There is so many awful newsworthy things happening throughout the world that this Tuesday’s Harper’s Weekly digest contains very few oddities to report:

“New research confirmed that smoking and obesity increase the risk of erectile dysfunction.[New York Times][Reuters] U.S. tax revenue was up.

“It was reported that Melinda Gates is more comfortable than her husband Bill when it comes to holding AIDS babies in Africa or talking to male prostitutes in India.[New York Times] The world’s oldest crow died in Bearsville, New York,[Associated Press] and astronomers observed what they said might be a strange glowing blob of dark matter sucking in gas.[New Scientist] …. .[Bloomberg] President Vladimir Putin of Russia explained that he had recently kissed a young boy on the stomach because he “wanted to stroke him like a cat.”.

The depressing news is that, according to the NY Times

“A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed “large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists” to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.
“We’ve got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad,” the group quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying in a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org. “That’s a problem.”.

‘YA THINK??!!
Read the reports from the Southern Poverty Law Center here and here.
On this mountain home front, life is just as surreal, as mom wanders, babbling something that has the word “potato” in it. During lucid moments, she wants to help — cook, clean, all the things she knows how to do to keep busy. I can’t let her do anything because she’s a danger at the stove or with a knife, and she’s not supposed to bend down and everything she touches seems to wind up someplace else and then we can’t find it. She gets really mad at me, shouting that she hopes someone does to me someday what I’m doing to her. “I hope that someday my daughter will try to keep me safe and take care of me if I’m like you,” I say. “You don’t have a daughter,” she throws back at me as she stomps away.
I spent all day today making homemade chicken soup and trying to keep her calm. She just wouldn’t sit for more than five minutes; she paced and panted and cried and refused to lie down and rest. On top of that, I got up early today and colored my hair, which didn’t come out the color it should have. Feh. I’ll bet it’s the stupid minerals in the well water, which my sib says he runs through a softener. I think he needs a new one. FEH! (as my old Polish grandmother used to say.)

When I first started blogging five years ago, I was very concerned about protocol. Is it OK to go back and change what I had written in a post? Is it OK to delete comments that are just way off the mark or offensive to other commenters? I don’t care about any of those things any more. It’s my party, and I’ll blog the way I want to.
Oh, of course i don’t want a reputation for being inauthentic or manipulative, and to be honest, only once have I gone back and made signficant changes to a post, and that was to keep much-needed peace in the family.
I am, however, at the point of considering tossing a commenter out on his ear. He’s an “intelledtual,” he claims; he’s also confrontational . He doesn’t seem to understand that one needs to be affective in order to be effective. If he has a “totem animal,” I suspect it’s a beaver — gnawing, gnawing, gnawing away at the same spot until he makes it give away.
Back in May of 2005, I blogged an item about what “truth” is/isn’t that continues to generate comments. The early ones were informative; the later ones seemed to be a battle between linear logic and the the more illusive emotions. It seems to me that the goal should always be to combine both in any argument because individuals are both rational and emotional. What we feel affects what we think — it’s just human nature. Unless, it seems, one classifies himself as an intellectual and ergo doesn’t have to look beyond the apparent “facts.”
For now, I let the dialogue between the mind and the heart continue, with my interjections when I feel like it. After all, it IS my party.
And the truth here is that you’re invited to join in the comments over at my Whose Truth post.

I haven’t blogged about blogging in a while; back in the “old” days, we all did a lot of that — especially as we women bloggers asserted our places in the blogsphere and commiserated on how to deal with commenters whose comments contributed nothing to the conversation and with the issue of just what family-related things shouldn’t be blogged. I finally had to resort to a system of commenter registration, as did Tamara, who wound up starting a whole new weblog.
Bitches, Bimbos, and Ballbreakers: many of us have been called that and more by some males who have stumbled onto our weblogs. There is a book by that title (Bitches, Bimbos, and Ballbreakers: The Guerrilla Girls’ Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes), published by the Guerrilla Girls. I indulged myself and recently sent for a copy.
The Introduction to the book has this to say about stereotypes:

It’s rearely a girl’s own choice. It’s a label someone else give you to make you less or more than you really are.

By empowering women to create their own stereotypes and to reject the ones our culture tries to squeeze us into, the Guerrilla Girls want to do our share toward saving the world from sexists and misogynists everywhere and have fun along the way.

A lot of us bloggrrrls are Guerrilla Girls at heart.
Which brings me to Shelley Powers (the blogger previously known as Burning Bird), who was a major figure in the blogoshpere before she took a long break. She’s baaaaack, this time with Just Shelleyas her home base, but with other sites as well.
And I think it’s funny that all of a sudden bloggers are discovering the clever, funny, talented, and prolific zefrank. I discovered him when I started blogging in 2001, and if you go here on my old blog and scroll down to May 16, you will see that I blogged about him then.
Ah, as usual, this crone is ahead of her time. (That’s my chosen stereotype, doncha know!)

(That’s this Crone, South Park Style)
And this has always been one of my favorites, thanks to Gary Turner over in the UK.

Stole his from Jeneane’s blog:

Can you tell my mom went to bed early tonight??

No, it wasn’t any of those — that thing that swooped low and heavy over the sunroof of my car from a tree at the foot of the driveway. At first I thought it was a wild turkey, but when it landed in another tree across the road, I noticed that it had a red head. It looked more like a buzzard.
What it was is a turkey vulture, and it must live somewhere very nearby because I saw it again this evening flapping through the woods toward the lake.
I know when they soar high in the sky, gliding on air currents, turkey vultures look like hawks, and now I know that’s what I often see high above the cliffs. But when one makes its landing approach through a stand of trees, it looks like a big fat ball of feathers hurled from the sky.
It must have a nest somewhere nearby. I wonder if I can find it.

