this strange world

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Each week, Harper’s offers its “Weekly Review—a digital newsletter that distills the world media’s discharge into three simple paragraphs.”

Here are some discharges (some amusing, some downright scary) from this week’s Harper’s Weekly Review. The links will take you to the original stories.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi denied accusations that he paid a teenage runaway for sex, explaining that he gave $65,000 to a bellydancer who goes by the name of Ruby the Heartbreaker to help her escape a life of prostitution by launching a beauty parlor, and that he thought she was Hosni Mubarak’s granddaughter. link

Donald Trump, who is giving “serious, serious thought” to running for president in 2012, outlined his Libya policy: “Either I’d go in and take the oil,“ he said, ”or I don’t go in at all.” link

Previously unseen emails revealed that BP tried to control independent research into the consequences of the Gulf oil spill. link

Hydraulic fracturing companies, an investigation revealed, injected hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals into wells in at least 13 states between 2005 and 2009, as well as salt, instant coffee, and walnut hulls, to stimulate the release of natural gas from underground reserves. link

Bolivia prepared to pass the Law of Mother Earth, which will grant nature rights equal to those of humans, although it is not yet clear how the legislation will be implemented. link

Scientists identified the part of the brain integral to embarrassment by asking subjects to listen to their own karaoke renditions of the Temptations’ 1964 hit “My Girl” played back without the musical accompaniment. link

A retired greengrocer from Southampton, England, spent 400 hours knitting a three-tier wedding cake to celebrate the upcoming marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton. “It’s not based on a pattern,” said 74-year-old Sheila Carter. “I just made it up. link

While I have to admit that, being an fanatical knitter, I was intrigued by the story of the knitted wedding cake. But only for a moment.

What really caught my attention was the Wired story about Bolivia.

Bolivia is one of South America’s poorest countries and is seeing its rural communities suffer with failing crops due to climatic events such as floods and droughts. Temperatures are set to rise by up to four degrees celsius over the next 100 years, while most of its glaciers are likely to melt within 20 years.

The Bolivian government — under president Evo Morales — will establish a ministry of mother earth and commit to give communities the authority to monitor and control the industries and businesses that are polluting the environment.

I hope the media keeps track of this story to see if what Morales proposes can work, given corporate greed, even in Bolivia.

morning dreams

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Since there is no urgency for me to get up mornings, I tend to lie abed for hours, drifting in and out of sleep. During that time in the morning is when I dream — complex narratives always set in the same dream universe, consisting of the same winding urban streets that rise up from a river and move out into an area that is reminiscent of the neighborhood where I grew up. Somewhere in the mix is a school/college campus and a hotel on a lake where there is always some kind of social dancing going on.

It is as though when I dream I move into a life in some parallel dimension where the topography reflects a mixture of places I have known in this life. They are recognizable places, but they are enough off-kilter to become problematic. I am often unsure or lost in this dreamscape, which is populated both with people I know and don’t know, and always fraught with distressing situations.

I dream these dreams almost every morning and wake up tired and disoriented.

Of course, the answer is to get up early and avoid the dreams. Somehow I can’t. I’m always curious to find out what is going on in this other life of mine.

This morning I dreamed of my cousins who are in Florida — two couples whom I haven’t seen in several years. In real life, one of their sons and my son were born a month apart. In my dream they were both the age of my grandson, now — around 9 years old. And my son was also my grandson. And there was a frisky puppy — a long-haired reddish puppy whose fur I could feel — soft and silky — as I held onto its collar to keep it from jumping on my son/grandson.

In the dream, one cousin was showing me around her opulent apartment. There was really no point to the story. (Even as in this life, there seems to often be no point.)

Nothing was resolved before I woke up with one of my favorite Mary Travers’ songs from the 1970s — “Morning Glory” — running through my mind. I spent some time today doing an internet search for the lyrics, but couldn’t dig them up anywhere. I remember them as something like

Morning glory, glory in the morning.
I wish that I could show my face like you.
I wonder where you go to every afternoon.
Sometimes I wish that I could go there too.
Sometimes I wish that I could go there too.

I’ve got to figure out how to make myself go to bed earlier and get up earlier. I wonder if it’s just how my biorhythms are?

one Republican’s good idea

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There are very few issues on which I can agree with most Republicans. They want less government interference; I want more government oversight. They believe that everyone should be able to “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.” I believe more in the “I am my brother’s keeper” socialist philosophy of Jesus Christ (even though I am an atheist).

“Government of the people, for the people, and by the people” is what our country’s founders intended, with “people” meaning ALL citizens or the representatives thereof. That means a strong federal government that serves the interests of ALL of its people, not just the rich and powerful.

Unfortunately, these days the richest and most powerful people are those who are supposed to represent us, with their closest financial friends backing them up.

So, when Virginia’s Republican James. M. LeMunyon wrote the following in the Wall Street Journal, I had to agree:

The U.S. Congress is in a state of serious disrepair and cannot fix itself. It has reached this point over the course of many years — in fact over decades. Regardless of the party in power, Congress has demonstrated a growing inability to effectively address the major issues of our time, including soaring federal debt and the extension of federal authority to states and localities.”

