your address book and I’ll get right back to you. 

The Year in Review – Evergreen Version

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The year that was.  Lots of people were born, lots of people died.  Lots of people did some really smart things, lots of people did some really stupid things. Somewhere there was too much rain, somewhere there was drought.  Some world leaders acted like assholes, and others acted even assholier. Some people complained about the weather, and others just complained. Some people starved, others were gluttonous. Some people fought, others loved each other and most did both. The earth orbited the sun once, the sun didn’t notice and now we start over.

So Who Prays for Forsyth County?

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After I vented my spleen yesterday I got to thinking that maybe I’d spouted off about the Forsyth County commissioners a little to rashly.  Specifically I said:

The Forsyth County commissioners and sectarian prayer supporters
consistently point out that the commissioners invite representatives of
different religions to open their meetings and so the current policy is
fair.  I’m left to wonder if they think that inviting Baptists,
Methodists, Catholics, Lutherans and Moravians qualifies as different
religions?  Exactly when was the last time a Pagan was invited to give
the opening prayer?  How about a Muslim or Buddhist?  Heck, what about
those Mormons that scare the crap out of your average Baptist?

I started thinking that maybe I should have checked before I wrote that, and I should probably look into it to be fair.  So I did.  I checked out the minutes for all the regular meetings held by the commissioners from 2000 to 2006 and the meeting summaries from meetings held in 2007.  That’s 175 meetings held from January 10, 2000 to April 9, 2007, each of which began with a call to order and then the attendees standing to hear the invocation and the pledge of allegiance.  Here’s who gave those 175 invocations:

  • 152 were delivered by representatives of Christian institutions (Churches, Salvation Army)
  • 16 were delivered by board members
  • 2 were delivered by a representative of a Unitarian Universalist congregation
  • 2 were delivered by a representative of Forsyth Jail Prison Ministry (both in 06)
  • 1 by a Rabbi (November of 06)
  • 1 by a representative of Carolina Dianetics (Scientologists) (1/22/07)
  • 1 (3/12/07) the notes only say "invocation" and do not indicate who delivered it

I guess I was safe in my spouting off.  Although I did see the occassional Seventh Day Adventist included I didn’t see any Mormons, Muslims or Buddhists.  I find it interesting that the Dianetics person was invited last month since that occured after the commissioners received the letter from the ACLU.  Another interesting point is that the board member who most often gave the invocation was Dave Plyler who lost his seat in a close election last year to Ted Kaplan.  Kaplan is one of the three commissioners to oppose proceeding with the court battle that the commissioners voted yesterday to pursue.

I wonder if we’ll see more diversification of invocators as we move forward thanks to the attention from the lawsuit?

Venting Ye Old Spleen

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Maybe I’m cranky because this is the most stressful time of the year for me at work.  Whatever it is I’ve had it with some of the crap that passes for news and public dialogue these days and I figured what better way to blow off a little steam than to spell it out for the three people who read this thing.  So here we go.

Item #1: Forsyth County Commissioners and the ACLU re. Sectarian Prayers to Open Public Meetings

A while back the ACLU sent a letter to a bunch of municipalities in western North Carolina threatening to sue them if they didn’t end the practice of opening public meetings with sectarian prayers said by preachers invited from various churches.  All of the municipalities were told by their lawyers that they didn’t have a leg to stand on and some came to the decision to either open their meetings with non-sectarian prayers or with moments of silence.  Of course my county commissioners aren’t listening to their lawyer and are considering going to court to fight the ACLU even though there is a ton of case-law, i.e. precedents, that have held against prayer at government meetings.  The commissioners are also getting a lot of vocal support for fighting the ACLU from local citizens with only a smattering of dissent. (For a taste check out the letters to the editor of at the Winston-Salem Journal).  What really gets my goat, though, is that the arguments put forward in support of sectarian prayer are downright obtuse.

One rationale that the sectarian prayer supporters use to argue their point is that the establishment clause should not be interpreted to allow a small minority to deny the majority their right to sectarian prayer.  This is as dumb an argument as you can make for this reason: Not allowing a government meeting to open with a sectarian prayer is not denying anyone the right to pray. If you feel like it you can go and sit in the meeting and pray to anyone or anything you like, but the government can’t invite you to come and pray as their representative.  What’s being denied is the government’s "right" to sanction any one religious group or sect.

