Check out *this* church (March 16, 2008)

[Pre-script, October 2011: This is about a church I have not attended since April 2010. At the time I wrote this, I had recently joined it, and was very upbeat about it. At this writing, I do not attend any church, and feel no need to, though I do stay in touch with several current and former members. The church still exists & is quite viable, but meets in a different location from what I say in my post. See the website.]

Current mood: rockin

Ya gotta love a church that starts its service with a Weird Al Yankovic song parody.

That, and we have one helluva band to lead us in song. The first thing I ever heard them do was a straight-up cover of Steppenwolf’s "Born to Be Wild". And loud, louder even than you would have turned up the stereo when your parents weren’t around to complain about it. They sound damn good, too. The Weird Al piece was done live, as is everything else. Very little piped in stuff here.

What really makes the place special is that, screwy as it may seem, the choice of tunes is entirely purposeful, an integral part of the message. "Spiderman", Weird Al’s parody of Billy Joel’s "Piano Man", highlighted our current "Heroes" theme. (For another reference, see my earlier blog entry.) The advertised message on the sign outside is "More Jesus, Less Crap", so if you’re cozy and happy in your Lowest Christian Denominator megachurch, or one of the many churches where the service hasn’t varied since the 1940s, fine, stay there. However, if (like me) you wouldn’t dare go to one of those, you might find this place to be worth a look.

I really haven’t strayed far from my atheist roots, when all is said and done. But consider: I’ve lived in a resident Jewish believe-this-or-else summer camp, have been raked over the hellfire and damnation coals by a Bible-thumping girlfriend from high school, repeatedly subjected by a carpooler to a point-by-point history of why the Irish Roman Catholics have been right in their 500 years of sectarian "troubles", dragged through dozens of life’s-rotten-and-you’re-a-worthless-piece-of-shit-until-you-die-then-everything’s-wonderful-and-you-live-forever sermons, and done Bible studies with right-wing fundamentalists to the tune of Fox News blaring in the background with piles of "Elect Bush-Cheney" paraphernalia sitting on a nearby table.

Yeah. Been there. Done that. *gags*

This place is different, which is appropriate, as Jesus wasn’t about any of that stuff. (You may have a vision of Elliot in E.T. telling off his older brother about the spacecraft. It’s not out of place in describing how differently my church approaches things.) Very simply, they focus on what Jesus of Nazareth had to say that makes life worth living, and screw the religious stuff. I really do think you can be an atheist and still get something out of Jesus of Nazareth that makes life worth living, or I wouldn’t keep coming back here.

If that sort of church service sounds a bit different, and you’re in the Pittsburgh area, I will give you my standard soft sell. I will never tell you what to think or how to believe, but just put it out there and let you decide for yourself. So here’s the info:

Sundays, 10:00 a.m., North Allegheny Intermediate High School, 350 Cumberland Road, Pittsburgh (McCandless Twp), PA 15237. That’s a quarter mile from the CCAC North campus, next door to Northland Library, and about a half-mile hike from McKnight Road. If coming by bus, use the 8:20 12A from Downtown, 8:40 at Siebert, and get off at Cumberland and McKnight, just past the hospital, where the bus makes a right turn.

Here’s the website. Sermons are archived, so you can listen for yourself. To me, it’s a welcome change.

Nose to nose with a raccoon (March 13, 2008)

Current mood: amused

On a lighter note for a change...

My bed sits right up against the window, and just outside is a small deck, actually the roof over the family room. At the edge stands a tall tree, easily 50 feet high, whose branches intersect another tall tree, and ... well, you get the idea: A critter superhighway.

Four-thirty this morning, the cat, who normally snoozes by my feet, went nuts. Even with the blinds down, she hissed and batted at the window. Raising the blinds, I was face to face with an adult raccoon. The cat was not amused. For a couple of seconds, they were nose to nose, with only a pane of glass and a screen to separate them. A couple seconds later, it came over to check me out, too, so I was maybe an inch and a half away from it.

Brave kitty, defending me against the local wildlife! I wish I’d been able to take a picture.

