Christmas begins at HOME this year!!

Thanks to Darlene for sending this gem!  I agree....forget the stuff at Walmart or Target. Most of us already have absolutely everything anyone could possibly need.  Try this:

As the holidays approach, the giant non-U.S. factories are kicking into high gear to provide Americans with monstrous piles of cheaply produced goods--merchandise that has been produced at the expense of American labor. This year will be different. This year Americans will give the gift of genuine concern for other Americans. There is no longer an excuse that, at gift giving time, nothing can be found that is produced by American hands. Yes there is!

It's time to think outside the box, people. Who says a gift needs to fit in a shirt box, wrapped in Chinese produced wrapping paper?

Everyone -- yes EVERYONE gets their hair cut. How about gift certificates from your local American hair salon or barber? 

Gym membership? It's appropriate for all ages who are thinking about some health improvement.

Who wouldn't appreciate getting their car detailed? Small, American owned detail shops and car washes would love to sell you a gift certificate or a book of gift certificates.

Are you one of those extravagant givers who think nothing of plonking down the Benjamins on a Chinese made flat-screen? Perhaps that grateful gift receiver would like his driveway sealed, or lawn mowed for the summer, or driveway plowed all winter, or games at the local golf course.

There are a bazillion owner-run restaurants -- all offering gift certificates. And, if your intended isn't the fancy eatery sort, what about a half dozen breakfasts at the local breakfast joint. Remember, folks this isn't about big National chains -- this is about supporting your home town Americans with their financial lives on the line to keep their doors open.

How many people couldn't use an oil change for their car, truck or motorcycle, done at a shop run by the American working guy?

Thinking about a heartfelt gift for mom? Mom would LOVE the services of a local cleaning lady for a day.

My computer could use a tune-up, and I KNOW I can find some young guy who is struggling to get his repair business up and running.

OK, you were looking for something more personal. Local crafts people spin their own wool and knit them into scarves. They make jewelry, and pottery and beautiful wooden boxes.

Plan your holiday outings at local, owner operated restaurants and leave your server a nice tip. And, how about going out to see a play or ballet at your hometown theatre?

Musicians need love too, so find a venue showcasing local bands.

Honestly, people, do you REALLY need to buy another ten thousand Chinese lights for the house? When you buy a five dollar string of light, about fifty cents stays in the community. If you have those kinds of bucks to burn, leave the mailperson, trash collector, or babysitter a nice BIG tip.

You see, Christmas is no longer about draining American pockets so that China can build another glittering city. Christmas is now about caring about US, encouraging American small businesses to keep plugging away to follow their dreams. And, when we care about other Americans, we care about our communities, and the benefits come back to us in ways we couldn't imagine. THIS is the new American Christmas tradition.

Forward this to everyone on your mailing list 

-- post it to discussion groups 

-- throw up a post on Craigslist for your city in the Rants and Raves section

-- send it to the editor of your local paper and radio stations, and TV news departments. 

This is a revolution of caring about each other, and isn't that what Christmas is about?

We didn't have "the green thing".....

Darlene sent this! Lovely!

In the queue at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.

The woman apologized to him and explained, "We didn't have the green thing back in my day."

The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment."

He was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that old lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana . In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Remember: Don't make old People mad.

We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to tick us off.

More good reads on Wikileaks

DemocracyforCalifornia hits another home run.   The post "Cablegate and the Little Website that Roared" is another treasure trove for people looking for information you can trust. 

 If you have time for just one of DfC's resources, check this out:

An invaluable resource: http://wlcentral.org/ 

Best reads on Wikileaks

Don't know what to think of the Wikileaks bombshell? Try these essays.  Thanks to today's Hullabaloo by Digby for putting us on their trail.

1.  This essay is by Glenn Greenwald in Salon, and it makes the most sense of anything I've read.

2.  This essay is by Julian Assange, and it explains his philosophy--why he's doing this. Before we accuse him of anything sinister, we owe it to ourselves to find out just what he intends.

Hope...and resistance

Today's Truthout arrived with Real Hope Is About Doing Something, by Chris Hedges. It's long and thoughtful. I especially liked the last paragraphs:

Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state, which saturates our airwaves with lies, seeks to obliterate. Hope is what our corporate overlords are determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don’t resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations to think. No. Above all do not think. Obey.

