Gas prices are on everyone’s minds these days, as they stay over the $3.00 mark. The high prices have some people going to any station that has the lowest price. But for others, brand loyalty is still important.

Brands of gasoline is this week’s topic.

• First to play last week: Paul of Aurora Walking Vacation. Congratulations!

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:
Choose your seven most commonly-used brands of gasoline.

Either answer the question in a comment or answer it in your journal and include the link in a comment. (To be considered “first to play,” a link must be to the specific entry in which you answered the question.) You may include this link in the URL space when leaving your comment, or in the comment itself. As long as it’s there in one spot or the other.

My Answers:
1. Unocal 76/Conoco/Phillips
2. Hess
3. Shell/Mobil
4. BP/Amoco
5. Sunoco
6. Chevron
7. Citgo

If the search engine Google happens to be your internet tool of choice, then you already know that the site often makes little adjustments to its logo to commemorate significant holidays and even a few obscure historic facts.

Google’s look du jour is to turn their page background pitch black, and they’re hoping you’ll do the same thing, in a manner of speaking, with your home tonight.

It’s a tip of the hat to Earth Hour, an event being marked at the 8pm hour today regardless of your time zone.

You’re being asked to turn out all of the lights in your home for a single hour to help reduce energy consumption.

Turning off the lights is one thing.  A little candlelight is nice every now and then.

But do they really expect people to turn off the…gasp…television, too?

Okay, I admit it: I slept until 11:00 this morning. I needed every minute of it.

And yes, I’m still tired.

But have no fear: even fatigue won’t stop the Saturday Six from getting through! Enjoy this week’s brain-probing questions and thanks for playing.

• First to play last week: Gabrielle of A Metamorphoself of Gabrielle. Congratulations!
  (According to the rules, “First to Play” requires you to be the first to include the link to the specific entry in which you answered the questions, not just the general link to your blog.)

Here are this week’s “Saturday Six” questions. Either answer the questions in a comment here, or put the answers in an entry on your journal…but either way, leave a link to your journal so that everyone else can visit! To be counted as “first to play,” you must be the first player to either answer the questions in a comment or to provide a complete link to the specific entry in your journal in which you answer the questions. A link to your journal in general cannot count. Enjoy!

1. When presented with a new project at work that clearly doesn’t make sense to you, are you likely to voice your reservations first or set them aside to work on the project?

2. You are shown a new technology that will be incorporated into your job, and you realize that this technology will actually slow things down. Do you express this discovery before trying the new technology, or do you try it first with the intention of then demonstrating how much more difficult it made things?

3. At your workplace, do you tend to be among the first people your co-workers approach for help in a crisis, the last people they approach, or somewhere in between?

4. Take the quiz: What Kind of Thinker Are You?

5. You’re watching television on a rainy Saturday: which has a greater appeal: watching a new show you’ve never seen before, watching a movie or television episode you have seen before and enjoyed, or watching a sporting event featuring two teams you have no strong connection to?

6. Should employers be required to provide naptime for their employees? If you think they should, how much time should be required?

If you have a Reader’s Choice question you’d like to see asked (and answered), send me an email! I’d love to be able to include it in a future edition of the Saturday Six.

…people who look like this guy really, really piss me off.

Mario Lopez was born in 1973, which means that on his birthday this year, he’ll actually be 35.

That also means that the infamous slowing metabolism that strikes in the thirties either hasn’t hit him, yet, or that he has some unimaginable obsession with working out.

He, like nearly every other celebrity these days, is about to release a new book on fitness.  The cynic in me suspects that the majority of people who buy this book are doing so just to drool over him in his shirtless glory.

I hope they enjoy themselves.

I, on the other hand, find myself particularly amused by the red balloon on the cover, which reads, “The Six-Week Plan for Sculpting Your BEST BODY EVER.”

You know, if I thought I could look like that in six weeks, I’d go to every book store in Charleston and buy every copy I could find.

Here’s your chance to ask a future question for the Sunday Seven!

As you know, the Sunday Seven is a weekly meme here at Patrick’s Place in which you are asked to list up to seven answers to a single question.

If you have an idea for a question, please email it to me at patrickkphillips@gmail.com and be sure to come back; it may well become a question.  (Be sure to include your first name and your blog’s URL if you have one so that I can give you proper credit for the question.)

Click here to look at examples of the most recent editions.