I’m guessing it was a female, quietly exploring and foraging. Males are bigger and more aggressive. This is not the first time we’ve had a raccoon at the window. Sometimes we get two males fighting over a female -- a fine way to be awakened at 4 a.m., I assure you -- and sometimes we get one of each, which involves a lot of running up and down the roof over us, and considerable yowling and squealing.

Yawn. Back to sleep, if I can!

My prediction on fuel prices (March 11, 2008)

Current mood: argumentative

In 1981, the car I was driving was a ratty looking 1972 Opel station wagon, the first wheels I could truly call my own. That summer, the speedometer cable broke, rendering the odometer useless. As I recall, the fuel gauge somewhat worked, but wasn't reliable.

This resulted in two things: I got real good at listening to the engine to figure out both vehicle speed and miles per gallon, and I began keeping a written log of fuel purchases. It worked: Despite my youthful heavy foot, I neither got a ticket nor ran out of gas. Six cars and 27 years later, though, I still log every purchase. I also still have every log. Someday I may key all this in.

What else came of that, though, was having a running database of fuel prices. Long before Trilby Lundberg came along, I got good at tracking, and predicting, the price of gasoline. Now that the Internet and everyone's wonderfully informative blogs are here (thank especially Oily Cassandra and Christian^TM), I think I can safely predict where the price of fuel is going: Up! (yawn, big surprise there!) Really, though, I'm going to go out on a limb and make honest predictions. As I write, mid-grade unleaded is about $3.25/gallon here in suburban Pittsburgh. I do not shop on price, and do not drive all over to get a better price. Four out of five purchases are made at the filling station at the corner on nearby McKnight, and have been since I moved here 17 years ago. I always buy 89-octane mid-grade, since every car I've ever had since the Opel pings on 87 octane.

Without further ado -- and these are the Pittsburgh 89-octane prices:
$3.50 - by May 1, 2008, start of the summer driving season.
$3.75 - by September 8, 2008, end of the summer driving season
Less than $3.50 again - by November 4, 2008, Election Day.
$4.00 - by March 11, 2009, one year from today.
$5.00 - by Labor Day weekend 2009.
$6.00 - by Labor Day weekend 2010.

I'm not really willing to stick my neck out beyond that. Something else is going to happen, not sure what. A conventional war. A nuclear war. A society changing terrorist attack. Another oil embargo. Major influence from the new Iranian International Petroleum Exchange. Destabilization of the dollar. Some sort of refining crisis, like post-Katrina, when we had plenty of oil, but limited refining capacity.

I will say that we will see $10/gallon before the 2012 presidential election, and $20/gallon before the decade of the 2010s is done. The problem with saying that is that inflation speeds these along, in a positive feedback loop.

It is hard to convince people that last autumn's even $3/gallon is really the same as the $2/gallon they were paying a couple of years ago, factoring in inflation, or that the roughly 80 cents a gallon they were paying in 1997 was actually half the roughly 60-cent price they were paying in 1977. I can tell you, though, that everyone surely recognized in 1977 (when I first started driving) was double what they were paying barely five or six years before.

Anyway, enough. The predictions are what matter. I will post updates to this, probably with bulletins, as either the time or the price thresholds are reached.

*

Totally off-topic: What I'm listening to: The music of the 1920s and 1930s on Radio Dismuke. MySpace doesn't hook in Internet Radio very cleanly.

My Hero: Liz Book (March 8, 2008)

Current mood: hopeful

 

Let me set the scene here before I tell you about Liz Book, whose name likely means nothing to you.

My church is currently featuring a series of messages concerning heroes – what defines a hero, what do heroes do, who is a hero to you – and we discuss these messages in Sunday evening small group meetings in someone’s home. The ultimate tie-in to church, of course, is that Jesus of Nazareth should rate pretty high on anyone’s hero list.

Our challenge two Sundays ago was to identify at least one hero. I had a short list of about eight, but on further thought, tried to distinguish between role models and heroes. To my way of thinking, role models are those whose way of life is worth emulating. They do the right things for the right reasons, and when they screw up as we all do, admit their faults and learn from them. All good stuff, and plenty of people fit that bill, both living and dead, both real and fictional. Heroes go beyond that. Heroes take on a cause, an ideal, a principle, and, facing true danger, with fear fully understood, blaze forward, see that cause through until success is reached. No small number die trying.

