Apparently zoo photos of abused pumpkins are a “thing”.

Zooborns via Slashfood

The weather’s definitely changing and what we get to eat from our garden is changing as well. Here’s the first pomegranate that we’ve picked this fall.

Dianne Feinstein, the senior senator from California, has done an excellent ad against Proposition 8, the pro-discrimination, anti-gay marriage ballot measure. It started running across the state last night.

No on 8

Whether it’s raising our vegetable garden from seed, keeping chickens, sewing, knitting, cooking, pulling apart a computer, keeping this blog…well, I really like to do things for myself.

So I was intrigued by the idea of making laundry soap. It turns out it’s incredibly easy to do and easy on the environment. It’s also fun and cheap.

Want to try? Here goes:

Put a pot with with one quart of water on the stove. Crank up the heat. While it’s coming to a boil, grate a bar of soap into it. (I used a microplane grater, but a box grater works just as well. It apparently doesn’t make any difference what kind of soap you use. I picked up a bar of Zote only because it was next to the next two ingredients. (This step is the picture on the left up above. Stir well and turn off the stove just as it starts to boil.

Take a large container (5 gallons will do) with a cover and put in it 1 cup of washing soda and 1/2 cup of borax. Add 3 gallons of hot water, stir well and then add the hot soapy water from the stove. Stir well. (Middle picture above.) Put the cover on and leave it overnight.

The next morning, it will have gelatinized somewhat into a thick slime (young boys will enjoy this part – right picture above) My batch is pourable, a good consistency. If yours isn’t , just stir in more water for the consistency you want (you’ll probably need to use more than a cup then). Use about a cup for a top loading washer, 1/2 cup for a front-loading high efficiency one.

About the ingredients: I bought them all at my local FoodMax. The washing soda was impossible to find anywhere else. (FoodMax is a slightly downmarket kind of grocery store that does great at ethnic ingredients, fresh produce and has good meat. It’s my favorite chain grocery next to TJs.) Washing soda is made by Arm & Hammer and it is sodium carbonate. Not the same as baking soda, which is sodium bicarbonate. Borax is a mineral and is a little easier to find. I’m not quite sure if the soap does anything except contribute to the consistency. For the first batch, I used Zote which is a bar laundry soap. It’s pink and has a slight fragrance. Next time I think I’ll try Ivory. That won’t be for a while considering how much laundry soap we wound up with! For the container, Tom cleaned out the bucket that the pool chlorine tablets (yuck!) came in. Or you could pick up a paint bucket and lid at Home Depot.

About the greenness: very simple ingredient list, no added junk, less fossil fuels are used to transport them compared to jugs of the other stuff.

About the cheapness: Simple Dollar (link below) says it works out to about 3 cents per load at a cup per load. So for our front loading machine, it’s about 1.5 cents per load. When I checked out the price per load signs at Costco the other day it does pretty good. Kirkland powdered detergent (which we don’t like in our front-loader) is a little more expensive at around 7 cents per load. The liquid detergents start out at about 13 cents per load and go up to around 21 cents for the Kirkland stuff that Consumer Reports says is good.

Effectiveness: I have a bad habit of walking around in my socks at home, in the driveway getting the mail, going out back to gather eggs. The bottoms get pretty dirty. This stuff made ‘em white and bright. The old stuff, not so much. Clothes smell good too.

The Simple Dollar: How to Make Your Own Laundry Detergent

A great site for catching up on the latest in the fight over gay marriage and Proposition is Towleroad, a blog which is really fantastic at covering these kinds of issues.

Another good source is the No On 8’s news page. And for some aggravation and/or amusement, check out the opposition.

Towleroad’s Gay Marriage News Hub

No on 8 News

Yes on 8 News

I think that the laws against interracial marriage and those against gay marriage have a lot in common. Knowing some history is helpful in this year’s elections.

