Is anybody paying attention?

Think the anti-abortion side won this weekend? Think women are going to accept this Stupak stupidity on behalf of their sisters and nieces and daughters and granddaughters?
Listen to what they're saying:

Angry Mouse in Daily Kos:

My autonomy is not about your religious beliefs. My autonomy is not about your "concerns." My autonomy is not about your arbitrary belief that rape victims are entitled to reproductive health care, but women who "use it as contraception" or "change their minds" or "forget to use birth control" are somehow not entitled to reproductive health care.

I refuse to argue the minutia anymore. I refuse to beg for the right to be a full and equal citizen. I refuse to be taken for granted by the Democratic party, who tells me I have no choice but to vote Democrat in elections, and then congratulates itself for its big tent when it comes time to vote on legislation.

Don't tell me how you feel about abortion. I don't care how you feel about abortion.

Tell me how you feel about my rights. Tell me whether you believe I am a full and equal citizen. Tell me whether you really believe the Democratic party stands for women.

It is time for every member of the Democratic party to answer one simple question:

Do you believe in equal rights for women?

Jane Hamscher, in Huffington Post:

Democrats in Congress have just proudly signed a deal with the Catholic bishops which allows a bunch of old men who have spent the better part of the last century avoiding their own sexual issues to dictate access to abortion services in the House health care bill.

No tax dollars were going to go to pay for abortions, mind you, but now insurance companies that participate in the exchange can't even cover them, thanks to Democrat Bart Stupak. FDL's Jon Walker explains how it works:

If the insurance companies offering plans on the exchange are not allowed to turn down any customers, it means no basic insurance plan on the exchange could cover abortion. There would be no way to prevent that at least one of the plan’s customer would be be using affordability tax credits to help purchase the plan. So the effect is no plan sold on the exchange could offer abortion coverage as part of its basic package.


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-hamsher/naral-and-planned-parenth_b_349596.html&cp

MY question is: Is this even constitutional? Can women's rights be dismissed so completely and with no problem to anyone other than women facing heartbreaking choices?

I think Obama really should have concentrated on doing something like FDR did--putting people to work on projects restoring the infrastructure. JOBS JOBS JOBS. Instead, we have this steaming pile of crap they are calling a "health care" bill. It has nothing to do with health and even less with care. All that will remain is the bill.

Dear Mr. President

It's getting annoying, the way you can't send a letter to an elected official these days unless you agree to contribute to something. So...Here's my letter to President Obama. I'd send it through the Planned Parenthood site, but they have not made it possible. YEt. Here's my letter:

Dear Mr. President:

You campaigned on a promise to put reproductive health care at the center of your health care reform plan. Now it's time for you to make good on that commitment.

I am one of many who are outraged that the House of Representatives passed a bill that would make women worse off under health care reform than they are today. I am asking you to ensure that lawmakers, especially those in your party, support health care reform that protects women's access to reproductive care as the next round of debate and voting occurs in the Senate.

President Obama, without access to abortion care, and to comprehensive reproductive health care, there is no choice. I will not stand for that, and I need to know that you won't either.

Also, Mr. President, we can read. Specifically, we have read Taylor Marsh's column in HP today, which reads, in part: "It was Pres. Obama who opened the door to sell us out when he decided to put the Hyde Amendment in the budget, something Bill Clinton never did. But Mr. Obama didn't stop there. During the stimulus fight, at the first sign of displeasure, our president personally asked that contraceptives be taken out. Now the president seems ready to finish the job, with Democrats in the House helping him do it."
(Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/taylor-marsh/in-pelosis-house-64-democ_b_349769.html&cp).

You are not going to WIN anything if you do it on the backs of women!!

Thank you,

Xtreme English

Another great blog!

It just hasn't stopped this week:  Welcome to Scotland for the Senses, whose post yesterday was on the "green monster," kale!  I adore kale, and S4S has a great recipe for BAKED kale--she says,

I’m telling you, it’s tastier than popcorn and about a thousand times better for you. If you like the deep-fried crispy seaweed you can get in Chinese restaurants, this is a perfect substitute. Best eaten straight away to get the best crunch factor, but you can pack it up for a lunchtime snack as well.

Welcome to 20th Century Woman!

Golly....The most wonderful bloggers keep stopping by and saying hello this week.  I'm pleased to welcome 20th Century Woman, who turns out to be an artist--currently studying painting but in her words, "I don’t think of myself as a painter.  I went to art school when I was 50, and I majored in printmaking." Art school!  Major!

She has links to other artists, too--like her community college painting teacher, Lorna Libert, whom 20th CW describes as "a free spirit, spontaneous, cheerful, friendly, intelligent and pretty."  All of that?! 

I've gone to many different art CLASSES--the University of Minnesota (metal sculpture), the Minneapolis College of Art & Design (painting), Art Students League in NYC (anatomical drawing), the University of Iowa (watercolor), Washington Studio School (figure sculpting), Gallaudet University (hand building ceramics),  the Torpedo Factory (watercolor again) but unlike 20th CW I've never signed up and picked a major.  What a great idea!

I'm feeling a great rush of inspiration here. Art has saved my bacon many times, and I'm going back to it.  Grandma Moses started painting when she was 74. Do you think she ever wondered what the hey to do with herself when her eyesight got too wobbly for her embroidering?

But enough about me. Welcome, Ms. 20th Century Woman!  You've come bearing great gifts!!

Introducing....Cosmic Navel Lint!

Sometimes I just get very lucky...as when I encountered Cosmic Navel Lint, a blog from the UK. CNL was so kind as to comment on a couple of my posts yesterday, so I looked it up, and found today's post, immediately preceded by THIS one. Sooooo funny, and so original, too.  Thanks CNL!!
 

i write letters.....

here's one I just composed...on "retired life":

retired life....well....lessee....it's sort of like being 9 or 10 but with nobody riding your ass all day--do this, don't do that, wash your hands, don't slam the back door (boy, there was one....my father used to go ballistic if i slammed the back door). i don't need much more money than i had then....so far, i've got a roof over my head, and food in the fridge, and three laptops. what more could a person want? haven't had a car since 1991 (for which, thanks be), but i do have a cool bike that i bought at a thrift shop last year and fixed up. it makes a lovely drying rack for my smalls, too.

Lest you misunderestimate what happened at the polls yesterday,

here's DIGBY, who always has something very sensible to say:

The fatuous gasbags have settled on the theme that the Democrats suffered a devastating setback to their agenda on Tuesday. This is despite the fact that as Clyburn pointed out, the only candidates who were actually running on the national agenda were those running for congress --- and the Democrats won. Nonetheless, the election has been decreed to be a precursor to a Democratic rout in 2010 and, more importantly, the reason for that will be because the Democrats have been far, far too liberal for the country. As usual.

In other words, Repuglicans, YOU LOST!!

Answer: Because altar boys don't get pregnant

Yesterday's mail brought a request from Planned Parenthood to help fight back against the Catholic bishops, who are throwing their weight around to encourage Catholic parishioners to agitate for more abortion restrictions in the health care bill.  This clearly is the episcopal issue of choice (oops) these days. No matter that what the law of the land is, or the opinion of compassionate people everywhere, they are totally against abortion (and worse yet, birth control) for women. 

Why, you ask?  See above.

More Engineer's Guide to Cats....

thankx to ronniecat for involuntarily sharing this....

Dear Diary....

November 2, 2009

Hard work today--successfully restrained myself from throwing my laptop through the window, and got the work done, too.