Another argument being floated is that denying Christians the right to invoke Jesus is also barring Jews, Muslims, etc. from praying to their God.  No one, including the ACLU, has said that the prayer before a meeting can’t invoke "God", they’ve only said you can’t invoke a specific deity like Jesus or Buddha.  I’ve mentioned that to a couple of people and they think I’m lying.  Whatever.

The Forsyth County commissioners and sectarian prayer supporters consistently point out that the commissioners invite representatives of different religions to open their meetings and so the current policy is fair.  I’m left to wonder if they think that inviting Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Lutherans and Moravians qualifies as different religions?  Exactly when was the last time a Pagan was invited to give the opening prayer?  How about a Muslim or Buddhist?  Heck, what about those Mormons that scare the crap out of your average Baptist?

Finally, I’m willing to bet that the commissioners know this is a losing cause.  They’ve been hemming and hawing while they try to come up with a resolution that protects them from the vocal choir of voters who want to fight the ACLU. It looks like they might have found a way out of their jam by deciding to fight if, as todays Winston-Salem Journal reports, some Christian-folk get together funding to privately finance the legal fight.  That would mean that the commissioners wouldn’t have to worry about any political fallout for spending public dollars on what everyone knows is a losing battle.  In other words they can pander to the vocal Christian majority of their constituents without risking anything.  Cowards. 

The county commissioners have been elected to represent all of their constituents, not just the majority who are Christians.  Every single one of them has an atheist, agnostic, and other non-Christian in their district but instead of looking out for this small minority’s interest they’re pandering to the majority.  They seem to think that their job is to do what the majority wants them to do, but if that’s how representative government worked then we could run our government like American Idol.  Their job, first and foremost, is to uphold the law for all of their constituents and if they fight a battle that their own legal advisors say is wrong then they all deserve to be canned in the next election.  And for anyone who doesn’t know me, I say this as a life-long Christian.

Issue #2: This Whole Imus Thing

What’s to say that hasn’t already been said?  Well, I’ll just add a couple of thoughts. 

Number one: How did Al Sharpton become the black community’s "representative"?  That’s like the white community being "represented" by some strange hybrid of Pat Robertson and Donald Trump. Sharpton’s an opportunistic gas-bag who’s cause is his own wallet, period.  If there wasn’t any money in it he wouldn’t be "representing" anyone.

Number two:  Sharpton’s antics took Imus from being a has-been listened to by a couple of million people who lost half their brain cells while dropping acid in the 60s and 70s to being the most prominent person in media. And it happened in less than a week.  Sharpton would argue that Imus is hurting because he lost a bunch of sponsors and has lost his simulcast on MSNBC (viewed by the tens of thousands!).  Of course now even my kids know who he is so when he starts streaming his schtick online, putting out podcasts, writing his autobiography, etc. he’ll make a gazillion dollars.  But Sharpton doesn’t care because he’s reaping the benefit during his own show’s sweeps weeks.

Number three: Imus and Sharpton both know that they’re going to get even richer off this thing and they literally have a symbiotic relationship now.  I imagine that in a month they’ll be toasting their success with a glass of Cristal at a restaurant in Harlem.  They’re playing us for suckers and it’s working.

Number four: Who thinks that by Monday we’ll still be engaging in the productive "discussion of race" that this episode supposedly opened up? If you raised your hand I know of a bridge in Brooklyn that Sharpton would love to sell you.

That’s it for now.  I do kind of feel better.

Why are you really sorry?

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Today’s "controversy of the day", at least for the morning, is what ex-NBA player Tim Hardaway said when he was asked about he would handle having a gay (homosexual, not happy) teammate.  Here’s what he said:

You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known," Hardaway said. "I
don’t like gay people and I don’t like to be around gay people. I am
homophobic. I don’t like it. It shouldn’t be in the world or in the
United States…

And second of all, if he was on my team, I would, you know, really
distance myself from him because, uh, I don’t think that’s right. And
you know I don’t think he should be in the locker room while we’re in
the locker room. I wouldn’t even be a part of that.

