Memorials for EricJames

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Reposted here from Queerlandia.com and QueerVisalia.com:

Two memorial services are planned for EricJames, who succumbed to suicide Wednesday, January 11, in Visalia, California.

EricJames, as he was known to his friends, was 19, and his death has struck a cord world-wide. News sites and blogs around the world have carried the report, with people writing how the news has touched them with sadness, and has strengthened their convictions to work harder on suicide prevention, and the acceptance of LGBTQ+ people of all ages.

Two public memorials are planned:

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

College of the Sequoias 915 S. Mooney Blvd, Visalia The Theatre Arts Department will hold a public memorial at 3:00 – 6:00 pm. See their Facebook event site, here. A map to the College is here.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

The Spiritual Awareness Center 117 S. Locust St., (map)

Due to capacity considerations, this memorial has been moved.  Same time, Saturday at 1pm.

New location:  The Lamp Liter Inn, 3300 W. Mineral King, Visalia map.

Facebook event page, here.

Survivor’s Guilt

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It’s been a difficult week.  On Wednesday, the young man in this picture, EricJames Borges, 19, committed suicide.  He was the latest in a series of young gay men who have killed themselves in the past two years.  From what we know of their stories, they were all bullied by others for being gay.  Some of them, like EricJames, also had to deal with families whose religion told them they were disgusting, evil, damned, and perverted.  EricJames, in a YouTube video for the “It Gets Better” Campaign, told of his mother trying an exorcism to rid him of his homosexuality.  He was told to leave home after he came out.  Whatever the exact situation in his life, EricJames arrived at a place where he could no longer cope with the depression, and hanged himself.  His friends and the LGBT community in Visalia and the central valley are in shock.

It’s completely normal for people who knew him to wonder if they could have done anything to prevent his death.  From his closest friends, to casual acquaintances, people are left to wonder, and hope, that they didn’t miss the opportunity to help.

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Weekly Roundup @ 9-1-1

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Some of this weeks more memorable calls:

#1. A woman found her horse, and wants a Deputy to help her pick it up.  Trouble is, is it really her horse?  You see, it’s been missing for a while, and she’s just located it at a rental stable.  She goes into a long story that basically boils down to – her daughter took the horse that she (the daughter) considered hers, after Mom and Dad went through a nasty divorce.  Daughter took the horse to a boarding stable, and didn’t tell Mom where it was.  Mom finally found out, and went to claim “her” horse (she “paid for it, fed it, has the papers”) and is upset the stable owners won’t let her take it, even going so far as to change the lock on the gate!  (How dare they?!?!)  Of course, the stable owners only have her word on it, as far as they know, the person paying the stable rental fees is the actual owner.  Woman wants the Deputy to help her take “her” horse.

Not going to happen.  Settle it in court.  Woman not happy, will call back later.

#2. Drunk woman sobbing on the phone.  She’s been abandoned by her kids somewhere in California!  She doesn’t know where she is!  Help her!  She tells me she’s on Highway 198.  OK, Highway 198 is close to a hundred miles from end to end!  Where on Highway 198??  She doesn’t know!  She’s near a Chevron station.  (We see from the cell tower address that she’s got to be close to Three Rivers, but that still leaves a lot of area to cover)

After about an hour of trying to get her to figure out where she is, and multiple calls of her sobbing and hanging up on us, we track it down.  She’s drunk. Very drunk. She wandered away from a local bar, her ‘significant other’ got tired of her and left her there and returned to his hotel room.  We finally got her back to the room with ‘hubby’ (or whoever) and tucked in for the night.  Oh.. the wonders of alcohol!

#3. Gangster wanna-be (and stupid with a capital S) teenager tries to shoot at someone, but misses.  Three targets, in close proximity, and he’s got a shotgun.  Lucky for the intended targets, this dip is a lousy shot, and misses all of them!  That’s one reason our gang related shootings only sometimes result in serious injury or death – the shooters are all really bad shots!

