
Aboy, His best friend, and his dog.
Okay a boy, his Dog and his computer - let them fight over who's the best friend.
Just a bum at the beach - all the goings on in America's Redneck Riviera
Christine Djordjevic stepped outside Monday morning to discover her car -- which she said is "possessed" -- had driven itself across the street and crashed into the neighbor's home.
Djordjevic said she must have accidentally hit some buttons on her key chain and activated the car's remote starter. And since the car had been parked in reverse gear, it backed up and didn't stop until it crashed into her neighbor's home.
The accident, which occurred about 8:20 a.m. Monday on Governor Road, in South Haven, caused several thousand dollars to Djordjevic's car and neighbor Gregory Hajduk's house.
Djordjevic said police were skeptical of her story until they witnessed her remote starter activate, sending her car driving down the road. They chased it down and prevented it from hitting anything, she said.
Police reports confirm the vehicle "was checked and it was learned that the vehicle will start and drive when the remote start is activated."
Djordjevic, who got the 1995 Mercury Tracer Trio in January, said the remote starter already was installed. She said the device previously caused her car to jump over a curb at Wal-Mart while she was outside the car and her 11-year-old son was inside yelling, "Mom, where are we going?"
To prevent any further problems, Djordjevic said she is taking the remote starter activator off her key chain.
"I don't even know how the stupid thing works," she said.
"It usually does it by accident ... It should have never had a remote starter put on it."
Many remote starters are advertised as not for use on stick shift cars like Djordjevic's car. Larry McIntosh, manager of K&T Auto Creation in Hobart, said he doesn't put remote starters on stick shift cars because there is no guarantee the driver will leave the car in neutral.
McIntosh said a remote starter professionally installed in an automatic transmission vehicle will only start the car and let the heater warm the interior, and will not drive until the driver depresses the brake pedal and puts it in gear.
Hajduk, whose home sustained damage to the garage door and the surrounding structure, said people are generally surprised when he tells them how his home became damaged. When he told his boss a remote starter caused a driverless car to strike his home, his boss replied, "No way."
Djordjevic said people never have believed her when she tells them her car's unique abilities, but she points out that her first name is Christine, which also is the name of a possessed car in the 1983 horror flick "Christine."
Both Djordjevic and Hajduk said they're glad this story ended with nobody getting hurt.
Well, Muggsy's blowup-free September ended at 23 days today. It was just a weird day all around. In fact, it was so bad that I called the behaviorist. When I got home, everything seemed OK, but when I went to lie down because I'm coming down with something, Muggsy came bolting into the bedroom and laid ontop of me. He wouldn't leave. Chubbs and Fenway wouldn't go near him. It was so weird. After that, he wouldn't leave my side. He wouldn't even get six inches from me. I was doing laundry, and he was underfoot. I sat on the couch, and he sat beside me. I sat down at the computer, and he tried to climb on my lap. He sat in the bathroom for 10 minutes and tried to catch a fly. I put him in his crate and he cried to get out. It was very un-Muggsy-like behavior.
I called my boss and she told me to call the behaviorist. The behaviorist said that something probably happened to scare him today and just go on with life as if he were fine. She said not to be worried until it went on a couple of days. But of course I'm worried! My boss suggested that maybe someone tried to get in the house today or made a big noise outside. She also said that an earthquake might be coming since dogs tend to get freaky before an earthquake. At her advice, I took him to a drive-through for a special treat. We went to McDonalds and then I gave him a chicken sandwich at Peck Park. When we got back home, he seemed a little better. But then he got really freaked out by a fly in the living room. He just couldn't settle down, running from room to room, climbing on Ross. We killed the fly and put him in his crate with a bone. And so comes the blowup.
We noticed that he wasn't chewing on the bone, so we went to try to let him out of his crate. As soon as Ross got close, he started growling. A few minutes later, I tried, and he growled at me. But I didn't want to leave when he started growling because I don't want him to learn that aggression works. I waited and he kept going, progressing into a full-blown blowup. I'm letting him relax now before I try to let him out one more time. If I can't let him out now, he'll have to stay in there all night.
Oh and did I mention that when we were leaving to go to the drivethrough, four little boys were walking by on our sidewalk and started making noises at Muggsy. So he lunged and burned my hand with the leash, trying to hold him back.
But Ross has generously offered to stay home tomorrow and make sure he's OK since I have two deadlines in the morning. I hope to see improvement tomorrow.
