my favorite holiday
Today is Halloween, and I'm driving up to Albany to attend a retirement reception for my former (female) boss, whose favorite holiday also is Halloween. So the reception is "come in costume." You can bet I am, including a mask. When I get back this evening, I will try to post a photo of me as "Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant.....the wisest woman in all of Europe with a wicked pack of cards." (from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland.) I have printed out business cards with the above quote on one side and one of the Tarot's Major Arcana on the other. I will hand them out at the reception. My former secretary, who is going as the Grim Reaper, will know who I am; it will be interesting to see if anyone recognizes me.
ADDENDUM:
So, there I am, in costume, with a great gypsy mask I bought on ebay and fringed scarves I got at the dollar store. There were some great costumes at the reception, including the Headless Horseman and a scarecrow on stilts. Even a former Commissioner of Education (my former boss' former boss) showed up with a black cape and an odd black and red hat and a scary clown mask. My boss was an angel. Literally.
As I drove through my town, nearing home, it was already dark. Lots of young adults in costumes milled about and started to fill up the local bars. A lovely white-faced geisha wearing a beautiful kimono embroidered in gold thread stood on the corner. A couple of masked scuba divers crossed the street in front of my car. (In this town, we stop for anyone who has one foot in the crosswalk.) In my rear view mirror, I could see someone dressed in fringed boots and a battered cowboy hat, face covered with a bandana, walking down the street beating a Native American drum.
This is definitely a night when strange spirits walk among us.
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the god question
With the recent death of his only aunt, my four year old grandson is starting to ask questions like "why do people go to church?" My daughter and son-in-law, both devout agnostics, are preparing themselves to deal with the god question that is surely soon to follow.
We raised both our kids without any belief in god or any religious affliations. We did, however, impart a belief system, through what we said and what we did, that resulted in their both offspring living lives that many so called Christians would be wise to emulate. They are guided by a sense of social justice and personal morality that is based on the Golden Rule. Very much in the spirit of "Jesus."
Tonight's PBS program with Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason featured Catholic novelist Mary Gordon and atheist philosopher Colin McGinn. I found the perspectives of both of great value to one of the big questions of our times:
In a world where religion is poison to some and salvation to others, how do we live together?
Mary Gordon is a believer. AND (NOT But) she is deeply thankful to the skeptics and non-believers who ushered in the Age of Enlightenment. As far as I'm concerned, the best statement she made in the program was:
Faith without doubt is either nostalgia or an addiction.
One of the questions Moyers asked McGinn was how come the Jesus stories and the religions that grew from them still flourish after 2000 years but the old Roman and Greek gods and associated religions did not last. The biggest reason, McGinn (so brilliantly) answered, is that Christianity was institutionalized, and there is an ongoing system that supports the continuation of those faiths. He also made the point that what religion you are taught is dependent on what country you were born in and what religion your parents are. McGinn also questioned whether "the longing for god" is innate or culturally stimulated.
McGinn described his experience of leaving his religious upbringing behind. There is a longing, he said, that many people feel to be connected to something greater than themselves. That longing supports their belief in god. That belief fills some void in them He said that, when he abandoned religion, he expected to feel that void, that longing for something that is missing. But he never did.
He also said some important things about "Reason," which is not only based in science. He described Reason as the faculty by which we acquire knowledge, search for truth, deduce, experiment, observe, and then reach a consensus based on evidence. Reason, he explained, is a rational belief system based on intelligent arguments. And you do the right thing -- not because somebody up there is watching you and will punish you if you don't but -- because it's the right thing to do.
My final thought after hearing Godon and McGinn, is that
Faith is not important to Reason, but Reason is important to Faith.
You can read the transcript of Moyer's interviews with Mary Gordon and Colin McGinn here.
And speaking of unChristian Christians, Jim Culleny spotlights our very own "Lucifer in a suit." Jim also posts about yet another such, saying: "If he's what Christianity's all about, I'll take paganism." Watch that "faith-based liar" through a link from Jim's post.
Need more convincing that scheming devils are at the helm of this country? Take a look at this. And this. Both via [son]b!X.
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Fascists rule
No, I'm not saying that Fascists are great. I'm saying that Fascists rule our county today. I mean, even a group of senior citizens carrying boxes of donuts as symbolic statements are being rousted by police. I got that story from here, in a post that also cites blatant tyrannies of our government leaders.
Of course, in the little picture, I live with a 90 year old fascist dictator who refuses to cooperate or doing anything that she doesn't want to do. I often can understand why some institutions medicate older people into obedience. The alternative is that their behavior is dangerous to themselves and frustrating and exhausting for everyone else.
So, I'm doing some research into using essential oils (inhaling, applying, and ingesting) on her as a non-intrusive way to help her focus, calm down, and find some kind of joy in her complaint-filled existence..
Of all our senses, the sense of smell is the most intimately connected with the brain. In spite of this, the sense of smell is very complex in how it functions. The mechanism by which the odor receptor cells interact with odor-causing molecules is still unknown, but studies of odors and the structure of the odor-causing molecules has revealed some correlations.