I make sure I see just about every movie about ballroom dancing that comes out. Some I’ve seen several times. But I watched one the other day that is worth watching even if you don’t dance. After watching it, you might want to.
I never head of Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School , but my sib rented it thinking my mom and I would like it. My mother loves to watch ballroom dancing. Marisa Tomei, Mary Steenburgen, Sean Astin, John Goodman, Sonia Braga, Adam Arkin — the list of great performers goes on. Even Danny DeVito (although I’ll be damned if I remember him in it!) And none of them is a “ballroom dancer.”
There is a line in the movie about dancing “to exorcise my demons.” I guess that’s how it always worked for me. But that’s not what the movie is about, and what it’s about is not just one simple idea.
If you can find it, rent it.

While many citizens of New York State scrambled to figure out what to do about the state’s Supreme Court’s ruling against gay marriage, I was having lunch with a male couple who have been together for 37 years. That’s a lot longer than many heterosexual marriages.
The lunch was at their weekend home, filled with memorabilia from their various travels. Lunch was home cooked and delicious, beginning with an fettucini Alfredo prepared at the table, with real butter, fresh egg yolk, parmesan cheese, and (I think) scallions. I wished I had asked to take the leftovers home with me.

John Lennon

The broccoli never went for good green food; instead, it flowered whitely and prematurely behind the row of healthy but inedible marigolds. Obviously I did something wrong when I planted it, so its growing life was considerably stunted. It all looks pretty, but it’s lost its purpose.

I sit on the bed with my mother this morning as she cries. “I’m thinking about my brother,” she says. She misses her brother. Before I moved her in with me, which was a year before her brother died, they shared a two family home. He drove; she cooked. They were good company for each other until each started down that road toward senility. Even then, they had those old memories to share of their childhood years when their mother took them to live in Poland, after WWI and before WWII. That’s what they would remember. That’s what they would talk about.
Over on Doug’s site, he’s remembering his childhood, which was similar to mine.
Hah (I commented on his post) I remember those days too. The first tv I saw was at my aunt’s house — 9 inch black and whilte screen that most of the time showed a station symbol because there were only a few shows available. We called pizza “hot pie,” and the kind that oozes as in your {Doug’s) description is still the best kind. It’s hard to find these days. “Fast food” came form Fred Laney’s hot dog wagon that was pulled by a little pony and came around once a week.
In the summer, trucks laden with fruit and vegetables came by once a week, too, with their drivers shouting “waaterrmellonnnn!!” Coal was shunted into our cellar to heat the coal furnace, which my father had to fill with a shovel. I would swipe some to draw “Girls Are” on the sidewalk.
Doug describes many of the things I also remember: the black and white televisions on which we put a plastic sheet that was blue (like the sky) on the top, red in the middle, and green (like grass) on the bottom. There were no such things as credit cards, and our phones all were “party-lines.” (Go over to Doug’s; he explains it all.)
Meanwhile, I’ve got to stop at the market to pick up some broccoli. The kind without flowers.

A great idea that never went anywhere.

I subscribe to Harper’s Weekly, where included items come strung together, the significant mixed with the strange. You wind up with an oddly accurate cross section of current life on this planet. Here are some excerpts:

”[Scotsman] A three-foot-long escaped porcupine named Twinkle was captured in Langwathby, England.[BBC] President Bush said that it was “disgraceful” for newspapers to report on a secret intelligence program to trace bank records,[New York Times] and China announced that media outlets would be fined up to $12,500 if they reported on any “sudden events” without prior authorization.[New York Times] The library of the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas, cancelled its subscription to the New York Times.

Bruno the bear was shot and killed by German authorities, ending his seven-week rampage through Germany and Austria; Bruno, officially tagged Rampant Brown Bear JJ 1, had killed sheep and rabbits, stolen honey, eluded Finnish bear trackers and elkhounds, and squashed a guinea pig. “Sexual frustration,” said a German official, “may be a reason for the random killings.”[Times Online (U.K)] Rush Limbaugh was detained at an airport when authorities found illicit Viagra in his luggage.[Hamilton Spectator][local6.com] A Vermont teenager was convicted of stealing the bowtie and eyeglasses from a corpse and cutting off its head to make a bong,[NBC5.com] and in Nigeria a professor at Olabisi Onabanjo University was found dead behind Poopola Hospital in Ijebu-Igbo; Professor Oyedola is believed to have been killed by one of two warring campus cults–either the Eiye Confraternity or the Buccaneers.[Vanguard] In Rajasthan, India, a low-caste bridegroom on a horse was stoned by onlookers when a camel in his wedding procession ran amok,[Hindustan Times] and David Hasselhoff hit his head on a chandelier while shaving. [AP via AOL News]

A study showed that rich people get more sleep than poor people, white people get more sleep than black people, and women get more sleep than men,[Reuters] and another study found that money does not buy very much happiness.[LiveScience.com] A gang of marauding transvestite thieves was terrorizing New Orleans businesses,[New Orleans City Business] and scientists were trying to create tomatoes containing an HIV vaccine.[New Scientist] It was revealed that a Minnesota Timberwolves basketball player crashed his SUV into a parked car because he was drunk and masturbating to porn.

Meanwhile, it’s Independence Day. Independence! I think I remember what that is.