Blue Collar Lit.

if you have to ask

2012-02-13T19:09:00.000-08:00

QUOTATIONS from Louis Armstrong:

-- If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

-- The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.

-- There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them.
(Was he referring to Congress, there?)

-- There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.

-- All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.
(He probably said that in the 60s when people argued about music that didn't "qualify" as "folk"..."I ain't never heard a horse sing a song." That would tend to end any controversy.)
-----------------------------
I think if Louis Armstrong could come back to life, he should be put in charge of Everything.

-30-

you don't have the enzymes

2012-02-10T18:44:00.000-08:00

The Lawrence / Julie & Julia Project is an hilarious blog
written by a college student named Lawrence Dai.

Following Julie Powell's pattern
(she cooked her way through Julia Child's cookbook, Mastering The Art of French Cooking, reporting her progress in a blog, spanning a year)
Lawrence Dai
set himself the challenge of watching the movie Julia & Julia (which chronicles Julie P.'s blog & Julia C.'s passion for cooking born in 1950s Paris, France)
every day for a year (!)
and
blogging about it.

----------------
On Day 12 of his blog (December 11, 2010) he put this:
[excerpt, Lawrence Dai's blog]------------Day 12.

Every time I've seen this movie, I've always been endlessly entertained by the scene where Julie Powell's mother calls Julie to berate her about starting the blog. If you haven't seen the film yet, the scene proceeds as follows:

Julie (voiceover): And then I came home and got a big vote of confidence from my mother.
Mom: Remind me why you're doing this...
Julie: Blog.
Mom: Whatever it's called.
Julie: It's a regimen, Mom. Like doing sit-ups.
Mom: Well, it's just adding pressure.
Julie: What pressure?
Mom: You have a full-time job, you have a husband, and now you're going to get sick from blogging.
Julie: It's sort of like being in AA.
Mom: What are you saying?
Julie: It gives you something you have to do every day, one day at a time.
Mom: How do you know this lingo? Honey, are you an alcoholic?
Julie: I'm saying it's good for me to have short-term goals.
Mom: Well, that is silly. That is just plain silly. Who's reading this blog?
Julie: People. People are reading it, I'm sure.
Mom: Well, it's something you decided to do, and you can decide not to, and not one single person's going to mind.
Julie: No, don't you get it? I just started. I can't stop. I have to finish--it's all I've got.
*Mom hangs up the phone*
Julie: Hello? Hello?

I've always laughed at this scene because of its exaggerated theatricality--that is, until my own mother found out about this blog. Let's just say that if they ever make my blogging experience into a movie (which would be a terrible, terrible idea), this particular Julie & Julia scene would be pretty easy to adapt.

Lawrence (voiceover): And then I came back to the dorm -- then I got a f---ing call from my mom.
Mom: You do homework yet?
Lawrence: Nah, I decided to start a blog instead.
Mom: What?
Lawrence: It's a blog, Mom. Like on the internet?
Mom: A what?
Lawrence: A BLOG.
Mom: What is this blog? You have no time for! How can you do this and get good grades, good job, make money?
Lawrence: I don't know, it's just a fun thing--
Mom: Fun? I send you to expensive school so you have fun? You can have all fun you want when you homeless!
Lawrence: I'm sure homeless people have a lot of fun.
Mom: How can you say that? Do you know what you say? Homeless people have no home! How fun is that? Are you alcoholic?
Lawrence: No, Mom. I'm not an alcoholic. You know I don't have the enzymes to even break down alco--
Mom: You don't have the enzymes to honor family either!
Lawrence: What?? What does that even mean?
Mom: Who is reading this blog?
Lawrence: People. People are reading it, I'm sure--middle-aged, married women mostly.
Mom: Well, give up. You need more time to study.
Lawrence: Alright, Mother. Listen, sorry, but I gotta go. Love you. Bye.
*I hang up the phone*
Mom: And what happened to you saying you want to be doctor? I remember--from very young age, you always say you want to be a doctor. Why can't you go to medical school? You know, blog once you're a successful doctor. You have time then, after you make money, marry nice smart girl...
*Dial Tone*
------------------- [end excerpt from Lawrence / Julie & Julia blog.]

"Fun? I send you to expensive school so you have fun?"
--
"You don't have the enzymes to honor family, either!"

LOL

---------------------

-30-

he said it

2012-02-09T19:31:00.000-08:00

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

---------------------
Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.

---------------------
If we [in the network television business] were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.

---------------------------
Good night, and good luck.

--------------------- [Edward R. Murrow quotes]

-30-

looking good

2012-02-08T18:52:00.000-08:00

This looks good:

Deadline Artists: America's Greatest Newspaper Columns

Ed. by John Avlon, Jesse Angelo, and Errol Louis.

-30-

rule of law

2012-02-07T18:19:00.000-08:00

The following Comment appeared on a NY Times article
(the Commenter says, nytimes "opening debate" to throw Constitution into "dustbin" -- I didn't see anything about a dustbin, it's just an article, but people get excited...)
still, while it's muddled in spots, you can get what he's trying to think about & I was contemplating this Comment:

-------------------------- [comment from CA] Do those arguing against Classically Liberal Rule of Law and Liberty values realize they are arguing for Rule by the Discretion of Men? That's the track record the founders pondered.

How's that Greenspan, Rubin, Paulson, Summers, Geithner Rule of Men working out for you?

Why are we so cowardly about holding ALL accountable to the Rule of Law, and so gullible to believe we should, and safely can, hand over so much power to unaccountable elites?

That article in the last few days about the SEC CHOOSING not to prosecute Big Banks, ostensibly because it doesn't fit the picture of our Central Planners.

The corrosion of justice and cynicism being bred as the financial swindle continues to go unpunished by either party is an AFFRONT to the classical Rule of Law concept, and most honest Americans are thirsting for accountability.

But now we have the NY Times fully opening the debate on throwing the people's Constitution into the dustbin.....

In exchange for what?

Benevolent Dictatorship? Philosopher King? Authoritarian Capitalism aka China?

People need to wake up and vigilantly self-govern again.
------------------------- [end Comment]

"Vigilantly self-govern."
I don't know if we "people" ever do that.
Who's got the time / energy?
That's what we elect them for. ...To do the job.
"Vigilantly self-govern." Does that mean vote?
OK.
Does it mean sit in on county commission meetings and city council meetings to see what they're up to? School board meetings?
People are busy and they don't want to sit. That's why they're usually not "sitting in" on those meetings unless there's a specific problem / issue.

And -- "accountability" for the Big Banks...if it is not OK for poor people to steal, then it is not OK for wealthy executives to steal.
That's an easy one, in my world -- like if you see a run starting in your nylons, some nude nail polish is called for. Not difficult; not rocket science. I've got a handle on that one, Scoob.

Crime is crime. Fraud is fraud.
Our local paper featured a headline in the center, half-inch or so from top, last Friday:
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE TRAINING.
Had to laugh at that -- like, OK, they're going to teach us, the public, how to better implement Domestic Violence.
(Ladies, bring frying pans.)
Next month: BANK ROBBERY TRAINING.
In April: CAR THEFT FOR THE NOVICE.
DRUNK DRIVING, MADE EASY AND MORE EFFICIENT.

(Continuing Education for Adults is a worthy goal in society, we think.)

And seriously what kind of courses did the Goldman Sachs & bank of America, et. al. on Wall St. sign up for? --
SUPER-GRIFT TRAINING.
POWER-CON, GET YOUR CERTIFICATION.
CONSUMER ABUSE METHODS ... (?)
HOW TO PURCHASE POLITICIANS...

...Now the wintertime is coming
The windows are filled with frost
I went to tell everybody
But I could not get across...
--Bob Dylan
"It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry"

-30-

probably sane

2012-02-06T18:01:00.000-08:00

two notes on a Monday:

Note 1. Studying the lyrics Friday of "The Ballad Of John And Yoko" realized -- when I used to hear that song on WBCN radio in Boston, the lines --

Peter Brown called to say,
"You can make it O.K.,
You can get married in Gibraltar, near Spain" --

...I used to hear them as,
Peter Brown called to say
you can make it OK,
you can get married since you're probably sane ...

and Note 2.
The Lawrence/Julie & Julia Project.
A college student named Lawrence Dai blogged for a year, watching the film Julie & Julia every day, and blogging comments.
(!)
same principle as Julie Powell's original blog -- cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering The Art of French Cooking, covering all the recipes in 365 days.

Well -- Mr. Dai's principle is different, I guess, because it's all the same movie -- I don't know, it's a relief to discover someone in world who does something like this, because it seems to confirm my own claims to what President Warren G. Harding called, in a coined word, "normalcy." Normality. Normalness. Not that that's necessarily a goal. (What's the percentage in being "normal"? Is there profit?)

Anyway, this kid is wildly funny, setting up a blog and doing what the woman in the movie did -- sort of.

I have wondered, before, if I could "talk" a movie. Just type on my blog all about a whole movie, and re-create the experience. But watching
the same movie
every day
for a year
and
typing in a blog post about it,
each day
had not occurred to me.

Am fan of Lawrence Dai.

Someone Commented on his blog,
don't you have something better to do with your life?
Lawrence Dai Replied -- No. No, I do not.
LOL

-30-

the way things are going

2012-02-03T15:41:00.000-08:00

Standing in the dock at Southampton,
Trying to get to Holland or France.
The man in the mac said, "You've got to turn back"--
You know they didn't even give us a chance.
Christ you know it ain't easy,
You know how hard it can be.
The way things are going
They're going to crucify me.

Finally made the plane into Paris,
Honeymooning down by the Seine.
Peter Brown called to say,
"You can make it O.K.,
You can get married in Gibraltar, near Spain" --

Christ you know it ain't easy,
You know how hard it can be.
The way things are going
They're going to crucify me.

Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton,
Talking in our beds for a week.
The newspapers said, "Say what you doing in bed?"
I said, "We're only trying to get us some peace" --

Christ you know it ain't easy,
You know how hard it can be.
The way things are going
They're going to crucify me.

Saving up your money for a rainy day,
Giving all your clothes to charity.
Last night the wife said,
"Oh boy, when you're dead
You don't take nothing with you
But your soul - think!"

Made a lightning trip to Vienna,
Eating chocolate cake in a bag.
The newspapers said, "She's gone to his head,
They look just like two gurus in drag", Christ,

-- you know it ain't easy,
You know how hard it can be.
The way things are going
They're going to crucify me.

Caught an early plane back to London.
Fifty acorns tied in a sack.
The men from the press said, "We wish you success,
It's good to have the both of you back" - Christ
you know it ain't easy,
You know how hard it can be.
The way things are going
They're going to crucify me

----------- "The Ballad Of John And Yoko"
Lennon / McCartney
released as a single, May 1969

--------------------------------------------- I do not have that song on a music CD, and am prevented from accessing You Tube -- (You Tube Deprivation! Repression! Cruel and unusual! Taxation Without Representation! "-Tion!"), but have the song in my head. It was bouncing through brain this morning, as I was setting out fresh Cat-food and Cat-water for Cat-man.

Cat-man.
Cat-buddy, Chess-cat, Cat-man-du.

------------------------
I think I'm going to Katmandu
That's really really
Where I'm going to
If I ever get out of here
That's what I'm gonna do

K-K-K-K-K-K-Katmandu
I think that's really where I'm going to
If I ever get out of here
I'm going to Katmandu.

I got no kick
Against the west coast
Warner Brothers
Are such good hosts
I raise my whiskey glass
And give them a toast
I'm sure they know it's true!

I got no rap against
The Southern states
Every time I've been there
It's been great

But now I'm leaving
And I can't be late
And to myself be true

That's why I'm
Going to Katmandu
Up to the mountains
Where I'm going to
And if I ever get out of here
That's what I'm gonna do

Oh, K-K-K-K-K-K-Katmandu
Really, really
Where I'm going to
If I ever get out of here
I'm going to Katmandu

I got no quarrel
With the Midwest
The folks out there
Have given me their best

I lived there all my life
I've been their guest
I sure have loved it, too.

I'm tired of looking
At the TV news
I'm tired of driving
Hard and paying dues

I figure, baby
I've got nothing to lose
I'm tired of being blue.

Ow! -- that's why I'm
Going to Katmandu
Up to the mountains
Where I'm going to
If I ever get out of here
That's what I'm gonna do

Wow! -- K-K-K-K-K-Katmandu
Take me baby, cause
I'm going with you
If I ever get out of here
I'm going to Katmandu.

Oh, take it away!

I ain't got nothing
'gainst the East coast
You want some people,
Well they got the most

And New York City's
Like a friendly ghost
You seem to pass right through

I know I'm gonna miss the USA
I guess I'll miss it every single day
But no one loves me here anyway
I know my plane is due

The one that's
Going to Katmandu
Up to the mountains
Where I'm going to
If I ever get out of here
That's what I'm gonna do...