Fragrance inhalation through the nose goes directly to the brain where its neurological effects can alter blood pressure, pulse and mood, as well as having sedative effects
I have heard that the sense of scent is the last to leave a dying person's consciousness.
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Harper's Tuesday on Thursday
Some things you just don't want to miss, such as:
Furry crabs were found in Chesapeake Bay. [Christian Science Monitor via Yahoo]
During a debate with his Democratic rival, Senator Conrad Burns of Montana said that President Bush (who this week compared Iraq to Vietnam) has a secret plan for winning the war, but that Bush is not going to share his plan with the world.[Billings Gazette][FT]
The king of Spain denied that he had shot and killed a drunken bear.[IHT via NYT]
A Massachusetts elementary school banned tag.[CBS News]
Las Vegas magnate Steve Wynn elbowed a hole through Picasso's “Le Reve,” a painting he had just sold for a record $139 million.
Scotland Yard and the British Home Office misplaced two “extremely dangerous” terrorism suspects. One escaped from a secure psychiatric unit, and neither can be named for legal reasons
The Maine National Guard has been offering “Flat Daddies” and “Flat Mommies,” life-size cardboard cutouts of deployed service members, to spouses, children, and relatives waiting for them to return.
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Hooray for the Elderbloggers
PhoneCon-ers!
Despite my mother's being in an "don't leave me alone" frame of mind, I managed to get some time in at Ronni Bennet's Elderblogger PhoneCon yesterday. Some 25 bloggers showed up. Only two guys, as far as I know. But that was OK because the women who chatted all had fascinating and/or funny things to say. I think I spent every minute that I was on-phone laughing. The biggest chuckles were the result of the hilarious one-liners from lovely Golden Lucy, 84 years old and good enough to have a career as a stand-up comic.
She stands in contrast to what my mother was at 84 -- which is only a little more coherent than she is now. We took a ride today to visit my father's grave and have lunch with her three remaining living friends. I think the whole trip was too much for her. While she was looking forward to seeing her friends before we went, on the way home she asked who those people were. She sort of knew and sort of didn't. Just like she sort of is and sort of isn't.
The one thing about blogging is that there is no end to the friends you can make. Over the PhoneCon, everyone admitted that they would love to meet each other in person. With Claude Blogging in Paris and the rest of us spread all other this country, it's just a fun fantasy -- although recently Claude did visit Ronni in Maine.
If you go to Ronni's post about the event, there are links to the other participants, including Joared, who just used to leave comments but inaugurated her first very own weblog yesterday.
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tomorrow, tomorrow
Tomorrow is the Elderblogger PhoneCon set up by Ronni Bennet , a premiere elderblogger in her own right.
I don't know who else will be there, but I'm sure looking forward to finding out.
On Wednesday, we're taking my mother for a ride down to our home town, where my Dad is buried. Wednesday is his birthday, and we're going to visit the cemetery. And then take my mom to visit with the three old time friends of hers who are still alive and still living in Yonkers.
Wednesday is also my son's birthday. Somehow he managed to get born on a day that made him the perfect birthday present for my Dad. They used to celebrate their birthdays together. Now my son lives across the country in the Pactific Northwest, and my Dad has been dead for more than 25 years. October 25 will be a bittersweet day.
Wonder Women, all.
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more disaster predictions
If you thought this post was disturbing, think about the results of a new study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which was reported in various newspapers yesterday.
The newspaper reports state that the study predicts:
a future of nasty extreme weather [that] also includes fewer freezes and a longer growing season....extreme events are the kinds of things that have the biggest impacts, not only on humans but on mammals and ecosystems...the scariest results had to do with heat waves and warm nights. Everything about heat waves -- their intensity, length and occurrence -- worsens.
That's the big picture. There are little picture disasters happening right heer not far from Mother Mountain. In my local newspaper today is a piece about an alien (to this area) species of turtles (red-earred slider) being dumped into various park lakes and ponds because those who owned them didn't want them anymore.
Home for red-eared sliders and other dumped species is south and way west of the Catskills. Right now, no one knows what kinds of diseases those turtles might have brought to this brave new (for them) world. All kinds of weird domino-falling stuff happens in nature.
That's why scientists insist you not expose native species to invaders. Too much isn't known.
One naturalist suggests that:
...some turtles, like red-eareds in Chinatown, are kept in unsanitary pens covered with visible fungus .... Fungus has been linked worldwide with the death of frogs. Harriman State Park's native endangered northern cricket frogs are almost gone.
Could it be that the fungus introduced by turtles from Chinatown was what did in Harriman's cricket frogs?
As a city girl from Yonkers who never owned anything that grew and needed to be fed until I was in my twenties, it sometimes amazes me what an affinity I have for the natural environment. When I moved here to the middle of the woods, I spent my first fall digging up naturally growing ground cover and flowering plants and moving them closer to the house.