Plus, Squeak threw up blood!  He probably heard us talking about my niece, who rescued a stray dog from the street in Naples yesterday.  As she was driving around it, it raised its poor head and looked straight into her eyes.  Being a kind person, she stopped traffic, got out and wrapped the dog in her sweatshirt, and hauled him home.  There are no English-speaking vets in Naples, so she had to wait until this morning to take him into the vet on post.  Last night, though, she said he had a broken leg and was vomiting blood.  I imagine he is on the rainbow bridge, as my niece calls it, by now--if not on the other side already.  But maybe not. I remember Josh surviving a hit by a panel truck back in the 70s.  He managed to limp back to the shop and stand swaying in the back, where the overhead doors were wide open to the outside and fresh air. He had blood running from his nose and mouth. Mary, who was working in the back, said "There's something the matter with that dog!" Off to the vet with him, and the prognosis was grim.  But HE survived.

Meanwhile, Squeak is at the vet here now, and the vet is going to do some blood work. What? No xrays?  No MRIs? Probably a good case of parasites. Squeak loves to supplement his diet with whatever he can find on the sidewalk or in the tall grass. He's been vomiting regularly since last Friday, when they installed all new carpet!  I yelled at him today for barfing on the carpet again, and woddya know, he directed his next four throwups to the kitchen tile!

So it's dog vomit day in Naples and DC.

I am not a dog lover like some.  And it always amazes some dog lovers that their dogs come to sit by me or lie at my feet when I visit. I disapprove of the dogs lollygagging on the furniture and eating food off the kitchen counter. I disapprove of the dogs' lack of obedience and good doggy manners. But ha.  The dogs still like me--more, it seems, than they like others who are more tolerant.

It's the day George Bernard Shaw died, at the age of 94. I was in the 8th grade at St. Mary's in Fargo that day, and I had never heard of George Bernard Shaw. I always thought he was English, but ha!  he was IRISH.

Yup, that's what we need, all right...more WAR we can't pay for

One of my favorite columnists anywhere, Glenn Greenwald, wrote this yesterday in Salon.com. Here are some highlights:

Something very unusual happened on The Washington Post Editorial Page today: they deigned to address a response from one of their readers, who "challenged [them] to explain what he sees as a contradiction in [their] editorial positions": namely, the Post demands that Obama's health care plan not be paid for with borrowed money, yet the very same Post Editors vocally support escalation in Afghanistan without specifying how it should be paid for. "Why is it okay to finance wars with debt, asks our reader, but not to pay for health care that way?"

Greenwald confirms what lots of us are thinking:

We have absolutely no ability to pay for our Afghan adventure other than by expanding our ignominious status as the largest and most insatiable debtor nation which history has ever known. That debt gravely bothers Beltway elites like the Post editors when it comes to providing ordinary Americans with basic services (which Post editors already enjoy), but it's totally irrelevant to them when it comes to re-fueling the vicarious joys of endless war.

Yeah.  Read Greenwald's whole article. 

Martha Argerich plays Chopin, Polonaise N. 6 l'heroique

And younger still...

Martha Argerich plays Scarlatti, sonata K. 141

Here she is at a younger age.  What a marvel!

Martha Argerich performs Bach Partita No. 2 at Verbier festival

Martha Argerich is an incomparable Argentine pianist. She shuns the press and the limelight, but to see and hear her play is to be in the presence of music itself.

DC people won't stop to listen to purty music

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Not let kidz listen, neither. (see previous post)

Perception....

Good old Darlene. She sent this today:

A true story.



Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approximately 2000 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.


4 minutes later:


the violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk..


6 minutes:


A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.


10 minutes:


A 3-year old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.


45 minutes:


The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.


1 hour:


He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.


This is a true story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people's priorities. The questions raised: in a common place environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?


One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made.... How many other things are we missing?

[XE here] Every Saturday morning, two guys play outside the Gallery Place metro--one on violin, the other on some kind of electric guitar/keyboard thing (dunno what it is--never seen one before). Last Saturday, they were playing Vivaldi's "Four Seasons." Their playing was so beautiful, it stopped lots of people in their tracks, but even so, only a few people contributed. still, what a fabulous gift....

Some of the pickle bucket players are great, too--it costs me an average of $3 just to walk down the street here....NEED to win that lottery!


Mary Ellen Carew

Angelic face in the crowd....

Henry sent this trailer for "This Is Not a Show" by R.E.M. at the Olympia Theater in Dublin. The angelic young face appearing about 49 seconds in, just before the on-screen words "is the sound track to your life," belongs to George, my grandson. The lad gets around!


New This Is Not A Show Trailer by Bill Berg-Hillinger

R.E.M. | MySpace Music Videos

WHAT "huge COLA increase in January 2009"??

OK...I may be old and funny, but I'm not quite as gaga as to have missed any huge cost-of-living jump in my Social Security payment in January, 2009. As I remember, we got the news last winter--rather shortly after the Inaugural, in fact--that there would be NO COLA increases for TWO YEARS: 2009 and 2010. This is not what I would call a COLA increase. COLA increases show up in your SS payment. Mine has held rock steady in 2009. The last increase of any kind in Social Security I got was in 2008. Quibble all you want, but we got zip in January of 2009, contrary to what I've read twice now in different news outlets. These articles are straight from the word processors of people who are either very young and don't know anything much or liars.

I read this morning that the President wants to give each and every one of us old crocks a one-time bonus of $250. Isn't that nice? I don't know how they're timing this, but it seems the bonus will appear in 2010. And the teabaggers have gone ballistic wondering just how "we" can afford this "socialistic" nonsense. The cause of their total astonishment is the apparent fact that to cut a $250 check for each of our country's aged, sick, and permanently incapacitated will cost $13 billion dollars! Mercy! It cost "us" several hundreds of billion dollars to ease the pain of bankers, white-collar employees on Wall Street, and Big US carmakers, not that Jessica or Joe the Line Worker in Detroit/Hamtramck will see a dime of it. Even there, the big payouts go to the executive suite.

But what's my problem? $250 is, as my dear, witty father-in-law used to say, "better than a poke in the eye." Of course, that will be $250 MINUS TAXES, don't forget. That's one thing us poor old folks are good at--paying taxes on every freaking penny so that the rich folks can avoid paying any taxes at all.

So, hmmm...what will $250 do RIGHT NOW, before they raise the prices of everything? (And aren't you just flabbergasted to learn that there was NO INFLATION this past year? Where are they talking about, do you know?) But I digress.

Go ahead, seniors! Take that 250 smackers (minus taxes) and FILL THOSE PRESCRIPTIONS! Get your teeth cleaned! Buy a used bicycle and use it for a walker! Take a trip to Florida on the Greyhound bus. There's talk of another payment for next year (2011 or 2012), when you can buy a return ticket!!

Like, Ha Ha....

One afternoon last week, I was heading toward the escalator at my local metro stop, and a cluster of teens fresh out of junior high school classes for the day burst ahead of me onto the moving steps and began their descent to the trains. One of the kids, a skinny boy about my height (medium), was trying to sit on the moving hand rail for a free ride, when the escalator stopped. The kid hopped on the railing, slid down the black rubber "bannister," and ran fast toward the gates. Was he feeling guilty? Afraid he'd get caught stopping the escalator? One of the sights in my neighborhood is young men running like crazy out of a store with merchandise in hand. Petty crime is great exercise, apparently.

You don't need much proof that lots of early teens act like jackasses until they either grow out of it or get passed on to juvenile court. As an adult, it's quite annoying to watch them throw their empty soda cans and cigarette boxes on the sidewalks, stuff their faces on the metro ("no eating or drinking"), and mess up public transporation with graffiti and stupid teen tricks. Since this is DC, there are bullets or knives involved all too often.

One of my sisters-in-law is from a tiny town in the western half of North Dakota. Her cousin lived in L.A., and his early teen-aged son was in such constant trouble for vandalism and other offenses there that the authorities suggested they send or take him "back home." My sister-in-law's parents offered to take him in, so back to ND he came. I asked her a few months after his return how he was doing.

"Oh, fine," she said.

"Is he settling down? No more vandalism?"

