MAW gets a deputy

July 30, 2007--7:30 a.m.

MAW* has front desk duty at her place o'employment. She has to let folks in, smile, say "good morning." So far, nobody else is here. It's Monday, after all. No school cuz of summer vacs.

Hark! The hoopty from Union arrives. No passengers.

Such is the life of a superhero: drudge work at some obscure joint. Nobody to arrest this time of day.

How about those folks who locked the office and didn't get somebody to open it so MAW could start her shift?

How about the hoopty driver who took the bumpy route?

Are they guilty of truly annoying actions, worthy of a few salutary days in the slammer? Or is MAW just cranky?? It is quite early--before her customary rising time.

MAW's spirichal challenge as an irascible superhero will be to maintain perspective!

As she scans the entrance for visitors, MAW thinks she should deputize the Little Red Hen, so she can arrest those boors eating popcorn during a Broadway play!! Quel dommage!!


*MAW stands for "Most Arresting Woman," foe of the annoying everywhere (including those who feel compelled to make an acronym out of everything)!

Happy Birthday, Peg-o!!

As this photo shows (dated August '69), Peggy has an affinity for deep water and, as a Leo, a natural talent for command. Her passengers are, from left to right, cousin Marie, Katie, and Sally. They're rowing on Enterprise Lake, just two miles from Grandma Carew's house in Elcho.

Peggy is the oldest of four kids, and as a kid, she patiently endured her inexperienced parents. She still has great tolerance for the knuckleheads of this world.

She has a heart as big as the great outdoors, which she loves.

It's her birthday*! Wish her a happy one....

*Yesterday, actually. Couldn't get my scanner hooked up to do the photo until just now.

And happy birthday again, sweetheart. Lots and lots of love, Ma

1/3 of the way through and holding....

'Arry Potter gathered dust last nite while I watched teevee with the magic cord that connects the toob to my CI processor. The woman who lives in the apt below was spared the nightly KABOOM when the big book slides off my bed after I conk out. Cathy had sent me an email that Simon Schama was on Steven Colbert, so I checked it out. Dint think Colbert was all that funny, sorry, wot with the way he kept talking over his guest. Argh. With Simon Schama on there, I wud have preferred he shut the eff up and listen.

Anyway, I LOVE hearing people speak. Especially all the characters on "Law & Order." There's three or four varieties of that program, and I watched 3 of them last night on different channels.

Best of all, it's good rehab: the more I hear, the more I CAN hear with this thing. E.g., this ayem on the metro, I could hear whole announcements! "Next station, Judiciary Square. Door opens on the right." Jeez, who knew?

MEDIA FAST....

i'm not reading any blogs or emails or reviews or newspapers (online, that is...i don't support many of them by actually buying copies) till i have a chance to pick up my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and see for my own self wot happens. i opened one of my very favorite blogs when i got back from cape may* this evening, and closed it back up immediately! i don't wanna know anything about it, even if the blogger did not spill the beans. my copy is waiting for me at olsson's books in dupont circle. as soon as olsson's is open tmw, i'm heading there to pick up my chunky book. then i'm gonna carry it home and dive into it...maybe take the whole day off.

also, i'm hatching a new series of posts or maybe even a whole blog about a cartoon superhero i'm creating: her name is "MAW," (an acronym for Most Arresting Woman) and she zips through the universe arresting local annoyances. this shall be a new art form for xtreme english. wish me luck.

*the ferry back from cape may to lewes this afternoon was sprinkled with earnest young readers, all deep into the newest and final potter volume. i resisted the urge to read over a number of shoulders as i passed them on the way to the refreshment stand and back.

Ioway, IOWAY...that's where the tall corn grows.

[No, this is not corn...this is lavender in our side yard being visited by at least four bees!! If you stare at it long enough, you can transport yourself into summer!]

In honor of July 4, when I again will be missing the 4th of July parade that starts on a county road leading from Solon, Iowa, crosses the Red Cedar River, and winds up in front of the general store in Cedar Bluff, Iowa, I just paid a visit to one of my favorite blogs: "A Year in Iowa, Dispatches from the presidential campaign trail in Iowa, by Mike Hlas of the Cedar Rapids Gazette."

Historical Note
The Cedar Bluff 4th of July parade used to be, as our town astrologer and seamstress (who attended Parsons School of Design with Calvin Klein), used to call it, a "stitch." On the year when the Pope had visited Iowa, one of the floats consisted of a black Cadillac convertible with a burly, cigar-smoking "nun" driving and the windshield wipers adorned with a pair of white gloves in such a way that the middle finger on each wiper pointed up as it swished back and forth. The "Pope," a hefty guy in a white cassock and pointy hat, rode sitting on the trunk, with his feet dangling into the back seat. When the Popemobile arrived in front of the General Store, one of the clerks came out and poured a can of beer onto the gravel by the curb. The Pope, as was his custom, then dismounted and kissed the anointed ground.

Another year, or maybe it was the same one, a bunch of "feminists" (my friend Margie's mother called them "women in pants") wearing Statue of Liberty hats and cargo shorts rode topless in a hay wagon to demonstrate for women's rights.

The 4th of July parade at Cedar Bluff was always an EVENT marked with copious quantities of bug spray and beer.