Again, think of Jesus of Nazareth. His cause was to reestablish the law of Moses, which had been trampled and twisted by the religious do-gooders of the day into some warped but entrenched imitation of God’s word. Jesus had to fight to get back to the real thing, and in so doing actually raised the bar, making the Mosaic law even tougher, changing the fundamental rules of society. What he did flew in the face of the establishment, who were so sure they were right that they ended up nailing him to a cross. His many disciples, though, picked up where he left off and, facing the same resistance and the occasional hungry lion, did ultimately succeed.

Returning now to my list of role models and heroes, here are a couple of each:

• John Lennon. Role model, possibly also a hero. Despite fame and fortune and all the distractions that accompany it, he set his own path and followed it, recording it in word and song for the world to follow. "Revolution", "Imagine", "In My Life", "Eight Days a Week", "(Just Like) Starting Over" – all these document a wonderful way to run one’s life. For the hero part, start with "The Ballad of John and Yoko", but for the details you have to get out of the songs and get into the news coverage. I won’t go into it here.
• Richard and Mildred Loving. Heroes. This interracial couple married in 1959, defying laws of the time, fought their arrest and imprisonment all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and won. Their battle against entrenched authority struck down anti-miscegenation laws in 17 states. Mildred is still with us, though Richard passed on, I believe, even before the ruling came down. Life isn’t fair sometimes.

Back to Liz Book, a resident of Ormond Beach, Florida, and why she rates as a hero. The nearby city of Daytona Beach arrested her about 10 years ago for baring her breasts during a rowdy festival known as Bikeweek. The problem was not so much the incident itself – many other women did likewise, in that year’s celebration and many more before and since – but what happened as a result of that arrest. You see, the crime she was charged with was "Exposure of Sexual Organs", which caused her to be placed on the Registered Sex Offenders list. And pay a $250 fine to the city of Daytona Beach. 

Liz Book felt that the law was wrong. Men can go shirtless; women cannot. Clearly sex discrimination. As recently as the 1930s, men too could be arrested for indecent exposure in most places for going shirtless, even on a beach. More importantly, though, she believed that Florida law itself is wrong, that female breasts are not sex organs. Sex organs are to be found below the waist. The mammary glands are there to feed babies. Men too have breasts, though usually not as prominent. Cultural and religious taboos aside, to classify female breasts as sex organs while not also doing the same for men, is blatant and illegal discrimination based exclusively on gender.

Note again that the cultural taboo also applied to men here until very recently. Note also that the uncovered female upper torso routinely appears on statuary without much objection, and has appeared on U.S. money from time to time (1896 $5 bill, 1917 25-cent piece) until someone raised a fuss about it. True, the taboo is there, but that’s not Liz Book’s point.

She took Daytona Beach to court, fighting the arrest. She won. Despite that, she still was placed on the registered sex offenders list. This prevented her from participating in school activities with her daughter, as she was now banned from setting foot on school property, by virtue of being a registered sex offender. Think that’s bad? We’re only getting started.

Daytona Beach appealed the ruling. It lost again. Despite this, city police went to extreme measures to identify and arrest every woman it could find who bared her breasts, even briefly. Each one got the $250 fine and placement on the sex offenders list. By police estimates, in one weekend over 200 women were so cited. The real motivation was now clear: It was a money maker for the city, tens of thousands of dollars per day. Daytona didn’t give a damn about the women whose lives it was ruining, most of whom had no idea of the consequences they were in for.

Next year’s Bikeweek, she repeated her shirtless display. She was arrested again. She fought it again. She won again. Daytona Beach appealed that ruling again, this time in a state court. Book won again, citing free speech rules.

In another iteration in a following year’s Bikeweek protest, she was assured that she would not be arrested if she bared her breasts. They lied. Not only did they lie, but they separated her from her crowd of supporters, marched to the center of a bridge, where a policeman asked her if she had any last words.

In yet another Bikeweek protest where she was assured of not being harassed, police hauled away every shirtless female protester around her, and tried to taunt her to come down from a platform from which she was speaking. Apparently she was safe from arrest if she stayed on the platform – protected free speech – but police intended to arrest her if she came off the platform with her shirt off. It took three days, but eventually all her supporters were freed and charges dropped.

