I have to say that I’ve been contacted by the most interesting people who Googled something they were looking for or interested in and found exactly what they wanted in one of my posts.
Take, for instance, Canadian Carrie Watkins, who found this 2003 post of mine because she was trying to track down a particular photo of “Witches at Tea.” She was doing the same thing I was at the time — superimposing the faces of the women in her life over the faces of the old ladies. We’ve kept in touch on occasion, and the last occasion was her sharing of her blog experiment in creative writing: A Witch’s Corner. I promised I would go over and keep up with her story — which I didn’t for all kinds of lazy reasons, so now I will tonight.
And then there’s artist Jan Hurst (from Indiana, I think), who also was looking for the “Witches at Tea” photo to use in a collage. I really like Jan’s work. Some of it reminds me of Laurie Doctor’s wonderful pieces that combine calligraphy and mythic images.
Doncha just love Google??!

No, not Mr. Brad Pitt Smith.

The Mr. Smith to whom I’m referring is Adam Smith, whose ideas about free-market competition are associated with the belief that self-interest brings about a healthy economy. His book, “The Wealth of Nations,” is often referred to as the text or prescription for laissez-faire capitalism. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner,” Smith wrote, “but from their regard to their own self-interest.”

The above quote is from my favorite local newspaper columnist, Diane Cameron, who, yesterday, had a piece about Adam Smith, since it was his birthday.

She goes on to say:
Adam Smith did understand that. While he wrote about the importance of self-interest, we forget that he was neither a politician nor an economist, but rather, by training and practice, a moral philosopher. He never advocated not caring for the poor; he presumed that a community — whether that meant a village or town or a country — took care of its needy. Smith made his name with another book before “The Wealth of Nations.” His first book was “A Theory of Moral Sentiments,” written in 1759, in which he described the role of sympathy in society and advocated for the need of it to maximize the “efficiency of care in a community.”

Smith believed that “there is no place for privilege and class” in a moral economy. In Smith’s scheme, wealth meant not just business and prosperity but also charity, generosity, compassion and modesty: having a sense of what is enough.

On the same page as Cameron’s article commentary is a piece by George Richardson of the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, “Waging a Ratio.”

Richardson suggests a way to a achieve a more equitable wage structure in which the minimum wage is tied, by a ratio, to the salaries of top CEOs. He suggests:
There are those who are troubled by soaring top management salaries while the purchasing power of average and minimum wages erode. It seems both immoral and unstable for a society to drive such a growing gap between its rich and poor. And it is a dramatic example of a kind of market failure: Top management compensation appears to be a runaway cost. The phenomenon cries out for solutions that help to control the growing disparity between rich and poor, and reduce the compensation strains on corporations without harming the strength of our economy.

It’s time to stop thinking about pushing on that string, and switch to pulling on it from the other end. We should work through the implementation puzzles and set a federal minimum wage ratio policy — a maximum compensation ratio — and set a self-adjusting standard for wage equity that re-establishes rationality in wages and compensation packages and is a model for equity and efficiency for the world’s economies.

I’ll bet that Adam Smith would have liked Richarson’s sensible and sympathetic solution.

Last night I met some of my “old” sorority sisters for dinner. It is reunion weekend at SUNY/Albany, so we thought we’d have our own get together. One of the women had gotten a letter from a guy we vaguely remember from the good ol’ days. He had kept track of lots of other people from college that we all knew in common; his letter filled us in on their whereabouts. It also filled us in on the career he wound up in with the CIA. Apparently, when I was still dorking around in graduate school, trying my best to avoid the real world, John Sullivan enlisted and
…served in the US Army from 1962 to 1967 as a Staff Sergeant E-6 in military intelligence. He was trained as a Russian linguist at the Army Language School in Monterey, California. After completing the Field Operations Intelligence (case officer) course, he was assigned to Germany where he studied the German language.
The most interesting information, from my perspective, is on Amazon.com, from the reviews of his new book, Of Spies and Lies: A CIA Lie Detector Remembers Vietnam.
This offered by Publisher’s Weekly:
…Sullivan arrived in Vietnam a war hawk. After 48 months of traversing the war zone administering lie-detector tests to thousands of enemy prisoners and others, he came home a thoroughly disillusioned dove. Sullivan chronicles his change of heart by seemingly sparing few details about his work and social lives during his extended tour of duty. He paints a generally negative picture of the CIA’s war against the Vietcong. Sullivan claims that CIA operatives produced “some good information,” but that information was misused by those at the top and produced no real progress in undermining the enemy. On the social side, Sullivan readily admits that he lived the good life in Vietnam. He and his wife and child lacked for few creature comforts in the war zone….
and this from Booklist:
There is no shortage of Vietnam War memoirs, of course, but here is one with what just might be a unique perspective: the war as seen by a CIA agent responsible for polygraphing prisoners of war, potential allies, and even his own colleagues. Sullivan is not unaware of the ironies implicit in his role as polygraph specialist–a lie-detecting expert hunting truth at a time and in a place where disinformation was ubiquitous. His work took him from one end of Vietnam to the other, as well as to Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, and his memories of the final four years of the war (1971-75) are deeply unsettling. There are no lid-blowing revelations here (like all books by former CIA employees, this one has been vetted by the agency), but the very personal story of a man confronted with the elusiveness of truth proves surprisingly moving….
I barely remember John from our college days. I have always been, after all, a peacenik. We didn’t travel in the same circles back then.
Actually, several of my sorority sisters and I didn’t really travel in the same circles either. They are the more conservative ones. But somehow, when we get together now, in our more mellow years, we enjoy each other’s company. We have a shared history of times when we were still forming who we would become. When, in those naive 1950s, we were still innocent. Some of us have stayed more innocent than others.
And we never would have pegged John Sullivan for a career detecting lies in a war zone.