To state the obvious, both involve marriages of minorities which have experienced widespread discrimination in all facets of their lives. The objections to these marriages were/are based not only on intolerance and ignorance, but also on misguided religious belief.

The huge difference is that interracial marriage is now legal, but the question of gay marriage is very much open.

American anti-miscegnation laws prevented the marriage between whites and people from other ethnic groups, although they clearly took aim at white-black intermarriage. The first laws date from 1691 & 1692 in the colonies of Virginia and Maryland.

Not surprisingly, such laws spread throughout the country. In 1883, the Supreme Court affirmed that such laws were in fact constitutional and did not violate the 14th Amendment (the one that establishes the principal of equal protection). In toto, 41 states passed anti-miscegnation laws during our country’s history. Amendments to the US Constitution to ban ethnic intermarriage were introduced in 1871 and 1912. Other countries joining the US in promulgating laws prohibiting marriage on the basis of ethnicity were famously Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa.

So, did we leave this shameful behavior in our distant past? Hardly. In 1948, 30 out of 48 states still had these laws on the books and enforced them . (Eleven others had repealed their laws by then, mostly during Reconstruction.)  During the 1930s the Hays Code, governing what could be portrayed in movies, explicitly prohibited as immoral interracial marriages.

Then in 1948, things began to change. The California State Supreme Court was the first court in the US to find that our state’s anti-miscegnation law violated the equal protection clause and was therefore unconstitutional. This was in 1948. It was just the opening shot in a civil rights struggle that would last until 1967.

[As an Asian-American man of Chinese and Filipino descent, I’d like to note that many of these laws specifically prohibited Chinese and Filipinos from marrying ‘outside their race’!]

In 1958 a Gallup poll found 96 percent of the white people surveyed opposed interracial marriage. The Wikipedia entry on miscegnation has a couple of interesting tidbits on the people from the wrong side:

In 1958, the Christian fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell, at the time a defender of segregation, in a sermon railed against integration, warning that it would lead to miscegenation, which would "destroy our [white] race eventually."

 

In the United States, segregationists and Christian identity groups have claimed that several verses in the Bible, for example the story of Phinehas and the so-called "curse of Ham", should be understood as referring to miscegenation and that these verses expressly forbid it.

Then came Loving v. Virginia. This was one the US Supreme Court’s finest hours. The apartment of an interracial couple was broken into in the middle of the night by Virginia policemen and the couple wasarrested for having an illegal marriage. (There was a similar central dramatic point 25 years later in the Bowers v. Hardwick case when Georgia police invaded a gay man’s apartment in the middle of the night and arrested him for violating the state’s sodomy law.) In its unanimous decision on the Loving case the Court said:

Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

I hope the parallels between these two civil rights struggles are obvious. And I hope the outcome next week will have the same blessing of justice.

Please, if you’re in California, vote NO on Proposition 8. If you’re in Arizona, vote NO on Proposition 102. If you’re in Florida, vote NO on Proposition 2.

I’ve been thinking that with the global financial crisis, something had to be going on with currency exchange rates. Not surprisingly it has, according to several newspaper articles. We’ve been avoiding going back to Europe for quite a while because of the unfavorable exchange rate (who wants to pay ten bucks for a cup of coffee, really?). The good news for us then is that the Euro is at its lowest point in two years and heading further.

How did I find that out? Yahoo Finance has a very nice Forex page where you can not only get current exchange rates, but get history going back five years. Also good is a little thingie in the top right corner of the graph that flips the currency exchange rates (useful when the other currency is worth more than one dollar).

Some of the other common currency exchange rate sites also have history, but I like the Yahoo graphs the best.

Yahoo Finance Currency Exchange

Joining all the good and brave people who have spoken out against Proposition 8 in California is Itzhak Perlman, one of the greatest violinists of our time.

By the way, the forces of intolerance and hate are at work on this issue in Arizona and Florida as well.

