Occasionally I find blogger.com frustrating, and today is one of those days. I had a great post eaten by their system. When I hit send it came back at me with an error, and there was not moving back to the page where I had typed everything. Oh well, I’m getting more than I’ve “paid” for so I can’t really complain too loudly.
A couple of things in the news today (is the Trib really news or mostly a waste of ink and paper…ah I digress….)
The first is an article about the new smoking ban in Ramsey/Hennepin Counties and Bloomington and Golden Valley Communities. I am in general philosophy usually against adding to our government, but in this case I am all for the smoking ban. As I have referenced in previous posts, I pay bills by slinging fish guts and crustacean parts. Within that restaurant there is a smoking section, where I end up working on average at least one day a week, shifts ranging from 5-9 hours usually. After each shift, I spend the next day coughing up all kinds of phlegm as a result of the crud I was breathing in. When I get home at night, I can almost scrape the build up off my face from the particulate in the smoke I have been working in. My clothes would smell extraordinarily bad as well (well, worse than their normal fried fish/drawn butter/cocktail sauce combination stench after a long shift). I will not miss the smoking. I will not miss the stench, and I will certainly not miss a day of coughing crap up after each one of those shifts. It will be interesting to see what kind of economic impact it has on the restaurant. There is a segment of the smoking population that is not what most would consider “prime” customers, but there is a second segment that are really good to their servers. Smokers tend to spend more on a per-customer basis in my experience. This is in large part because they on average order more alcoholic beverages than do non-smokers. Even if it costs me a bit of money though, I’m glad to see the smoking gone from our area, and I hope the rest of the state follows suit. California paved the way for this, and as much as I hate to give positive pub to that state, on this I have to admit they have done good.
The second section of great news is that the House of Representatives of Minnesota passed a proposal to ban gay marriage with a vote of 77 to 56. While I’d like to see a lot more than 77 yes votes, I’ll take it for now (last year the vote was 88 yes to 42 no). Last year the State Senate did not bring it to vote, avoiding their responsibility. This year I don’t think they will be able to get away with that. The Senate is Democrat controlled, but I think many of the Dems realize they might start some fires in their districts if they oppose this measure. I don’t know if it will pass the Senate, but I do have hope. I have contacted my state legislators (as well as a number of others) encouraging them to support this. I say let the people vote on the issue. Senator Michele Bachmann should be commended for her efforts on this issue.
2 comments:
Blogger is indeed a pain in the butt. It has gotten to the point that I have had to start cutting and pasting my posts into Word before hitting publish as blogger seems to be eating about 30% of my posts. I have emailed blogger on many occassions and not once have they gotten back with me. It seems that since Google bought them they are spending very little money on fixing the bugs. The new pop up comments are nice, but I still prefer Haloscan.
My state just passed a constitutional amendment to ban same sex marriage. Not sure how it will stand up in court but I m sure that since it passed by a nice margin that if it should not stand up the lawmakers will re-write it and it will pass again.
Thanks for reading! I really hope our state gets to vote on it. I've only lived in Minnesota for a couple of years (while doing my seminary courses) and am originally from South Dakota. Minneapolis is the congregation point for many of the gays in the upper mid-West, giving it an abnormally high percentage of gays. In spite of that, I would expect a vote to go in favor of traditional mariage values.
MrCLM
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