Often, as I stand outside and absorb the forms of things out here -- fallen trees and broken stumps, stones from boulders to rocks -- I see them as natural sculptures. The esthetics of the natural environment. Sometimes I think about moving this limb here, that stone there -- creating my own nature-based formations.
Alongside the long, steep driveway, there's what's left of the bottom of a tree that fell long, long ago. It's looks like a four foot high spire rising out of the debris of the seasons. One side of it has rotted away on the inside, down to six inches from the ground. I'm thinking that, in the spring, I will try to find some flowering vine that tolerates shade and plant it in the hollow dead trunk -- a combination of nurture and nature, the living and the dying.
Appropriate for this place, this time.
Categories:
hear hear
Uh oh, the cat's still outside, I say to her as I walk over to open the door. She comes running after me, calling Who died? Somebody died? Who just died?
She gets mad when I shout so she can hear me. When I don't shout, she keeps asking What? What?
What? What? is what I said when I got on the scale this morning. This is the most I've ever weighed, including when I was pregnant. I eat when I'm bored. And I'm bored almost every evening when all I can do is sit and watch television with her. And shout so that she can hear me when I try to explain what's happening on the small screen in response to her periodic assertions that she doesn't understand.
Stop! Stop! I've got to stop eating so much. And I've got to stop shouting so much. It gives me a headache.
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some disasters grow slowly
On the news today, a report of a stingray leaping into a boat and piercing an 81 year old man with its barbed tail. Imagine that -- a fish several feet wide just flinging itself out of the water into a boat! Not very natural behavior for this graceful ocean dweller.
Yesterday, a herd of wild elephants went on a rampage and killed a sleeping family of five in Bangladesh.
Today, our government announced that the precious ozone layer above the Antarctic is the largest ever -- 10.6 million square miles.
Personally, I believe that we humans are hell bent on destroying our planet. I found an interesting article that lists many of the environmental catastrophes that we are currently instigating by our assumption that we have the right to rape and plunder this planet for immediate gains in personal comfort and wealth. (The article also attributes these catastrophes to breaking "god's" laws about how to deal with the natural world. I'm igoring that part of it all because of my non-belief system. But for those who believe, it makes sense as well.) I quote below the best of "Our Dying World."
First, look at the extent of global environmental degradation by simply reviewing the natural catastrophes occurring around the world. Whether they are caused by global warming or not, each of these crises is real and unfolding right now.
Look at Europe. This summer, Britain and much of continental Europe were wracked with devastatingly hot and dry conditions that ruined large swaths of cropland. British gardeners were warned in September that the English country garden will be a memory of the past within 20 years. In Italy, melting glaciers mean that skiers will soon have to climb beyond 2,000 meters to find snow to ski on. Even as far north as Greenland, temperatures have been so warm that barley is beginning to grow in the normally ice-clad nation—an occurrence not seen since the Middle Ages.
Further south, in the Mediterranean Sea, water temperatures have warmed to the point where swarms of jellyfish are plaguing tourists along the coast of Spain. In the famous water city of Venice, rising water levels are spurring urgent meetings on how to prevent the city from being overrun by water. Such meetings are also being held by worried engineers in the Netherlands.
Similar problems are seizing Africa, already the poorest continent on Earth. As the Independent reported in September, “Natural disasters, extreme weather, floods and droughts have always been common in southern Africa, but the severity of the wet and dry periods is intensifying with disastrous results” (September 15). Massive droughts in the Horn of Africa this year have killed much of the region’s wildlife and disrupted the migration patterns of animals and birds.
In Kenya, soaring temperatures and drought conditions are driving herdsmen to war over the few remaining cattle that are surviving the drought. On the other hand, extreme drought in Ethiopia was recently broken by torrential rain and devastating flooding that caused river banks to overflow, drowning more than 800 people.
North America is suffering the same. “In Alaska there has been millions of dollars of damage to buildings and roads caused by melting permafrost. The region has been blighted by the world’s largest outbreak of spruce bark beetles, normally confined to warmer climes. Rising sea levels have forced the relocation of Inuit villages, and polar bears have been drowning because of shrinking sea ice. The caribou population is in steep decline due to earlier spring and the west is suffering one of the worst droughts for 500 years” (ibid.).
More than 60 percent of the United States is suffering drought or abnormally dry conditions. But other areas have had devastating floods that have caused millions of dollars in damage. In Hawaii, the island’s famous coral reefs are being destroyed by large-scale bleaching.
South America is walking the same path. “Last year, the largest river in the world [the Amazon] was reduced to a trickle by an unprecedented drought. This year sand banks have already appeared in the deltas of the Amazon and fears are rising that a drought cycle that was previously measured in multiples of decades may now be an annual event” (ibid.). Unusually dry conditions are disturbing the fragile ecosystem of the Amazon forest, driving animals and plants to extinction and ruining the health of the forest known as the lungs of the Earth.
“In the Peruvian Andes the alpacas that have for centuries provided indigenous farmers with a means of survival have died in cold snaps where temperatures plummeted to -30°C. In the summer, melted glaciers revealed rock faces burnt red by their first contact with direct sunlight” (ibid.).