K-K-K-K-K-K-Katmandu
Really, really, really going to
If I ever get out of here
If I ever get out of here
If I ever get out of here
I'm going to Katmandu

Oh
Ooh hoo hoo
Ooh hoo hoo
Oooh, yeah, yeah

(Katmandu)
(Katmandu)
(Katmandu)
(Katmandu)
(Katmandu)
(Katmandu)
(Katmandu)
(Katmandu)
(Katmandu)
(Katmandu)
(Katmandu)
(Katmandu)

--------------- Bob Seger

-30-

writing in the desert

2012-02-02T16:41:00.000-08:00

QUOTES used in Lee Silber's book,
Time Management For The Creative Person:

"The only limit to what you can achieve is the extent to which you can clearly define it."
-- Anonymous

"Just get it down on paper, and then we'll see what to do with it."
-- Maxwell Perkins (editor - F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc.)

"If you can dream it, you can do it. Always remember that this whole thing was started by a mouse.
-- Walt Disney

"Never, never, never quit."
-- Winston Churchill

"Without discipline, there's no life at all."
-- Katharine Hepburn

"I'm always interested in the right things at the wrong time."
-- Andy Warhol

"Success rests with having the courage and endurance and above all the will to become the person you are, however peculiar that may be. Then you will be able to say, 'I have found my hero and he is me.'"
-- Dr. George Sheehan

"Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes."
-- Carl Jung

"Commandment number one of any truly civilized society is this: Let people be different.
-- David Grayson

"The triumph over anything is a matter of organization."
-- Kurt Vonnegut

"Creativity is a highfalutin' word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday."
-- David Ogilvy

"Our life is frittered away by detail....Simplify. Simplify."
-- Henry David Thoreau

"Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast -- you also miss the sense of where you are going and why."
-- Eddie Cantor

"You only live once, but if you work it right, once is enough."
-- Joe E. Lewis

"Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes you happy, satisfied, even joyous. That has more of an effect on economic well-being than any other single factor."
-- Paul Hawken

"If you are working off the in-box that is fed you, you are probably working on the priorities of others."
-- Donald Rumsfeld

"Time is what we want most but what we use worst."
-- William Penn

"It is better to have a bad plan than no plan at all."
-- Charles de Gaulle

"Concentration is the secret of strength."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I enjoy writing in the desert. There are no distractions such as telephones, theaters, opera houses, and gardens."
-- Agatha Christie

"One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn't pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself."
-- Lucille Ball

"You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take."
-- Wayne Gretzky
-----------------------------

Under the caption, "Motivation Boosters", some of the entries --

Make some changes. Redecorate....

Fake it till you make it. [Think, "success".]

Help others...

Find a role model or mentor you can turn to for advice and support.

Go one week without criticizing, complaining, or condemning.

Smile. A lot.

Put up signs that say "Yes!" all over your house.

Take action.
----------------------------------
----------------------------------

That one about "Yes!" makes me think of an interview with John Lennon that I read: when he met Yoko Ono at an art show in -- (Europe? Japan?) -- at her display, the viewer had to climb a ladder and then look into something. He thought it was going to say, "F--- you" or something, but it just said, "Yes". ...

--------------------------------
"I've been on a calendar but never on time."
-- Marilyn Monroe

-30-

time management

2012-02-01T17:20:00.000-08:00

"Time Management."
What an attractive idea.
I love to read about Time Management sometimes, and then other times -- I need to take the "time management" book and -- put it in the freezer.

Some of the things they -- ("they") -- tell you to do are not that realistic, plus one style doesn't "fit all" types of work, and types of personalities.

In my childhood my mother read the book Cheaper By The Dozen aloud to me, and when I was old enough I read it to myself. The dad in that book was a "motion study" expert (Frank Bunker Gilbreth) -- while the real highlight of the book, for me, lay in the humorous adventures of the large family of 12 children, I also absorbed the idea of the Motion Study expert helping people, making their jobs easier by cutting down on the amount, and difficulty, of the "motions" required to do the task.

"Efficiency expert" was also another word for that.

-------------------- Someone said, (loosely quoted), "When we buy books, we are imagining, on an emotional level, that we are buying the time to read them." A way to stretch out time -- or give ourselves more of it.

---------------------- On the sitcom "Mad About You" Paul Reiser would say, "That's two hours of my life I'll never get back" -- if it was something he didn't want to do. I walked out on the movie Kill Bill, thinking of Paul Reiser. ("I'm 35 minutes in; the mindless violence continues, machine-like; I'm out seven dollars, but if I stay to the end, I'm out seven dollars and two hours. Two hours of my life I'll never get back...!") And I went home to write, feeling as if I had not only made a Statement Of Protest which would teach modern Hollywood a thing or two (not), but also had magically extracted about an hour and twenty minutes of extra Time in Life, from the universe.

For a while in the 90s I was quite wrapped up in planners. Thought of Time Management in relation to my planner, and how Everything would now be Organized In One Place.

Now, into second decade of the 21st, I see people with their Phones-In-Hand, and wondered the other day if the Daily Planner business has suffered any because so many people now have "Everything" "Organized In One Place" -- on their phone.

Lee Silber wrote a book called Time Management For The Creative Person.
Irresistible.

A segment titled "Left Brain / Right Brain" is topped with the quote,
"Break on through to the other side."
-- Jim Morrison

[excerpt]------- Each side of the brain processes information differently and has its own specialization, although at any given time you are using both sides of your brain. It's more a matter of emphasis than exclusivity. Still, we refer to linear thinkers as left-brain or logic-brain people. Right-brainers (artistic brain) tend to be more creative, visual, and emotional, although mathematical ability is located in the right brain also. The right-brain person is a divergent thinker in a one-track world, and at times this can be a struggle.

Nearly all the time management products on the market favor the left-brain thinking style, ignoring the needs of right-brainers. There's a simple reason for this: If you want to set up one system that's going to work for a lot of people, you're going to set up a left-brain system. Left-brainers learn patterns better, follow directions better, are better at details than right-brainers -- and they're more alike. Right-brainers would prefer to concoct their own unique time-management tools (which is a great idea, by the way) rather than conform to an existing system.

------------- [end excerpt]
I need to get a larger freezer. (No, only kidding....)

-30-

the undead

2012-01-31T19:16:00.000-08:00

Safety manager in workplace says,
When injury rate is a little high,
OSHA says it's bad because people are being injured.

And when the injury rate is a little lower,
OSHA says, "What's the deal? Are you hiding something?"

-- "Are they ever happy?"
-- "No."

Maybe OSHA has not read The Power Of Positive Thinking.

There was an episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" where Mary tries to interview a member of the Mafia. He refuses the interview. She says to Mr. Grant:

-- They think the press only publishes negative things about them. He said, "Why don't they write about all the people we don't kill?"

-------------------------------
It would be like -- Why doesn't OSHA talk about all the people who didn't get injured?

-30-

"f" is for "fighting"

2012-01-30T17:54:00.000-08:00

Three images of fighting
entered my consciousness, weekend - through - today.

The movie Duplicity has, at the beginning, a scene on the tarmac at an airport, where two men who are top executives of two huge world-wide companies yell at each other, face-to-face, then get exasperated and start fighting with each other, physically. They are wearing suits. Each has an entourage -- cluster of people, some with umbrellas, standing, waiting, near the planes.

The fight is filmed in slow motion -- really slow motion -- and you see, while watching the seconds unwind like hours, how stupid fighting is.

And you really don't expect it -- the behavior -- from "top executives," whom we assume will be dignified, classy, and understated.

So it's funny.
And weird.
But -- it's only a movie.

------------------

Reading short stories by Raymond Chandler -- "I'll Be Waiting," "The King In Yellow," "Pickup on Noon Street," "Smart-Aleck Kill," and "Guns At Cyrano's" -- encountered several fighting scenes. Bad guys routinely take a shot at Chandler's private detective heroes, with fist, "sap" (blackjack), or butt end of a gun.

There, it's part of the story, part of Chandler's style -- and I know it's fiction. No need to call the emergency room.

--------------------

Then today, heard someone at work discussing problems with his son, who has gotten into trouble by fighting. Now, that's not fiction, or dudes wearing suits in a movie -- it's a bummer for the parents.

I wonder how people go about teaching their teenage sons to organize their aggression into productive, society-sanctioned channels. ...

(I'd like to get that kid a job in the next Julia Roberts movie...He could pretend to beat people up, while wearing a suit...)

--------------------
Julia Roberts herself is rather terse in Duplicity, which is a welcome departure from the usual gooey luuuuhhhhh-vv-e stuff in some of her movies that leaves you feeling like you're trapped in quicksand mixed with sugar-frosting and you're getting sucked ever-downward. ...

Although even in this hard-edged movie about lying, stealing, cheating, tricking, trapping, spying, and general bliccchh in modern upper-corporate "world," there's still a part toward the end where it's:
(Julia Roberts): "I love you."

Oh-kay. Yadda-yadda-yadda.

(Julia): "I love you."
[yadda-yadda-yadda]
(Julia): "I really do." [I reeee--llll--yyyy---dooooo -- bleah]
[yadda]
Clive Owen: "I think about you all the time."
[ya-]

Those lines are in every freakin' movie where people are supposed to be
"iinnn-lluuuuvvvh"

come up with something original or just play some music instead --

There are two actors, besides Julia Roberts, who were also with her in the film Charlie Wilson's War -- the station chief in Pakistan who tells Charlie Wilson, "A sudden influx of money -- and new weaponry -- would draw attention..."
Charlie Wilson: "Draw attention...! I don't even know what that means. This is the Cold War! Everybody knows-about-it!..."

And the really smart weapons expert from C.W. War is also in DUPLICITY --
looking them up --
Denis O'Hare! -- is Harold Holt in CW War & something in Duplicity,
and
Christopher Denham -- is in both films.

Julia Roberts is sort of the Ingrid Bergman for our time.
Liked best: Erin Brockovich.

-30-

secure the scene

2012-01-27T18:36:00.001-08:00

Tired all week, now is Friday.
Want to
rest my hair,
and
watch the movie "Duplicity" and figure out what it is about.

(Playing it on TV in bedroom while in bathroom showering and getting ready for work has not provided clarity on the plot, or the point, of this movie.)

A quality assurance person at the place where I work said she never has a "list" of things to do, on the weekend.

I'm modeling that.

In my notebook on my desk outside kitchen, I don't even have a page marked "Saturday" or "Sunday" now. The next page after Friday is Monday, and during the weekend I can just set things on top of the notebook.

No list.

Oh, writing about this makes me remember an episode of "Friends" where Joey is re-reading The Shining, & when it gets too scary he puts it in the freezer.

Then he reads Little Women, on Rachel's recommendation, & when he's getting worried that Beth, who is very sick, might die and he's getting emotional, Rachel asks him, mom-like, "You wanna put the book in the freezer?"

I could put my notebook of Lists Of Things To Do -- in the freezer! Just for the weekend.

and
LOL
OMG

that makes me remember when I was in about fourth grade a girl at school gave me a book of scary / spooky stories, and they were too scary, really for children -- something about slime, I don't know -- and I took the book down into the basement and put it in a big box of stuff, way down at the bottom, so it was underneath all of the stuff.

And -- presumably -- couldn't ... --
I don't know...
get out...

ohmygosh, cannot stop laughing -- that is so weird; I can't believe I did that!

So I have options -- I can take my notebook of Lists of Stuff To Do and --
put it in the freezer, or
put it in basement box, under stuff in box, or --
set things on top of it.

Strategy. Method. The art of war.
Or -- security. Like, protecting yourself from your own lists and all that they represent.

-30-

trouble is my olive oil

2012-01-25T18:31:00.000-08:00

I sprawled, but I never knew when I reached the floor. The fist with the weighted tube of nickels met me in midflight. Perfectly timed, perfectly weighted, and with my own weight to help it out.

I went out like a puff of dust in a draft.

--------------------
I sat still for about five minutes and then my pipe got too hot.

--------------------
"I always take champagne with mine," he said. "A third of a glass of brandy under the champagne, and the champagne as cold as Valley Forge. Colder, if you can get it colder."

----------------
I skinned through the door and made a fast break through the gap in the hedge and up the hill, half expecting lead to fly after me. None came.

I jumped into the Chrysler and chased it up over the brow of the hill and away from that neighborhood.

-----------------
We were sitting in a room at the Berglund. I was on the side of the bed, and Dravec was in the easy chair. It was my room.

Rain beat very hard against the windows.

-------------------------
She looked up and smiled and said: "How do you like the mountains?"
I said: "Fine."
"It's very quiet up here," she said. "Very restful."
"Yeah. Do you know anybody named Fred Lacey?"