I think Hillary Clinton is trying a little too hard to convince voters of how experienced she is in dealing with potential world crises. At a recent press conference, in an attempt to demonstrate that she was right on the “front lines” when the world has been at war — as if anyone would believe that, anyway — she told the story of landing in Bosnia amid sniper fire and being rushed to safety.

She was referring to a visit to Tuzla in 1996, when she was First Lady. Though the war there was over, hostilities remained.

“There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

That’s how she described the scene.

Apparently, Hillary Clinton momentarily suffered from the same problem that hit Mike Huckabee when he was speaking about his comments on the AIDS crisis: she forgot that this happens to be the Information Age.

Let’s think about this for a second. The First Lady of the United States lands in a war-torn country, and has to dodge bullets as she is rushed to safety.

Does anyone really believe that this wouldn’t have been the top story for the week? We’d have seen images from this nightmarish scene plastered across every newscast since Clinton announced her candidacy. Rather than asking who you’d want answering some silly phone at 3:00am, she’d have replayed this video to demonstrate that she can indeed hit the ground running. Literally.

Even if no cameras were around, the scene would have been so well-described as to insure that no one forgot it. I’m sure that there wasn’t a national correspondent among the “lazy press corps” those liberal bloggers keep talking about who wasn’t scratching his head to remember the details of this story. And likely, he was also wondering why he wasn’t there covering such an exciting, visual event. And surely that “liberal media” that the conservative bloggers keep complaining about would easily remember such a harrowing experience for their First Lady.

One particular correspondent, CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson, didn’t have to wonder for long. She was there, it turns out. And her memory was somewhat different.

And unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, Attkisson’s memory was corroborated by videotape.

Clinton said:

“There was no greeting ceremony and we were basically told to run to our cars. That is what happened.”

But it isn’t. Video shows that there clearly was the greeting ceremony. Hillary is shown speaking to a little girl, with Chelsea also in attendance, and no sniper fire to be found. If it wasn’t enough that the First Lady would have to flee from gunfire, doesn’t she think we’d have remembered if young Chelsea had been in harm’s way?  Can’t she imagine that those annoying Republicans questioning her judgment as a mother for bringing her daughter into such an obviously-dangerous setting?

Even worse, the video depicts Hillary singing along at a USO show that featured Sinbad and Sheryl Crowe. Big smiles.

As if the embarrassment of being “busted” wasn’t bad enough, a Clinton aide then made matters worse by attempting to come to her rescue with an explanation: “She meant that there was fire on the hillside around the area when we landed, which was the case.” Trouble is, that ain’t what she said.

When a candidate reaches a point of blatantly making things up just to point out how much experience she has, when is it fair to question why she’s that desperate to make the point?

Just a few minutes ago, a bulletin from the New York Times reported that a roadside bomb in Baghdad killed four U.S. soldiers, bringing the official American death toll, as tabulated by the Associated Press, to 4,000.

The grim milestone came on the same day that rockets and mortars pounded the U.S.-protected Green Zone, underscoring the fragile security situation and the resilience of both Sunni and Shiite extremist groups despite an overall lull in violence.

Excuse me, but isn’t this famous “Green Zone” the same one that John McCain toured in an attempt to prove how safe the streets of Iraq have become?

Ever counted how many ice cream flavors there are out there? It’s amazing. There is just about every conceivable variety already invented, yet they keep coming up with more flavor options.

This week, you’re the ice cream chef. You get a counter full of seven ingredients to experiment with, and as much vanilla ice cream as a base as you’d like so that you can create your own flavor. You don’t have to use all seven, but if you were asked to choose seven ingredients that you might use in the ultimate flavor, which would you choose? That’s this week’s challenge.

• First to play last week: BunGirl of BunGirl Congratulations!

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:
Choose seven ingredients you’d use with vanilla ice cream to invent the next great ice cream flavor.

Either answer the question in a comment or answer it in your journal and include the link in a comment. (To be considered “first to play,” a link must be to the specific entry in which you answered the question.) You may include this link in the URL space when leaving your comment, or in the comment itself. As long as it’s there in one spot or the other.

For those of you who stopped by to check out this week’s edition of the Saturday Six, you will have noticed that there was no outside meme this week. The reason for this is, simply, that I couldn’t find one on the subject of racism that wasn’t blatantly racist itself or just plain silly.

Had it not been for the “recent developments in the presidential campaign” which prompted the questions I selected this week, I would have surely geared the questions toward the celebration of Easter, which is tomorrow.