Then there is Australasia. Large sections of Australia’s traditionally productive agricultural regions are drying up. Farmers are being forced to buy water and truck it to their farms. The drought is rampant from one end of the nation to the other. In some states, it is the worst in decades; in others, such as Western Australia, it is the worst on record.
In New Zealand, floods, snowstorms and harsh weather caused millions of dollars in damage this past winter.
Then there is Asia, where “some of the most visible effects of climate change” are evident. “From the frozen wastes of Afghanistan, where the river bed in Kabul has become a dry rubbish tip, to south India, where thousands of farmers have killed themselves after successive years of drought wrecked their crops …” (ibid.). Potentially the worst damage is occurring in the Himalayas, where glaciers are melting. “Several glacier lakes have already burst in Nepal and Bhutan. The disappearance of the glaciers could dry up major rivers as far away as China, India and Vietnam” (ibid.).
Serious and alarming environmental crises are impacting every corner of the Earth. Weather disasters and their resulting crises are killing hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, and wreaking billions of dollars’ worth of damage.
It is impossible to deny that planet Earth is being ransacked by deadly and potentially catastrophic environmental disasters.
Can you see why some people believe it's the End Times?
It's inevitable that some day will come the end of this planet's time. I'm sure that we are doing our best to make that time come sooner than later. As a species, we humans are going to grow old before we ever grow up.
The quotes below from here.
GROWING OLDER IS MANDATORY, GROWING UP IS OPTIONAL.
The elderly usually don't have regrets for what we did, but rather for things we did not do.
I have to admit, there are things that I regret not doing. I think I would have regretted not taking care of my mother.
POST SCRIPTS:
UN reports increasing 'dead zones' in oceans
The number of oxygen-starved ``dead zones" in the world's seas and oceans has risen more than a third in the past two years because of fertilizer, sewage, animal waste, and fossil-fuel burning, United Nations specialists said yesterday.
Loss of species that pollinate is cause for global alarm, researchers say.
Birds, bees, bats and other species that pollinate North American plant life are losing population, according to a study released Wednesday by the National Research Council. This "demonstrably downward" trend could damage dozens of commercially important crops, scientists warned, because three-fourths of all flowering plants depend on pollinators for fertilization.
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kalilily's foolproof cold cure
Every year about this time of year I wind up with a sinus infection. This is the time when the windows get closed and the heat gets turned on. We have forced air heat, which makes things even worse. And then there's also all of that leaf mold being blown around outside.
It always starts with a drip down the back of my throat. I start to feel the glands under my jaw getting larger and tender to the touch. Then my sinuses start to get stuffy. Within four days, I am at the doctor's office getting an antibiotic because, although the whole thing begins with allergies and a virus, all of that yuck in my head is a great breeding ground for bacteria as well. I have, in the past, been laid up for almost two weeks.
This year I was ready. I was ready with Vitamin C, Echinacea, Oregano leaf and oil, Goldenseal, Zicam swabs and Zicam mouth spray, and saline nasal spray. At the first sign (the scratchy throat) I quarantined myself for one day and spent the day dosing myself every three hours with all of the above. In the morning and at night, I added a Benedryl to the drill.
The mouth spray pretty much kills your taste buds for the duration, so the orange juice I consumed throughout the day tasted like metal. As did everything else I ate. But that's a small price to pay for avoiding being miserable for two weeks.
The kalilily cold cure means having a day with no stress -- a day when you can rest, drink all the juice and tea you can stand, and dose yourself every three hours with immune system strengthening products. Over the course of one day, I ingested about 3,000 mg of Vitamin C, 1300 mg of Enchinacea, 900 mg of Oregano, four droppersfull of Goldenseal extract, and a quart and a half of orange juice. At night, I rubbed Vicks on my swollen glands and wrapped my neck in a towel.
That was yesterday. Today, except for some stuffiness in my sinuses (which I tend to have all winter) I am feeling fine. Well, also except for the stubborn cold sore, on which I'm using Abreva. What I should have done at the first sign of the cold sore is start taking L-lysine, which is an amino acid that that makes one's system inhospitable for the Type 1 herpes simplex virus (which is what causes cold sores). My mother takes it to prevent a recurrence of shingles.
For the rest of the week I will continue to take daily doses of all of those substances, but cut them down to 1/3 of what I took yesterday. And I'll keep using the saline nose spray all winter.
I discovered an interesting product called Xlear -- a saline nasal spray with xylitol, a sweet-tasting substance that discourages the growth of bacteria in the nasal passages and throat. That got me through last winter with no sinus infection at all. I need to start using it as soon as the heat gets turned on. Obviously, I neglected to do that this year.
So, if you're prone to colds and sinus problems, set yourself up with an arsenal of immune system strengthening products, megadose yourself the first day you feel symptoms starting, and avoid the misery that so many of us are confronted with each winter.
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thank you, Frank
Frank Paynter posted about it, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't pick up on the implications until I read what he wrote. He begins his post with this:
This post is not about the grim and twisted irony of the violence of a school shooting in Amish country. Rather, I want to draw attention to the unspoken horror of the misogyny, the hate crime against the female gender that it represents.