----------------------
I went back towards the living room, stopped in the doorway to take another pleasant look around, and noticed something I ought to have noticed the instant I stepped into the room. I noticed the sharp tang of cordite on the air, almost, but not quite gone. And then I noticed something else.

------------- [excerpts, Trouble Is My Business / Raymond Chandler.]

One day, making my salad at work, head of my dept. told me some "extra virgin olive oil" isn't really olive oil, they put other kinds of oil, like maybe peanut oil or something in a bottle, & label it "extra virgin olive oil" because that sells because the health & fitness people often recommend it.

I was like, that's not fair, that's cheating, that's not Truth In Advertising. (Not even advertising -- labeling!)

Then read about topic on internet, promptly became more confused. Various opinions & assertions out there, but no "bottom line," it didn't seem like.

And then another co-worker told me the whole "maybe it isn't really ex. virg. olive oil unless it comes from CA and has a certain "seal" on the label"-'drama' is possibly cooked up to "scare" us into buying their particular kind of olive oil. (I now have the kind from CA, with seal, & dark bottle. ...as mentioned in some of the internet articles. ...)

Am disliking duplicity.
Fake olive oil.
Or -- a fake scare about fraudulent olive oil, to make us buy theirs.
I don't like it when they ("they") try to get us to buy something by scaring us. If their product is really good, they could sell it honestly without scaring people.

And thought of Raymond Chandler's classic mysteries, and wondered, what would his "first person" private eye (Mr. Carmady; Philip Marlowe...whomever) do about --
a) fake olive oil, &
b) fake stories about fake olive oil to try to trick us into buying their brand...How would he approach the issues?

-------------------------------

I sprawled, but I never knew when I reached the floor. The fist with the bottle of extra virgin olive oil met me in midflight. Perfectly timed, perfectly weighted, and with my own weight to help it out.

I went out like a puff of dust in a draft.

--------------------
I sat still for about five minutes and then my olive oil got too hot.

--------------------
"I always take olive oil with mine," he said. "A third of a glass of brandy under the olive oil, and the olive oil as cold as Valley Forge. Colder, if you can get it colder."

----------------
I skinned through the door and made a fast break through the gap in the hedge and up the hill, half expecting olive oil to fly after me. None came.

I jumped into the Chrysler and chased it up over the brow of the hill and away from that neighborhood.

-----------------
We were sitting in a room at the Berglund. I was on the side of the bed, and Dravec was in the easy chair. It was my room.

Olive oil beat very hard against the windows.

-------------------------
She looked up and smiled and said: "How do you like the olive oil?"
I said: "Fine."
"It's very quiet up here," she said. "Very restful."
"Yeah. Do you know anybody named Fred Lacey?"

----------------------
I went back towards the living room, stopped in the doorway to take another pleasant look around, and noticed something I ought to have noticed the instant I stepped into the room. I noticed the sharp tang of olive oil on the air, almost, but not quite gone. And then I noticed something else.

---------------------------------------------
--------------------------------

("And then -- I noticed something else."
That's why he's The Master.)

Trouble is my -- business.

-30-

hello there

2012-01-24T18:12:00.000-08:00

[excerpt, "The Curtain," story by Raymond Chandler. Collection: Trouble Is My Business, Copyright 1939, Curtis Publishing Co.]
---------------- The minutes passed on tiptoe. Long, sluggish minutes. Then feet crunched outside and the door was pushed open. The light hit pencils of rain and made silver wires of them. Art trundled two muddy flats in sulkily, kicked the door shut, let one of the flats fall on its side. The rain and fresh air had given him his nerve back. He looked at me savagely.

"Seattle," he snarled. "Seattle, my eye!"
The brown man lit a cigarette as if he hadn't heard. Art peeled his coat off and yanked my tire up on a rim spreader, tore it loose viciously, had the tube out and cold-patched in nothing flat. He strode scowling over to the wall near me and grabbed an air hose, let enough air into the tube to give it body, and hefted it in both hands to dip it in a washtub of water.

I was a sap, but their teamwork was very good. Neither had looked at the other since Art came back with my tires.

Art tossed the air-stiffened tube up casually, caught it with both hands wide, looked it over sourly beside the washtub of water, took one short easy step and slammed it down over my head and shoulders.

He jumped behind me in a flash, leaned his weight down on the rubber, dragged it tight against my chest and arms. I could move my hands, but I couldn't get near my gun.

The brown man brought his right hand out of his pocket and tossed a wrapped cylinder of nickels up and down on his palm as he stepped lithely across the floor.

I heaved back hard, then suddenly threw all my weight forward. Just as suddenly Art let go of the tube, and kneed me from behind.

I sprawled, but I never knew when I reached the floor. The fist with the weighted tube of nickels met me in midflight. Perfectly timed, perfectly weighted, and with my own weight to help it out.

I went out like a puff of dust in a draft.
* * * *

SEVEN
It seemed there was a woman and she was sitting beside a lamp. Light shone on my face, so I shut my eyes again and tried to look at her through my eyelashes. She was so platinumed that her head shone like a silver fruit bowl.

She wore a green traveling dress with a mannish cut to it and a broad white collar falling over the lapels. A sharp-angled glossy bag stood at her feet. She was smoking, and a drink was tall and pale at her elbow.

I opened my eye wider and said: "Hello there."-----------------[end excerpt]

-30-

you mean t' tell me...

2012-01-23T17:04:00.000-08:00

The summer after senior year in high school I worked as a waitress (pity those customers!) at a summer resort: park service men would come in for coffee almsot daily. The coffee was some outstandingly low price, like 10- or 20-cents per cup. And of course most of them would order breakfast. (Is that the principle of the "loss-leader"...?)

The park service men would tell stories about tourists. (Since tourists supported the local economy, making fun of them was a bit of a pre-requisite...!?...) [All in fun; all-ll-ll in Fun.]

Buffalo roam the state park, following their own obscure "schedule." Their massively-maned, prehistoric heads fronting mysterious bodies, powerful in their stillness -- chocolate-brown, ageless eyes watchful.

The park service men often had a sense of the herd-movements of the buffalo -- they would be -- over to the west, or "in the trees." (It seemed like park service guys never said "woods," or "forest" -- they would refer to -- over in the trees, or "up in the trees," meaning -- up, on the side of the mountain, amongst the trees, or in the forest. ...)

One of our park service fellows told us once, there was this tourist from the east coast who approached him one day with what seemed almost like a demand -- to see some buffalo.

(Like -- we've gotta see the buffalo, take some pictures, and get-the-hell-outta-here, so we can get on to the next tourist thing on our list. ...)

("Hey, you're on vacation.")
But some "Type A" sorts don't adjust to that schedule so quickly. ...

Wondering how he would explain to the imposing east coast tourist that buffalo were not exactly ready-on-demand, our park service guy stalled for time, saying in his low-key style, "Well this morning, I think the buffalo --" (looking over to the thickly forested hill) "--are probably up in the trees."

Abruptly frowning and staring up into the branches of the nearest tree, the tourist's expression rapidly hit quizzical, then amazed, then incredulous, as he turned back to Park Service and said, "Do you mean to tell me, that those big animals get up in the trees??!...!"

We waitresses thought that was pretty damn funny.

"Buffalo -- climbing trees!"
"Roosting in the trees..."
"Swinging from branch to branch!..."
"Merrily swinging from branch to branch...!"

---------------------- I wish I had skill as a cartoonist: I would draw some trees with buffalo: two standing on the ground nearby; one climbing a tree; one sitting on a tree branch, and one or two -- swinging between the branches...

I told that story to tables of tourists all summer long, I think.

-30-

we collide with Mars

2012-01-20T18:16:00.000-08:00

Have you heard? It's in the stars

Next July we collide with Mars.

Well, did you evah?

What a swell party, swell party

Swellegant, elegant party this is!

---------------------------------

[Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, in
the film, High Society]

-30-

own a cigar butt

2012-01-19T15:24:00.000-08:00

A banging on the door woke me.

--------------------[excerpt from Playback, a book by Raymond Chandler. The "I" of the first-person narrative is private detective Philip Marlowe. Setting: California. Marlowe was hired by an attorney to follow and protect a young woman traveling alone. Attraction and aggravational tension between the private eye and the woman, who is nervous and fearful, leads to the two of them spending a night together in his motel room.]

----------------------- A banging on the door woke me. ...I got out of bed and pulled a bathrobe on and went to the door; I didn't open it.
"What's the matter? I was asleep."
"Captain Alessandro wants you at the office right away. Open the door."
"Sorry, can't be done. I have to shave and shower and so on."
"Open the door. This is Sergeant Green."

"I'm sorry, Sergeant. I just can't. But I'll be along just as soon as I can make it."

"You got a dame in there?"
"Sergeant, questions like that are out of line. I'll be there."

I heard his steps go down off the porch. I heard someone laugh. I heard a voice say, "This guy is really rich. I wonder what he does on his day off."

...
[later down at the police station]:
"Is this being recorded, Captain?"
He nodded. "Every word."
"All right, Mr. Cumberland. There's more, I take it."
"Naturally. I have a great deal of influence in Westfield. I own the bank, the leading newspaper, most of the industry. The people of Westfield are my friends.

["The people of Westfield are my friends."
LOL.
I'll bet.]

The people of Westfield are my friends. My daughter-in-law was arrested and tried for murder and the jury brought in a verdict of guilty."
"The jury were all Westfield people, Mr. Cumberland?"
"They were. Why shouldn't they be?"
"I don't know, sir. But it sounds like a one-man town."
"Don't get impudent with me, young man."
"Sorry, sir. Would you finish?"

"...The judge was senile.
...He voided the verdict and discharged the defendant.
I told her that she had murdered my son and that I would see to it that she had no place of refuge anywhere on this earth. That is why I am here."

I looked at the captain. He looked at nothing. I said: "Mr. Cumberland, whatever your private convictions, Mrs. Lee Cumberland, whom I know as Betty Mayfield, has been tried and acquitted. You have called her a murderess. That's a slander. We'll settle for a million dollars."

He laughed almost grotesquely. "You small-town nobody," he almost screamed. "Where I come from you would be thrown into jail as a vagrant."

"Make it a million and a quarter," I said. "I'm not so valuable as your ex-daughter-in-law."
Cumberland turned on Captain Alessandro. "What goes on here?" he barked. "Are you all a bunch of crooks?"
"You're talking to a police officer, Mr. Cumberland."
"I don't give a good goddam what you are," Cumberland said furiously. "There are plenty of crooked police."

"It's a good idea to be sure -- before you call them crooked," Alessandro said, almost with amusement. Then he lit a cigarette and blew smoke and smiled through it.

"Take it easy, Mr. Cumberland. You're a cardiac case. Prognosis unfavorable. Excitement is very bad for you. I studied medicine once. But somehow I became a cop. The war cut me off, I guess."

Cumberland stood up....He made a strangled sound in his throat. "You haven't heard the last of this," he snarled.
Alessandro nodded. "One of the interesting things about police work is that you never hear the last of anything. There are always too many loose ends. Just what would you like me to do? Arrest someone who has been tried and acquitted, just because you are a big shot in Westfield, Carolina?"

"I told her I'd never give her any peace," Cumberland said furiously. "I'd follow her to the end of the earth. I'd make sure everyone knew just what she was!"
"And what is she, Mr. Cumberland?"
"A murderess that killed my son and was let off by an idiot of a judge -- that's what she is!"

Captain Alessandro stood up, all six feet three inches of him. "Take off, buster," he said coldly. You annoy me. I've met all kinds of punks in my time. Most of them have been poor stupid backward kids. This is the first time I've come across a great big important man who was just as stupid and vicious as a fifteen-year-old delinquent.

Maybe you own Westfield, North Carolina, or think you do. You don't own a cigar butt in my town. Get out before I put the arm on you for interfering with an officer in the performance of his duties."

Cumberland almost staggered to the door and groped for the knob, although the door was wide open. Alessandro looked after him. He sat down slowly.
"You were pretty rough, Captain."
"It's breaking my heart. If anything I said makes him take another look at himself -- oh well, hell!"

"Not his kind. Am I free to go?"
"Yes. Goble won't make charges. He'll be on his way back to Kansas City today. We'll dig up something on this Richard Harvest, but what's the use? We put him away for a while, and a hundred just like him are available for the same work."

"What do I do about Betty Mayfield?"

"I have a vague idea that you've already done it," he said, deadpan.

"Not until I know what happened to Mitchell." I was just as deadpan as he was.

"All I know is that he's gone. That doesn't make him police business."
I stood up. We gave each other those looks. I went out.