(I had to agree on the statement, but I probably wouldn’t agree on his interest in extending “federal authority to states and localities.)

LeMunyon calls for a Constitutional Convention, more specifically, an “Article V Constitutional Convention,” which is a process for delineating and submitting to Congress requests for changes to the Constitution that a majority of citizens support.

As a matter of fact, there is already, online, a petition to hold an Article V Convention, which

…is simply a deliberative assembly of state delegates discussing what might garner the approval from an overwhelming amount of citizens from across the political spectrum.

As one might expect, there is a lot of discussion going on about the value of having an Article V Convention.

Of course, I support such a move, especially because the technology enabled by the Internet can be used to draw out the actual desires of individual citizens. We, the people, telling our government what we need from it.

And one of the major things we need is the reform expressed in what I got as a forwarded email with no attribution. But it makes a good case, so I reprint it here:

Subject: Let’s NOT be sheep!

Take a minute and read this please

No one has been able to explain to me why young men and women serve in the U.S. Military for 20 years, risking their lives protecting freedom, and only get 50% of their pay. While politicians hold their political positions in the safe confines of the capital, protected by these same men and women, and receive full pay retirement after serving one term. It just does not make any sense.

Monday on Fox news they learned that the staffers of Congress family members are exempt from having to pay back student loans. This will get national attention if other news networks will broadcast it. When you add this to the below, just where will all of it stop?

Governors of 35 states have filed suit against the Federal Government for imposing unlawful burdens upon them. It only takes 38 (of the 50) States to convene a Constitutional Convention.

This will take less than thirty seconds to read. If you agree, please pass it on.

This is an idea that we should address.

For too long we have been too complacent about the workings of Congress. Many citizens had no idea that members of Congress could retire with the same pay after only one term, that they specifically exempted themselves from many of the laws they have passed (such as being exempt from any fear of prosecution for sexual harassment) while ordinary citizens must live under those laws. The latest is to exempt themselves from the Healthcare Reform… in all of its forms. Somehow, that doesn’t seem logical. We do not have an elite that is above the law. I truly don’t care if they are Democrat, Republican, Independent or whatever. The self-serving must stop.

If each person that receives this will forward it on to 20 people, in three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message.. This is one proposal that really should be passed around.

Proposed 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution: “Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States .”

Please pass this on!

stoop sitting

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A day like this in early Spring would be the beginning of our “stoop sitting” season.

There were no driveways in that old urban neighborhood, with no basketball hoops in them. But we all had stoops. The stoop was for the kids; the upstairs porches for the adults, from which they reigned over that blue-collar neighborhood with watchful eyes.

My cousins and I would sit on the bottom step of the 3-family-house stoop (where most of them lived) and play Jacks on the sidewalk or Stoop Ball (which we called Fly’s Up) from the first two steps using a super pinkie ball. The sidewalk itself would be chalked with games of Girls Are and Hopscotch. I couldn’t find anything online defining our game of “Girls Are,” and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s just the name we gave it. Maybe it’s even a game we made up.

There wasn’t much of a backyard, back then, and within what there was my grandparents had planted various greeneries that I thought were weeds until I saw my grandmother make concoctions for her arthritis out of them.

Now I live in a middle class neighborhood where people don’t seem to ever sit out on their stoops. Except for us.

The front of our house, with its minimal stone stoop, faces south, so it’s the best place to sit and have a cup of tea in the morning or relax after dinner. In a few weeks it will have plants on and around it, but it’s still too cold to get the plants in. But we all sat out there in the sun for a while today — the only family in the neighborhood who stoop sits.

We do have a back yard, where the vegetable garden will go again, bigger this year, and where perennials wait for a stronger sun while crocuses, daffodils, and a yucca plant that never dies off in the winter are pressing their way into Spring. And in the shady side yard, where the irises are are just sprouting, the heavy old cement Pan statue that I have hauled around through four moves, now sits, down and dirty, playing his silent pipes.

It’s almost Spring, and it’s stoop sitting time.

she might

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The following is my response to the visual writing prompt at Magpie Tales #59. Go to the site to find the responses of other writers.


she might really be him, you know,
that quirky painter who so loved codes
that he scratched subtle signs
behind and under what you see
so that you can’t see what he really
means unless you look too close,
and, even then, no one knows if
that’s what he meant or if he just
liked to play in a wig and snide smile.

his dream coming true

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He tells the story, here, of how his dream began at age 5:

……when everyone else was answering “policeman” or “fireman” or “doctor” to the question of what they wanted to be when they grew up, my first real answer was that I wanted to be an “outer space moving van driver”, helping (and this part was very specific) families to move into orbiting space stations…..

Well, as he goes on to explain,

Needless to say, I never did become an outer space moving van driver. Nor did I end up in space science in any fashion whatsoever. Or, indeed, in any field of science at all. (For that matter, I don’t even drive.)

But the exploration of space, whether by human or machine, has since that early memory of film fiction [2001: A Space Odyssey] been a consistent source of inspiration, and the realities of that exploration over the decades since have made me both cheer and weep over what’s possible when men and women strive for something (is there any other word for it?) awesome.