Frank links to several female bloggers who posted vehemently and accurately about what seems to be an increasing number of hate crimes against females. He ends his post with this:
Misogyny is everywhere. It’s in the burka. It’s in the genital mutilation of so-called “female circumcision.” It’s in the Chinese infanticide of baby girls. It’s practically a human condition. Yet once slavery was a human condition too, and now, except for a few corporate monsters, some backwards nations, and the perversion of sexual slavery it has largely been wiped out. Can we make progress against misogyny too?
I wonder why all of us female bloggers aren't all posting about how the status and safety of all of us females is consistently being eroded. Why aren't we mad as hell!
Every night, my news stations report the rape and murder of some female, the lethal violence against some child. Tonight it was what was believed to be a mother and daughter murdered in an apartment on NYC's upper west side.
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It's Harper's Tuesday and I'm sick and tired.
Despite the parallel construction, the two statements in the title of this post are not related.
The truth is, I've got a wicked sore throat and a cold sore in the corner of my upper lip that even Abreva is having a hard time with. I've been spraying my mouth with a zinc acetate spray, which really does help, but now everything I put in my mouth tastes like zinc acetate. I have to stay away from my mother so she doesn't get sick. Every cloud has a silver lining, right?? On the other hand, while I have lots of projects I'd like to work on, I'm just too wiped out to get into any of them.
And, on top of that, my daughter and her family were going to come and visit this weekend, but both my grandson and I are sick. So it goes.
Meanwhile, here's the best of this week's Harper's Weekly Review:
North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong Il was said to be at risk of losing his access to McDonald's hamburgers and Hennessy cognac if sanctions on luxury goods are imposed in response to his country's recent nuclear testing.
In China's Shanxi and Shaanxi Provinces, families with dead sons complained that corpse brides were in short supply.
A Pennsylvania woman was arrested for beating her baby's father with the baby.[AP via New York Times]
In Bombay, where the city courts faced a backlog of 16,234,223 cases, police arrested a drunk three-foot-tall man for extorting money from people with a meat cleaver. “Everyone pampered him because he was so small and cute,” said the man's brother. “But he has brought great misfortune for the family.”[Mumbai Mirror]
The U.S. Department of Justice accused blacks of suppressing the white vote in Mississippi.
India's Supreme Court ordered the seizure of 300 macaques who had terrorized bureaucrats and destroyed top-secret defense documents.
Walnut-related crimes were on the rise in the United States,[Appeal-Democrat]
Two Indianapolis morticians ran into a burning building to save three corpses;
In Uganda, a mob armed with spears, machetes, and clubs killed a lioness, mutilated the carcass, and imprisoned the remains
Research by U.S. epidemiologists and Iraqi physicians found that 654,965 Iraqis have died as a result of the Iraq war, though half of households surveyed were unsure of who to blame for the deaths of their family members
Libya announced that it would provide laptop computers for 1.2 million schoolchildren,[AP via CBS News][AP via local6.com] and Chinese Wal-Mart workers unionized.[International Herald Tribune]
Americans were claiming political asylum in Britain.
Fish leapt from the ocean near Hawaii in anticipation of an earthquake
There are lots more news items to Huh and Hah about if you go over to Harper's.
But there are just too many Huhs and not enough Hahs as far as I'm concerned. Just another indication of how screwy our world is getting. Curiouser and curioser.
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"Nobody's all good."
That's what a 14 year old boy who was locked in a burning shed by other boys said about the lesson he learned from the experience.
Most of us have always known that. Everyone has the potential to do evil deeds, but whatever sense of morality we have tends to keep that potential in check. It seems to me, however, that these days there is a worldwide shift to the darkside.
Violent crime in England and Wales has risen 14%.
Murders in the United States jumped 4.8 percent last year, and overall violent crime was up 2.5 percent for the year, marking the largest annual increase in crime in the United States since 1991
With the number of homicides in Sacramento already past last year's death toll, 2006 could prove to be one of Sacramento's most violent years in recent history
And on and on.
Elder abuse is a growing problem.
Whatever the reason/s, an increasing number of people seem to be either unable to keep their cool or have simply forsaken their humanity.
You just can't help wondering what's pushing so many of us in that dark direction. Is it the war and all of the publicized violence associated with it? Is it the glorification of violence and immorality in video games, on television, in the movies? Is it the frustrations of living in poverty -- getting poorer as the rich get richer? Is it the tragic lack of role models among our leaders -- both cultural and political?
I suggest that it's the cumulative effect of all of the above (and more). More than ever belfore, we are surrounded constantly by seductions toward the darkside.
No, nobody's all good. But it used to be that most were mostly so.
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number weirdness
Have you noticed that if you turn upside down the date of Cory Lidle's airplane crash into the NYC high-rise apartment building -- 10/11/06 -- you get 9/11/01?