W.H. Auden wrote:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and money. The powerful protect their own. They divide the world into the damned and the blessed, the patriots and the enemy, the rich and the poor. They insist that extinguishing lives in foreign wars or in our prison complexes is a form of human progress. They cannot see that the suffering of a child in Gaza or a child in the blighted pockets of Washington, D.C., diminishes and impoverishes us all. They are deaf, dumb and blind to hope. Those addicted to power, blinded by self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope any more than most of us can decipher hieroglyphics. Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing.

I cannot promise you fine weather or an easy time. I cannot assure you that thousands will converge on Lafayette Park in solidarity. I cannot pretend that being handcuffed is pleasant. I cannot say that anyone in Congress or the White House, anyone in the boardrooms of the corporations that cannibalize our nation, will be moved by pity to act for the common good. I cannot tell you these wars will end or the hungry will be fed. I cannot say that justice will roll down like a mighty wave and restore our nation to sanity. But I can say this: If we resist and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished. If all we accomplish is to assure a grieving mother in Baghdad or Afghanistan, a young man or woman crippled physically and emotionally by the hammer blows of war, that he or she is not alone, our resistance will be successful. Hope cannot be sustained if it cannot be seen.

Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war, of those who perpetuate corporate greed and are responsible for state crimes, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others. Hope affirms that which we must affirm. And every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself.

Also from Auden:

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

P.S. I especially liked "Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations to think." What was he talking about, do you suppose???

3/50 Project: Check it out and take part!!

You know the most famous motto--"Think globally, act locally"? Here's a new one:

This is supposed to be funny, but I think it's a great idea!!!

New Direction for any war: Send Service Vets over 60!

 I am over 60 and the Armed Forces thinks I'm too old to track down terrorists. You can't be older than 42 to join the military. They've got the whole thing backwards. Instead of sending 18-year olds off to fight, they ought to take us old guys. You shouldn't be able to join a military unit until you're at least 35.

For starters: Researchers say 18-year-olds think about sex every 10 seconds.  Old guys only think about sex a couple of times a day, leaving us more than 28,000 additional seconds per day to concentrate on the enemy.

Young guys haven't lived long enough to be cranky, and a cranky soldier is a dangerous soldier. 'My back hurts!  I can't sleep, I'm tired and hungry' We are impatient and maybe letting us kill some jerk who desperately deserves it will make us feel better and shut us up for a  while.

An 18-year-old doesn't even like to get  up before 10 a.m. Old guys always get up early to pee so what the hell. Besides, like I said, 'I'm tired and can't sleep and since I'm already up, I may as well be up killing some fanatical SOB....
  

If  captured we couldn't spill the beans because we'd forget where we put them. In fact, name, rank, and serial number would be a real stretch.

Boot camp would be easier for old guys.  We're used to getting screamed and yelled at and we're used to soft food. We've also developed an appreciation for guns. We've been using them for years as an excuse to get out of the house, away from the screaming and yelling.

They could lighten up on the obstacle course however. I've been in combat and didn't see a single 20-foot wall with rope hanging over the side, nor did I ever do any pushups after completing basic training.

 Actually, the running part is kind of a waste of energy, too. I've never seen anyone outrun a bullet.

An 18-year-old has the whole world ahead of him.. He's still learning to shave, to start up a conversation with a pretty girl.  He still hasn't figured out that a baseball cap has a brim to shade his eyes, not the back of his  head.

These are all great reasons to keep our kids at home to learn a little more about life before sending them off into harm's way.

Let us old guys track down those dirty rotten coward terrorists. The last thing an enemy would want to see is a couple of million pissed off old farts with attitudes and automatic weapons who know that their best years are already behind them.

***How about recruiting Women over 50 ....with PMS !!! You think Men have attitudes !!! Ohhhhhhhhhhhh my Lord!!!  If nothing else, put them on border patrol....we  will have it secured the first night!

[UPDATE from Xtreme English....sorry, i think the prime age for PMS is BEFORE 50.]  

