he following from an email from non-blogger myrln, who is also an avid Red Sox fan. When I saw this reported on television, at first I thought it was a joke. But, NOOOO. We are becoming just like our own sworn enemies.

The following are some odd pieces of news, excerpted from here.
¤ the Senate Permanent Investigations subcommittee reported that law enforcement agencies were powerless to prevent the super-rich from cheating on their taxes
¤ the London School of Economics determined that good-looking couples are 36 percent more likely than their ugly counterparts to have female offspring
¤ a Chicago woman was suing Borders Books after she was “permanently disfigured” in a toilet seat accident
¤ in China 50,000 dogs died in Yunnan province when government-authorized “killing teams” crept into villages at night and beat the dogs to death
¤ a laser-equipped research aircraft owned by NASA was being used to locate woodpeckers in the Mississippi Delta
¤ at least 25,000 chickens died in Indiana from the heat, and geologists in Ohio were baffled by the earthquakes in suburban Cleveland
¤ bungs, drugs, and wholesale cheating were declared to be the norm in all major sports.
AND THAT’S JUST THE GOOD NEWS.

t times, my son and I disagree when it comes to contemporary culture. That’s not surprising, of course. We have different life experiences, and it’s common for different generations to see things differently. It’s always been so. I won’t even get into Elvis Presley.
And so I left the following as a comment on his post about the recent research on the the negative effect on teenagers of today’s music that glorifies sexual degradation.

Put your cursor on each block to find out what it means.

Or go here to see the whole profile.

ust for the hell of it, I went back and looked at the posts I made on this blog in August four years ago. I notice that I linked to a lot of other bloggers back then; I don’t do that very much these days. I just write. I guess that’s because I seldom have the time to read other bloggers — even the ones I really appreciate reading, like Tom Shugart, who is back after a too-long hiatus from blogdom. My life was so totally different four years ago. Just about everything has changed. And I can’t even remember the last time I linked over to Blog Sisters, where I was once one of the leaders of the pack.

he sleeps more hours during the day than she spends awake; she never bothers to get out of her nighclothes. At least that’s how it’s been for the last two days. I don’t know if she’s just recuperating from the stress of the hospital visit or if something else is going on. She eats and drinks, but very little. The diarrhea has reversed itself and now there’s nothing coming out. Something is happening. Her doctor is away on vacation this week. We’re on our own.
It’s a bizzarre feeling — all of a sudden having all of this time to myself. I spent hours this evening trying to learn more tips from Mandarin Meg’s website, looking up true type fonts, making some letters into images. I was unsuccessful in in putting in her codes that would let me put an image in the middle of text; I spent hours playing around with the her code, but I couldn’t get it to work. This is how I play when I’m left with unexpected free time.
This afternoon, while she napped, I went outside to check on my garden — do some watering and deadheading. Oddly enough, there are some tomatoes ripening on vines that are barely there, what with the plague of pests we’ve had all summer. Even though the bottom branches have been infested into ragged brown stalks, tomatoes are still popping up farther up on the wilting vines. Where there’s life, there’s hope.
Over in the back of the house, where my little statue of Pan (that I’ve hauled around with me through several moves) nestles among the leaves of melissa officinalis, the gregariously ubiquitous cinquefoil finds its way into Pan’s muddy crotch, providing much unnecessary modesty to the smooth stoney satyr and inches its way toward my patch of wildflowers, which I planted from seed and still doesn’t sport anything near a bloom.
I have been somewhat partial to Pan ever since I saw this painting at the Clarke Institute in Williamstown, MA. You can’t see the expression on the poor goat-footed guy’s face, but it is pure “panic.” He looks like he’s quite a bit concerned about what those nasty nymphs are going to do to him. Of course, my little cherubic Pan, chipped and bird-splattered, innocently playing his pipes to waken the fertile earth, will never know the neediness of nymphs. Nor will he feel the greediness of the creeping cinquefoil. He doesn’t know that something is happing.
It has taken me two hours to make this post because I was having trouble getting the photos to appear where I wanted them. Even now, they’re not where I wanted them, but at least they’re somewhere reasonable. One of my my best virtues is perseverence. One of my worst faults is perseverence. I have a need to hang in there until things happen.

That’s what’s keeping her going (or, rather, NOT going). I bought a sippy cup a while ago at a dollar store, just in case she might need it someday. That day has come, and she’s been sipping gatorade out of if all day. That’s all she’s allowed to ingest for two days — that and an a strong antibiotic, since so far they haven’t found anything apparent that is causing her diarrhea.
It was a bad morning, with her refusing to sit or lie down and insisting on walking, walking, walking. In desperation, I gave her some of my passionflower extract that I got from the health food store and that I use to calm myself down enough to fall asleep. Eventually, she actually relaxed enough so that we all could relax a little.
As for my toe, it’s better today — obviously just a bad bruise.
My garden’s not much for harvesting this year. I keep salvaging tomatoes, but unless I find the time and energy to water what’s there, the pickings will be even slimmer. My flower/planters are so dried out that I’m not sure I can save what’s in them. Too much sun, not enough water. Not enough time to do the watering.
It’s so hard to get all of those balances right.

In addition to a well encaspsulated report of the murder, mayhem, and madness going on the Middle East, today’s Harper’s Weekly listed a few other items of odd interest, excerpted as follows:
— in Minnesota people in zombie costumes were arrested for carrying “simulated weapons of mass destruction
— hot weather killed 141 people (as well as 25,000 cattle and 700,000 fowl) in California, at least 170 people in France, Italy, and Spain, and dozens of racing dogs in Oregon, and shut down MySpace
— two people in England were killed by a giant inflatable sculpture named Dreamscape
— a school headmaster in China burned down 10 classrooms when the dog meat he was cooking burst into flames
— Radiologists announced that many Americans were becoming too fat for X-rays
— a man in Sumatra was squashed by an elephant.
— poisoned pigeons rained down in Schenectady, New York
— Texas was overrun by butterflies.
— a man in Prey Veng province, Vietnam, killed a 76-year-old nun by strangling her with a krama, then attempted to assassinate a monk, while the victims slept at a wat
— an influential Italian banker and member of Opus Dei was found dismembered under a bridge in Parma
— doctors in India removed a 15-year-old dead fetus from a woman’s womb
—————
— a verbally abused 66 year old woman commits fratricide in New Paltz, NY while 90 year old mother sleeps soundly in the next room
The itme above was not listed. But it might be someday.