(Then there was the Bicentennial 4th of July parade in Clear Lake, Iowa, when someone on the fireworks barge accidentally lit a roman candle, which spun around out of control, shooting fire balls at the Jaycees hastily diving off the barge into the lake.) But I digress....

Back to the Caucuses
Hlas covers all or most of the presidential campaign events there, which bring the candidates, both Republican and Democratic, together with the inimitable citizens of the Hawkeye State.

On days when El Busho has done something particularly heinous (most of the time recently), I need to read commentary that has lines like the following:

"I think this is my eighth trip (to Iowa this year),'' Clinton told the crowd. "I plan to spend so much time here I'll be able to caucus for myself before it's over."

++++++++

"A free press met someone [Senator Joe Biden] running for president who was willing to be questioned by it. Few others among the busy people in the Gazette's downtown offices were even aware Biden was in their building. But in one the newspaper's conference rooms, the democratic process was in session."

++++++++

"In most Iowa communities, Cinco de Mayo might seem like St. Patrick's Day in El Paso. An excuse to drink, but without much apparent local relevance."
...
Perhaps the biggest complaint from non-Iowans about Iowa's first-in-the-nation status when it comes to holding its January presidential caucuses is the state's lack of demographic diversity.
...
"Tell them to come to West Liberty,'' Sen. Chris Dodd said here Saturday afternoon as he dropped into town for an hour to visit a Cinco de Mayo celebration in Ron-De-Voo Park.
...
West Liberty is 40 percent Hispanic. Over half of the students in kindergarten through eighth-grade here are Hispanic. The town's newspaper, the West Liberty Index, prints its stories in English and Spanish. The first Hispanic graduate of West Liberty High School was Manuel Sebot in 1929. For a century, people of Mexican descent have lived in this town, 18 miles from Iowa City and the University of Iowa. Many came to work for the railroad. For the last several decades, many have worked for what is now West Liberty Foods, a turkey-processing plant that employs 900."

++++++++

"...It was late Friday morning in an equipment and parts shed on the grounds of Rexco Equipment, where a somewhat hastily planned Rudy Giuliani campaign stop was held. Word got out to enough of the Republican faithful in the Cedar Rapids area and beyond, and a crowd of 125 got shelter from a light rain inside the shed.

"You here for the event?" a Giuliani staffer asked a senior female as she entered the shed.

She wasn't there to pick up a rough terrain forklift."

++++++++

[I've posted some of these McCain jokes before, but they bear repeating....]

"Arizona U.S. Senator John McCain tries to warm crowds with old chestnuts of jokes before soberly explaining why he believes the U.S. must maintain and increase its military presence in Iraq.

"Two inmates at a state prison are in a chow line,'' McCain told a crowd of about 450 this afternoon in a ballroom at the Crowne Plaza Five Seasons Hotel. "One of them said to the other one 'The food was a lot better in here when you were the governor.' "

"Do you know the difference between a lawyer and a catfish? One is a scum-sucking bottom-dweller and the other is a fish. There goes the lawyer vote.''

"Following Phil Gramm (who introduced McCain here) sometimes, I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor's fifth husband where on the wedding night he said 'I know what I'm supposed to do, I just don't know how to make it interesting.' That's the kind of line that goes over better at Republican women's club meetings.''

Happy 4th of July, folks! I hope there's an Iowa somewhere in everyone's experience.

Knitting as TM?

A Little Red Hen knitted (knit? knat?) this fetching baby hat in TWO DAYS!! What's more, this blindingly speedy knitting feat was only ONE of the things LRH accomplished in those two days (not to mention blogging about it!!). Ufda! LRH seems to be a force of nature.

In any case, she is definitely individuated in the Jungian sense--not much group-think there. She said she also was pondering a remark I made in a recent post here about...oh, what? older folks vis-a-vis media attention? something like that. I probably stepped on a bunch of toes when I opined that nobody seems to cares about old people as a group, any more than they care about any other folks as a group. Maybe it's because I've been excluded from full participation in the media for so long, thanks to being deaf, that everything really wonderful has come to me from individual people--and mostly one at a time, too--and so I think everyone experiences life like that.

I don't know what the media are up to these days, but it doesn't seem good. I miss Bill Moyers every week on PBS. There's little I want to watch or read. And I'm not alone....Jamie Lee Curtis had a great essay in today's Huffington Post on not watching television.

Anyway, I'm too slow to take in more than one thing at a time. I could no more knit a hat for a small head in two days than I could fly. In fact, if I were a betting person, I'd put my dough on flying. Well, I know people can levitate. I spent an afternoon trying to take a nap in a basement bedroom while a bunch of TM practitioners met in the living room overhead to practice their meditations, or whatever. I couldn't sleep for all the banging and crashing...WHAM! THUD! At supper I asked my host wot in hey they were doing up there...seemed pretty noisy for meditating. She laughed and said they were levitating. Right. I can tell you that they did really well getting off the floor, but they needed some practice on those landings!!

Speaking of meditating, I'm wondering if knitting is an ancient forerunner of transcendental meditation--you know, sitting down and focusing on a mantra (knit one, purl two...). The only difference I can see is that they tell you to close your eyes to meditate. However, LRH and her coterie of fellow accomplished knitters can probably do that, too: Knit with their eyes closed....