[This is from Darlene, of course....who else? I don't know if it's on her blog, but she sends lots of funnies out every day. This is one of today's....]

 

Congratulations, Ronniecat!!!

Ronniecat has a swell new job! She'll be doing what she's doing now in the private sector (working with multicultural and community associations) for the Canadian gummint. Her new gig involves lots more money, better benefits--and doing it all in FRENCH! Is this a brave young woman, or what?

The downside will be either a 4-hour commute each day or, alternatively, spending part of each week AWAY from her dear Husband and Cats!! I WAS hoping that on days she picks the commute, she could do so via the fabulous Canadian rail. Four hours of naps, breakfast or dinner (or both) in the cafe car, reading, listening to tunes, and at night sleeping in her own bed.... but ha...Canadian Rail, alas, is no more fabulous in the wilds of New Brunswick than Amtrack is in, say, North Dakota or Iowa. There seems to be but one train per weekday that runs between the town where Ronniecat will start her new job and a station that is relatively close to where she lives now (but not RIGHT IN TOWN).

We've learned to look up to Canada as superior and more civilized than our beloved US of A. But golly whiz...it's THEIR polar bears who are being forced to swim where once they could sit on the ice and have a civilized Canadian dinner of baby seals. You'd think the Canadians'd, um, do something about beefing up their trains instead of bragging about all their new highways.

Oh, they are superior. I'm not being snide. As a Yankee, I've come to expect greater clarity of thought from the rest of the world on the whole issue of global warming. But get this, the Loonie is now worth more than the US peso-formerly-known-as-dollar! Methinks the end is nigh....

Xtreme English Goes Knuts!!

[I had a long, interesting discussion with Cathy t'other day on whether a pun is a metaphor (she says yes; I say not really, and I do b'lieve I'm right--it's WORD PLAY). Thus, I could not resist making the pun in the title of this post--and wouldn't you know it, it appears the knitters in Dish and Wash Cloth Mania are crazy about punning!]

Anyway, the author of Xtreme English is doing her best to be relevant to her audience, which includes at least two or three very skilled knitters, weavers, and other fabric wranglers. Thus, she is adding a great, handy blog to her list of favorites: Dish and Wash Cloth Mania. The blog, discovered on Ideal Bite, Xtreme's favorite green blog (also among the favorites), is about how to knit your own dishcloths and washcloths!!. There's loads of patterns, too, but I haven't checked it all out yet.

Finally! a knitting blog even I can grasp, out of which I and others similarly disfunctional with knitting needles possibly make something!! I must say, however, that on further investigation, even this looks pretty hard (cf. the bee stitch...tsk...who thinks of these things??)

WDC Peace March 9/15/07--part 4 (photos)

"Make levees, not war"

"Kuchinich 2008"--little sign, great big guy

"Fake President, Fake Airman, Fake Cowboy, Fake Christian, Fake...Fake...Fake..."

"Oh, nooooo...Bush Again"

WDC Peace March 9/15/07--part 3

Before anyone complains about the execution here, they should go take a look at early Mickey Mouse cartoons or early "Peanuts" strips. Xtreme English promises to do better with the text...just slow down a little so she gets it right the first time. Katie has always been excellent at printing by hand, and Sally has always been a great cartoonist, and Peggy can write circles around all of us, although Tom is the best writer of all. He just lost his crayon when he joined the Navy during the first Gulf War. His teachers used to give him "C's" on his compositions, then they'd cross that out and give him an "A." In third grade, a teacher took a look at my drawing, dug her fingernails into my shoulder, and hissed, "There's NO SUCH THING AS A PURPLE CAT!!!" Creepy old trout. In art, what counts, what's fun, what's most rewarding is just DOING IT! So go draw something!!

WDC Peace March 9/15/07--part 2

WDC Peace March photos, 9/15/07--part 1

"another pissed-off redhead for peace" (relative of ex-Shammy?)
Drummers greeting arriving marchers

The crowd begins to assemble

here comes code pink!

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....

Time to Retire….

I first retired in 1988, when I was 52 years old. I wanted to write for a living. Because my employer was a generous man, I had made a good salary (that I didn’t equal until ten years later!) and saved a nice little nest egg thanks to their profit-sharing program. The nest egg didn’t last long, but I found another job right away working for one of my former bosses, who had started his own company. In the meantime, I wrote and wrote some more but never sent anything in for publication. Then the first company called and asked if I’d like to come back to work—in another town. Sure!