Yowch.  His statements are definitely politically incorrect, obviously objectionable to many people and just as obviously reflective of his true feelings.  And I’d hazard a guess that his views are shared by many of his NBA peers and by a fairly large segment of the population.  Personally I don’t share his views, but they are his views and he’s being brutally honest about his feelings with his comments.

Well, not 24 hours after his comments hit the airwaves Hardaway has issued an apology.  Here’s an excerpt from an ESPN.com story about the controversy:

Hardaway, later saying he regretted the remarks, apologized for the
remarks during a telephone interview with Fox affiliate WSVN in Miami.

"Yes, I regret it. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said I hate gay people or anything like that," he said. "That was my mistake."

Well, I’m sure he is sorry for making the comments.  He’s probably lost a lot of future dollars from media and PR gigs and I’ll bet he is sorry for that.  But is he sorry for hating gay people?  I doubt it, and in our society I don’t know if we can or should demand that people apologize for expressing their true feelings.  Nothing says we have to agree with them, or support them, but their feelings are as legitimate as anyone elses.  If anything we should say, "I hear what you’re saying and here’s why I think you’re wrong."  Instead we shout "You’re wrong you bigoted asshole!" and then wait for the public bowing down and apology.

Our airwaves are filled with celebrities, athletes, politicians and other infamous folk who open their mouths, utter something considered objectionable by a segment of the population, and then when they figure out they might lose money or status they issue an apology.  Their apologies are sincere in that they really regret making trouble for themselves, but otherwise they ring hollow as a damage containment tool.

For once I’d like someone to say something like, "I know most people don’t agree with what I said, but it’s what I believe and that’s that.  Maybe I should learn to say nothing if I’ve got nothing nice to say, but it’s too late for that now so if you disagree with me let’s talk about it."  Unfortunately we don’t seem to have people in the public eye willing to do that.

What’s real interesting about the Hardaway story is the reaction of John Amaeche, an ex-NBA player who came out of the closet in a book he recently wrote.  Amaeche’s book has caused a big stir in the NBA universe and is what prompted the interviewer to ask Hardaway about his feelings on having a gay teammate. Here’s what Amaechi said:

Finally, someone who is honest. It is ridiculous, absurb, petty,
bigoted and shows a lack of empathy that is gargantuan and
unfathomable. But it is honest. And it illustrates the problem better
than any of the fuzzy language other people have used so far.

Exactly.  Without people like Hardaway, people who say what they really feel, we don’t stand a chance of having an honest conversation about issues like these.  And without an honest conversation we don’t ever get any closer to understanding each other’s position.  In Amaeche’s words we will continue to have a gargantuan and unfathomable lack of empathy.

Where I’d Like to Position the Missionaries

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Something I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions since moving to Winston-Salem is that when I was in the DC area most people would ask me "What do you do?" when they met me but here they ask "What’s your church?".  And it’s not confined to parties or other social situations.  It happens at the grocery store, the barber shop, and just about any other public forum.  It’s also interesting to me that people here will unabashedly share their religious views with total strangers and will invoke religion in discussions of things like schools.  Let’s just say that school prayer is still a hot issue here.

It has never really bothered me that people profess their religion so publicly and it also doesn’t bother me when they ask where I go to church and then invite me to attend theirs.  The public square is as much theirs as it is mine and I’ve always felt that if it made me uncomfortable I could just ignore the question or brush them off.  Although I’ve never done it I’ve had in the back of my head a plan to say "I’ll come if you let me sacrifice a chicken on the altar like I do in my basement".

What does bug me is when members of various churches knock on my door and try to sell me on their church.  This is my sanctuary after all and I don’t like it being invaded.  I understand that most Christians believe it is a necessity to recruit (I don’t know where it is but there’s apparently a passage in the New Testament that invokes people to play Coach K and recruit for Jesus’ team), and as I said before I don’t mind if they use the public square to do it, but when I’m at home I want to be left alone. 

Quick side note: Whenever I hear people talk about the part of the Bible where they’re instructed to go out and recruit I always wonder why they assume it means for their particular church?  I mean if I’m Christian then I’m Christian, so what does it matter where I go to church?  Two words: collection plate.