Now my son has a chance to witness, in person, the launch of the shuttle Endeavor on April 19 as one of 150 people selected from all over the world and hosted by NASA, as explained in the following:

NASA will host a two-day Tweetup for 150 of its Twitter followers on April 18-19 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Space shuttle Endeavour is targeted to launch at 7:48 p.m. EDT on April 19, on its STS-134 mission to the International Space Station.

The Tweetup will provide @NASA followers with the opportunity to tour the center, view the shuttle launch and speak with NASA managers, astronauts, shuttle technicians and engineers. The event also will provide participants the opportunity to meet fellow tweeps and NASA’s social media team.

He’s been invited. And, yes, he’s excited.

Now he has to find the money for air fare and housing. While he’s in the middle of discussions with his fellow invitees regarding how to share expenses, he will still have costs that, unemployed as he is at the moment, he can’t afford to pay for.

But he is an active citizen of the Net, and, as such, he’s put himself out there to ask for help from those who know him and can’t wait to see what he reports and photographs as he lives out his dream.

He says:

Please consider donating to my trip fund for this experience. Anything raised in excess of funds required to cover trip expenses will be donated to Mercy Corps for Japan earthquake relief and recovery.

Yes, I’m donating, as is his sister, and, hopefully other family members and friends.

b!X needs a break. A job would be great too, but in the meanwhile, a chance to be at Cape Canaveral on April 18 and 19 is the closest he’s ever going to get to having his childhood dream come true. And, on top of that, as he tweeted:

This trip will happen three years almost to the day since my Dad died. He would have thought this was the most awesome thing ever.

And a note to my friends and family:

I’m sure that you will never have a chance to give him a wedding gift, so how about donating a few bucks to this adventure, which will no doubt be the highlight of his life.

To donate online, go to https://www.wepay.com/donate/197774.

turnaround fantasy

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The following is my response to the visual prompt of Magpie Tales #58. Go to the site for links to the responses of other writers.

Turnaround Fantasy

In my dreams I saw a warrior,
caped in scarlet velvet,
with eyes as green as spring mischief
and legs as strong as the golden mare they rode.

The warrior ranged the ragged cliffs
above a raging sea,
rescuing damsels in distress
and returning ancient thrones
to rightful heirs.

And when the moon was full,
the warrior would ride to the village
and make music, and laughter, and
even, love.

And, one one of those moonfull nights
I asked the warrior:
‘What do you seek?”

And the warrior answered:
“I seek a knight in shining armor,
with eyes as daring as the autumn seas
and hands as gentle
as the brush of his stallion’s silver mane —

A knight who rides the wooded hillsides
and rain-washed valleys
rescuing damsels in distress
and returning ancient thrones
to rightful heirs.”

Then,
in the startling shadows,
I saw a dark longing
drown the mischief in her eyes,
as the warrior turned
to face the moon.

(copyright Elaine Frankonis)

on turning 71 today

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It’s March 11, 2011.

There was a terrible earthquake in Pacific Ocean today, and Japan is being hit with 30 foot waves. Tsunamis of various sizes are headed toward both North and South America. Untold lives are being destroyed even as I write this.

Rebellion and unrest in the Middle East and Africa continues to escalate, as untold lives are being destroyed even as I write this.

The state of Wisconsin is leading the way toward an America I’m not going to want to live in, and untold lives are being destroyed even as I write this.

It is my 71st birthday today, and, as I watch and listen to the devastating events going on all around me, I am grateful for the life I have right now, uneventful ‘tho it often is.

And that’s why today, on my 71st birthday, I am filling out forms to be a hospice volunteer — because I am used to doing useful things and need to do something useful with the time I have left.

When I moved here to be with my daughter and family two years ago — after almost a decade of care-giving and 40 years of various other “useful” jobs — I thought that I would be happy hanging-out, relaxing, reading, doing my crafts, gabbing with my daughter, playing with my grandson.

Well, I’ve been doing that for two years, and now I’m ready to get on with some kind of more useful life.

There are about five nursing homes in my immediate area, all of which have hospice units. I’ve been on the receiving end of hospice services as a family member through both my dad’s and mom’s illnesses. I know, from experience, what kind of support people in that situation need. And, since I was an undertaker’s daughter, death has been a part of my life since I was born. It is as though I am coming full circle.

I’m not doing this for altruistic reasons. My reasons are rather selfish. I need to interact with and meet other people (and I discovered that the gym and senior citizen center are just not my style); I need to do something useful.

And that “usefulness” might even spill over to my creative crafting, since I would be interested in making the kind of “memory pillow” that I made for my mother for others who might find them comforting.

So, at 71 I’m shifting gears yet another time so that my time here has meaning for me. My mother lived until she was 94. I don’t know if I’ll last that long, but, while I’m here, I want to be engaged with the world in a more meaningful way.

For my birthday dinner, my daughter is making my favorites: shrimp scampi and key lime cheesecake.

It’s my 71st birthday, and, even as I write this, my life is good. But as I watch the news on CNN, I wonder — for how long?