So for those who were hoping for an Easter-related meme, let it not be said that I disappoint my readers: here’s my answer and the link where you can find your own to the all important question, “What is your Easter Egg personality?”

What Your Easter Egg Says About You

You are cheerful, friendly, and open minded. You do your best to make sure everyone is happy, including yourself. Empathy comes easily to you. You are very forgiving. You don’t hold grudges. You easily forget about any negativity in your life.

The Easter Egg Personality Test

This week’s set of questions comes in response to recent developments in the presidential campaign. I’m intentionally not answering this week, because there be a separate post in which I will address my views on the subject, both generally and specifically.

I realize that not all of my viewers participate in formal religion, and that a few of them would likely sooner set their hair on fire than do so. Those folks are equally welcome to participate: the questions regarding church should be universally hypothetical, and questions involving clergy or spiritual leaders can be modified for those people to include friends and fellow non-believers who influence your own beliefs.

To put it another way, whether you actually go to church regularly should not be regarded as an indication of whether it is appropriate for you to participate in this week’s edition of the Saturday Six.

• First to play last week: Gabrielle of A Metamorphoself of Gabrielle. Congratulations!
  (According to the rules, “First to Play” requires you to be the first to include the link to the specific entry in which you answered the questions, not just the general link to your blog.)

Here are this week’s “Saturday Six” questions. Either answer the questions in a comment here, or put the answers in an entry on your journal…but either way, leave a link to your journal so that everyone else can visit! To be counted as “first to play,” you must be the first player to either answer the questions in a comment or to provide a complete link to the specific entry in your journal in which you answer the questions. A link to your journal in general cannot count. Enjoy!

1. You’re in church, listening to a sermon, when your pastor begins a diatribe that you strongly disagree with. Which are you more likely to do: sit through the sermon and confront the pastor privately afterwards, get up and leave in the middle of the sermon, or say nothing at all?

2. Regardless of your response to question #1, how likely would you be to return to the same church with the same level of enthusiasm the following week?

3. Based on how well you know your particular belief system’s main principles, how much do you agree with them overall?

4. Based on how well you know your pastor or the person from whom you take the most spiritual advice (or the person who has influenced your beliefs the most if not a pastor), how much do you think you agree with this person overall and how much do you disagree?

5. How important is it to you that the people with whom you associate most often have views on spirituality that closely mirror your own?

6. To what extent do you believe spirited rallies about racism actually opens the door to improve race relations in this country, as opposed to merely maintaining a level of anger that blocks such attempts to improve things?

If you have a Reader’s Choice question you’d like to see asked (and answered), send me an email! I’d love to be able to include it in a future edition of the Saturday Six.

Today, as many of you may know, is Maundy Thursday, a significant day on the Christian calendar because it is the start of the Easter Triduum, the three day period covering Christ’s death and resurrection. Maundy Thursday, or Holy Thursday, was the day of the Last Supper.

So I suppose it is more than appropriate that I take a few moments to discuss a significant religious experience of which I was part over the last 24 hours.

I realize that my audience here at Patrick’s Place is diverse in many ways. In religion, for example, I realize that my readers include Christians you might describe as being “on fire for Jesus” to Jews to Buddhists to Agnostics to Atheists. And most likely, there are other viewpoints — likely a taste of everything in between these — who also stop by from time to time. I don’t try to preach here, but as my faith is a part of who I am, I can’t imagine doing a blog without an occasional discussion of my views on the subject, so I hope those who are reading this will at least indulge me. If you can’t bring yourself to read a religious-themed post, I hold no hard feelings for you; Christians have done much over the years to push even other Christians away. This is an unfortunate fact of church life that I think cannot be addressed soon enough. The shame is that most churches seem unwilling to admit that there even is a problem.

The church I currently attend doesn’t have any difficulty admitting that Christianity as a generic thing has strayed from the original intent. My church’s slogan is “A Return to God.” Those things that divide so many, even putting Christian against Christian, are things we tend not to fight about; we recognize that there comes a point at which the specific method of doing something isn’t nearly as important so long as the positive, God-focused action is actually accomplished.

My pastor, Paul, announced to the congregation last week that he was to undergo a medical procedure this morning to determine whether or not he has pancreatic cancer. He has already lost one brother to this very deadly form of cancer, and another brother is fighting it now. He says his doctors have informed him that there is at least a 50% chance that he will get it, and that he has battled some symptoms that point in that direction now. So this particular procedure was not one of those litttle “long shots” a doctor might recommend while thinking to himself that it’s unlikely anything will show up; there is good reason to believe that this could be the problem.