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there's Columbus and then there's Columbus
On the day this nation celebrates Columbus Day, i watched the televised parade in New York City with my mother. She likes parades. It seems that everybody's Italian on Columbus Day (the way that everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day). At least that's what Major Bloomberg was heard to say.
Now, those of us who were taught the accurate version of history know that the Vikings actually discovered this land long before Columbus missed landing on the continental shores of what became America. What I didn't know until I watched a Discovery Channel special that aired on the afternoon of Columbus Day, was that Christopher Columbus might not have been Italian at all. Chances are that he was the son of a Catalonian mariner/mercenery and his last name was really "Colom."
Garrison Keillor in a Common Deams piece suggests because George W. Bush bears a great similarity to the real Christopher Columbus, we should change the focus of Columbus Day:
The following are excerpts; it's worth it to link over and read the whole thing.
October 12th, the traditional Columbus Day, is a day to reflect on the nature of celebrity. Columbus was a pirate and tyrant who sailed off and bumped into the Bahamas, had no idea where he was, and to his dying day believed he had reached the Indies. By the time he arrived in the New World, America was old news to the Vikings. They already had that T-shirt.....
....The Vikings were not out to lord it over the Indians or bring democracy here or teach folks about Nordic gods. They were free spirits, sailors, explorers, so they left some carved stones here and there, relished the exhilaration of the voyage and the sight of new lands, and went home and composed sagas for the amusement of their friends and families. That arrogant fool Columbus, who demanded 10 percent of all the gold the Spanish stole in the New World, got the holiday, a town in Ohio and another in Georgia, a major river in the Northwest, a university in New York. But who cares? Scandinavians don't.....
..... I propose that we change Columbus Day to Bush Day, a cautionary holiday, like Halloween, a day to meditate on the hazards of ambition. We could observe it by going through the basement and garage and throwing out stuff we don't want or need. Also, by not mortgaging the house to pay for a vacation, and not yelling at the neighbors, and not assuming that the law is for other people.
A day to honor kindness, industriousness and modesty.
In that same issue of Common Dreams is a piece by Ted Rall that brutally describes the brutality of he Bush Regime. It's not as clever as Keiller's, but it's an indictment worth reading.
It includes this powerful statement:
How did we get here? Good Germans--and many of them were decent, moral people--asked themselves the same thing. The answer is incrementalism, the tendency of radical change to manifest itself in bits and pieces. People who should have known better--journalists, Democrats, and Republicans who are more loyal to their country than their party--allowed Bush and his neofascist gangsters to hijack our republic and its values. They weren't as bad as Bush. They just couldn't see the big picture.
And it ends with:
It doesn't matter how much food aid we ship to the victims of the next global natural disaster, or how diplomatic our next president is, or whether we come to regret what we have done in the name of law and order. Our laws permit kidnapping, torture and murder. Our laws deny access to the courts. The United States has ceded the moral high ground to its enemies.
We are done.
If these two articles made you really depressed, take a minute to read "What the Amish are Teaching America" by Sally Kohn, which ends with:
Our patterns of punishment and revenge are fundamentally at odds with the deeper values of common humanity that the tragic experience of the Amish are helping to reveal. Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done in life. Someone who cheats is not only a cheater. Someone who steals something is not only a thief. And someone who commits a murder is not only a murderer. The same is true of Charles Carl Roberts. We don’t yet know the details of the episode in his past for which, in his suicide note, he said he was seeking revenge. It may be a sad and sympathetic tale. It may not. Either way, there’s no excusing his actions. Whatever happened to Roberts in the past, taking the lives of others is never justified. But nothing Roberts has done changes the fact that he was a human being, like all of us. We all make mistakes. Roberts’ were considerably and egregiously larger than most. But the Amish in Nickel Mines seem to have been able to see past Roberts’ actions and recognize his humanity, sympathize with his family for their loss, and move forward with compassion not vengeful hate.
We’ve come to think that “an eye for an eye” is a natural, human reaction to violence. The Amish, who live a truly natural life apart from the influences of our violence-infused culture, are proving otherwise. If, as Gandhi said, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” then the Amish are providing the rest of us with an eye-opening lesson.
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It is Friday the Thirteenth of October, and there's two feet of snow in Buffalo.
Categories:
a sad day
My daughter's sister-in-law, who was the same age as my daughter (mid-forties), passed away yesterday. She had MS.
It just seems so unfair that she had to suffer as much as she did before she finally died. She leaves two young daughters behind, as well as a family and extended family who will all miss her.
I can't begin to imagine what it's like to lose a child, no matter how old that child is. I am heartsick for her parents. I can't imagine. I can't imagine.
And yet my mother keeps on keeping on. She has no life-threatening illness. Only very old age. Well, I guess that's life-threatening, isn't it?
Categories:
roads
This is the road I walk late in the afternoon, when my mom is calm or napping. This is a perfect road to walk, devoid of traffic, the cloudless sky a sunny blue, the shadows cool, the trees still full and just starting to color. Two hawks glide on the currents above the mountain, but they are too far away to catch with my camera. This road is one of the reasons I can live here, where her tears run endlessly like the stream that feeds the pond beyond the soundless forest.