------------------------------ [end excerpt]
{Playback, by Raymond Chandler. Copyright -- Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.}

-30-

oh, don't ask why

2012-01-18T16:06:00.000-08:00

You know the day destroys the night
Night divides the day
Tried to run
Tried to hide
Break on through to the other side
Break on through to the other side
Break on through to the other side, yeah

We chased our pleasures here
Dug our treasures there
But can you still recall
The time we cried
Break on through to the other side
Break on through to the other side

Yeah!
C'mon, yeah

I found an island in your arms
Country in your eyes
Arms that chain
Eyes that lie
Break on through to the other side
Break on through to the other side
Break on through, oww!
Oh, yeah!

Made the scene
Week to week
Day to day
Hour to hour
The gate is straight
Deep and wide

Break on through to the other side
Break on through to the other side
Break on through
Break on through
Break on through
Break on through
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

-30-

a joyful noise

2012-01-17T17:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was thinking of Mineral City, Ohio -- a very little town I lived in from before kindergarten through first third, or half, of Third Grade.

At that age I -- and the other little kids -- could walk or ride our bikes anyplace in the town. We could go anywhere, and there was no worry of kidnapping or etc.

And thinking about third grade made me remember Mrs. M. who lived in a house that fronted sharply on our street -- like, you looked up, and there was her front porch, wham, above you, it seemed like, because of being built on a hill.

She had a parrot that could say things.

And the story I remember was, one day the Catholic priest was going to the Cs' house, across the street from Mrs. M., and as he approached their door, the parrot squawked out cheerfully, "Hello, Sweetie!"

And the priest was said to have turned around and looked straight up at Mrs. M. on her porch, in surprise. And Mrs. M. was flustered, believing that the holy man thought she had called out the unexpectedly flirtatious greeting....

Oh dear! GAL (giggling-a-little)
Such "problems" ...

And that town had Steiner's Bakery -- a sweet aroma like a million happy kitchens came from there & covered the town like a pleasant rain.

-30-

I'll be seeing you

2012-01-16T19:23:00.000-08:00

"I'll be seeing you some more. Maybe in heaven."
That's what the icy platinum blonde says to the private detective (the first-person "I" character) in "The Curtain," by Raymond Chandler.

I was thinking about that Friday when I typed it in my post.
And I remembered when someone said something like that to me, once.
When I was in third grade, my family moved during the school year -- in the fall, I think, but cannot be sure. I went to school on moving day, and my parents finished the whatever at home & picked me up from school in middle of school day.

A weird way to leave -- with the school-day interrupted, and all the students looking at me, and even the teacher.
Ehrm.
Everyone said, "good-bye" in a group of voices, & this one kid named Ted who always used to talk to me, or more like "at" me, 1st - third grade, in a challenging way -- kind of intimidating, so I tried to stay inside safe shell ... he called out, separate from the rest of the kids, "See ya in heaven!"

At the time, did not know what to make out of that. (Was not sophisticated enough, in third grade, to know that if a boy "bothers" you in a harmless way -- teases you, it could be he likes you...)

"See you in heaven."
Hmmh. Was Ted reading Raymond Chandler stories, in the third grade?

The other thing I could remember about Ted was one day outdoors he called out to another boy something about, "Who's driving the bus tonight? Is it Earl?" Eagerly, like he wanted the driver to be Earl, because that would be more fun than if the driver were anyone else.

And I was struck that Ted could call a grown-up man by his first name. I would not have been allowed to do that. I would have had to find out "Earl"'s last name -- (Stravinsky, whatever...) and then refer to him as "Mr. Stravinsky." Or..."Mr. Whatever..."

Ted seemed sort of grown-up, and daring and even commanding because he referred to the bus driver as "Earl." Earl the bus driver in Mineral City, Ohio.
Ted, the third grader.

See ya in heaven.

-30-

change of direction

2012-01-13T19:00:00.000-08:00

{excerpt from "The Curtain," a story by Raymond Chandler}----------------------------------
"You're lying, Carmady. Just to scare me. Get out. I'm not afraid of Lash Yeager. I'm his boss's wife."

"Joe Mesarvey is a handful of mush," I snarled back. "The only time a girl like you goes for a wrong gee is when he's a handful of mush. Let's drift."

"Get out!" she said hoarsely.
"Okay." I turned away from her and went through the door.
She almost ran past me into the hallway and opened the front door, looked out into the black wetness. She motioned me forward.

"Goodbye," she whispered. "I hope you find Dud. I hope you find who killed Larry. But it wasn't Joe."

I stepped close to her, almost pushed her against the wall with my body.

"You're still crazy, Silver-Wig. Goodbye."

She raised her hands quickly and put them on my face. Cold hands, icy cold. She kissed me swiftly on the mouth with cold lips.
"Beat it, strong guy. I'll be seeing you some more. Maybe in heaven."

I went through the door and down the dark slithery wooden steps of the porch, across gravel to the round grass plot and the clump of thin trees. I came past them to the roadway, went back along it towards Foothill Boulevard. The rain touched my face with fingers of ice that were no colder than her fingers.

The curtained roadster stood just where I had left it, leaned over, the left front axle on the tarred shoulder of the highway. My spare and one stripped rim were thrown in the ditch.

They had probably searched it, but I still hoped. I crawled in backwards and banged my head on the steering post and rolled over to get the manacled hands into my little secret gun pocket. They touched the barrel. It was still there.

I got it out, got myself out of the car, got hold of the gun by the right end and looked it over.

I held it light against my back to protect it a little from the rain and started back towards the house.
--------------------------------[end excerpt]

{"The Curtain," written 1936; published in collection titled Trouble Is My Business, copyright 1939.}

"...and started back towards the house." Ooooh.

-30-

The Long "I've heard this"

2012-01-10T19:31:00.000-08:00

Reading Raymond Chandler novels, The Long Goodbye, The Little Sister, and Playback -- kept getting feeling of -- "I've heard someone say something like this before."

"I've heard this."

It's weird -- can hear and picture Humphrey Bogart because even if a person has only seen -- part -- of one -- of the Philip Marlowe movies, Bogart inhabited and owned that character so you totally picture him while reading. (Other characters H. Bogart played in films that were not based on Raymond Chandler novels -- Key Largo, To Have And Have Not, Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon -- were similar, so the essence of that Type resonates and bounces around in memory and dominates.)

So while reading this collection of Chandler works, a pervasive sense of familiarity lives in your head, and you feel like, "Oh. Yeah. ...Yeah."

And some of it sounds like the way I've heard actual people talk -- especially Playback, the last thing he wrote in 1958. -- Expressions, turns of phrase. People I've known actually said some of those things, not so much now.

And -- unexpectedly enough -- some of it -- (the Chandler text) sounds like the 90s TV show "Friends."

I'm not kidding.
Just -- random, certain little phrases, ways of saying things, some kind of style -- it seems strange, but I knew I picked up on it. (At end of book, thought, now why didn't I write that down?)

And really -- Not so "strange" -- I noticed the same thing reading On The Road, by Jack Kerouac -- a couple of little spots, ways of using words, expressions -- and I'd be like, "Why does On The Road sound like "Friends"?

But of course it's the other way around.

On The Road and all of Raymond Chandler's writing is classic & well-known: I thought, Why wouldn't the producers and writers of a comedy show read the same stuff I read -- the same things lots of people read, that's how it got to be "classic." ...

There's a passage in The Little Sister where the character is asked for the spelling of something and he answers, with each letter, pausing to say, "...as in __________" -- with every letter, and the words he uses to illustrate which letter it is, are kind of unusual. And I went, "I don't believe this" -- because there's a "Friends" episode where an interviewer for "Soap Opera Digest" asks Phoebe for the "correct spelling" of her name and Phoebe says, "Yes, ok, P as in Phoebe, h as in heebie, o as in obie, e as in eebie, b as in beebie, and e as in -- 'ello there, Mate!"

bizarre?
silly?
stupid?
funny?
all of the above...? But when I read something similar in The Little Sister, thought -- OK, I've only heard a joke like that in two places. The "Friends" writer must have been echoing, or taking inspiration from this Raymond Chandler novel.

And since one of the characters on "Friends" is named Chandler -- I'm thinking that is maybe the producers' (Kaufman, Bright, Crane) homage to the mystery writer.

There's one episode (in Season 4, I think) where Phoebe is expecting triplets & the people for whom she's a surrogate want her to name one of the babies. Joey and Chandler get all competitive: Joey wants Phoebe to name the third baby Joey, and Chandler of course wants her to name it Chandler.

Joey says that "Chandler" isn't even a real name. "Name one person besides you who's named that!"

Chandler: "Raymond Chandler!"

Joey: "OK, somebody you didn't just make up!"

{Yes, think someone in the "Friends" writing room was definitely a Raymond Chandler fan.}

-30-

yo-yo yoga

2012-01-09T17:28:00.000-08:00

ohmygosh last week the New York Times brought 'em out of the woodwork with a food column featuring vegan recipes; this week, it's: "yoga can be bad for you!"...something like 750,+ comments...! Similar to the food issues, many people think they have the answers...Everyone's got a mat and a pair of leggings...!

Here I thought yoga was something I could practice (and I said practice, not excel -- just "do" and "be") and now this alarmist article warns me not to stand on head or crack spine.
(Ehrm...shall try to avoid...)

Really, if someone as strongly aspirational and at the same time utterly un-athletic and non-talented as myself can follow yoga videos (mid-first-millenium-decade) and drawings on sheet from magazine (now) and not get "injured" it's difficult to realistically see any danger.

(At first, thought -- Oh No! Another thing am not supposed to Do! And like Pooh when he got the honey jar stuck on his head, thought, "Bother!" and "Oh, help!")

But then, think -- just another yo-yo selling books.

...Yoga teachers might not approve of Frost / Nixon DVD as accompaniment to my Yoga poses -- with Frank Langella (as Nixon) saying, "The thing that makes life worth living is a fight! A battle, a struggle! Hell--even if ya don't win..." but everyone has own path to Relaxation and Higher Consciousness....

-30-

come a long way

2012-01-06T18:10:00.000-08:00

RAYMOND CHANDLER SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS

I went up to the office and into the little reception room. There were two of them this time, Carol Pride and a blonde. A blonde with black eyes. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

---------
"I kissed you in that ambulance," she said. "If you remember, don't take it too big. I was just sorry for the way you got your head bashed in."

"I'm a career man," I said. "I wouldn't build on anything like that. Let's go riding. I have to see a blonde in Beverly Hills. I owe her a report."

----------
I was breaking a new pair of shoes in on my desk that morning when Violets M'Gee called me up. It was a dull, hot, damp August day and you couldn't keep your neck dry with a bath towel.

"How's the boy?" Violets began, as usual. "No business in a week, huh? There's a guy named Howard Melton over in the Avenant Building lost track of his wife. He's district manager for the Doreme Cosmetic Company. He don't want to give it to Missing Persons for some reason. The boss knows him a little. Better get over there, and take your shoes off before you go in. It's a pretty snooty outfit."

Violets M'Gee is a homicide dick in the sheriff's office, and if it wasn't for all the charity jobs he gives me, I might be able to make a living. This looked a little different, so I put my feet on the floor and swabbed the back of my neck again and went over there.

--------------
I saw the big guy standing in front of Shamey's....He was looking up at the broken stencils in the electric sign, with a sort of rapt expression, like a hunky immigrant looking at the Statue of Liberty, like a man who had waited a long time and come a long way.

[Like The Great Gatsby: "He had come a long way to this blue lawn..."]

[excerpts from stories in Trouble Is My Business collection. Vintage Books, Random House, New York]

Raymond Chandler, in the Introduction:
Possibly it was the smell of fear which these stories managed to generate. Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night.

------------------
He wrote that in 1950. The stories were written mostly in the 1930s, and maybe 40s, I think.

-30-

anything can happen

2012-01-05T17:14:00.000-08:00

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.
-------------------- [from the story: Red Wind. From collection: Trouble Is My Business. Written by Raymond Chandler. Copyright, 1939, the Curtis Publishing Company. First Vintage Books (Random House, New York) Edition, July 1988.

------------------------
In Episode #146 of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary becomes enthusiastically involved in writing a story about her grandfather. She shares the idea with her boss, Lou Grant, and receives an unexpected response. She sort of wants, from this authority figure, encouragement to match her enthusiasm.

But he's not into it. (Can't remember if he reads her story & doesn't think it's good, or if he refuses to read it in the first place because he thinks he knows it isn't going to be good, and doesn't want to tell her that, and let her down.) Something like that -- she gets disappointed and hurt -- he gives her this intense talking-to: something like, "Everybody thinks they can write, but they can't, and if you were going to be a writer you would have done it already...you want me to read this and like it, and I'm not going to like it, because I am a conoisseur of good writing, and I know how this is gonna end...and I don't want to go there..."

He's like, Your story isn't going to be good, and I don't want to lie to you and say it's good, and I don't want to hurt-and-disappoint you by telling you the truth.

Something like that...

And then he takes a book out of his desk drawer, and reads aloud,

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen."