"No, he's still at it, but you know, folks in [hometown] just expect kids will do that, so nobody pays much attention."

And sure enough, the kid stopped after a while. Maybe petty crime wasn't as much fun if it didn't cause a ruckus. Or maybe he just found other interests like sports (you can almost always play on a team in a very small town--they need all the bodies they can get) or girls.

Watching that kid dash away from the escalator reminded me of all that. But there's lots more involved in big cities now than just low tolerance for youthful hijinks. Bob Herbert has an excellent column in today's NYTimes: "Behind the Laughter."

Herbert talks about Conan O'Brien's needling of Newark Mayor Cory Booker.

O’Brien joked that the mayor was establishing a program to improve the health of the city’s residents, then deadpanned: “The health care program would consist of a bus ticket out of Newark.”

He did a video bit in which he praised the city’s “thriving arts scene” (while showing a graffiti-scarred wall); its “four-star lodging” (shots of abandoned, gutted, rusting vehicles); and its “world-class live theater” (a peep show).

Conan is just trying to be funny, I guess. And his audience (or at least his laugh track) finds it all amusing. Herbert, however, points out this [emphasis mine]:

In Newark, where some of the streets do look as bad as the scenes that were part of Conan’s comedy bit, the unemployment rate is 14.7 percent. Keeping kids in high school long enough to graduate is difficult. Drug dealing is a fallback employment option for men and boys who can’t find legitimate work.

Other cities have the same problems, some to a greater degree. So what are we doing? While mulling the prospect of sending up to 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, we’ve stood idly by, mute as a stone, as school districts across the nation have bounced 40,000 teachers out of their jobs over the past year.

That should tell you all you need to know about twisted national priorities.

Even as teachers by the tens of thousands are walking the plank to unemployment, we’re learning, as The Times reported last week, that one in every 10 young male dropouts is locked up in jail or juvenile detention. As if that weren’t gruesome enough, we find that the figure for blacks is one in four. What would it take to get the perpetual crisis facing these young people onto the radar screens of the rest of America?

And in case you haven't heard about all the teachers being laid off, Paul Krugman had an enlightening column in the NYTimes last week: "The Uneducated American."

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States economy lost 273,000 jobs last month. Of those lost jobs, 29,000 were in state and local education, bringing the total losses in that category over the past five months to 143,000. That may not sound like much, but education is one of those areas that should, and normally does, keep growing even during a recession. Markets may be troubled, but that’s no reason to stop teaching our children. Yet that’s exactly what we’re doing.

There’s no mystery about what’s going on: education is mainly the responsibility of state and local governments, which are in dire fiscal straits. Adequate federal aid could have made a big difference. But while some aid has been provided, it has made up only a fraction of the shortfall. In part, that’s because back in February centrist senators insisted on stripping much of that aid from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a k a the stimulus bill.

As a result, education is on the chopping block. And laid-off teachers are only part of the story. Even more important is the way that we’re shutting off opportunities.

For example, the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on the plight of California’s community college students. For generations, talented students from less affluent families have used those colleges as a stepping stone to the state’s public universities. But in the face of the state’s budget crisis those universities have been forced to slam the door on this year’s potential transfer students. One result, almost surely, will be lifetime damage to many students’ prospects — and a large, gratuitous waste of human potential.

Teabaggers, pay attention! Your beloved 'Murica-loving', tax-hating representatives are doing their best to bring the country down.

My favorite banana story

I put this in a comment on Major Reader's recent post on opening a banana "the monkey way" (see above video). However, I love this story. Those who know me may find I have repeated it 1000 times, but so what? Why get old if you can't repeat your old stories??? Here it is:

One of the women in my reception at 1890 Randolph tells us that she and her numerous siblings had never eaten bananas in all their young lives until after WW2 ended, and their mother came home one day bearing a bag of groceries containing a bunch of bananas. Mom was highly excited about being able to find bananas on sale in Minnesota at long last, and she pulled the bunch out and left it on the kitchen table for her children to admire while she went to the hallway to hang up her coat. While she was in the hall, the phone rang, and she answered it and chatted at some length.

When she came back to the kitchen, there were no bananas on the table.

"Where are the bananas?" she said.

"We ate them," the children said.

"But where are the peelings?"

"Peelings?"

"Well, yes, you have to peel them. You can't eat the peelings!"

"We don't like bananas," they said.

Happy Almost Friday.....P.S. My favorite is #10

This came today from M'reen. Thanks, kiddo....

This may be a little old but it's short and still may give you a smile!


1. A day without sunshine is like night.

2. On the other hand, you have different fingers.

3. 42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.

4. 99 percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.

5. Remember, half the people you know are below average.

6. He who laughs last, thinks slowest.

7. Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.

8. The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese in the trap.

9. Support bacteria. They're the only culture most people have.

10. A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

11. Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.

12. If you think nobody cares, try missing a couple of payments.

13. How many of you believe in psycho-kinesis? Raise my hand.

14. OK, so what's the speed of dark?

15. When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.

16. Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.

17. How much deeper would the ocean be without sponges?

18. Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

19. What happens if you get scared half to death, twice?

20. Why do psychics have to ask you your name?

21. Inside every older person is a younger person wondering, "What the heck happened?"

22. Just remember--if the world didn't suck, we would all fall off.

23. Light travels faster than sound. That's why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

O Canada!! Fall, 2009, version

To Ronnie, Fenella, and Sherwood (well....almost canadian), et al.

Smartest Thing I Heard All Week--And It's Only Monday

In my class in positive psychology this week, we're thinking about "ultimate currency"--which the teacher tells us is HAPPINESS.

One of the students pointed out this link to an article in an Australian newspaper.

Leave it to the French to have something smart to say about how to live your life. As the article's author, Henry Samuel, says, "FRANCE has long been famed for its love of the good life - the land of wine, cheese and generous holidays."

French President Sarkozy is pushing the idea of happiness and well-being as a better indicator of a society's progress than the GNP.

Mr Sarkozy said he would ''fight to make all international organisations change their statistical system''.

He said: ''A great revolution is waiting for us. For years, people said that finance was a formidable creator of wealth, only to discover one day that it accumulated so many risks that the world almost plunged into chaos.

''The crisis doesn't only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so.''

"Let Us Begin Again"

William Rivers Pitt, in today's Truthout says this, with which I heartily agree (emphasis is mine):

Putting aside any and all grievances you and I may hold regarding the acts and activities of the Obama administration, you have to admit, it is a brighter day. I actually voted for President Obama twice - calm down, once in the primary and once in the general - for a variety of reasons, but none more than this: I don't think Obama can change everything that needs changing.

I don't think any one election or any one president can repair the damage done over the last eight years, not to mention the damage done over the last half-century. I believe Obama has done much good work, and will do much good work in the years to come, but the challenges we face as a nation and planet are so daunting, it is fantasy to believe this president, or any one president, can address everything before us.

"Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards," said German sociologist Max Weber. "It requires passion as well as perspective." My perspective, and the final reason I voted for Obama, is as Mr. Weber said. The process of change takes lifetimes, it is slow, it is grueling, it is excruciating, and it is filled with defeats and setbacks. Especially now, in this degraded age, when only half the country votes, when the vast majority of young adults know all the contestants on "American Idol" but can't name three Supreme Court justices, don't know the name of their representative, don't know the names of their senators, don't know about Vietnam, or the Cold War, or Nixon, or Johnson, or Reagan, don't know history and how it has long, long teeth, don't know those teeth have been sunk into their flesh, and don't have any idea how to do anything about any of it.

People are unbelievably cynical now, as voter turnout statistics can attest to. A lot of people don't believe things can change, so they don't bother trying to try to even dare to imagine it ever could. That's why Obama got my vote: he has that once-in-a-lifetime gift that lets him elevate people, inspire them, fire them up, and make them believe change is possible. Before anything can change, people have to be convinced there is actually hope, that they can make a difference, that a difference can be made.