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10/11: deja vu
Just before 4 p.m this afternoon., I was channel surfing to try to find something on tv my mother might sit down and watch. We had just watched Bonanza on TVLand. I thought she might sit a while for the Ellen DeGeneres show, so I punched in NBC.
Instead of Ellen, a news report was on. A plane had just crashed into a building in New York City, and the screen showed flames pouring out of the windows of the bujilding.
OMG. Not again! I could feel my stomach clenching.
No, not again.
This time it's a small private plane that came down nose first into an apartment building and crashed into the street. Four people dead; one still strapped into a cockpit seat.
The newscasters get on the internet and start searching for the type of plane, the owner, etc. etc.
I watch the fire blazing from the 40 something floor of the building, the black smoke billowing out, the fire engines rushing to the scene. When I actually post this later tonight, I no doubt will have links, but right now, it's still happening.
There just seems like an awful lot of bad things happening in NYC. Last week or so, a building mysteriously "detonated." This week, the plane, the plane.
We get the NYC news here in the Catskill Mountains. Each night we are innundated with killings of all kinds. If it's not the killings in Iraq, it's the murders in New York City. No wonder I escape these days into Adriana Trigiani's books about Big Stone Gap and Big Cherry Holler -- filled with people who don't kill and live deeply and uniquely in a world that I'm sure must still exist somewhere.
It is almost 7:30 p.m. now, and they've identified the pilot of the plane. Cory Lidle, Yankees pitcher, is already being memorialized on the Internet. I heard on the television news earlier that four people were dead, but Lidle seems to be the only one at this point being mourned.
My mom doesn't like living here in such an isolated piece of the woods at the foot of the mountain. She's afraid of the dark.
That is not the kind of dark that frightens me.
Categories:
It's Harper's Tuesday
I couldn't make up news like this:
South Korean soldiers fired 60 warning shots after North Korean soldiers crossed into the demilitarized zone, but it was not clear if North Korea's action was a deliberate provocation or an attempt to go fishing.[CNN][Chicago Sun-Times][CNN.com] North Korea later detonated a nuclear bomb
...dog-feces-cleanup franchises were opening across the United States. It's the “best job in the world,” said Matt Boswell, the Chief Excrement Officer of Texas-based Pet Butler, which operates in 14 states
Iranian Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei announced that intentional masturbation during Ramadan breaks the fast,[YNetNews.com] and the British Minister of State for Public Health said that pregnant British teens, seeking to ease their labor pains, were smoking to reduce the birth weight of their babies.
Researchers found that Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was on the rise. “Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relative peaceful coexistence,” said professor Gay Bradshaw of Oregon State University, “there is now hostility and violence.” Bradshaw hypothesized that elephants are suffering from species-wide chronic stress brought on by poaching, habitat loss, and other traumas, which may explain why young male elephants have been observed raping and killing rhinoceroses
Britain's Prince William played bingo.
A new group called Scientists and Engineers for America vowed to promote a pro-science president in 2008.[New Scientist]
[The Christian Science Monitor] Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who criticized Russia's Chechnya policy, was found shot to death in an elevator.
Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson told a group in Bozeman, Montana, that half of the world's species could be extinct by 2100,[Fox News]
I didn't even bother to include anything about that Foley Fiasco. It's in a class all by itself.
Categories:
self image
Often I look in the mirror and I can't believe it's me. My mind's eye sees me as I was 25 years ago -- with an actual waistline and strong, slim legs; with wide eyes and energy to burn. Growing older is unavoidable. One can avoid growing wider and droopier, but that takes determination, perseverence, and lots and lots of exercise, lotions, and pampering. If you can afford to go that route, that's just fine. Me? I have not the time, energy, or resources. Anyway, it's easier to let time take its toll and learn to laugh at the ignominy of it. Like Maxine.
Over at Time Goes By Ronni continues to protest the stereotyping of older individuals. Her latest post on Frailty and Stereotypes is excellent, providing references to research that indicates that we can do things to avoid becoming frail. Yes, ofen we can -- again: systematic excercise, good nuitrition, optimistic attitude. In the best of all personal worlds, that's the ticket. But many of our personal worlds are far from even good. I, for one, find it difficult to keep an optimistic attitude. Like Maxine.
Now, some might say that these Maxine cartoons perpetuate a negative stereotype of the "old lady." Except there are grains of truth in them. And they are funny. And it's therapeutic to laugh at oneself.
But that can't be the end of it, and it's how we feel about and deal with the realities of getting older that make the difference in how we are perceived -- and will be perceived -- by younger generations.
I found a post on ZDNet very telling in relation to how many "elders" relate to all of the rapidly evolving Internet offerings:
...only a few of the faculty members I questioned about YouTube knew what it was. For them, the phenomenon of user-generated video was something abstract. This highlights a knowledge gap between the twenty-somethings that attend the university and the 30-60 year-olds who teach there.