He looks up from the book and says to Mary, "Now that's writing."

---------------------------------

I remember when I saw that episode for the first time, I felt a couple of different things: I thought Mr. Grant was being a little mean, and discouraging. Also -- how does he know Mary can't be a writer? He doesn't know. After all, like Raymond Chandler himself says, "Anything can happen." Plus I also thought Mary went to the wrong person for encouragement and inspiration. (A lot of writing books advise writers to not tell people they're writing, or to be careful who you tell, because some folks like to be discouraging about things like that, for whatever reason, and the writing-advice-people usually say, Hey no point in wasting your time on 'em, much less allow them to succeed in discouraging you...Just do it!...or whatever.)

And I also felt, while watching that episode, that Mary's story about her sweet old grandfather probably was corny, and of interest only to members of her own family, if that. ...
(But then, how did I know that? Now see, I was being terrible. ...Is there a competitive tendency in human beings to disparage the effort of another, to make one's own efforts somehow more noteworthy?) Also there's the reflexive pessimistic negative thinking: if I look down my block, how many of my neighbors are writing symphonies to uplift the human soul? How many people who try stuff are going to succeed? yada yada yada...Screenwriter William Goldman says, "Nobody knows anything." Referring to Hollywood where business guys try to figure out what type of movie will Make Money, and so end up basically doing same stuff over and over, copying something which Made Money. Goldman wrote that self-appointed "experts" say, This is what sells! Here it is! I can tell you!

But, said Goldman, no one really knows. They're just selling themselves, to make money.

"Nobody knows anything."

And that was true of the Mr Grant character. He didn't know anything. He didn't really know if Mary could be a writer. He just knew that he had not yet seen her, or known her, to be working at writing -- it kind of came out of the blue -- and so he was -- unconvinced of her seriousness of purpose, maybe. And rebelling at being asked for kind encouragement when he wasn't in the mood. Which he would not often have been. Mr. Grant was a gruff and often grumpy character.

--------------------------
Someone "Mr.-Grant-ed" me once -- I don't think I made the connection then, in the conversation, that it was similar to the MTM Show episode, but I make the connection now! It was just as funny -- it was weird -- I was on the phone with a state senator. We had talked about something -- cannot remember the main topic, but we had finished that, and somehow the topic of writing came up, and I shared with him the fact that I was doing some, and he launched into a whole lecture, beginning-middle-and-end, all points-made-loud-and-clear, to tell me why I could not be a writer. Basically advising me not to even try.

I thought it was strange. He had never read anything I've written. He had no evidence to show that I could not be a writer, or that anything I wrote would not be any good, he was just like -- in Lou Grant mode -- "these people think they can write, everybody thinks they can write, and they can't. It takes a very special talent that's very rare..." something like that...

the thing that had seemed to really set him off was that I might be imagining that I could "do it." That I could write a good story. And he didn't want me thinkin' that...! (?!)

If I had listened to his monologue before the age of 30, it might have really seriously demolished my determination and ambition but I was older than that at the time -- and I try to meet speeches like that with a firm attitude of Emotional Maturity. So I listened to him, sitting on the top basement step, at the edge of the kitchen, & thought about how it was as if I'd put money in a vending machine and pressed the wrong button and stuff was coming out that I didn't want and hadn't ordered.

It must have been more about him than me.

Maybe he's right. Maybe I can't be a successful writer.
(Shrug.)
He may be right.
He may be wrong.
Makes me no never-mind.
He may be right.
He may be wrong.
Is it going to rain?
Are there any bananas left?

like -- whatever, dude.

-30-

say, what?!

2012-01-04T18:24:00.000-08:00

Watching Holiday Inn, it was weird, because suddenly had deja vu...

in my childhood there was a Christmas-time tradition in my family (an extremely informal tradition)where a person opens a gift and holds it up and says, "Wonderful! Just what I always wanted!...What is it?" -- my dad's joke, and people would echo it. ...

and in this film I like to watch at Christmas time, I just caught up with a scene last night where Bing Crosby goes back to NYC to visit Fred Astaire & the agent, and tell them about "Holiday Inn," the nightclub that's open only on holidays...Crosby's character has homemade peach preserves for all his friends, made down on the old farm in Connecticut. He says, "Oh I almost forgot, I have a little Christmas remembrance for everybody..." and he hands Fred Astaire a jar of preserves.

Fred Astaire turns the jar a little in his hands and goes:
(smile): "Gee, this is swell!"
(curious look): "What is it?"
!! - I had to go back into the bedroom and replay that part -- it's the same joke!

My dad probably adapted it from the movie. The film came out in 1942; that year my father would have been 19. He probably went out to see that, before leaving for World War II. (Good to have some singing, dancing, and witty repartee before heading out to tussle with crazed foreign dictators...)

-30-

tree-tops glisten

2012-01-03T17:47:00.000-08:00

The character Bing Crosby played in Irving Berlin's Holiday Inn was sort of like a "drop-out." But not in a negative way -- as he says, "I just have my own ideas about living."

At the start of the movie, three people --
"Jim Hardy" (Bing Crosby)
"Ted Hanover" (Fred Astaire)
"Lila Dixon" (Virginia Dale)
have a hot song-and-dance act in New York.

But they are about to split up: they all understand the plan -- Lila and Jim are going to be married and sort of semi-retire to a farm in Connecticut where he wants a more relaxed, stop-and-smell-the-flowers type of lifestyle, and Lila agreed with him that she wants it, too.

Except that she's all set to throw Jim over in favor of Ted. She would rather marry Ted (she currently believes, in the first scene) and keep on with her stage career. Bright lights, big city. Da-da-da-da-da.

Jim finds out; his heart is (currently) broken, and he goes ahead and retires to his farm and farmhouse in the Connecticut countryside on his own.

Sometimes people from big cities think farming is "relaxing." LOL. Jim Hardy (Crosby) quickly finds out living on the farm is not less work, it's nothing but work.

The number "Lazy" is sung in the background while you see a montage of Crosby / Jim trying to do all the farm stuff -- a bunch of hay or straw falls down on him -- nothing works out right, it's all hard -- not the "taking it easy" that he had envisioned.

Evry time
I see a puppy upon a summers day
A puppy dog at play
My heart is filled with envy
Thats because
My heart is yearning to pass the time away
Like that pup
cause I'm all fed up
And tho its wrong to be
I long to be
[chorus:]
Lazy
I want to be lazy
I want to be out in the sun
With no work to be done
Under that awning
They call the sky
Stretching and yawning
And let the world go drifting by
I want to peep
Through the deep
Tangled wildwood
Counting sheep
til I sleep
Like a child would
With a great big valise full
Of books to read where its peaceful
While im
Killing time
Being lazy
[2nd verse:]
Life is short
And getting shorter with each day that goes by
And how the time does fly
Before you know, its over
Thats why im
In such a hurry to pack my things and fly
To a spot
Where its nice and hot
And hear the birdies sing
While Im being ...Lazy...
------------------------------
Pretty soon he flips out, with all the pressure -- today, they want to slap us with initials [ADD, ADHD, CTIA -- "can't take it anymore"] & prescribe Drugs -- back then people could go to a "sanitarium" where a person could get help, take a rest, and get their balance back.

Bing Crosby's Jim Hardy character emerges from his "rest cure" at the sanitarium with a new plan for his country place: he tells it to his old Broadway associates -- he is going to open up "Holiday Inn." It will be open only fifteen days a year, on holidays, with dinner and nightclub acts. The rest of the year, he will relax and enjoy life. A reverse schedule from the rest of the working world.

His buddies raise their eyebrows, upon hearing this plan.
"Say, did you get your discharge papers from that sanitarium?" asks one.

-----------------------------
The Holiday Inn thing starts working out -- a lovely singing / dancing woman named Linda Mason comes to work at the inn, and Jim Hardy starts falling in love with her.

(There's no kissing or hand-holding, but he writes songs for her, treats her nicely, and -- looks at her with tenderness.)

Meanwhile Ted Hanover (Astaire), who stole Lila from Jim at the beginning, shows up at the inn -- Lila has since run off with "some Texan from Texas," and Ted gets interested in performing at the inn, then meets & dances with Linda Mason and becomes interested in her...Bing Crosby looks askance -- he's worried...
Ted: "She's wonderful! I feel like I've known her for months!"
Jim: "Umh -- same ol' feeling, huh?"

Jim tries to keep Linda Mason with him at the inn, but since he hasn't got the financial stability he wants, yet, with the new project, he has not asked her to marry him -- and Ted Hanover moves in.

Ted and the agent lure Linda to Hollywood. Out there, in the last scene, she's up on a busy movie set, about to sing the song "White Christmas," but she's sad and lonely, missing Jim out there in Connecticut. Meanwhile, he has flown out to Hollywood to declare his love for her and bring her back with him, if she will agree: when she begins singing, he chimes in and sings harmony -- and she's all surprised, and looking around. Then when she spots him, she cries out, "Jim!" and she's so happy, she runs to him.

Then the camera focuses on the closed door to the set, where Fred Astaire and the agent (having escaped the room where Crosby locked them in, several minutes ago, to give himself a head start) burst through and look around wildly, then see something at the same time. Both men look intently, with surprised expressions, off-stage. We cannot see what they're looking at, we can only see them looking.

Agent (incredulous): "How could he get that far in five minutes?"
Astaire (resigned to his loss, this time): "The lady must have been willing."

-----------------------------
The movie features singing-and-dancing routines throughout, all plot-related, & once they're at the inn, it's an act for each holiday. Hard to pick a highlight because they're all such dazzling-good fun, but if I could only bring one to a desert island with me, it would be Fred Astaire's famous "Fireworks Dance" the 4th-of-July number. Expert critics say it is the fastest-moving, most complicated dance ever filmed. I want to dance it, too. ...Ehrm.

-30-

madness

2012-01-02T19:16:00.000-08:00

A column in New York Times by Mark Bittman, offering some "vegan" (no meat, no dairy) recipes -- oh my gosh what a storm of Commentary: kind of funny because political articles usually draw the most comments, but another column in the same issue hammering at the hammering attack ads for Iowa Repub. primary (attack ads can now come from pacs that don't have to identify themselves, &, due to current supreme court's "Citizens United" decision, have limitless funding flowing from God-knows-where...) drew a total of One -- ONE! -- Comment, while the Food column was peppered with 580+ Comments!

While many people will (I'm beginning to think, intelligently) eschew politics & its related news, Everyone believes they Know Food, by George...
the "I eat meat and cheese and that's the only way to do things!" Comments
and the
"I don't eat any living creature, and P.S. tofu is Delicious!" Comments rivaled, answered, and peppered one another, & badgered, battered away at Mr. Bittman's Jan. 2 entry, for hours, apparently....

(Mushrooms aren't a vegetable! They're a fungus! So -- when eating mushrooms, you're eating an animal!!)

(For us to eat honey, they take the honey from the bee, and that is invasive. And wrong!)

(The reason humans have such large brains -- [and do so many intelligent things...?!] -- is because we EAT MEAT!)

(I'm a vegan except for fish sometimes.
--"If you eat fish, you're not a vegan!")

(Tofu is disgusting and tasteless!
--Tofu is delightful if you prepare it correctly!)

(I went vegan and have never been healthier / slimmer!)

(I went vegan and my hair started thinning. Began eating steaks again, & now my hair got thicker again...!)

---------------------
Just typing these makes me giggle. It goes on and on. Some of it's the same people, but a lot of the comments are original. Of course it's natural, everyone thinks they know how to eat. ...
Also reflected in many of those comments was what is, to me, the most irritating common thread in all diet / nutrition / fitness advice that I've heard during the 800years I've been alive -- the demonizing of some particular food or food group, and then its later rehabilitation.

And now with internet, seems like everything goes faster, so that nutrition advice (decrees?) touting and/or demonizing some kind of food are lobbed at us almost simultaneously:
Low-carb!
Eat nothing but carbs!
Meat will kill you!
You'll die if you don't eat meat!
Vegetables all the time!
But never starchy vegetables!
Red wine!
Dark chocolate!
No chocolate!
Nothing that tastes good, ever!
Potatoes!
Never eat a potato, they should be outlawed!
Cholesterol is bad!
Except for Good Cholesterol -- good cholesterol is Good!
No soda, ever, except for Diet!
No Diet Soda!
Whole wheat!
No wheat!
--------------------
When I was in college there was a movie called "Reefer Madness" that would be shown around campus sometimes -- I never saw it, as I understood it, the routine was, people would get high and then go to the movie and laugh at it -- it is supposed to be something the govt. made, or commissioned, to frighten people so they wouldn't smoke pot...
thinking, now, about all the vegetable advice, like "only eat berries and leaves" I want to informally christen it, "Leafer Madness" ...
------------------
One Commenter, Musician in Cleveland, wrote -- "I love dairy. It makes me happy. I eat it, as well as meat and fish, in smaller quantities. I eat well by cooking from scratch, reserving over half my plate for non-starchy vegetables, and regarding sugary dessert as a rare treat. I already keep kosher, adding another layer of absolutism would do nothing for me."