Half way through the Berkshire Mountains on the Mass Pike, I noticed a band of crows circling over my car. Five minutes later, one of my back tires went flat. A minute or so later, I was pulling off the road in front of a trooper, who just happened to be parked there waiting for speeders. Another five minutes and the emergency truck arrived; another two, and I was on my way again. “Somebody up there must be watching out for you,” the trooper smiled, winking.
We had put in my daughter’s meditation garden — turning what had been a huge circle of white stones that occupied the space where the former owners once had an above ground pool into a tear-drop patio that curves into the edges of a garden (that will soon be covered with the herbs, ground covers, and grasses that we planted. Except where there’s a path leading from the patio to a bench. And except where there are rocks, a fat maternal garden hare, a watchful hedgehog [which I call a hedgehag], and a guardian gargoyle.)

My grandson and I had our own journeys to take, as we spent a long afternoon together while his folks went out to lunch and shopping for more garden plantings. We improvised little scenarios, in which he always remembered both his lines and mine. And then there were the trucks. Lots of trucks. Diggers. Excavators. Front loaders. And a truck video on which, he explained to me, there were an auger drill and an impact hammer. We were on a learning journey, and he was the teacher.





…………………………………………………..
someone was in my apartment, she says. they moved things around in my dresser. were you in here taking my gloves, she asks. she’s back. you’re back. so much for rejuvenating journeys.

I’m leaving early tomorrow to visit the Wizard Who Can Make Me Laugh.

Or rather the goofy Munchkin.

Of course it’s raining and it’s going to rain all week. Tomorrow I’m taking my mother to my brother’s and then I’m heading out on Thursday for some R&R at my daughter’s in Massachusetts.
Perhaps we should do what the people in Fairhaven, in the rainy Pacific Northwest do: have an annual Rain Festival. Unfortunately, their last such event was spoiled by a plague of sunshine. What rotten luck.
The willows near the pond are heavy with rain. I had planned to sneak out tonight and cut/steal some willow branches to weave a “protection shield” for my daughter’s house. I will be going out there on Thursday, so I still have time when I get back from my brother’s tomorrow. Unless it’s raining then as hard as it is now.
it’s raining, it’s raining
I can’t help my complaining

from myrln
We need more atheists, agnostics, and Buddhists:
NY Jews Heckle Sharon
Israeli Jews and Muslims heckle Laura Bush.
Bush heckled at Christian College.

I’m pissed that CBS has concelled Joan of Arcadia. Now, you might not think I watched a program like that, what with Joan talking to God and he/she talking back. But I understand the difference between fanatasy and reality, and that was one of the most creatively written shows on network tv.
But CBS says that the demographics they’re after don’t watch creatively written and well-acted quirky dramas that explore the human struggle to develop personal and moral values.
And the same network also cancelled Judging Amy, and so there goes the great imperfect older woman role model played by Tyne Daly.
CBS thinks that the demographics they’re after are not interested in watching well-written and acted shows that feature strong imperfect women struggling to make their way in the world while still remaining the center of strong imperfect families.
And on top of all of that, according to the Observer:
Nestling deep in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas, in the heart of America’s Bible Belt, this is the first dinosaur museum to take a creationist perspective. Already thousands of people have flocked to its top-quality exhibits which mix high science with fundamentalist theology that few serious scientists accept.
Well, there you go. CBS’s demographics:
Even as America’s scientists make advances in palaeontology, astronomy and physics that appear to disprove creationism, Gallup surveys have shown that about 45 per cent of Americans believe the Earth was created by God within the past 10,000 years. It is not just creationism either. Last week NBC’s Dateline current affairs programme, equivalent to the BBC’s Newsnight, investigated miracles. It concluded some could be real.
Oh yeah. Feed the frenzy of fundamentalism!
And don’t forget the Silver Ring Thing.
Don’t bother those Right/eous with facts. They know what they believe.