Since then, she has been vilified in the press, raped in her own bed by an intruder, attacked at a convenience store, and dragged through one court after another, even facing a judge who groused "Don’t bring the Constitution into my courtroom!" before the hearing began – and won anyway.

March 8, 2008 – today as I write this in the early morning – she will again face down the city of Daytona Beach. She will not rest until the city breaks its money-driven obsession with women’s breasts, and until state law is changed to decriminalize baring breasts.

To reiterate, it is not her goal that she be able to stroll down the beach or a city street without a top on. It is only her goal that a woman be able to take her top off and not be placed on the sex offenders list, and making the city of Daytona Beach $250 richer each time. For all that, for repeatedly marching into battle against an avowed adversary – an adversary determined to defend the wrong thing for the wrong reasons – she clearly rates as a hero.

When right next door is unique, do you notice? (Mar. 4, 2008)

Current mood: enthralled

WQED-13, the PBS television outlet here in Pittsburgh, produces a 30-minute magazine show called OnQ. On tonight's show, two of the three 10-minute segments concerned not only the unique, but to me, unique and VERY close to home.

Record-Rama is -- or rather, was -- a retail store selling used records. Not only that, it was -- or rather, still is -- reputedly the largest, privately owned record collection in the world, with some 3.4 million recordings. Beyond that, the amount of records for sale was enormous. In fact, I blogged about this in one of my earliest posts on MySpace [link]

What makes -- made -- it so special was that it was so close to home, barely 3/4 mile. If I needed a needle for one of my nine turntables, all I had to do was trot (or bike or bus or unicycle) that little bit of Perry Highway, and there it was. Oh well, it's gone now. Sigh. I wonder what will become of that mountain of 78s. I could have spent all day in there.

Second thing on the OnQ show that's close to home is even closer: Adzema Pharmacy. It is one of the very few full service, independent pharmacies still around, but what really makes it unique is the 7-day breakfast and lunch counter. Since it's right up the street, not even a quarter-mile away, I never thought about it much, and since I'm in the place three, four times a week, and have been for the 17 years I've lived in this house, its uniqueness doesn't really register.

Where can you find another restaurant-in-a-pharmacy? Forty years ago they were everywhere. Fortunately, this place isn't going away anytime soon. Business is apparently still booming, on both the restaurant and the pharmacy sides.

Forgot to mention that it's also a great place to just shop. It's a lot of the reason I never go to a mall, never go to a Wal-Mart, and rarely go to any other retail outlet. Like the fictional Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion monologues, "If you can't find it at Ralph's, you can get along pretty well without it."

Record-Rama and Adzema Pharmacy are/were hardly a half mile apart on Perry Highway. I just hope that whatever goes in where R-R was is at least half as useful as its predecessor, and that the new Walgreens two miles up Perry in the other direction doesn't kill off Jay Adzema's prescription business.

Updated footnote: The OnQ video clip for Adzema is available here. The clip for Record-Rama appears not to be available, August 2011.

* * *

Original comment from 2008:
Stuart Strickland
Sad news update: The founder of Adzema Pharmacy, Jay's father Bob, passed away a couple of days ago. Here is the obit from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:


Robert P. "Bob" Adzema
ADZEMA ROBERT P. "BOB"
Age 79, of North Myrtle Beach, SC, formerly of Pittsburgh, on Thursday, March 6, 2008. Husband of Joan (Staab). Father of Diane, Amy, and Jay. Grandfather of Zeke, Max, Jake, and Eli. Private Funeral. In lieu of flowers donations in his name to the American Heart Association.


I do not know if he got to see the WQED piece, but I'm sure he knew about it.

March 1: Springtime! (Mar. 1, 2008)

Current mood: hopeful

Yesterday afternoon we got this from the National Weather Service here in Pittsburgh:

"URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PITTSBURGH PA
629 PM EST FRI FEB 29 2008
..HEAVY SNOW WARNING IN EFFECT UNTIL MIDNIGHT EST TONIGHT...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN PITTSBURGH HAS ISSUED A HEAVY SNOW WARNING...WHICH IS IN EFFECT UNTIL MIDNIGHT EST TONIGHT.