-------------
"Absolutism." That is a word to think about.

Cleveland guy -- eats sensibly, and --
"I already keep kosher, adding another layer of absolutism would do nothing for me."

Drawing the line, somewhere.
Leafer Madness

-30-

feel the love

2011-12-30T19:05:00.000-08:00

Interesting article about Verizon with their $2 fee idea --
they "ran it by" consumers,
then had to
-- RUN...!

Customer comments:
"We at Verizon take great care to listen to our customers." Yeah, right. Feel the love....

--------------------
What a bunch of greedy stupid idiots. And these people are running Veriozon?
With all the uemployed I would think it would be easy to find qualified replacements for these clowns.

--------------------
Amazing how good things happen when the Disaster-in-Chief is busy golfing in Hawaii and the worthless Congress has disbanded to the boonies.

The real people spoke and won.

Now, let's speak again in November and throw all the do-nothing's out!!!

----------------
These big corporations (such telecom, airlines etc) need to be broken up so that consumers get a better deal.

------------------------
Don't you remember that we did?
MA Bell spin- offs of all the Baby Bells?
Wall St. And big biz made billions and now, here we are again!

--------------------
It is a whole new game with social media. Ten years ago Verizon would have slipped this junk fee in without much notice until it was too late. Times have changed. Good job activists!

-----------------------
I love it. I remember the "fee to pay fee" in other contexts but I cannot recall now what it was. It is abhorrent.

------------------------
This is refreshing. Consumers can still effect change, and social media provides the weapon to do so.

[Comments from The Washington Post, Dec. 30, 2011]

-30-

feet hit the ground

2011-12-29T18:01:00.000-08:00

A 1942 film called Holiday Inn starred Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.

The real Holiday Inn hotel chain was named after the movie title.
Irving Berlin wrote all of the songs for the film, including "White Christmas."

The movie has an atmosphere of determination, working hard cheerfully, accomplishing something, and a sly sort of black-and-white intimacy that makes the viewer identify with each of the characters -- all of them! -- not just one. It's as if you're right there, in the cozy, classically-textured living room at the inn.

Fred Astaire, dancing: the description I can come up with that does justice to his talent --

. [Hmm. I don't have enough skill to describe his talent.]
Here in the 21st Century we don't go looking for tap dancing on a regular basis, but a person watches Fred Astaire dance, it's like a "Come-to-Jesus" movement for Tap Dancing. (Why isn't everyone doing this?? -- ALL THE TIME - ?!!)

It is as if -- air and gravity and the every-day, work-a-day Rules of Existence don't apply to Fred Astaire -- he just skims, and flies, floats, spins, stomps, and then swirls with a shag-step that's so smooth it's almost invisible. It's like, "Wait-a-minute -- how'd he get over there?!"

And none of it is "special effects" or "blue screen" with a computer -- he did all the stuff, and the cameramen simply filmed him.

The Holiday Inn DVD contains extra things -- videos, histories, commentaries...there's film (from a different movie) of Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby performing together, singing and dancing: they both sing, and both dance, but the attitude, or received wisdom is that Fred is the better dancer, and Bing the stronger singer.

[Both:] In us you see a couple of song and dance men
[Bing:] I'm the song
[Fred:] I'm the dance
[Both:] For laughter, joy and happiness, we're advance men
[Bing:] With a song
[Fred:] And a dance

[Bing:] I sing for my supper
[Fred:] I dance for my lunch
[Bing:] I croon when the landlord comes around
[Both:] For miles around the women and children

{called out, Not sung} - pass! out! cold!

[Bing:] When my voice hits the air
[Fred:] And my feet hit the ground

[Bing:] Last night
[Fred:] Out in the moonlight
[Bing:] I came to serenade
[Fred:] A very pretty maid
[Bing:] I sang her to sleep with "Asleep in the Deep"

[Fred:] (That always makes them collapse!)

[Bing:] I saw her eyes close, then she started to doze
[Fred:] But she arose when I sounded taps
[Both:] Which goes to show what women will do when we're around
[Bing:] And my voice hits the air
[Fred:] And my feet hit the ground
------------------------------
In Holiday Inn, Crosby and Astaire play song-and-dance men working in New York. They have a problem of competing, in their social life, and "stealing girls" from each other. Their female dance partner in the act is Lila -- she's wearing Bing Crosby's ring but is about to run off with the Fred Astaire character.

Fred Astaire asks her, "What?! You didn't tell him yet?"
Lila: (deflated from not doing what she knows she has to do) -- "I couldn't. He gets a look."

"That isn't love. It's something to do with his -- liver...."

--------------------- When Bing Crosby starts falling in love with a new singing / dancing girl, Linda, he sings,

Sweetheart of mine, I've sent you a Valentine
Sweetheart of mine, it's more than a Valentine

Be careful, it's my heart
It's not my watch you're holding, it's my heart

It's not the note I sent you
That you quickly burned
It's not the book I lent you
That you never returned

Remember, it's my heart
The heart with which so willingly I part

It's yours to take, to keep or break
But please, before you start
Be careful, it's my heart

-------------------
...Bing Crosby's brainstorm after he loses Lila in New York is that he's been wanting to leave the city and have a quieter, more relaxed life. So he buys a farm in Connecticut.

"He's already bought the farm!" one of the characters explains. ...

-30-

avert; bewitch

2011-12-28T18:31:00.001-08:00

Time.
Time to get accustomed to the idea (the reality) of 2012.
(I'm not even really used to it being the 2000s. Not necessarily on board with it. Feel like it should still be 19-something. ...)

Thinking about time, and coming across a reference to Proust, I remembered the title of his gigantic novel, "Remembrance of Things Past." Have not read it; always liked the title, somehow....

In his book, Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting An Icon, author and Yale professor Wayne Koestenbaum wrote --
[excerpts]-----------Apparently Jackie was caught reading Proust at a campaign stop. In her last interview, she mentions Proust: "Proust? I'd read that long ago." In early coverage of Mrs. Kennedy, much was made of her recherché tastes in reading (everything from "Colette to Kerouac").
...
[from the first chapter]...I began to write about the allure of icon Jackie in May 1993, while the real Jacqueline Onassis was alive and well. I addressed my sentences toward her....But...Her cancer was announced; with sad suddenness, she died. I can't address Jacqueline Onassis anymore.

But icon Jackie remains, a baffling array of images still requiring interpretation --not because interpretation is a panacea for loss, but because Jackie darkly captivates, and captivation fumbles for a foothold in speech.

Dare I find words for why Jackie mesmerizes? Even while Jacqueline Onassis was alive, icon Jackie had a life of her own, obeying comic-book laws; we could no more explain the icon than we could avert war, bewitch our neighbors, or reverse time.
------------ [end excerpts] {copyright 1995. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York}

"Reverse time." Hmm.
Type in "time is" on Google and it offers us back --
time is on my side
time is running out
time is money
time is of the essence
time is an illusion

"avert war, bewitch our neighbors, or reverse time" --
man has a way with a phrase

-30-

(theory and practice...)

2011-12-27T18:56:00.000-08:00

"In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life."

-- Marcel Proust

----------------------------------------------
You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss...
a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply --
As time goes by.

[music and words by Herman Hupfeld]
{in the movie Casablanca}

-30-

we shall not fail

2011-12-26T16:19:00.000-08:00

4 June 1940
(a speech given by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill):

“I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.

At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government-every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation.

The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail.

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,

we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,

we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender,

and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

-30-

"Mercy Mile"

2011-12-23T18:44:00.000-08:00

Christmas things:

singing Christmas carols in a group ("gang colors": red and green!) and it being so cold, too cold, glad to finish and have "lunch" (which was their odd & funny term for "a snack") in the church

the liberation of momentary inspiration and Cash to support it -- of buying Christmas gifts for family & friends, at Copley Plaza shopp. area to take home from college at Christmas break

the "hmmm"-moment of realizing presents taking up room in suitcase which was sort of needed for clothes...

after opening presents indoors by Tree, going out to garage for one final, large gift: a Sled. (Mobility!) sort of...

Christmas dinner, people seated all around a table, the Food plentiful, varietal, and delicious, and atmosphere of cheer, and hope, and goodwill -- when you don't really need to tell people anything, and they have no surprises for you, you can just "be," and the air between everyone can billow with comfort and pleasantness

Church -- the same story each year, always good, good to be comforted by the Expected

the "Bewitched" Christmas episodes -- when Samantha takes Larry and Darrin's cranky client to the North Pole, on her broom, to meet Santa Claus -- (make a believer outta that greedy Madison Avenue yo-yo...)

the Peanuts Christmas special! -- Hark the herald angels sing, Glory to the newborn king! Peace on earth, & mercy mild -- God and sinners -- reconciled!...rock on...

-30-

I WANT to pay taxes...

2011-12-22T19:03:00.000-08:00

Thwarted in my desire to play the song "White Christmas" for some of my co-workers, I instead read about the song's author, Irving Berlin.

He was born in 1888 in Russia; his name originally was Israel Isidore Baline.

His family emigrated to New York City, leaving Russia because of the pogroms of czarist Russia -- (czar's guys would ride into the Jewish town and wreck & burn stuff.)

Irving Berlin grew up to write songs, including “There’s No Business like Show Business,” “God Bless America,” and many more as well as “White Christmas.”
The on-line encyclopedia (Wikipedia) says [quote]:

The 1942 film Holiday Inn introduced "White Christmas", one of the most recorded songs in history. First sung in the film by Bing Crosby, it sold over 30 million records and stayed #1 on the pop and R&B charts for 10 weeks. Crosby's single was the best-selling single in any music category for more than fifty years. Music critic Stephen Holden credits this partly to the fact that "the song also evokes a primal nostalgia — a pure longing for roots, home and childhood…."

Richard Corliss also notes that the song was even more significant having been released soon after America entered World War II: [it] "connected with... GIs in their first winter away from home. To them it voiced the ache of separation and the wistfulness they felt for the girl back home, for the innocence of youth...." Poet Carl Sandburg said, "Way down under this latest hit of his, Irving Berlin catches us where we love peace."

"White Christmas" won Berlin the Academy Award for Best Music in an Original Song, one of seven Oscar nominations he received during his career.

----------------------
Berlin supported the presidential candidacy of General Dwight Eisenhower, and his song "I Like Ike" featured prominently in the Eisenhower campaign. ... According to his [Irving Berlin's] daughter, "He was consumed by patriotism." He often said, "I owe all my success to my adopted country" and once rejected his lawyers' advice to invest in tax shelters, insisting, "I want to pay taxes. I love this country."

According to Saul Bornstein, Berlin's publishing company manager, "It was a ritual for Berlin to write a complete song, words and music, every day."

Berlin has said that he "does not believe in inspiration," and feels that although he may be gifted in certain areas, his "most successful compositions were the "result of work." In an interview in 1916, when he was 28, he said:
I do most of my work under pressure. When I have a song to write I go home at night, and after dinner about 8 I begin to work. Sometimes I keep at it till 4 or 5 in the morning. I do most of my writing at night, and although I have lived in the same apartment four years there has never been a complaint from any of my neighbors.... Each day I would attend rehearsals and at night write another song and bring it down the next day.

Not always certain about his own writing abilities, he once asked a songwriter friend, Mr. Herbert, whether he should study composition. "You have a natural gift for words and music," Mr. Herbert told him. "Learning theory might help you a little, but it could cramp your style." Berlin took his advice.

------------------- [end quote]

-30-

no room at the inn

2011-12-21T18:41:00.000-08:00

I pulled in to Nazareth

Was feeling 'bout half past dead.

Just need to find a place

Where I can lay my head

Mister, can you tell me where

A man might find a bed...

He just grinned & shook my hand

"No" was all he said ...
-----------------------------

["The Weight"
The Band]

-30-

ghost of truth

2011-12-20T18:58:00.000-08:00

Reviewing lyrics of The Band's song, "Ophelia," wondered --

"the ghost is clear"
??
!!
?
That's not even an expression!
I don't know why I rely on these lyrics posted on official Lyrics sites on internet: feel that it should be like Encyclopedia, sort of a Received Wisdom, but now think maybe should just listen to songs myself & type what I hear. And what makes sense.

...because -- it's got to be "the coast is clear."

"The coast is clear."
"The coast is clear!"
OK, that's an expression.
But how could a "ghost" be clear?
And -- hello? What ghost??
There was no ghost...!
makes no sense

this is the paradox of the internet:
we can look up Everything on "It"
and we may get true information
and we may get wrong information,
or incomplete information.