I went there for about a year, then moved to NYC in January the next year. I had a couple of p/t jobs, then went to L.A. for a couple of months, then back to NY for one more month, then back to the Midwest—where I wondered what to do with my life. “I’ll teach deaf kids,” I thought. Back in the 1950s, the sisters had prepared me to teach high school science, so I thought I’d apply for certification to teach deaf students. Because I needed to work as well as go to school, I wrote to the on-campus publishing house, enclosed my resume, and asked if they needed any part-time workers. They called a few days later and asked if I wanted a full-time job. Sure!

In 1996, at the age of 59 going on 60, I retired again with another small nest egg and went back to NYC to concentrate one more time on writing. Because all of the classes in creative writing met late in the day, and because by this time I was too deaf to find more than a few p/t jobs, I took a morning class in anatomical drawing at the Art Students League. Every day on the subway, I sketched my fellow passengers and had a great time. In June of 1998, on what would have been my mother’s 101st birthday, I got an M.A. in creative writing. And I came back here to work as a writer/editor.

In two months, I’m going to retire again at age 70! Having retired twice and spent all the money, I’m feeling the need to figure out how to survive on FICA plus a small pension. One smart thing I did was start collecting Social Security when I was 65. That was the year they changed the rule so that you could work full time and not have anything deducted from your SS check. Because I kept earning money, my Social Security benefit kept going up! Today, it’s almost twice what it was in 2001.

Two very kind relatives have offered to take over my mortgage payment, etc., but I declined. They have enough uses for that money besides throwing it down a rat hole. It’s more fun to take care of yourself anyway, if you can possibly swing it. (You don’t feel guilty, and you don’t have to answer any nosy questions.) I don’t mind living frugally—been there. I learned long ago that a diet of rice, beans, kale, garlic, peanut butter, bread, apples, and bananas goes a long way for hardly any $$ at all. And there are LOTS of great Spanish wines (tempranillo, garnacha, rioja) for less than $10 a bottle. I don’t have a car—sold that in 1991 when I moved east.

When the real estate market recovers, I may sell my condo and move to France. Meanwhile—one of these days—farewell to the office! Time to write and paint again!!

Buy the Book 2

Glenn Greenwald wrote A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency not only to show us how and why the Bush presidency has been such a disaster but also to warn us that the forces behind Bush's presidency will still be alive even after Bush et al. are gone. We need to understand where these neocons are coming from and what we can do about it.

Some good news:
Greenwald yesterday announced that, following Jane Hamsher's campaign, A Tragic Legacy made it to #1 on Amazon's list last evening, and today is at #2. He says, in his lovely, reasoned prose:

Exactly the same thing happened with my first book, How Would a Patriot Act? -- it was ignored almost completely by establishment media outlets (not a single review, television interview, etc.), but nonetheless was pushed to the top of Amazon and the NYT Best Seller-List exclusively as a result of blogs. And other books pushed almost entirely by blogs have achieved similar success.

One can debate the true influence of blogs and whether they will continue to grow in size and influence. But what seems beyond reasonable dispute is the fact that nothing can match bloggers and their readers in terms of political interest, intensity and energy. And, most importantly, the ability of blogs to be self-sustaining is growing rapidly.

I'm assuming he's talking about the good guys who are blogging. Yaay, bloggers!!!

Buy the Book!!

Jane Hamsher of firedoglake has a great plug for Glenn Greenwald's new book.

"Why," you say? Ms. Hamsher says

The response to his new book, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, on the part of institutional book review organs has been complete silence. Glenn’s presence in the blog world and the progressive movement, not to mention the work he does in Salon, is invaluable. No bloviating pundit wants to be deconstructed by Glenn Greenwald and right wing pants pissers think of him as a boogeyman on the level of Osama Bin Forgotten. But if we want our own voices to be promoted, to resonate and continue to have influence, we’ve got to step up and support them.

She says "Glenn shows up for us every day. Let's show up for Glenn."

So buy the book, already!!