If community-based sites are the bread and butter of Web 2.0, then it's mostly the people who grew up with the 'Net who are participating. Most older folks have their communities and they're not online. What's that mean for business models as the ARPA crowd gets steadily bigger with the influx of baby-boomers? Are we going to settle for part of the population, or will someone break the age-barrier with online communities?
Phil Windley, who posted the above, also links (from his Technometria) to a suggestion by Google's Adam Bosworth:
Interestingly, Adam talks about content in the context of community (no big surprise there) and spends a great deal of time talking about the health care industry. Adam claims that there’s a growing need for tools that allow patients to add value to health-care related communities by sharing information and experiences. These tools could lead to better predictors of health conditions, earlier diagnosis, and more successful treatments. And we’d save a lot of money too.
"Elders" like my 90 year old mom with increasingly disturbing dementia will continue to avoid anything new, especially technologies. But those others who have avoided technology so far can be lured in by offering them the kind of online community Bosworth has in mind -- IF the offerings are constructed to be solidly elder-user friendly.
Meanwhile, little (or not so) old ladies like me, who make every effort to keep our "mind's eye" image of ourselves as vital as possible, will always keep up with whatever new "YouTube" type fancies rise up from the younger Net set. We'll keep blogging and wondering and giving our finger to the stereotypes that try to limit what we are and can be.
And meanwhile, some of us will always think that being an old lady can be a real hoot! Like Maxine.
Categories:
perspectives
ENDINGS
ABUNDANCE
Categories:
driveling with Doug
I'm really tired tonight, having had a rough few hours with my mom, as she obsessed about my brother going out to dinner with friends this evening. She paced and ranted and cried, insisting that he probably drowned or was murdered our was out with some girl and I should call him and don't I know where he is and who he's with until I finally just let her go on and on while I turned on my laptop and left a comment over at Ronni's, where there's a great piece (and comments) about how the entertainment media still stereotypes "older" individuals.
[Gasp. Gasp.]
However, I can't call it a day until I post about having a Skype chat with Doug Alder, way up there in Canada. He has a web cam, so I could see him. (I'm not sure I'm ready to mount a web cam here yet; I would have to make sure my hair is combed and I don't look like I just finished a wearying three hours with my mother.)
I only know Doug from his blog, but talking with him felt as though we were old friends. We just hung out and chatted. It's happened that way for me before, like when I talked to Jeneane Sessum on the regular phone and later, at various times, had a chance to meet other bloggers in person :Betsy Devine, Halley Suitt, Frank Paynter, and Dave Rogers.
Now that Doug has helped me get more comfortable with Skype, I'm going to make plans to talk with Ronni. She's up in Maine.
But for now, yawn....
Categories:
blogblab brewing
PhoneCon, Blogblab, call it whatever you want, but make every effort to be there.
Jeneane lit the Phone Con fire, and now Ronni is burning to launch an Elderblogger PhoneCon.
On October 24, from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Eastern Time, Ronni will host a blogblab fest for anyone who might like to join in.
Get the offical info here and check in with Time Goes By to keep up with the pre-blab chatter.
Many of us know each other from our blog "voices." Ronni's blogblab will give us a chance to hear the voices behind the voices.
I'll be there, probably even relieving Ronni's hosting responsibilities every now and then.
Got my Skype. Got my headset. I'm clearing my throat and clearing my calendar (such that it is.)
'Hope to hear you there as well.
Categories:
too good not to share
Two posts over at Blogsisters are worth your time. Both are about how important it is to connect with other people in a meaningful way.
This one called "Look Them in the Eye and Smile."
The other requires both looking and listening, and it actually made me choke up a little.
I send (((H))) to you all.
Categories:
the slow letting go
No, this post is not about my mother. It's about letting go of stuff. Physical stuff. My stuff.
My brother is cleaning out his basement, and I still have stuff in there left from when I moved here more than a year ago. One of the boxes held what I came to think of as my "professional portfolio," e.g. many of the articles, grant proposals, profiles, etc. etc. that I had been paid to write over the course of my professional career. I kept them in case I needed to look for another job. I never intended to spend 20 years with, and retire from, the state's Education Department.
Tonight I threw it all away. It no longer matters that one of my funded proposals was used by the National Science Foundation as a model. It no longer matters that the Chairman of the Biochemistry Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute sent me a note thanking me for turning my lengthy interview with him into a well-written and interesting profile. And so into the trash went everything I wrote for other people that got them what they wanted. All of that no longer matters.
What I did save was a box of stuff about my kids -- newpaper articles, writings, report cards, and, suprisingly, my son's (that's b!X) assessment report from his year at a Montessori Pre-School some thirty-three years ago. What his teacher said about him then is pretty much what those who know him would probably say about him now. Except maybe for one thing -- which might or might not still be true: "frequently bursts into song."
When my daughter and her family come to visit here in a few weeks, I will give her what I have saved about her. It's time for her to begin amassing her own box documenting her history that will get stored in her basement.
My brother tells me that I have one last box in his basement that is labelled "craft stuff." I have no idea what's in it, but I'm readying myself to let it go.
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