UP TO 4 INCHES OF SNOW HAS FALLEN ACROSS MUCH OF THE WARNING AREA SINCE EARLY THIS AFTERNOON. AN ADDITIONAL ACCUMULATION OF 1 TO 3 INCHES BY MIDNIGHT TONIGHT WILL BRING STORM TOTALS TO 5 TO 7 INCHES BEFORE THE SNOW TAPERS TO SNOW SHOWERS.

A HEAVY SNOW WARNING MEANS SEVERE WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW ARE FORECAST THAT WILL MAKE TRAVEL DANGEROUS. ONLY TRAVEL IN AN EMERGENCY. IF YOU MUST...KEEP AN EXTRA FLASHLIGHT...FOOD...AND WATER IN YOUR VEHICLE IN CASE OF AN EMERGENCY."

Hardly a harbinger of spring, is it? Well, as the song goes, that was yesterday, and yesterday's gone.

It's March! And just like I said in December about winter, and in September about autumn, by my definition it is now spring because the calendar changed. Sure, as I write, six inches of snow sits in the yard, but:

* The birds are back! All manner of twittering can be heard outside.
* It's bright out! The highest the sun gets on December 21 is now attained by 9:30 in the morning.
* The sap is rising! Maple syrup production is going full blast.
* The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is out!

Can warm days be far behind? Can the sound of peepers on mild evenings be more than a couple weeks away?

The official astronomical start of spring is March 20. By my reckoning, the height of springtime is about a month later, about the third week of April. That's when things are greenest, snow even in the air is a rarity, and it has not gotten too warm yet.

But it's March! So, everyone, run out in the snow and exclaim "Welcome, Springtime!"

Buying the salt truck but not the salt (2004, 2007)

Pre-pre-script: I wrote this in 2004. I posted this in 2007. I am posting it again in 2011. Blessed little has changed in seven years, and it had not changed in a long time when I was inspired to write it in '04. (Yes, there are some apps for high-end phones. For the rest of us, on the scale I envisioned 15+ years ago, nada.)

Navigating without a map

Current mood: impatient

This essay from April 2004 followed my Post-Gazette opinion piece from April 4 2004, itself still a viable explanation of public transit's ever-present funding issues. However, this one addresses the fundamental needs for proper transit information faced by riders, a problem still not yet addressed.

I want to solve this! I want to have someone pay me to solve this!  Help me, someone, please!

Stu

Buying the Salt Truck But Not the Salt

Imagine for a moment that you just got a new job, hired through an agency, and now need to drive there for the first time.  There is just one teeny-weeny problem: Yes, you have the name and address of the place, and you do own a map, but no road signs of any sort exist anywhere, and never did.  The highway people said that sometime they will put up a few signs along the larger roads, but with all these recent layoffs in highway maintenance, that might be a long time in coming.

That could never happen, right?  Quite true, it can't.  Our highways are very well signed, thank you.

Such, however, is the lot of the transit rider.  A vast need exists for truly useful rider information, but it is assumed that everyone who rides simply knows how to get from place to place.  That is not a correct assumption.  Commuters who drive, as a class, simply have no concept of what the rider deals with, nor do they care to.  Well, as the song goes, there but for fortune go you and I.

To help illustrate this, in late August 2000, a friend lost his home and moved in with me for a few weeks.  Though he was 100% transit dependent, I knew it was possible for him to bus to work from my house, since we worked in nearby buildings and I made the trip by bus myself each day.  However, he was thrust into a very foreign commuting pattern.  He needed to make the two-bus trip both ways without landmarks, without help, and without error, right away.

The biggest problem was his work schedule, which differed considerably from mine.  While he worked a fixed-shift, five-day, 40-hour week, no two days' work times were alike, and his days off were Tuesday and Wednesday.  The buses have entirely different schedules for weekdays, Saturdays and Sundays.