Obama, to me, is the first step on a very long road. He's not going to fix everything, but he is a good start, the best start I've seen win that office in my life, and even with all the darkness and everything that has gone so horribly wrong, that is a light to absolutely celebrate. He has the power to inspire, to make people believe change is possible, and I am telling you now, no change is possible if people don't believe it can happen ... but all things are possible if people do, and that is what President Obama has the potential to do and to be: the motivating factor that changes doubt to hope. Nothing is possible without that, and everything is possible with it.

Shame on SNL for mocking the president's achievements in his first months in office. The Truthout article has a long list of his achievements. I hope you'll read the while thing.

Things to think about....

DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU



THAT INCLUDES THE OCEAN



TOP TIPS

Hilarious

Skywatching with Goats - from Esther Garvi aka Ishtar's Ark

One of my favorite blogs originates in Niger. It's written by a young woman who manages the Eden Foundation. Not only is her writing simple and wonderful, her photography blows me away. Photos of what? Solar cooking, indigenous plants and foods, puppies, horses, goats, children, life in Niger, visits to Sweden. Today's post, Skywatching with Goats is a perfect example. The photos of Nigerien sunsets with goats silhouetted against the bright twilight are bittersweet. All of EGAIA's fans have had goats on our minds these days, and one goat, Allis, in particular. Today's pictures show Allis on her feet and moving around. Happy news! Earlier this week, Allis gave birth prematurely to two twins, one of whom was stillborn. The survivor, Alfonso, was a beautiful blue-eyed heartbreaker of a kid, but with Allis totally exhausted and unable to nurse him, he died, too. And the most recent other photo of Allis showed her looking like a goner. But she's better. And Niger's sunsets are without parallel. Thank you, Esther, Anette, Tabita, Arne, Allis, Esmeralda, Sahara and Kalahari, Sheba and the seven, for sharing your rich life.

Zombie Reaganism

Truthout has a wonderful post today, and I hope you'll click the link and read it all. If you are as baffled as I am over the dumbing down of the American public and the nastiness of American discourse recently, and if you want to know just HOW and WHEN liberal became the hated "librul" seen on demonstrators' signs, Henry A. Giroux's thoughts are enlightening. He says,

Part of the answer to the enduring quality of such a destructive politics can be found in the lethal combination of money, power and education that the right wing has had a stranglehold on since the early 1970's and how it has used its influence to develop an institutional infrastructure and ideological apparatus to produce its own intellectuals, disseminate ideas, and eventually control most of the commanding heights and institutions in which knowledge is produced, circulated and legitimated. This is not simply a story about the rise of mean-spirited buffoons such as Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage.

He writes,

...one starting point for understanding this problem is what has been called the Powell Memo, released on August 23, 1971, and written by Lewis F. Powell, who would later be appointed as a member of the Supreme Court of the United States. Powell sent the memo to the US Chamber of Commerce with the title "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System."

Giroux continues,

For Powell, the war against liberalism and a substantive democracy was primarily a pedagogical and political struggle designed both to win the hearts and minds of the general public and to build a power base capable of eliminating those public spaces, spheres and institutions that nourish and sustain what Samuel Huntington would later call (in a 1975 study on the "governability of democracies" by the Trilateral Commission) an "excess of democracy."[5]

...

Any attempt to understand and engage the current right-wing assault on all vestiges of the social contract, the social state and democracy itself will have to begin with challenging this massive infrastructure, which functions as one of the most powerful teaching machines we have seen in the United States, a teaching machine that produces a culture that is increasingly poisonous and detrimental not just to liberalism, but to the formative culture that makes an aspiring democracy possible. This presence of this ideological infrastructure extending from the media to other sites of popular education suggests the need for a new kind of debate, one that is not limited to isolated issues such as health care, but is more broad-based and fundamental, a debate about how power, inequality and money constrict the educational, economic and political conditions that make democracy possible.

Vast right-wing conspiracy, anyone?

MoneyMoneyMoneyMoney....Goop!

Goop has a

wonderful newsletter today. It's on money. As Gwyneth says,
Here, a collection of thoughts on the topic of investing from two bankers, a money coach and an accountant. Some illuminating concepts, histories and practical advice for the layman in these uncertain times.

I always enjoy this website: it has something different each time on one of its major themes: Make, Go, Get, Do, Be, See. The last time XtremeEnglish featured anything from Goop was last month when we showed Goop's YouTube video on making bibimbop.

There are no videos for this money newsletter, alas. (Do you think I could throw a handful of bills out the window and video them as they sail away?) But it's full of advice from Goop's wise people--many, if not all, of whom are friends or acquaintances of Goop's originator, Gwyneth Paltrow. You can subscribe to the FREE newsletter yourself. Just go to the Goop website and sign up.

UPDATE: Michael Moore's movie on capitolism is about to come out this weekend in DC, and I can't wait to see it. I'm sure the movie will say a lot about much of what is said in this newsletter, which appears to be written by capitalists. I personally don't agree exactly with what one of the contributors says about commodities. A woman I know makes a ton of $$ by trading commodities. But she's an expert and has been doing this for years in a serious way. Anyway....
what do I know about money? Not much. That's why I like things like Goop's newsletter. It provides food for thought on many areas of life.

UPDATE: and yes, she's an OLD woman!!

Baucus, Conrad, et al.: Daily Kos comments

I am having a hard time digesting the fact that Kent Conrad, D-ND, was one of the DEMOCRATIC PARTY senators who brought the p.o. down. I grew up in ND. What the hey is that effing turkey thinking? I turned to Daily Kos for comments on the public option fiasco engineered by Baucus, Conrad, et al. Here's what it says:

Public Option Outlook after Today

by mcjoan

Tue Sep 29, 2009 at 05:30:04 PM PDT

One thing that that's clear from today's Finance Committee votes on the public option: Kent Conrad is the problem for the Dems. He provided the cover today for Lincoln, who was virtually invisible, to vote against the Schumer "level playing field" public option that would have done away with Conrad's supposed problem with Rockefeller's amendment--that it was tied to Medicare rates. If that was truly Conrad's big problem with the bill, he should have had no problem with Schumer's bill.

Obviously, he's the anti-public option problem in the Democratic caucus, if you take Baucus at his illogical word that he supports the public option, but had to vote against it because it didn't have enough votes. But, on the other side, the most conservative of the committees to take up healthcare reform had 10 Dems supporting some form of public option--that's more than I think anyone thought they'd get. Rockefeller told Ed Schultz today that he was suprised to have gotten eight votes for his.

Bottom line, the Finance Committee is going to pass out a bill without a public option, unless Rockefeller and Cantwell do indeed decide to oppose it and can find a third Dem (assuming Snowe will vote with the majority). But it's also coming out of SFC with a strong majority of Democrats who will vote for the public option on the floor.

Which leaves us with a couple of questions, as posed by Ezra:

There are two questions here. The first is "60 votes for what?" Do they not have 60 votes in favor of a health-care plan that includes a public option? Or do they not have 60 votes against a filibuster of a health-care plan that includes a public option? If it's the former, that's okay: You only need 51. If it's the latter, that's a bigger problem. But I'd be interested to hear which Democrats will publicly commit to filibustering Barack Obama's health-care reform bill. If that's such a popular position back home, why aren't more Democrats voicing it loudly?

Second, why give up the public option now? If these moderates want to kill the measure, let them get full credit for doing so on the floor. They can sponsor an amendment to strip it out of the final legislation and go home to their districts having played a clear and undeniable role in the elimination of the public option.

What Democrat is going to stand up and say out loud that he (or she) will join a filibuster with the Republicans against a public option? But they're getting the easy way out on that question, with Kent Conrad (and Max Baucus) to hide behind.