A notable exception is the Mormons.  Yes this is very inconsistent but there’s a personal reason.  When I was a kid my family was Mormon and at an early age I was being prepared for the day that I would go on my mission.  I started saving money at around 8 years old, but when my parents got divorced we left the church so I never got much past saving $20 for the bike I was going to ride for God.  To this day I’m still on the books with the Mormons and they periodically send the boys in white shirts to my house to say hi.  It’s easy for me to see myself in their shoes so I’m inclined to be sympathetic.  And because they’re so young it’s also easy for me to steer them away from selling to talking basketball over a glass of water that they’re always thankful for, which means it’s almost always a pleasant 15 minutes.

The other churches tend to send little blue haired ladies who are not easily swayed from their topic.  They’re also stubborn and doctrinaire and exactly the kind of people I don’t much want to hang with, but because they’re little blue haired ladies I’m incapable of brushing them off. It would be too much like brushing off my grandmother.  I think if they sent someone younger I’d be able to invoke my chicken sacrifice ploy, but I just can’t do it with the blue hairs.

So I’ve started to think about how I can cut them off at the pass, as it were.  Some ideas include:

  • Putting a Buddha on the front porch.
  • Keeping a turban by the front door that I can don before opening the door.  They wouldn’t know a Sikh from a Shitzu, but they’d know that whatever I was I wasn’t Christian.  It’d probably scare ’em to death and I’m willing to bet they’d set a record for the 100 yard dash in the 80+ division.
  • Put a statue of the Virgin Mary on the front porch and a sign on the front door that says "We’re Catholic and One of Us Used to be Mormon".  This has the advantage of being true and thoroughly confusing.  What could they possibly say?

For the record we’ve been attending the Moravian church down the road for the last several months.  They’re great people, they never once knocked on our door and they spend an inordinate amount of time eating chicken pie and drinking coffee.  Exactly the kind of people I want to hang with.

In anticipation of those of you who I’m sure I’ve offended let me say this: I’ve spent a lot of time in various churches including Mormon, Presbytarian for a couple of months, Unitarian for one service, Baptist with some of my cousins, Lutheran High School for three years, Lutheran College for one year, Catholic for much of my adulthood, Methodist for several services and now Moravian.  There is much more similarity than difference between them, and almost all of the difference is in what I’ll call ceremony.  From what I can tell the doctrinal differences are more important to the church leaders than their congregations so where I choose to spend my time is based more on the people of the church than the doctrine.  That probably best explains my peturbation at being evangelized (I feel like a Verizon customer being cold-called by Cingular) and my inclination to be attracted to the Moravians’ honey-pot practice of "Food and Fellowship."

RINO and DINO meet NINO

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RINO and DINO sounds like some sort of cartoon or maybe even a NY nightclub act from the ’50s, but in this case it means "Republican in Name Only" and "Democrat in Name Only."  These terms are bandied about online, usually as an epithet in some political nutjob’s rantings.  You know the kind: "Bush is God, the Republicans are the only thing standing between America and the Democrats’ bankrupting us with their irresponsible tax and spend policies and the liberals’ bringing about Armageddon with their support of baby butchering and butt humping", or, "Bush is the Devil, the Democrats are the only thing standing between America and the Republicans’ bankrupting us with their irresponsible tax-cut and spend policies and the neo-cons bringing about Armageddon with their foolhardy battle with Islam."  Basically I’m talking about the pains-in-the-asses who see all human relations as adversarial and somehow never picked up the finer points of civil discourse during their adolescent development.

I’m always amused by the RINO and DINO accusations.  As someone who’s never joined either party I can’t be called anything but NINO (nothing in name only) and since that doesn’t actually mean anything it doesn’t really sting.  My brother used to accuse me of being an independent because I didn’t have the balls to take a stand on issues.  I used to respond that I refused to be associated with any group that I could disagree with consistently since I didn’t want anyone to think that I might believe in something in which I didn’t.  I think I also said something nasty like he was a Republican because he couldn’t think for himself, but hey, we were young.

I truly have a hard time understanding why an "average voter" would join a political party.  It’s easy to understand why people who want to be in power would form or join a party since it’s a means for them to achieve their goals, but I just don’t get it for the average person.  Maybe they want to be told how to think, or maybe they look at it like supporting a football team, or maybe they like the snacks at the party meetings, but it’s still a befuddler to me. I mean if I were to declare myself a Democrat I’d be associated with people like Kennedy and Rangel, and if I were to declare myself a Republican I’d be associated with people like Foxx and Bush.