Taking his work schedule and the printed timetable for every bus route that went within a mile of both my house and our worksite, I figured out everything he needed to know: local streets, bus stops, nearby routes, their routing variants, walking directions, walking travel times, Downtown transfer points, how to travel between those points, and landmarks to identify where to get off.  He also needed alternative travel plans in case he had to stay late or he missed a connection.  One thing I did not have to figure out was fares, since he owned a monthly pass.  Without one, figuring out fares is a project unto itself, in addition to the travelling.

This was not a trivial task.  It was a tedious, meticulous, manual process, even if it did follow a straightforward pattern.  Two hours later, I had made a suitable set of maps and figured out the weekday schedule.  Saturday's chart took over another hour, Sunday's yet another.  After almost five hours work, I had him rolling for about a week and a half.

Then came September 10, 2000, opening day for the West Busway.  Every route in my charts was modified.  With new timetables in hand and a couple of new routes in the mix, I again returned to the charts, this time cranking out the three in a little over two hours.  I didn't mind the work, as I also needed much of the information for my own commute.

This *must* be computerized for public use somewhere, I thought.  With the right programming, those charts could be assembled in seconds.  Port Authority had a website, but at the time it had little more than an on-line version of the printed schedules.  In my graduate research, I knew that information in the form I needed was not available anywhere in 2000.  Almost four years later, very little has changed. [Update, February 2008: Almost eight years later, very little has changed.] [Update, August 2011: Eleven years later, we are finally starting to see some apps for high-end cell phones, plus Google Transit is a nice start, but it is not what I want to see.]

I began to wonder just how often a scenario like this transpires.  People move.  People change jobs.  People relocate here daily.  Some workers travel to a different site every day.  If it was as difficult for everyone else as it was for me, a graduate student with formal training in geographic information systems, is it any wonder that people prefer to drive if they have a choice?

Now again imagine if the tables were turned.  No roads have signs, but transit information is available in forms aplenty, everywhere, embedded in people's psyches.  Service abounds 24/7.  Express and cross-town routes are everywhere.  Vehicles are clean and properly maintained.  And anyway, since it costs 10 times more to maintain a car than it does to ride buses, for a year, when all is said and done, why would anyone want to use a car?

Back to reality.  Transit-dependent riders somehow figure out how to get around, or so we think.  They have to, or they wouldn't have jobs, or so we think.  But hey, wait a minute, could it just be that the reason this segment of the population often does not have good jobs, or cannot keep them, is precisely because of this information deficit?  Or at least a major factor?  For even when the service is there, if you don't know that it is, it cannot help you.

What does this all mean?  Riders need information.  They don't have it.  When they do get information, it isn't enough, and rapidly becomes obsolete.  Without the right information, they become stranded, lost, late, and have paid for the privilege.  This failure to provide for people's needs persuades people to abandon transit as soon as they can, and dissuades them from ever returning.

Nor, with the on-going strangulation in transit funding, are they likely to get that information anytime soon.  In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, transit has been underfunded for decades.  People may gripe about government subsidizing transit, but nary a thought goes to the trillions of dollars that have been and continue to be spent to build and maintain roads.  Do we spend all this money on roads because it is the right thing to do?  Or, rather, has it become the right thing to spend money on roads just because we can find the money?  There is certainly nothing right about strangling transit, any more than it would be right to forego further road maintenance.  But highways have a dedicated funding source; transit does not.

To remedy the information deficit, transit company staff must be hired to provide and maintain information systems.  That requires money, money that Pennsylvania transit companies do not now have and cannot ever seem to get.

Highways have signs, even cameras, because of this dedicated source.  Sure, transit capital projects get funded (busways, new buses, etc.), but not operations.  It's like buying a salt truck, but never the salt.  Every year, it's the same battle.  Maybe they can run the buses, maybe not, but if funding is short, the first thing to go is support staff, thereby blocking or delaying progress in making things better.  Then it's fare hikes and service cuts, year after year.  Sound familiar?

What Pennsylvania legislators need to do is not just find the $110 million more to keep the buses running this year [FY2005] ($27M for Port Authority alone), not just set up a structure for dedicated funding for next year, but add to that enough to make transit better, and easier to use.

Think about that the next time you see a road sign.

[Post-Script: Port Authority of Allegheny County laid off dozens of white-collar staff in 2007, gutting its Information Technology department. Consequently, there is not even a hope of getting this project underway. Still.]