As reported by ABC news,

Sajani Shakya, 10, is the first living goddess to visit the United States from Nepal, where she is worshipped and believed to inhabit the Hindu goddess Kali, who is thought to live in girls until they reach puberty.

Strange, it seems to me, that the people of Nepal associate the Indian goddess Kali with purity, since

Kali is represented as a Black woman with four arms; in one hand she has a sword, in another the head of the demon she has slain, with the other two she is encouraging her worshippers. For earrings she has two dead bodies and wears a necklace of skulls ; her only clothing is a girdle made of dead men’s hands, and her tongue protrudes from her mouth. Her eyes are red, and her face and breasts are besmeared with blood. She stands with one foot on the thigh, and another on the breast of her husband.

The “kali” in “kalilily” is for the goddess Kali.

…meet the so called “32 perfections” of the girl who holds the goddess Kali. They include having the gait of a swan, and teeth and golden, tender skin so perfect the skin has never even had a scratch.

We humans might not create our gods and goddesses in our own image, but we do seem to make up myths to meet our need to have what we already believe, reinforced.

As far as I’m concerned, these are the best quotes from the latest Harper’s Weekly Review. Click the link to get the citations and other tidbits that YOU might think are more interesting.
“The one fact I’ve learned–I can’t get out of my mind,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said to an audience at the Center for American Progress, “is that Rudy Giuliani’s been married more times than Mitt Romney’s been hunting.”
Piles of human feces were found in the Senate. “There was,” said a staffer, “so much of it.”

(thanks to Jim Culleny’s daily poetry email.)

MYRLN is a non-blogger who guest-blogs here on Mondays.

T.B.? So What? Revisited

Andrew Speaker’s the sociopathic tuberculosis carrier who decided what he wanted was more important than the possibility of spreading his disease by traveling. So he went on an international jaunt to get married.

So what’s new about that? This: it turns out that lawyer Speaker’s lawyer father — who insists he and his son weren’t told travel was inadvisable — was less than cooperative with or responsive to health officials even after the full extent of his son’s condition was known. The Centers for Disease Control called him to learn of the peripatetic Andrew’s whereabouts so they could get him back to the U.S. quickly and safely. Father Speaker’s response? “I can’t do that. I don’t know where he is. I appreciate your call.” And hung up.

Additionally, it turns out that Andrew’s new father-in-law, Robert Cooksey — who, ironically, works for the CDC — was asked to help stop the planned wedding in Greece. He not only declined to help, he went off to the wedding himself — obviously knowing by then the full extent of his new son-in-law-to-be’s condition.

And in a gesture that would make his daddy and daddy-in-law proud, Andrew has apologized for the scare and for putting dozens through the need for t.b. testing. How nice of him.

It’s a whole familyload of sociopaths who deserve both each other and some jail time. If only and as if.

And next month, Andrew Speaker will have surgery to remove lung tissue infected with the deadly, drug-resistant t.b. he carries. It’s a particular surgery in which — back in 1943 — a five-year old’s mother died on the operating table at Saranac Lake, New York. As despicable as Andrew Speaker is, one must wish him better luck in his surgery. If only for the good of those unfortunate enough to have contact with him afterwards.

Well, it’s not her glaucoma or her macular degeneration. There’s no infection, so the blood test say. Maybe it’s the new medication or maybe she had a little stroke the other night when we somehow managed to get her to the emergency room. But now she’s like a zombie. Sleeps most of the time, eats a little, goes to the bathroom (still by herself, thank god), and goes back to sleep. Doesn’t say much except to cry a little that she can’t remember. I’ll call her geriatric specialist tomorrow and confer about the medication.
In many ways, it’s easier on me because while she sleeps, I can do other things, like blog and alter some of my clothes that are now getting baggy, since I dropped about six pounds (on purpose). But I hate to see her like that. Like a walking dead.
We have to find out what it is.