I have become friends with Archie, the minister of music at my church — I suppose he’s sort of the “second in command” — and he called me Wednesday to tell me that a group of people from the church were planning an impromptu gathering for a group prayer for Paul that evening.

As depicted in this image from Wikipedia, it took the form of an old-fashioned prayer circle with the “laying on of hands” in the tradition of Christ. We gathered in a circle around Paul, who sat in the center, and as we played, we placed our hands on his head, shoulders, and back. People in the circle prayed along silently as others took turns praying vocally.

It was quite an interesting experience for me. I had never been part of such an event, and I therefore went into it with no real idea of what to expect.

The leader of the group said right from the beginning that anyone who didn’t genuinely believe that such a prayer could actually heal someone, that it could actually make a real, genuine difference, should leave immediately. I stayed.

It was a powerful night. There is no way that I can adequately describe to a non-believer what the feelings really were, so you’ll have to forgive me for not giving it a genuine try. Perhaps, however, those who have experienced similiar “God moments” will understand what I mean when I say that there was a power in that room that definitely felt stronger than the determination of those of us who gathered around Paul. I don’t really know how to say it better, and I apologize for my failure of creativity, but power is the one word that keeps coming to mind.

We shook hands, hugged, and encouraged Paul as we left. I thanked Archie for inviting me to be part of it, and I asked him to give me a call today if he was able to release the results of Paul’s tests.

I was a little apprehensive every time my phone rang today. Around lunch, it rang and I saw that it was Archie. The big moment had come.

I could hear it in his voice. The emotion was very real. Continue reading “The Circle”

It was not a dark and stormy night, although perhaps that would have been a more appropriate setting, obvious cliché aside. In fact, it was an otherwise quiet morning in Washington, around 9:00am, when President George W. Bush gave the executive order from the Situation Room that launched Operation Iraqi Freedom.

As you must surely know, that event happened five years ago today.

It was followed, less than two months later, with Bush standing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, a banner that read, “Mission Accomplished” in the background.

One may continue to wonder why, if the mission had truly been accomplished on May 1, 2003, we are marking our fifth anniversary in Iraq amid warnings from the Bush administration that pulling troops out too soon could spell certain disaster there and here at home.

I was told by someone I work with that they had heard someone on another station — possibly one of the cable networks — say that today we “celebrate” the anniversary of the war in Iraq.

I’m glad it wasn’t someone on our station, because I’d have had to get up, walk out of my office to the newsroom, walk up to that person and smack them right upside the head.

We commemorate such an event, but with casualties around the 4,000 mark and the price tag that grows by about $200 Million every day, there seems to be little to “celebrate.”  To add fuel to that fire, I note that one of the candidates for president says it’d be fine with him to keep our troops there for 100 years.  Wonder what kind of celebration would be appropriate for that?

Yesterday in Columbia, as everyone was celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, an educator was sent home because of going “over the top” with his costume.

Michael Rice, an English teacher, coach and U.S. Army Reserve Staff Sergeant, reported to his mentoring job at Lower Richland High School wearing a green hat in the style of Shaft and light green “alien” sunglasses. Underneath the cap, he had dyed his short black hair green, also in honor of the holiday.

Rice was called to the principal’s office shortly after the first block of the day ended, local station WLTX-TV reported, and was told by the principal that the hair color was “over the top.”

Clearly, with that hat and the sunglasses, it was dyed hair that was over the top!

Rice explained that he wore his hair that color in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. (No one explained why anyone would need to explain something so obvious.)

Rice says he wanted to give fellow staff members and students “a good laugh.” But the principal wasn’t laughing, apparently having decided that Rice was not dressed professionally.

Seriously. This guy, who works as a 9th grade mentor, helping kids prepare for college, gets sent home over green hair.

When I was in school, we’d have loved such a “deviation” from the norm. It wouldn’t have disrupted anything; if anything, it would have made this particular teacher seem more hip, more cool, and worth more of our attention. Even if only for a day.

It certainly wouldn’t have caused a complete breakdown in the educational process. But learning that the principal actually sent this guy home because of the green hair sure would have.

I bet that’s all they’ve been talking about ever since. Maneuvers like this aren’t exactly what it takes to get South Carolina out of the cellar when it comes to state rankings of educational performance.