So what can progressives do? Progressives in the Senate need to take a page from their House colleagues. Tell Harry Reid and Max Baucus that there aren't 60 votes for public option-less bill. There are certainly more Democrats who support the public option than who do not. With that strong majority, Reid has no excuse not to be an enforcer over breaking a filibuster.

The other thing today demonstrated is that the Dems have 50 Dem votes for reconciliation. There's really not much of an excuse at this point for a public option NOT to be included in the bill Reid brings to the Senate floor. Particularly considering that it's going to be in the House version of the bill.

Lida at the Arts Club of Washington, D.C.

On Wednesday of last week, Cathy and I went to yet another of Lida Moser's shows, this one at the MacFeely Gallery of the Arts Club of Washington, D.C. It's always a wonderful experience to be in Lida's presence--even if she's not there in person. A bad fall last month on her 89th birthday has sidelined her at home while she recuperates. Microphone in hand, however, she and her walker did manage to address the crowd on opening night two weeks ago. As Lida's friend Lenny says, "Tough New Yorker." Indeed!



Lenny--F. Lennox Campello--who blogs as Daily Campello Art News, reported:

This almost 90-year-old photographer is not only one of the most respected American photographers of the 20th century, but also a pioneer in the field of photojournalism. Her photography has been in the middle of a revival and rediscovery of vintage photojournalism, and has sold...at Christie's auctions and continues to be collected by both museums and private collectors worldwide. In a career spanning over 60 years, Moser has produced a body of works consisting of thousands of photographs and photographic assemblages that defy categorization and genre or label assignment.

Additionally, Canadian television a couple of years ago finished filming a documentary about her life; the second in the last few years, and Moser’s work is now in the collection of many museums worldwide.

She was once called the "grandmother of American street photography" by an art critic, which prompted a quick rebuttal by Moser, who called the writer's editor and told him that she wasn't the "fucking grandmother of anything or anyone, and would he [the writer] ever describe Ansel Adams or any other male photographer as the 'grandfather' of any style."

Tough New Yorker.

The show is a reprise of her contributions to a major 2001 exhibit of contemporary realist artist John Koch's paintings at the New York Historical Society. The exhibition notes on the Historical Society's website include this remark:

Koch's work resisted the trend toward abstraction prevalent in his time. He chronicled a variety of relationships as experienced in the mid-twentieth century: friends, lovers, spouses, artists and models, teachers and students (even apartment dwellers and contractors!). Many of the paintings record members of John and Dora's social circle, most of them artists, writers and musicians, who participated in their European-style salon, an oasis of high culture and refinement in New York City.

Lida's unique photographic vision is made for elegant, contemplative spaces in which visitors can savor her love of capturing extraordinary artists in their everyday milieu. Lida was enamored of the MacFeely Gallery space and the whole building, and so were we. She feels the atmosphere fit with Koch's own elegant home in NYC. Koch (1909-1978) and his wife, Dora Zaslavsky, were friends of Lida's. She took many photos of both John and Dora and his work in their apartment. She says, "They were a sweet, LOVING couple--to each other, to other people, and to his art."

Cathy resting in one of the galleries.


Simplicity and light.







Get well soon, Lida! We love you!

Darlene shares the good stuff!

The incomparable Darlene, of Darlene's Hodgepodge, emailed this yesterday. Darlene is 83 years old and not willing to give up. Her series on the health care debate is without peer. She finds the good stuff and posts it for all of us to read. Thank you, Darlene. (If nothing else, I can repost your work and share it with my (Canadian) readers. Well, they're not all Canadians...there's at least one in California, which is fast sinking as a real state.)

This item, however, it not just about health care. It's about how one beautiful, idealistic, intelligent, and compassionate young man has found himself in a supreme pickle: Being president of the United States, which has sunk into a strange, un-American inertia. The author is Bill Maher, again, at his best:

New Rule: If America can't get its act together, it must lose the bald eagle as our symbol and replace it with the YouTube video of the puppy that can't get up. As long as we're pathetic, we might as well act like it's cute. I don't care about the president's birth certificate, I do want to know what happened to "Yes we can." Can we get out of Iraq? No. Afghanistan? No. Fix health care? No. Close Gitmo? No. Cap-and-trade carbon emissions? No. The Obamas have been in Washington for ten months and it seems like the only thing they've gotten is a dog.

Well, I hate to be a nudge, but why has America become a nation that can't make anything bad end, like wars, farm subsidies, our oil addiction, the drug war, useless weapons programs - oh, and there's still 60,000 troops in Germany - and can't make anything good start, like health care reform, immigration reform, rebuilding infrastructure. Even when we address something, the plan can never start until years down the road. Congress's climate change bill mandates a 17% cut in greenhouse gas emissions... by 2020! Fellas, slow down, where's the fire? Oh yeah, it's where I live, engulfing the entire western part of the United States!

We might pass new mileage standards, but even if we do, they wouldn't start until 2016. In that year, our cars of the future will glide along at a breathtaking 35 miles-per-gallon. My goodness, is that even humanly possible? Cars that get 35 miles-per-gallon in just six years? Get your head out of the clouds, you socialist dreamer! "What do we want!? A small improvement! When do we want it!? 2016!"

When it's something for us personally, like a laxative, it has to start working now. My TV remote has a button on it now called "On Demand". You get your ass on my TV screen right now, Jon Cryer, and make me laugh. Now! But when it's something for the survival of the species as a whole, we phase that in slowly.

Folks, we don't need more efficient cars. We need something to replace cars. That's what's wrong with these piddly, too-little-too-late half-measures that pass for "reform" these days. They're not reform, they're just putting off actually solving anything to a later day, when we might by some miracle have, a) leaders with balls, and b) a general populace who can think again. Barack Obama has said, "If we were starting from scratch, then a single-payer system would probably make sense." So let's start from scratch.

Even if they pass the shitty Max Baucus health care bill, it doesn't kick in for 4 years, during which time 175,000 people will die because they're not covered, and about three million will go bankrupt from hospital bills. We have a pretty good idea of the Republican plan for the next three years: Don't let Obama do anything. What kills me is that that's the Democrats' plan, too.

We weren't always like this. Inert. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law and 11 months later seniors were receiving benefits. During World War II, virtually overnight FDR had auto companies making tanks and planes only. In one eight year period, America went from JFK's ridiculous dream of landing a man on the moon, to actually landing a man on the moon.

This generation has had eight years to build something at Ground Zero. An office building, a museum, an outlet mall, I don't care anymore. I'm tempted to say that, symbolically, all America can do lately is keep digging a hole, but Ground Zero doesn't represent a hole. It is a hole. America: Home of the Freedom Pit. Ironically, it's spitting distance from Wall Street, where they knock down buildings a different way - through foreclosure.

That's the ultimate sign of our lethargy: millions thrown out of their homes, tossed out of work, lost their life savings, retirements postponed - and they just take it. 30% interest on credit cards? It's a good thing the Supreme Court legalized sodomy a few years ago.

Why can't we get off our back? Is it something in the food? Actually, yes. I found out something interesting researching last week's editorial on how we should be taxing the unhealthy things Americans put into their bodies, like sodas and junk foods and gerbils. Did you know that we eat the same high-fat, high-carb, sugar-laden shit that's served in prisons and in religious cults to keep the subjects in a zombie-like state of lethargic compliance? Why haven't Americans arisen en masse to demand a strong public option? Because "The Bachelor" is on. We're tired and our brain stems hurt from washing down French fries with McDonald's orange drink.

The research is in: high-fat diets makes you lazy and stupid. Rats on an American diet weren't motivated to navigate their maze and once in the maze they made more mistakes. And, instead of exercising on their wheel, they just used it to hang clothes on. Of course we can't ban assault rifles - we're the first generation too lazy to make its own coffee. We're the generation that invented the soft chocolate chip cookie: like a cookie, only not so exhausting to chew. I ask you, if the food we're eating in America isn't making us stupid, how come the people in Carl's Jr. ads never think to put a napkin over their pants?