#4. Better shot in front of the ‘stop and rob’ along the freeway.  A call that we originally thought was an armed robbery with shots fired turned out to be a fight in the parking lot that escalated into someone grabbing their shotgun and blasting away.  Everyone was gone before we got units on the scene, including the victim, but he showed up at a local hospital fairly quickly.  Detectives still tracking down this one, but they’ve got some good intel, so it’s probably only a matter of time.

It was a slow week, maybe the weather kept them in.  More later.

White House: No aliens (that we know of)

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In response to online petitions at the White House website, the Obama Administration has formally responded to demands that the government “formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race.”

Not surprisingly, the official response is:

The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.

Of course, that’s what they want you to believe! I mean, after all, what are they going to say? “Yeah, you got us! We admit it, Rosewell was a alien spaceship, and we’ve got the bodies in a morgue at Area 51.”

Next up, a petition to make them admit this petition was disinformation and a lie, too.

The Truth Is Out There.

Mulder! Run!

 

Have we lost the wars yet?

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Well, we’re in the third day of the post-DADT world.  Have we lost the wars, yet?  Are the recruiting centers empty?  Do we need backhoes to find our troop’s moral?  Are our enemies plotting our overthrow, now that the military is all homo-fied?

No. No. No. Yes, but they’d have been plotting that anyway, so no big change there.

It won’t take long for most people to come around to the conclusion that this will be the biggest non-event in military history.  Right wing Chicken Little’s not withstanding.

To all our active duty service members, and to the veterans, thank you for your service, thank you for being part of the finest military in the world, and thank you for showing the rest of us how to live up to our national credo.  Salute.

 

Safety First: Don’t Sext and Drive – You’ll Make A Mess!

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Always good advice.  We got a bunch of calls about this sign after it appeared on Road 80, north of Visalia.  Construction is ongoing, the formerly two-lane road being upgraded to four lanes between Visalia and Dinuba.  Nobody’s quite sure who’s responsible for the message, but the sign itself belongs to a contractor working on the highway.  It was finally taken down.  Probably a good idea, no telling how distracting (or suggestive!) it might have been!

Memorial Geek: Mars Rovers Contain WTC Metal

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NASA’s Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, carry pieces of metal recovered from Ground Zero.  Both rovers are equipped with identical parts.  This image, provided by NASA, is of the rover Spirit, and was taken by the panoramic camera on February 2, 2004.  The piece of metal with the US flag emblem is aluminum recovered from the World Trade Center, after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Image: NASA. Click on the image to go to the NASA site.

Mars Geek: Opportunity’s Picture of the Moment

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Mars is more than a red dot in the night sky.  It’s a real place.  We can go there.

End of an era: Last Shuttle launch

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An era ends.  The last Space Shuttle lifted four astronauts and tons of supplies into the Florida sky today, enroute to the International Space Station.  The first Shuttle launch, of Columbia, occurred on April 12, 1981.  That launch was a mere 20 years to the day after the first manned space flight, by Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union.  In those 20 years, we went from the first dangerous launches on modified ICBM rockets, to the Saturn 5 that took us to the Moon six times, to the “space truck” that is the Shuttle.  The last Shuttle mission, flown by Shuttle Atlantis, is scheduled to land on July 20, the 42nd anniversary of Apollo 11’s landing at the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon.

Once Atlantis lands, the United States has NO way of launching astronauts into space.  We hope to have private industry doing so “soon”, but that “soon” could be a decade away.  In the meantime, we buy rides on the Russian Soyuz.  “TAXI!”

 

Birthday Bash for Ted, Sunday July 17th, in Fresno!

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Sunday, July 17, 6pm, at the Express, 708 N. Blackstone, Fresno.

Join us as we celebrate the birthday of Ted Freitas, and help us embarrass him silly!

Full details at the Facebook event page, here!

See you Sunday!

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