If you can, please help. Maybe the best thing right now is to actually speak to another person about it. There a plenty of folks whose lives aren’t directly touched by the issue and haven’t thought much about it. Yesterday, Tom and I were bringing donations to a local animal shelter and somehow the subject came up with the lady who was helping us. She was one of those people…just a few words and a few minutes might make the difference in her vote.

[Proposition 8 would take away the right to marry from gay and lesbian Californians.]

CALIFORNIA: No on 8

FLORIDA: No on 2 or here or here

ARIZONA: No on 102

Heading into final three weeks of the campaign with Barack Obama solidly ahead in California with polls putting him 15 points in front of McCain, it’s time to make a solid push to defeat Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that enshrines hatred and intolerance as a central principal of the California Constitution. It takes away from lesbian and gay couples the right to marry.

Ellen Degeneres stepped up today with an ad that she is paying to air out of her own pocket.

Please take a minute to watch what she has to say and then considering making a donation to the No on Prop 8 by clicking the banner in the right column of this page.

Just as important: call, write, email and speak with everyone you know. Stop this horrible attempt to write discrimination into the state constitution!

	Joe Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, asking Barack Obama about his tax plan in Ohio this past weekend.

No doubting my political preferences: I’m for Obama. Still, what I’d like to say isn’t so much about the campaign as an observation about how a something so seemingly straightforward as a regular “Joe Voter” confronting a candidate can go off in such odd and oddly entertaining directions.

This story so far: in last night’s debate, McCain brought up “Joe the Plumber” as a likely victim of Obama’s tax plan. An aspiring small businessman, Joe said he’d face higher taxes under Obama’s tax plan if he fulfilled his dream of buying the plumbing business he works for.

Lots of media outlets have looked into this today. Wurzelbacher didn’t say whether his possible acquisition’s earnings would put him over the $250,000 threshold for a higher tax rate or not. Actually, 98% of all small businesses have adjusted earnings of less than $250,000 per year. Those adjustments?…typical things like rent, equipment, and employee payroll. All which would mitigate $250,000 in receipts and would likely keep this two-employee heating and plumbing contractor company below the new tax threshold.

What about the company? Well the contractor that Wurzelbacher works for has earnings of about $100,000 per year, putting him in no way in the path of the magic number of $250,000. It’s also been reported today that the owner of this company has no intention of selling it. When asked, Wurzelbacher said he didn’t actually have a real plan or timetable.

Now things get really squirelly:

Wurzelbacher is not even licensed as a plumber in Ohio! (Go here and check for his name in Ohio.)

Wurzelbacher owes $12,000 in back taxes for 2007 and his house has a tax lien on it.

Ready for really, really squirelly?:

Remember the Savings & Loan scandal in the late 80s/early 90s? McCain was hauled before the Senate Ethics Committee for his ties with the central criminal, Charles Keating. McCain regretted his association, calling it one of the worst decisions of his life. (Why, because he was forced to repay the government the $112,000 in contributions from Keating?) Indeed it was bad for us, since it cost taxpayers $120 billion for the S&L bailout.

Back to today. Charles Keating’s son-in-law is Robert Wurzelbacher who, in turn is closely related to the Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher.

Finally, Wurzelbacher’s previous appearance in the media was a radio call-in show where he said that Barack Obama:

"can tap dance – almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr."

Yikes.

Finally an irony: in Ohio, the Republican party is waging a massive voter disenfranchisement campaign, challenging hundreds of thousands of voters, many of them based on clerical errors. Wurzelbacher’s voter registration card says “Worzelbacher” (sic). I wonder if they’re planning on sweeping him up as well?

_________________________

Joe the Plumber isn’t going to be a game-changer in this election, no-way, no-how. The underlying issue is worth discussing: whose tax plan is better for the country. Still, it seems like the McCain campaigne could have vetted this story a little more thoroughly. Oh wait, woops, same thing happened with Sarah Palin, didn’t it?