Bill Maher is host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher"

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-if-america-cant_b_299383.html"

And here is one of my favorites from Darlene's Hodgepodge, September 11, 2009. Be sure to click the link so you can see the cartoon:

It's The Money Stupid

I thought this article on Truthout was a funny 'tongue in cheek' rant that simplifies why we should have health care reform. If you don't think it's funny, just look at the facts it contains. Facts are still stubborn things.


( I have edited it a tad. If you want to read the entire article here is the link:

http://www.truthout.org/090909A?print

by: John Cory, t r u t h o u t | Perspective


The media tells me that health reform is a very complicated issue, that it is hard to understand and even harder to explain to simple-minded and politically unsophisticated people like me. It is about money and costs and free-market and big government socialists versus real America, or something like that.

So, I ask: How can the majority of other industrialized nations manage to provide affordable health care to their citizens?

The fabulous media roll their eyes and show me the following Organization for Economic Development (OECD) report:

Total health care spending per person as of 2007:

US: $7,290
UK: $2,992
Japan: $2,581
Canada: $3,895
France: $3,601
The average OECD expenditure: $2,964


Next question: If other countries spend less than half of what the US spends (on average) with good results, where does all our money go?

This is where my neat-o media suddenly points across the room at the man jumping up and down about wanting his country back or the lady hollering about the Muslim socialist in the White House. Look, look they say, Jerry Springer politics is so entertaining!

But I still want to know where all that money goes. Don't you?

We spend twice the money on health care as most other countries and we are supposed to just accept this as the cost of a free market, the price of being American? Let's face it folks, if health care was manufacturing or Walmart, the jobs and services would already have been outsourced to the cheapest foreign competitor.

I'm not a journalist or a particularly educated guy, but golly, gee whiz Batman, it seems to me that somebody is getting ripped off here - and that somebody is, us.

Here's more figures I hear tossed around without examination: The administrative costs of Medicare run about 3 percent while the corporate health insurance industry administrative costs hover at 30 percent.

How can that be? I thought the government was really bad at managing anything while private enterprise is expert at cost containment. But the businessmen require ten times as much overhead costs as big government politicians?

Whatever happened to the old adage "follow the money?" Who in our media or journalist-pundit class is willing to give up the ratings gold of raucous town hall meetings to investigate where our money is going?

How much of that $7,290 per person in the US goes to exorbitant CEO salaries? How much goes to lobbyist funding to deregulate the insurance industry? How much is waste and fraud? How much of that money is actual medical treatment?

This is America, the greatest nation with the best health care in the world. I know, because my TV tells me so. But something is not right here. Something is off.

America is the home of innovative capitalism. Europe is a bunch of socialistic democratic republics. How can they provide health care at a lower cost? How do they get lower drug prices than we do? Why can't we?

Lift one rock and you find more and more. Medical bankruptcy comprises 50 percent of all bankruptcies nationally. And 80 percent of medical bankruptcy comes from people who have insurance.

Treatment clinics set up by Remote Area Medical on American soil from California to Kentucky just to provide basic health care to those who cannot afford it. Think of that: A medical organization that specializes in Third World underdeveloped countries has to fill a need in America, the wealthiest country in the world.

Is this what we've come to? The value of a healthy life is determined by deductibles? Does the value of a life have a monetary cap? Is life itself a pre-existing condition? The corporations that sell insurance think so. They sat before Congress and justified "rescission" as a cost-effective management tool, and no matter the examples of ruined lives shown to them, when asked how many of those executives would put a halt to these practices, not one manicured hand was raised. No need to fear government death panels - they're already here in tailored suits and silk smiles that say, "Show me the money."

US: $7,290 - the average: $2,964 - results: Quality is fairly equal. How can that be?
It's always about the money.

Wotta week!

Folks, do you ever just WONDER how in touch with reality the people are who think they are running things?

Emily's List sent a message tonight about the urgency of electing more WOMEN to Congress. The message includes this gem:

During debate of health care amendments involving maternity care, GOP Sen. Jon Kyl (AZ) made an unbelievable statement: "I don't need maternity care. And, so requiring that to be on my insurance policy is something that I don't need and will make the policy more expensive."

Without missing a beat, EMILY's List alum Sen. Debbie Stabenow (MI) fired back: "...I think your mom probably did."

Ever consider women, Senator Kyl? We find time to vote while we're having babies.

But the biggest jaw-dropper is THIS quote from the September 28, 2009, issue of New York magazine:

In an article by Robert Kolker, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York is quoted as saying

"Sex is not a human right, even if modern culture has made it appear that way."

Huh?

A little further on in the article, the Cardinal says,

God made me with a particular soft spot in my heart for a martini.

I'll bet. The Cardinal is a regular good sport. And good old God, too, always thinking of ways for Cardinals to lighten the load of weird thinking they have to haul around.

Happy birthday, dear Sally....happy birthday tooo YOOOO!!

Our Sally is inching toward another demographic crossover, these days--a BIG one--and she's still the delightful person she's always been, even from her first moments. Most babies yell and cry after they're born, but not Sally...she looked all around and sucked her fingers noisily all the way from the delivery room to our room at St. Alexius in Bismarck. Sally was born at suppertime, and she was looking for the dinner cart. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration. She really had no experience with dinner carts in a hospital, but SOMETHING was telling her it was time to eat.

Anyway, here's to you, dear Sally. You've brought us lots of joy and happiness in your sojourn on this planet as a member of our family. I can't imagine now, looking at "Dirty Dancing," why we got so upset when you snuck off to Cedar Rapids with your friends to see it when you were in high school. and I know all about the MUSHROOMS...(I think that was you and Suzanne, but I'm getting old and can't quite recall all the details.)

Thanks for being such a wonderful wife, mother, sister, and daughter. We love you. Ad multos annos!!!

Deaf Driver

this guy is sooooo funny!

kids vs marshmallow

My former neighbor posted this on FB, saying "How can you not love this?"

today is somebody's birthday....

i looked and looked at the date this morning....i knew it was somebody's birthday, but whose? ah! the light dawned...it's sarah's, of course. sarah was born on september 17, 1935, in grand forks, north dakota. we entered the convent on the same day. i left five years later, and she stayed, becoming novice director, finishing her masters program in mythology, studying film-making in chicago and NYC. she died in january and was buried on ground hog's day, 1985. here's a poem i wrote then:

Groundhog’s Day

You cast no shadow
The day you left the ground
Though light poured into light
Inundating trees, houses, our faces
A celebration of all keen air,
Of all awakenings, of all
Bright gladness, of sun.

And I could smell your warm
Scent beside me and feel
Your breath, the animal vapors,
Sweet and intimate and newly of the
Earth. And I could see the
Day’s splendor radiant in
Your soft, fresh eyes.

You cast no shadow.

Mine foretold more dark,
More cold,
More winter still to come until
The green roots
Overcome the snow.

Hell Explained - by a Chemistry Student

This oldie but goodie arrived this a.m. from M'reen, who lives somewhere in AZ--which explains the location of the school in the story. It could have been UCal Berkeley, whose chemistry department is in a league of its own.

The following is an actual question given on a University of Arizona chemistry mid-term and an actual answer turned in by a student.

The answer by one student was so 'profound' that the professor shared it with colleagues via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well:

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time.. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving, which is unlikely.. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today.


Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:


1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, 'It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,' and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct..... ...leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting 'Oh my God.'

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED AN A+.

don't ask....

Here ya go, Charles....