It’s a gorgeous Monday in Charleston. There are few clouds in the sky, and the sunshine is bright as it peers around the edges of a window shade, lighting my table at a local soup restaurant that has quickly become one of my favorite places to eat.

Today’s pleasant weather is quite a departure from Saturday night’s, during which at least 18 tornadoes ravaged the Palmetto state. I note that the 18 figure is only the number that the National Weather Service has been able to confirm so far; it could go up.

Every time there is severe weather, local television stations’ weather teams go on alert. When there is the threat of severe weather, they will often interrupt programming to let viewers know. That’s part of their responsibility to keep the public aware of emergency situations.  It is both a legal and moral requirement.

But don’t tell that to the army of armchair weathermen who call television stations while severe weather is in the area to bitch about missing their favorite television program.

Yes, those of us who work in television do get it: if you’ve made the time to actually tune in and watch our station, you want to see what you want to see, not some special report about bad weather. You want us to tell you about the bad weather quickly, during a commercial break, (because you don’t give a hoot about whether the station loses money on the deal), and not during any part of your show.

Don’t get me wrong:  no television station, and no one who works for one, wants to alienate viewers.  We appreciate people who do want to watch a show on our channel.  We’re grateful for their time and attention.  But there comes a point at which viewers need to understand that some things are indeed more important than what TV Guide says is supposed to be on the air.

“The storms aren’t even here, yet,” some of you might have said when you called local stations on Saturday night to complain.  Any of the local stations which, at various points over the course of the evening, went “wall-to-wall” with continuous live coverage of the storm.

“But they’re on the way,” might have been a response from the beleaguered newsroom employee who tried to offer something in the way of an explanation.  After all, we knew that that was true, because the same line of storms had caused major damage across the southeast and across South Carolina.

For some reason, that explanation never seems to satisfy the complaints.

Viewers who get that response then try to tell us where the storm is headed, despite what high-dollar weather equipment (and the National Weather Service) happens to say.  But when our area is under a tornado warning…

Wait a second…there’s an important distinction to be made here:

A tornado watch means that conditions are favorable for the formation of a tornado. It’s the classic, “Be ready because it could happen” scenario. Anything could happen, of course, but when it’s a tornado that could happen, that’s enough to get at least some reasonably-minded people to think about what they’d do if the could becomes a does.

A tornado warning, on the other hand, eliminates the possibility and room for doubt: a tornado warning means that an actual tornado — the real thing, not some nasty looking clouds that might be a problem, but a bona fide tornado — has been spotted. It’s on the ground. It’s likely doing damage, because, well, that’s what tornadoes do. Not that they’re bad people, you understand; they don’t really get that they’re hurting anyone because in that mass of 100-or-so-mile-per-hour winds that uproot trees, sling cars and boats around and destroy homes, there’s no brain operating that might steer the monster clear of populated areas.

So back to my earlier sentence:

When our area is under a tornado warning, we are going to interrupt programming to let viewers know that. If we don’t, there’s a major problem. If we don’t, in fact, just as many of you will then bitch about us being “asleep at the switch” and not warning you about the potential danger. And at least then, you have a valid reason to complain.

I wonder about all of the people who were so rude on Saturday to employees of the various local stations who felt put upon by having their evening’s television plans interrupted.  I wonder what they’d say about the “threat” not being “serious enough,” or that all of the local meteorologists were “exaggerating” how serious conditions were to people who actually lost their home.

Especially after looking at damage from around the state and right here in the Lowcountry. There were 10 tornadoes (again, that is the number confirmed so far) that hit here.  Not somewhere else.  Not in some other station’s coverage area.

Right here.

I wonder what these armchair weathermen who are so quick to spew hatred into the telephone of any hapless television newsroom employ unlucky enough to have to answer their call think has to happen before a local weather team actually has a reason to interrupt their favorite show.

Today is St. Patrick’s Day.

Patrick is an Irish name that became famous because of St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. Patrick was a man, of course, and Patrick is a male name.

Patricia, it should go without saying, is a female variant of Patrick. Patty is a nickname for Patricia; Patty is the feminine form.

If you want to abbreviate St. Patrick’s Day, it’s St. Paddy’s Day, not St. Patty’s Day: Paddy is the masculine nickname for Patrick.

Most seem to know that once it is mentioned, yet just count how many people try to wish you a “Happy St. Patty’s Day!”