And what about the issues?  You ask any 10 Republicans what they believe about the war and you’re going to get a lot of different answers.  Some want to get out, some want to stay.  Ask them about the separation of church and state and you’ll get different answers depending on whether you’re speaking to a fiscal or social conservative.  If I were Republican I’d be spending all my time prefacing my remarks with, "I’m a Republican, but not one of those Republicans, because I don’t agree with their stance on…", and it would take me a full paragraph before I could actually state my own beliefs.  As an independent I simply start with, "I don’t belong to a party.  I believe…"  I’m not picking on the Republicans since the same would happen with the Democrats.

All this got me to thinking that maybe the solution is to start a party of NINOs.  We’d essentially be a party that professes a belief in nothing, requires its members to only vote their consciences and endorses no particular candidate or issue.  We’d have a big convention just like the other parties, and we might even nominate a candidate, but we’d do it by lottery.  Hell, our odds would be fantastic for putting someone better in the White House than the Democrats or Republicans, I mean even random selection could do better than those jokers have done for the last generation or so.  We could even give ourselves a nice all-encompassing name: The Elephant’s Ass.  Our slogan could be something pithy like, "All for nothing".  I wonder if the RINOs and DINOs would come over if we invited them?

Easy to Criticize, Hard to Do

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A while back I left a comment on someone else’s blog (can’t find it or I’d link to it) in which I said some rather critical things about TV reporters and their writing abilities.  Lenslinger quickly, and rightly, took me to task.  He pointed out how hard it is to write stories on the fly, match it to video and then get it even semi-coherent for the air.  That was just one reminder about how easy it is to criticize and how much harder it is to actually do anything.

It’s easy to critique an author’s book, but incredibly difficult to write your own.  It’s easy to tell a waiter how to do his job, but when’s the last time you carried five plates on your arm without spilling?

I was reminded of this by Lenslinger’s post "Ten Things I’d Teach News Reporters."  You get an appreciation for how much goes into a nightly newscast, even when it doesn’t go well.  Of course we can, and should, criticize anyone who can do good work but doesn’t, just as we can be criticized when we don’t do our jobs well.  These folks choose to do their jobs in public and as a result they open themselves up to criticism by a far larger audience than the rest of us can even imagine, but that’s the road they chose.

There are other jobs that open the practitioners up to public criticism.  Professional athletes come to mind, and on this election eve so do politicians. I’m sure that politicians’ jobs are harder than we’d like to admit, but at the same time the power they wield demands that we be highly critical of them.  If TV reporters screw up the worst thing we get is bad TV (who’d notice?), and if professional athletes screw up they get check mark in the "L" column, but if politicians screw up we get, well, screwed.

While reading Lenslinger’s piece I remembered how pissed I got the first time I got a negative comment on this blog, and I remember how agitated I was when some troll got on here and started giving me hell.  I also remember thinking, "How do public people do this every day?"  So, yes I’m appreciative of the thick skin that all people in public life must have and I wonder why they do it.  I’m also trying harder to appreciate the hard work that goes into what these folks do, but I’m also not going to give anyone a free pass when they don’t do their jobs well.  In the case of a bad on-air report I’ll probably just laugh and say something like "that was inane", but in the case of politicians I’m gonna squeal like a stuck pig and demand better.

And, oh yeah, I’m gonna try and toss the rascals out.

Don’t Buy Gas from the Bastards on Old Bridge Road

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GashikeSee that picture on the right?  You might have to click on it to see it at full size to see that I paid $3.39 for 87 octane unleaded gas. I took the picture with my camera phone right after filling up at a station on Old Bridge Road in Prince William County, VA earlier this week. It was the day after the BP announcement re. the pipeline in Alaska being shut down for a while and a miraculous $.40/gallon jump occured overnight.

I bought there because I was on fumes and didn’t have the opportunity to look elsewhere, but just down the road I found gas that was $.20/gallon cheaper and that trend stayed everywhere I drove.  I’ll take my hits for not looking for gas sooner and denying myself the chance to find a better price, but I can at least call them out on their gouging. 

On the way home last night I got a tank full in Petersburg, VA for $2.92. 

And for the record I don’t have anything against higher oil prices (that whole supply and demand thing), but I do have something against gougers.