Deep Fried Mars Bars Recipe #43463

Invented in Scotland, this dish has now become famous worldwide. It is an excellent source of fat, sugar and calories. For a seasonal variation you could also try deep frying a Cadbury's Creme Egg.
by Sackville

10 min | 5 min prep

1 deep fried mars bar

* 1 Mars bar or Milky Way bar
* 1 cup plain flour
* 1/2 cup cornflour
* 1 pinch baking soda
* milk or beer
* oil (for deep frying)

1. Chill the chocolate bar by keeping it in the fridge, but don't freeze it.
2. Mix the flours and bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) together.
3. Add milk (traditional) or beer (which gives a lighter result) until you get a batter with the consistency of thin cream.
4. Heat the oil until a small piece of bread will brown in a few seconds, but don't allow to smoke.
5. Remove wrapper from chilled chocolate bar.
6. Coat completely in batter.
7. Carefully lower into hot oil and fry until golden brown.
8. Serve, with ice cream or french fries, if you're so inclined.

© 2009 Recipezaar. All Rights Reserved. http://www.recipezaar.com

homemade ice cream--no cooking!

lately I've been enjoying some wonderful homemade chocolate ice cream from a fairly common online recipe:

2 cups chocolate milk
5 oz. evaporated milk
1 can (14 oz.) of sweetened condensed milk (and those of you who want to avoid the Nestle-affiliated (boo) Carnation evap. milk, look for SANTINI ORGANIC SWEETENED CONDENSED MILK--i got some at YES! gourmet friday for about half the price Safeway charges for Carnation.)
1/2 can of Hershey's chocolate syrup

mix it all up in the blender, then chill it for a couple of hours.

then pour it into your ice cream freezer and let it process until it gets nice and thick. it tastes like fudgesicle! yum!!

i don't really know how long to work my ice cream freezer--i think it's getting old and needs to be replaced. But i process the mixture until it gets to be almost the consistency of Dairy Queen, then pour it into a 2 quart freezer container and put it in the freezer overnight. (Natcherly, i can never wait for it to sit overnight. i'm always in there with my ice cream scoop around midnight so i can have a little taste....ha.)

yesterday i got the bright idea of using coconut milk instead of evaporated milk (not the sweetened condensed milk--that's where all the sugar comes from). and i chopped up half a bar (2 oz.) of 100% cacao unsweetened chocolate and added that instead of the hershey's syrup. and i used 2 cups of SILK chocolate soy milk instead of regular milk. no cholesterol, for whatever THAT's worth.

lemme tell ya, this stuff is GREAT!!! warning, though: it'll keep you awake at night with that 100% cacao. you may find yourself at 3 a.m. having yet another little bowl of your very own homemade chocolate ice cream....don't worry. life is short. enjoy that chocolate ice cream while you can.

Eight Years....

Most of us remember clearly what we were doing on September 11, 2001--eight years ago today. I arrived at the dentist's office for an early appointment just as they were setting up a TV on one of the dental chairs. They got it tuned in just in time to see the second plane hit the World Trade Center in NYC.

The article by William Rivers Pitt (linked above) describes clearly how I feel about what has happened here in the US since that time. We have been and continue to be attacked by lies more than anything else--there were no weapons of mass destruction, a major "justification" for the invasion of Iraq (Iraq?? The men who commandeered the planes were mostly Saudis). The liars are still at it--still lying in their best effort to bring down President Obama. Rep Joe Wilson of SC yelled "You lie!" during the President's speech Wednesday night, but Wilson himself had his facts all wrong.

William Rivers Pitt writes:

Afghanistan started eight years ago today, as did Iraq. Bush stood before the American people on live television and told us about 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX gas, 30,000 munitions to deliver the stuff, mobile biological weapons labs, uranium from Niger for use in a robust nuclear weapons program ("noo-clee-urr," not "nook-yuh-lurr," by the way; he never once got it right), mushroom clouds, doom, fear, and all the rest of that tremendous, deadly lie. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians were torn to pieces because of those lies, but he got away with telling them, thanks to the best day of his life: Tuesday, September 11, 2001, eight years ago today.

A French newspaper declared "We Are All Americans" on September 12, but it was all downhill after that. By the first week of October, with a pall of poison smoke still hanging over New York City, Bush declared that, "We have to counteract the shockwave of the evildoer by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates," and the world threw up into its collective mouth. He took us to war; he took us to Hell, and we are still far, far from anything resembling recovery.

Goop's back

Not that it was gone, exactly, but GOOP newsletter seems to have taken a sensible vacation--and returned today with some great recipes. There are more recipes than just for bibimbop, the dish demonstrated on the video. It doesn't look like the bibimbop I remember from that great little restaurant on Gilbert St (?) in Iowa City (no meat), but it's basically a bowl of rice that you top with various items and a special sauce, then bibimbop--mix it all up!

I wish our farmers market here offered burdock--but as Gwyneth says, you can substitute any other root vegetable. The best part is how they chop it into matchsticks. And take heart, seniors, it's not just your blender that can offer you supremely digestible vegetables via green smoothies, all that fancy chopping shown here cuts that wonderful fiber down to something your teeth can manage. It's making me hungry already.

Happy Labor Day

....Which I have insisted on calling "Memorial Day" all day today. That's ok, I'm not embarrassed....YOU will be old and funny yourself someday! Ha.

Here's a good post from Democracyforcalifornia.com, and the author also quotes a good article from the Anchorage Daily News! (As you may have suspected, SheWhoIsNotToBeNamed is NOT as popular in Alaska as cable news and the repugs would have us think.)

Anyway, I spent a lot of the day working, thanks to a wonderful friend who shoved a job my way. So it's time to lick the container of my chicken dinner with mashed potatoes & gravy and broccoli and check out the blogs I follow.

Henry sent me some more fabulous African music, and the rain kachina came to bless the day, arriving shortly after midnight last night. I loved the instant quiet on the street after the first downpour sent everyone inside.

Here's to a big city enjoying a day off.

Peccavi

Those of you who remember your British history will recall the one-word note sent by General Napier to his commander, telling him he had conquered the province of Sindh in India: "Peccavi." That's Latin for "I have sinned."

So have I. I confess I have been reading bits and pieces of the NYTimes this month--nothing big, and certainly nothing by the guy in the pink shirt (the so-called "good" conservative), but I do enjoy Gail Collins when she writes alone. (The sneaky Times has been pairing her occasionally with one or another of their gawdawful right-wingers.)

Collins was especially hilarious yesterday in her "End of Summer Quiz" column. Even funnier was the first reader comment on this piece by one "KT" of NYC:

Match the social behavior with my reaction:

A. People without health insurance, jobs or money call the POTUS "Hitler" because he wants to provide them with affordable health care.

B. Fox talk show host gets high ratings when he declares Rockefeller Center to be laden with communist symbols intended to subliminally corrupt tourists.

C. Guy gets finger bitten off at Town Hall meeting.

D. Republicans pull kids out of school so that they will not hear POTUS talk urging them not to drop out.

Answers:

1. Someone please call the EMS guys, and tell them to bring a really big net.

2. How fast can you get me to Canada?

3. Purell for All.

4. I keep clicking the heels of these cool red slippers, but cannot seem to leave Oz.

Answers: Pick whichever one you want; they are all interchangeable.

But I digress. Worst of all, I have just purchased another year's subscription to...no, not the whole paper...the crossword puzzles!! Of course, they've changed the system. It's not so easy to get in there and open up the puzzle any more.

They've had my $40 for about an hour, and I still can't open the bleeping Sunday crossword. I've downloaded Across Lite, as in the past, and its cheery little crossword-y icon is parked on my dock. But nothing I do makes the puzzle open.

Plus, the crossword FAQs have nothing to do with my problem. They are all about how to open a puzzle with Across Lite IF YOU HAVE WINDOWS. Dear Times, you mean AS IF!!!

Fooey. I only wanted to save what's left of my mind. It took me two days to work last Sunday's puzzle, which I filched from the BFF's recycling pile. I figgered I'd better get exercising the old brain cells. FaceBook is not gonna do the job.