It's like, if it was wrong all the time, that would be better because at least it would be consistent -- you could look up the information, & then simply realize that the opposite is true. But it's inconsistent, that's the problem.
One of the problems.

Is it making our very lives less stable, because truth itself is called into question? Or sometimes disregarded?

-30-

darken my door

2011-12-19T18:41:00.000-08:00

Boards on the window
Mail by the door
Why would anybody leave so
quickly for?
Ophelia...
Where have you gone?

The old neighborhood
just ain't the same
Nobody knows just what became
of Ophelia --
Tell me, what went wrong...

Was it somethin' that somebody said?
Honey you know we broke the rules...
Was somebody up against the law?
Honey, you know -- I'd die for you --

Ashes of laughter
The ghost is clear
Why do the best things always
disappear
Like Ophelia --
Please darken my door.

Was it somethin' that somebody said?
Honey, you know we broke the rules--
Was somebody up against the law?
Honey, you know, that I'd die for you...

They got your number
Scared and runnin'
But I'm still waitin' for the
second comin'
Of Ophelia

Come back home

-------------------------
["Ophelia," by Robbie Robertson. The Band.]

-30-

fresh as paint

2011-12-16T18:15:00.000-08:00

When reading E.F. Benson's Lucia (and Miss Mapp) novels, sometimes you don't understand everything they're saying, partly because in England they say things differently than we do in America -- ("turn the subject" instead of "change the subject" and "coming round the corner" instead of "coming around the corner") -- & partly because they're written in the 1920s, and styles of expression in the language change & evolve over time.

Sometimes you read a paragraph and go, "That's so funny!" or "That's so true!" Other times you read a paragraph & think, "What?"
Sometimes it's like listening to music where you can't understand the lyrics. You can still like it, because of the rhythm, the beat, & the melody.

(I used to always think in "Edge of Seventeen" Stevie Nicks was singing, "Just like the one we love..." Come to find out, ("Behind the Music"...) she wasn't singing, "Just like the one we love," she was singing, "Just like the white-winged dove." whatever. ...)

Queen Lucia was published in 1920. It went out of print later. Then came back in the 70s. Nancy Mitford wrote a Foreword in 1971:

-------------------------------
At long last, here she is again, the splendid creature, the great, the wonderful, Lucia. What rejoicing there will be among the Luciaphils! Those of us who lost her chronicles during the war and have never, by Clique, by barrow or by theft, been able to replace them, now find ourselves armed against misfortune once again; when life becomes too much for us we shall be able to take refuge in the giardino segretto. The publishers, in reprinting QUEEN LUCIA (and by degrees, the whole saga), have deserved well of all who like to laugh.

Lucia (Mrs. Emmeline Lucas) is a forceful lady who lives in the South of England in two small country towns -- that is, when we meet her first, in the late Twenties, she is the Queen of Riseholme, but half way through her story (which ends just before the war) she transfers, presumably so that her creator can pit her against the formidable Miss Mapp, to Tilling. Tilling, I believe, is Rye, where E.F. Benson himself lived in the house formerly occupied by Henry James; this is the very house which Lucia finally worms out of Miss Mapp.

Lucia's neighbours in both towns are almost all, like herself, middle-aged people of comfortable means. Their occupations are housekeeping, at which most of them are skilled (there is a good deal about food in the books, and lobster a la Riseholme plays an important part), gardening, golf, bridge and bickering. None of them could be described as estimable, and they are certainly not very interesting, yet they are fascinated by each other and we are fascinated by them. [Makes me think of "Friends"...]

All this fascination is generated by Lucia; it is what happens with regard to her that counts; she is the centre and the driving force of her little world. As she is a profoundly irritating person, bossy, horribly energetic and pushing, [Monica Geller!] the others groan beneath her yoke and occasionally try to shake it off: but in their heart of hearts they know that it is she who keeps them going and that life without her would be drab indeed.

The art of these books lies in their simplicity. The jokes seem quite obvious and are often repeated: we can never have enough of them. [Like in "All In The Family" no matter how many times Archie said, "Editt, you are a dingbat," or, to his son-in-law, "Get away from me Meathead!" it was funny every time...you waited for it...] In Lucia in London, Daisy gets a ouija board and makes mystical contact with an Egyptian called Abfou. Now Abfou hardly ever says anything but "Lucia is a Snob," yet we hang on his lips and are thrilled every time Georgie says, "I am going to Daisy's, to weedj."

Georgie is the local bachelor who passes for Lucia's lover. Then there is the Italian with which Lucia and Georgie pepper their conversation: "Tacete un momento, Georgie. Le domestiche." It never, never palls. On at least two occasions an Italian turns up and then we learn that Lucia and Georgino mio don't really know the language at all; the second time is as funny as the first.

I must say I reopened these magic books after some thirty years with misgivings; I feared that they would have worn badly and seem dated. Not at all; they are as fresh as paint. The characters are real and therefore timeless; the surprising few differences between that pre-war world and its equivalent today only add to the interest. Money of course is one of them -- the characters speak of 2,000 pounds as we would of 20,000 pounds. At least two people have Rolls-Royces; everybody has domestiche. When listening-in begins, Lucia refuses to have a wireless until Olga, a prima donna whom she reveres, owns to having one and listens-in to Cortot on it.

None of them ever thinks of going abroad. When Lucia and Georgie want to get away from Riseholme for a little change they take houses at Tilling for the summer; that is what leads to them settling there.

But the chief difference is that, in Lucia words, "that horrid thing which Freud calls sex" is utterly ignored. No writer nowadays could allow Georgie to do his embroidery and dye his hair and wear his little cape and sit for hours chatting with Lucia or playing celestial Mozartino, without hinting at Boys in the background. Quaint Irene, in her fisherman's jersey and knickerbockers, would certainly share her house with another lesbian and this word would be used.

There are no children in the books -- "Children are so sticky," says Georgie, "specially after tea." After the death of Mr. Lucas both Georgie and Lucia are afraid that the other may wish for marriage; the idea gives them both the creeps. However, the years go by and they realize that nothing is farther from the inclination of either than any form of dalliance. Marriage is obviously the thing; Georgie remembers that he is a man and proposes it.

I was a fellow guest, at Highcliffe, with Mr. E.F. Benson soon after Lucia had become Mayor of Tilling. We talked of her for hours and he said, "What must she do now?" Alas, he died in the first year of the war; can we doubt that if he had lived Lucia would have become a General?
-----------------------[end Foreword]
Queen Lucia, by E.F. Benson. Copyright (the novel), 1920 by George H. Doran Company. Copyright (the Foreword), 1971 by Nancy Mitford.

-30-

-30-

spy unseen

2011-12-15T17:53:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the New York Times ran an article about Facebook and how so many people are on it now, it's like those who are not "on it" are sort of like a -- minority.

Different points of view were commented in: riotously funny;
there are people who spend a LOT of time on Facebook and LOVE it and are REALLY REALLY into it.

And there are people who use it, and enjoy it, but don't spend that much time -- it's a smaller part of their lives.

And there are people who -- have a -- (what do you call it? a -- space??) on Facebook, but they're not into it, they're somewhat critical of the type of information that gets put up there by people, and they sometimes think about closing their account.

And there are the people in the minority: they "don't have" and are "not on" Facebook.

It's like this whole -- spectrum. Or -- no, continuum. I don't know.

One guy said he was closing his Facebook account; he'd determined it was a waste of time, and he listed the things he intended to do with the Time he saved by not being on Facebook: read; work out; create art; spend time with the cat.
: )
I was utterly charmed by that. Some guy in upstate New York.
"Spend time with the cat."

----------------------
I had been thinking about three great English novelists anyway, whose work has some similarities: you could almost group them together, maybe --
Jane Austen
Helen Fielding
E.F. Benson.

They write -- funny novels. (Or should say -- wrote -- two of them, dead.)

Put that thought together with the Facebook -- I don't know -- celebration / debate / heated argument...
and began imagining the characters in these authors' novels & whether (and to what extent) each would use Facebook.

Jane Austen's stories are written, early 1800s, and E.F. Benson's "Lucia" novels came out between the two world wars, so of course no Facebook existed in the "real" world of these fiction worlds. But even Helen Fielding's famous Bridget Jones character didn't have Facebook, it's so New; Bridget Jones seems so Modern, yet technology moves so fast, it makes even a character who burst on the scene in the late 90s seem like she exists in a "past" world...

Now, Bridget Jones would use Facebook; her (wonderful) boyfriend Mark Darcy would not be on Facebook. Her friends Jude and Shazzer would be on Facebook, and so would their gay friend Tom. Bridget Jones's mother ("Mum") would so totally be so all over Facebook she would actually use it too much, create too many accounts, meet and "friend" too many people, and cause too much commotion & eventually the Facebook corporation would ask Mrs. Jones to please close her account and go away. (LOL!) P.S., Bridget's dad would be relieved.

Jane Austen's Emma would be on Facebook, but would use it sparingly. She would consider it a little bit beneath her, & would say to herself that she would not allow time spent on the social network to at all interfere with her piano practicing and reading of good literature. Mr. Knightley would have no use for Facebook. Mrs. Weston would be on Facebook to keep up with her sister in London, and with Emma. Mr. Woodhouse would be utterly disapproving of the whole concept of the internet, forget Facebook. He would have concerns and fears that people might become too mesmerized staring at their computer screens. (And, quaint as his worrying always is, he would not be entirely wrong in his conjectures.)

Miss Austen's "Elizabeth Bennet" in Pride And Prejudice would not disapprove of Facebook, & would consider opening an account, but would not have got around to it yet. Mr. Darcy most emphatically would not be on Facebook. Elizabeth Bennet's father would think Facebook was all right, but would not participate. Mrs. Bennet would be on it.

E.F. Benson's "Lucia" would resist the idea of Facebook, and would worry about whether members of her social circle were on it. Once she knew that some of them were on Facebook, she would want to look and see what they put up there, but she would not want anyone to know that she looked. Miss Mapp would search all over Facebook looking to see what the other people in the town put up there, and looking for something about anyone that she can interpet as bad. Georgie Pillson would be on Facebook, happily and humbly "friending" people.

--------------------------------
--------------[excerpt, Miss Mapp]: Miss Elizabeth Mapp might have been forty, and she had taken advantage of this opportunity by being just a year or two older. Her face was of high vivid color and corrugated by chronic rage and curiosity; but these vivifying emotions had preserved to her an astonishing activity of mind and body....Anger and the gravest suspicions about everybody had kept her young and on the boil.

She sat, on this hot July morning, like a large bird of prey at the very convenient window of her garden room....This garden room, solid and spacious, was built at right angles to the front of her house, and looked straight down the very interesting street which debouched at its lower end into the High Street of Tilling....from a side window of the garden room...she could sit quite close to that, for it was screened by the large-leaved branches of a fig tree and she could spy unseen.

...There was little that concerned the social movements of Tilling that could not be proved, or at least reasonably conjectured, from Miss Mapp's eyrie. Just below her house on the left stood Major Flint's residence, of Georgian red brick like her own, and opposite was that of Captain Puffin. They were both bachelors, though Major Flint was generally supposed to have been the hero of some amazingly amorous adventures in early life, and always turned the subject with great abruptness when anything connected with duelling was mentioned....

...And only last week, being plucked from slumber by some unaccountable indigestion (for which she blamed a small green apple), she had seen at no less than twelve thirty in the morning the lights in Captain Puffin's sitting room still shining through the blind. This had excited her so much that at risk of toppling into the street, she had craned her neck from her window, and observed a similar illumination at the house of Major Flint. They were not together then, for in that case any prudent householder (and God knew that they both of them scraped and saved enough, or, if He didn't know, Miss Mapp did) would have quenched his own lights, if he were talking to his friend in his friend's house.

The next night, the pangs of indigestion having completely vanished, she set her alarm clock at the same timeless hour, and had observed exactly the same phenomenon. Such late hours, of course, amply accounted for these late breakfasts; but why, so Miss Mapp pithily asked herself, why these late hours?

...Miss Mapp had a mind that was incapable of believing the improbable....

[end Excerpt]
-------------------------------------------
{Miss Mapp, by E.F. Benson, Copyright
1922. George H. Doran Company.}

-30-

dulled, pummeled, and badgered -- oh my

2011-12-13T17:39:00.000-08:00

A guy named Carne Ross wrote in the Huffington Post the following:

----------------------- [quote from article] -- [The last line is the most important]: The political methods of the 20th century are, it appears, less and less effective for the world of the 21st.

The nature of globalization is without precedent: accelerating interconnectedness, with billions of people interacting constantly in a massive, dynamic, and barely comprehensible process.

Yet the assumption persists that the political processes and institutions designed in the 20th century, or earlier, remain appropriate and effective in this profoundly different state of affairs. In fact it appears that the ability of national governments and international authorities to manage the severe problems arising from this new dispensation are declining, despite their claims to the contrary.