what’s this, she says, holding up a jar of mayonnaise that you’ve been wondering what happened to. that’s my mayonnaise, you say, picking it up to see if it’s cold. it’s not.
where was it, you ask.
I found it in there, she says, pointing to the buffet against her dining room wall.
why did you put it in there, you ask.
I didn’t put it there, she insists.
it’s just about midnight. she is looking through all the boxes in her bedroom that she has begun to pack in anticipation of the big move you both will soon be making. she says someone keeps moving things around from box to box.
you ask what she’s looking for, but she doesn’t seem to know.
why is everyone taking my things, she sobs. why can’t I have the things that are important to me.
no one is taking your things, you say. it’s all here, somewhere. you forgot where you put them. no one wants your stuff, you say. we have our own stuff.
I love you, she says. you came out of my body. why do you want to do this to me. why do you want to make me think I’m crazy, she says.
go to sleep, you say. tomorrow you’ll be rested and you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for.
you go back across the hall. turn on the computer. it’s almost twelve-thirty.
the phone rings. did you take the photo I have of you, she says.
no, I didn’t, you say. it’s there somewhere.
you’ll fix it for me tomorrow, she says. good night, she says.

Teenage Blogging
[subtitle added after posting for search purposes]
I’m sitting at my computer in the HOBY t-shirt that I got yesterday as one of the gifts to the panelists at the seminar.
I can’t remember when I’ve been so wound up and tired at the same time that I can’t get to sleep. So, yesterday evening, I played cards with my mom, watched the tape I made of Smallville’s finale (Yup. I watch Smallville. Everwood, too. Something about never letting go of my inner teenager.) I remember having private drool over Tom Welling (Smallville’s Clark Kent) when he appeared on Judging Amy as a yoga instructor that Amy had a fling with.
Is this starting to sound like a teenage girl’s blog? (I’m so easily influenced!)
After the blogging panel part of yesterday’s program, each of us three panelists (SUNY Journalism Professor William Rainbolt, an HR person whose name and company I didn’t write down so I can’t remember and her name isn’t in the program, and me) sat down with a randomly selected group of the kids to chat.
I thought it was interesting that only a handful of the fifty or so kids in my group had a blog, and they were mostly girls. Before yesterday, I did a little Googling and found out that, a couple of years ago,
The average blogger is a teenage girl who posts every two weeks to update her friends on her life. Two years in blogtime makes a big difference, though, and I’m sure that the average has shifted. If anyone has stats on that, I’d love to know.
As you might expect, this was an energetic and lively bunch of kids — for the most part. I couldn’t help notice a few, though, who looked familiar — that holding-back and mildly defiant stare — the bright rim-walkers who sit in the back, watch, ingest, process, and somehow find their own way around the hypocrisy of systems. They weren’t the bloggers. At least not yet.
The questions the kids asked were not terribly insightful — but hey, future leaders or not, they’re still tenth graders. They asked me to elaborate about b!X’s current brouhaha (which I had mentioned earlier), about why I blog, how long etc. They seemed to be most interested in how personal they should get on their blogs. I shared with them many of the quotes from the comments I got about the guidelines various bloggers I know use for themselves. I also cautioned them about blogging information that predators can use to track them down. And I reminded them never to assume that they can hide behind anonymity. Everything on the Internet is public and can be tracked down by the persistent. I also recommended the various weblog handbooks in which Shelley Powers, Rebecca Blood, and Meg Hourihan contributed. I should have also told them to ask their school librarians to stock them if they haven’t already.
One young woman asked if I use music in my weblog. Admitting to being an absolute non-techie, I responded that I’m a “word” person, a writer, and I never bothered to learn how to import music because I don’t want to distract from my writing. I also told them all that I know about “audio blogging,” which is that it exists.
They asked me how “public” I am about who I am. I replied, as you might expect, that I didn’t worry about anyone out there wanting to harass a “little old retired grandma raising hell at the keyboard” — and that I am a performer at heart, and these days my blog is my one-woman-show. But they need to be a lot more careful because they are in a much more vulnerable position.
Finally, I stressed that blogging is an extension of one’s life — they should blog the way, I would hope, they live — with compassion for others, with respect for the privacy of others. What I wish I had thought to say is that rather than attack individuals and their behaviors (except, of course, if they’re public figures) phrase what you want to say in the form of questions. Question the validity of behaviors, comment on the effects of certain behaviors. The point will get through without naming names or crucifying with specifics.
When they ran out of questions, I just shared my blogging experiences — how my blog gives me an identity, a place to be creative, a way to meet kindred spirits (I tend to interact mostly with bloggers who identify themselves as real people with names, locations, and histories). I told them that I usually write a draft of what I’m going to post before I post it so that I can make sure it’s what I really want to say and check for typos, etc. Usually, but not always. And when I don’t, I’m usually sorry I didn’t.
Finally, I urged them — if they want to make a difference in their communities, change their little pieces of the world, become a voice for the causes they espouse — to try blogging. And I told them to check out theonetruebix.