Thank God for Al Franken

at least one elected representative from Minnesota has his head on right!

Check This!!

Democracyforcalifornia has a great post today--and here it is:

Healthcare and Gomorrah

What is behind the shrill and seemingly irrational opposition to healthcare reform?

Award-winning journalist Max Blumenthal delves into the deeper meaning of the increasingly rancorous side-shows surrounding this and other public policy issues in his new book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party . In the book, Blumenthal traces the GOP's transformation from the “big tent” party of President Dwight D. Eisenhower to the “one-ring circus” it has become, culminating with the nomination of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate in 2008. His explosive thesis: culture warriors such as Focus on the Family’s Dr. James Dobson “cultivate Republican shock troops” by preying on people’s fears and insecurities to “turn personal crisis into political resentment.”

In the interest of full disclosure I've only read excerpts from the book. I did, however, catch Blumenthal’s lengthy discussion of Republican Gomorrah this morning on the Pacific Network's Democracy Now! and it started me thinking.

Applying Blumenthal's narrative to healthcare reform, the ongoing controversy bears little resemblance to the picture presented by the corporate-controlled media: a spontaneous expression of public discontent with costly, inept government intrusion in our lives. Indeed, beneath the chilling rhetoric and town hall theatrics of the lunatic fringe is nothing more than a power grab, pure and simple, by reactionary forces that will be satisfied with nothing less than the establishment of what Blumenthal calls "a theocratic dystopia."

Forget cost, forget "socialized medicine," forget Washington bureaucrats coming between you and your doctor, forget rationing of treatment, forget “death panels”...what really terrifies Them is that a public-funded, private delivery healthcare system (in other words, Medicare for all) just might work! For any government solution to common people's problems will mean death to their sadomasochistic empire – and the powerful business interests they are in cahoots with.

How this shotgun marriage of convenience works to draw people like sheep to the slaughter and embrace policies that are against their own best interests is well-documented by now.

Promise prayer in schools and give them tax cuts for the rich; promise immigration reform and ship their jobs overseas; promise to outlaw gay marriage and call-in their subprime loans; promise to overturn Roe v. Wade and give them The Health Insurance Industry Preservation Act of 2009.

In short, millions of poor souls have made a Faustian deal with the leaders of a “religio-political subculture” (to quote The New Yorker’s Henrik Hertzberg) who care not a whit about anything but prospering from the personal trauma of others. Meanwhile their corporate masters have channeled these shared psychoses into a state-by-state scheme to game the initiative process in order to pass pro-business ballot measures.

In what the White House is hoping will be game-changing speech on healthcare, President Obama on Wednesday in prime time is scheduled to address a joint session of congress. Perhaps a better idea would be to call on Pastor Rick Warren to perform a mass exorcism.

Please look at the original post (link above) so you can follow up their own links, too.

Now What?

Everybody I know who is retired is so daggone busy doing meritorious stuff that I've really begun to think about just what kinds of things I could be doing. The books and magazine articles say we all have things we're GOOD AT, and that these are the kinds of things we should be doing now that we don't have to punch a time clock every day.

It's not that easy. I've tried to think of what I'm good at, and the list doesn't really spell YOUR PERFECT POST-RETIREMENT CAREER. For example, one thing I know with certainty I was always very good at was target shooting. I think I can pretty much rule THAT one out for my golden years. And I was pretty good at some parts of teaching (like making the kids feel good about the natural world) but very lousy at others (like handing back papers after I'd corrected them).

I took that test that Red Nose posted about this past week: the Strengths Finder quiz. According to that, my top five strengths are Adaptability, Relator, Actuator, Empathy, and Ideation.

I can see all that. Adaptability means I'm perfectly happy to switch gears if something isn't working. Relator means I pick my friends carefully and (probably) drive them up the wall with my attention. Actuator is another way of saying patience is not exactly my strong point. Ha. Empathy means I can sense what's going on with people (whether they like it or will admit it or not), and Ideation means I can have really cool ideas. I like the last one, and I can even admit it's been true in a certain area of my life: I have great housing karma, and I've been able to work with the light and space in a dwelling so that it's actually pleasant for me to live in. And I've loved painting and drawing, though the art provides all the fun there--I've never earned any $$ at it.

How all of this fits into retirement is beyond me. I do think I need to find someplace else to live. Maybe I should just quit dillying around (which is going against my strong point of Actuator) and get with finding a place. That, of course, will mean going against the Relator thing. I'm not particularly social, but moving house will mean giving up what little social life I have at present. The Adaptability will help with that, though, because I've been able to survive in a number of highly disparate environments, doing all kinds of weird things.

When I retired, I had worked as an editor for almost 30 years, most of which was in management. But due to circumstances (like being deaf as a post for 46 years) it was not always easy to find or get a job. Thus, I've had to earn my living at various times by teaching 7th & 8th grade life & earth science, walking beans (if you're from Iowa, you'll know what that is, otherwise, don't ask), painting houses, doing kitchen prep in a restaurant, hemming pants for a dry cleaner/tuxedo rental place, cleaning student apartments (gah), and cutting down trumpet vines in a wildly wooded apartment complex for $3/hr. Plus, there's that big chunk of time working as an editor. I liked that, but it's really hard work. Thanks be I could do that without having to hear much, but if I'd had my druthers....

Actually, this may be why I've spent the past year loafing or riding my bike--I'm resting. But since I'm running out of quarters, I'll have to get with it again. My piggy bank is looking emaciated.

If I moved to the Midwest, I could cut my housing expenses in way less than half, but who wants to freeze?

Anyway, each stage of life has its own challenges. I feel as if I've run out of ways to entertain myself.

Any advice?

While We're At It....

Life always has so many surprises, some of them really wonderful. A newcomer commented on one of my posts this week, and I've been busy enjoying the heck out of her blog. I like the way she thinks, and I like the way she writes. So please visit Cop Car's Beat and see for yourself that riches actually can come out of a freakin' red state!! (I don't know how I feel about writing that...I am so bloody fed up with red staters acting like yahoos and hauling guns to town meetings and shouting "keep your government out of our...whatevers." But see for yourself.)

I especially liked her post that commented on an article in Kansas! Magazine about "15 Reasons to Love Kansas." (Following in indented text is the post...I didn't write it, Cop Car and somebody else did.)

I lied...er...forgot: so, sue me!

In the posting, This & that from The New Yorker, August 3, 2009, I wrote, "These days, the only magazine subscription that I maintain (apart from "house organs" that come with memberships) is to The New Yorker." Kansas! Magazine, to which I've subscribed for (I'm guessing) over 40 years, had slipped my mind. There is a small item in the Fall 2009 issue, in the section titled "15 Reasons We Love Kansas".

[Reason] 3 - Good Works

When the economy took a dive last year and business started to slow down at B&W Trailer Hitches in Humboldt, founder and President Joe Works (below) [referring to a photograph of Mr Works] decided it was time to give something back to the town and his 180 employees. At Joe's direction, the manufacturer of high-quality truck beds and trailer hitches (Humboldt's largest employer) turned its attention to sprucing up the town of 1800. Employees went to work cleaning the playground, refurbishing the baseball diamond and painting churches while still getting full pay from B&W. The result is a revitalized town busting with pride. "We've had good years and lean years," Joe says. "There's no need to be greedy." ...Beth Barlow, Humboldt

Wouldn't it be nice if Wall Street took a page out of Mr Works' playbook? I sometimes weary of living in such a red state; but, if all of the State's residents were like Mr Works....Wow!

Sweet Jebus...wouldn't that be great if the rich guys in DC could do stuff like that? We'd have to quit whining and maybe half the population would quit SHOOTING each other!!

Back to Health Care--What Moyers Thinks

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=6CF29607-18FE-70B2-A81F4C1852C7AC81

We can't give up and allow this spinelessness to go unremarked. It's not too late.