7AM - I worked till 11 last night and didn't really get to bed till 3AM. Sooooo I wasn't really happy when Skittles the Wonder Dog (played by Ed from The Lion King) Came scratching and whining at 7AM.
went out and had a great time peeing and pooping and sniffing and licking themselves and each other. For about ten minutes. Just as I had settled back in again and got all snuggly with Michele , the howling started - Skittles can break windows when he gets going.
Where Reese make the neighbors think we are beating her (with her sharp, painful-sounding yipes) when she wants in, Skittles does an impression of an A10 Warthog. The piercing noise doesn't even sound dog-like. Imagine a beagle with his balls in a vice. Then play that at double speed and there you go. If you have ever heard the distinctive sound of an A10 - Imagine one tied down outside your bedroom window at full throttle.
Nathan
I am a Typhoon
wild
crazy
unpredictable
I come quickly
then...
I go as fast as I came
with a piece of that place with me
as a reminder
and leave a reminder with that place
always moving
never stopping...
Learning
I am a Typhoon
The Cindy Sheehan you don't know
By Cathy Young, Globe Columnist | August 22, 2005
IT IS ENORMOUSLY difficult to say anything critical about Cindy Sheehan, the Everymom of the antiwar movement, without sounding indecently callous. She is, after all, a woman who has lost her child -- one of humankind's most universal images of grief. Her vigil outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, where she has vowed to stay until the president meets with her and hears her out, has inspired great sympathy. Conservative attempts to make an issue of Sheehan's far-left ties have been cited as an example of how low those abominable right-wingers will to stoop: They'll even slime a grieving mother.
I respect Sheehan's pain, no doubt compounded by her mother's stroke last week. Yet Sheehan is not simply expressing her pain and rage, privately or even publicly; when she turns her grief into a political cause, her politics cannot remain off-limits.
Sheehan's first and foremost demand is that all American troops be brought home from Iraq immediately. On this scale, irrationality becomes dangerous. Even many of those who opposed the war in Iraq from the start are convinced that a quick pullout would be a disaster -- both for the Iraqis, and for all those who would suffer if Iraq became a fully operational terrorist base. Who will have to give account to the bereaved men and women whose loved ones will be killed as a result?
But there's more than that to Sheehan's politics. She is not simply against the war in Iraq (and, as she told talk show host Chris Matthews on CNBC, against the war in Afghanistan as well). She has thrown in her lot with the hardcore Michael Moore left, and this less savory aspect of her crusade has been largely ignored by the respectful media.
In her public appearances, Sheehan has not only called Bush ''the biggest terrorist in the world" but suggested that his ''band of neocons" deliberately allowed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to happen: ''9/11 was their Pearl Harbor to get their neo-con agenda through," she told a cheering crowd at San Francisco State University last April.
That crowd, by the way, was holding a rally in support of Lynne Stewart, a radical New York attorney convicted in 2003 of aiding and abetting a terrorist conspiracy. Sheehan compared Stewart -- who served as a liaison between her incarcerated client, terrorist mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, and his network outside -- to Atticus Finch, the lawyer in ''To Kill a Mockingbird" who heroically defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in the Jim Crow South.
Even more troubling opinions have surfaced in an e-mail Sheehan sent to ABC News last April: ''Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC [Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think thank] Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel."
After some media outlets publicized these comments, which smack of blaming the Jews for drawing the U.S. into the war in Iraq, Sheehan disavowed them: she claims the offending lines were inserted into her email by an ABC News staffer. (The original email has been lost due to an Internet virus attack.) But this latest conspiracy-mongering is hard to believe, especially given the general anti-Israel tenor of Sheehan's public statements: for instance, she railed against the notion that ''it's okay for Israel to have nuclear weapons, but Iran or Syria better not get nuclear weapons."
A comment on the left-wing website Daily Kos described Sheehan as ''Terri Schiavo reincarnated." I believe this was meant as a compliment. But actually, the Sheehan circus has a lot in common with the Schiavo circus, none of it good. Both stories represent a triumph -- on different sides of the political divide -- of emotion- and sentiment-driven politics. Schiavo's parents could go off on paranoid, crazy, vitriolic rants, and enjoy a certain immunity by virtue of their unthinkable tragedy. The same is true of Sheehan.
Sheehan's grief entitles her to sympathy, which is why I believe the president should have granted her the meeting she wanted. (On pragmatic grounds, it would have also taken the sting out of Sheehan's protest.) But her loss does not give her, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has claimed, an ''absolute" moral authority -- any more than it would if her reaction to her son's death was to demand a US nuclear strike against the insurgents.