...Effects in the real world should be the test...
Experts say that the internationally-agreed Basel III rules to reduce risky banking practice are insufficient, and they are already being watered down by banks’ lobbying. …

At home, democracy has been subverted. Corporations donate copiously to both parties to insure their influence. Politicians initiate legislation in order to extract rents from big business. Private prison owners lobby for longer sentences. There are now lobbying organizations representing the interests of lobbyists.

There is a more pernicious consequence of the repetitive but tenuous claims to effectiveness made by the practitioners of conventional politics and government: everyone else is dulled into stupefied inaction. If “the authorities” claim to be on top of these problems, what does it matter what we do? …
We have been pummeled into a kind of dazed apathy, endlessly badgered by politicians that they can fix it, when in fact we are the most potent agents of change.----------------------- [end excerpt, Huffington Post, Dec. 12, 2011]

And -- the last line is the most important.

-------------------------------------
He followed that up with an article telling the reader how he can be a "potent agent of change" -- a list of nine or ten things, and Voting was not even in the list.

There goes my whole world view...
(More music -- fudge -- eeehhgh...)

-30-

if you try sometimes

2011-12-12T18:57:00.000-08:00

You can't always get what you want

You can't always get what you want

You can't always get what you want

But if you try sometimes well -
you just might find ...

You get what you need
Oh -- yeah...

Mick! Keith! What do those lyrics mean? I'm going to have to take them to mean --
that since cannot find anything under 700 !(*%^#^#@! dollars to
TYPE
and
PRINT STUFF OUT
on
-- even Manual Typewriters -- anything that's gonna work is 700$$ & less expensive ones aren't real --

I'm gonna take the "you can't always get what you want" lyrics to mean:
I have to keep writing, pen and paper longhand, and
FORGET about ever having anything at home to type stuff and print it out on.
I am so tired.
Of.
This.

A person can write out their book in long-hand and send it to an agent, but -- by today's standards, they're not going to look at it, everybody expects everyone to be able to afford a computer in every room. They aren't going to accept the fact that a lot of people can't afford a computer --or even a typewriter -- & don't have a way to get their story typed. They're never going to understand that or give a rat's ass & will never read what I send them.

(Of course they don't look at the typed ones either, so --.)

You can only get published if your work is shown to the publisher by an agent and you can only ever get an agent if you're already published, prosperous, and famous, one of those doomed, round-in-a-circle, chicken-egg Things.

I wish I had never seen the free computer, it only made me realize how hopeless my goals are.

--------------------------
On bright side -- some guys I work with got the free computer -- (they don't need to print!), they are happy, and -- I made fudge.

-30-

"extreme" typing

2011-12-08T18:50:00.000-08:00

OMG
(oh my goodness)
Did not realize how very much I
desire
a
Manual Typewriter
until discovered how incredibly difficult / impossible / Aaaauuugggghhhh!
it is to match a printer to what Computerhumans call

"an outdated operating system."
(Yuh--from last spring...(!!!) sorry for doing such a Silly Thing as trying to get printer for computer from -- like -- last weekend...[!]
ok it's older than that but come on...!!!!)

Local store person assures me I can get an XP tower and a printer that will "communicate with" it for a amount which is -- more money than the whole shebang costs at Walmart --
the precise amount of money which is Too Much...erk, mmrrmphgughqx @#%%#@!

-----------------
may go another route: I learned to type -- (touch system, no looking at keys) ON a "Manual Typewriter" so long ago freaking Nixon was president (wage and price controls) --
did it then, can do it now dammit
-- and they (the manual typewriters) are -- floating out there -- on the internet ocean -- in space -- near the Sea of Tranquility --
at prices from $10 to $650.

($25 - $85)...
N-n-n-n-n-0-0-0-0-w-w
we are
talkin'

Am tired of all this -- everything's-outdated-so-fast-to-keep-you-buying new
and thus-churning-money-through-economy-which-benefits-someone-somewhere-but-not-me-far-as-I-can-tell:

By going with a Manual Typewriter,
am-taking-stand-against-being-forced-coerced-to-buy-stuff-cannot-afford,
and
(I'm guessing)
helping the Environment, in some way -- would like to believe. ...Hmmm...

The Smith Corona Classic 12!
The Vintage Royal Aristocrat...
The Smith Corona Sterling...!
The Smith Corona Super Sterling...
Yum.

Do not possess internet at home.
Wish to do "production typing."
Think circumstances have led (or pushed?) me to correct decision...
OMG, am psyched.

-30-

Amen

2011-12-07T18:20:00.001-08:00

"May the authorities grow like onions with their heads in the ground!" is an off-the-cuff curse tossed out by an Anatevka villager in Fiddler On The Roof.

The men stand in a group, around a wagon, talking. The news-bringing guy comes over with a long sheet -- "In a village called [something-or-other] all the Jews were forced to leave."

They stand in intimidated stressful awe.
"For what reason?"
"Doesn't say. Maybe the tsar wanted the land. Maybe a plague."

"May the tsar have his own personal plague!" one cries.
All together: "Amen!" And they all turn away and spit.

More discussion.
News guy: "I don't know any more than that. An edict from the authorities."

"May the authorities grow like onions, with their heads in the ground!"

"AMEN!"
Spit.

------------------------------
F-O-T-Roof
takes place during the last gasp of tsarist Russia right before the communist revolution (1917...?)...
talk about out of frying pan & into fire...
Tsarist Russia was a lousy place to live for many of the people -- that's why they got the energy for a revolution -- then the communists were just as bad or worse...
when I was in elementary school my piano teacher told me that Russian music is often in a minor key because "the people over there haven't had very much to be happy about."

---------------------------
I was thinking about the scene with these grown-up, hard-working, devoutly religious villagers -- cursing the "authorities" - ! (I was taught, "The policeman is your friend.") ...but in a society, and system, where the actual authorities misbehave and persecute, and it's the authorities you have to be afraid of more than actual criminals -- that's a whole dysfunctional & corrupt system.

Traditionally we think we're safe from that type of scenario in America, because we live in a democracy and the authorities are the "good guys."

-30-

facets of publicity

2011-12-06T17:31:00.000-08:00

One evening a few weeks ago I discovered -- stumbled upon, completely by accident -- an article in a trade journal about the company where I work.

("This article stars us! Wow, Yay!")

Not like being in The New York Times or national magazine or something, but it's still -- An Article About Us!

So I was showing the article to people who work here -- one man sat down and read the entire article carefully. When he finished he said, with skeptical smile and some gentle doubt in his voice, "Well -- they make it all -- sound -- very -- Good..."

Another man, as I held out the magazine open to the article-about-us page, glanced at the full-page photo of a corporate executive & walked away: "rh-rh-rhrhrhnahru-read-about-him...he doesn't even know who-I-am...!"

A third worker responded to that, later, with a judiciously enunciated, thoughtfully spoken sentence: "I've always found, that if the -- top guy -- doesn't know you, ... that's a good thing."

Some of the people we work with speak only a small amount of English -- when I showed the magazine article to people, those who had the least understanding of what it was, seemed to be the most impressed ...

-------------------------
Standing in my office with my "find" -- the exciting, interesting, surprising magazine article, I had not predicted any of those reactions. ...

-30-

...when unchecked

2011-12-05T19:09:00.000-08:00

"Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
-- WINSTON CHURCHILL, speech, Nov. 11, 1947

"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."
-- ROBERT HUTCHINS

"Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers."
-- ARISTOTLE

"Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike."

-- PLATO

God's hand, like a sign-board, is pointing toward democracy, and saying to the nations of the earth, "This is the way: walk ye in it."
-- HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
-- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

"Although our interests as citizens vary, each one is an artery to the heart that pumps life through the body politic, and each is important to the health of democracy."
-- BILL MOYERS, The Nation, Jan. 22, 2007

"The sides are being divided now. It’s very obvious. So if you’re on the other side of the fence, you’re suddenly anti-American. Its breeding fear of being on the wrong side. Democracy’s a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it’s no longer democracy, is it? It’s something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism."
-- SAM SHEPARD, The Village Voice, Nov. 12, 2004

"There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship."
-- RALPH NADER

"The ballot is stronger than the bullet."

-- ABRAHAM LINCOLN, speech, May 19, 1856

"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."

-- WINSTON CHURCHILL

"Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors."

-- RALPH WALDO EMERSON

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty."

-- JOHN ADAMS, letter to John Taylor, 1814

-30-

a proper blessing

2011-12-02T19:00:00.000-08:00

Rabbi, may I ask you a question?

Certainly, Leibesh.

Is there a proper blessing...for the Tzar?

A blessing for the Tzar?
Of course.
May God bless and keep the Tzar --
far -- away - from us!

[Fiddler On The Roof]

-30-

work to live, or live to work?

2011-12-01T18:16:00.000-08:00

[excerpt, Rybczynski]---------------------
What is the meaning of the weekday-weekend cycle? Is it yet another symptom of the standardization and bureaucratization of everyday life that social critics such as Lewis Mumford or Jacques Ellul have warned about? Is the weekend merely the cunning marketing ploy of a materialist culture, a device to increase consumption? Is it a deceptive placebo to counteract the boredom and meaninglessness of the workplace?

Or is this the heralded Leisure Society? If so, it is hardly what was anticipated. The decades leading up to the 1930s saw a continuing reduction in the number of hours in the workweek -- from sixty to fifty to thirty-five. There was every reason to think that this trend would continue and workdays would grow shorter and shorter. This, and massive automation, would lead to what was then starting to be referred to as "universal leisure."

Not everyone agreed that this would be a good thing; there was much speculation about what people would do with their new-found freedom, and some psychologists worried that universal leisure would really mean universal boredom. Hardly, argued the optimists; it would provide opportunities for self-improvement, adult education, and a blossoming of the creative arts. Others were less sanguine about the prospects for creative ease in a society that had effectively glorified labor, and argued that Americans lacked the sophistication and inner resources to deal with a life without work.

...
All this has called into question the traditional relationship between leisure and work, a relationship about which our culture has always been ambivalent. ...The Aristotelian view that the goal of life is happiness, and that leisure, as distinguished from amusement and recreation, is the state necessary for its achievement.

"It is commonly believed that happiness depends on leisure," Aristotle wrote in his Ethics, "because we occupy ourselves so that we may have leisure, just as we make war in order that we may live at peace." ...

Opposed to this is the more modern (so-called Protestant) work ethic that values labor for its own sake, and sees its reduction -- or, worse, its elimination -- as an unthinkable degradation of human life.

"There is no substitute for work except other serious work," wrote Lewis Mumford, who considered that meaningful work was the highest form of human activity and who once went so far as to liken the abolition of work to a malignant Final Solution.

According to this view, work should be its own reward, whether it is factory work, housework, or a workout. Leisure, equated with idleness, is suspect; leisure without toil, or disconnected from it, is altogether sinister. The weekend is not free time but break time -- an intermission.
------------------- [end excerpt]

{Waiting for the Weekend, by Witold Rybczynski.
Copyright 1991. Penguin Books, New York.}

-30-

'Twas in another lifetime

2011-11-30T17:39:00.000-08:00

A crashing, rolling, frightening Thunderstorm happened the night of the Fourth of July the year I was 10 or 11 years old. A fireworks display at the Hudson Plaza in Ohio -- you would, like, sit in your car in this big shopping mall parking lot & watch the fireworks.

(I suppose everyone would have sat on their cars, or on the grass if it hadn't been storming.)

Or -- how was it? Did the storm come later, as the fireworks ended & everyone headed for home? Or did those northeastern Ohio patriots set off big professional-size fireworks right during a Thunderstorm? Not sure...

But for some reason I could never forget the excitement / danger of the evening: going to see fireworks! - excitement!
A ferocious thunder-and-lightning Rainstorm! - danger!

It was an intense, stormy, loud, dark, lightning-flashed, sloshy slashy wet drive home.

And the next day I woke up to find out that the largest tree in the backyard had been hit by lightning and was now horizontal instead of vertical. You could actually do more things with the tree in that position. A while later it got moved out of there, but temporarily the tree was more fun than when it was upright -- you could climb it better, & the branches with their outer tips touching the ground, made a space that was clubhouse-like. Or maybe a -- "fort."

Having the tree down seemed exciting and new, and strange -- and fun.
How unexpected!
How fascinating!
Let's go!

And on that same summer morning I learned that a young woman from our church was killed the night before in the storm. She and her boyfriend were driving and there was a tree down across the road and they didn't see it until too late and crashed into it. They were both killed.

I didn't know her personally; only knew her face from church, and her name, Karen (something) was familiar, at the time.
She had a mother and a grandmother who came to church also. There didn't seem to be any man -- any father -- around, just mother and grandmother, and Karen. She had dark brunette hair and pale, light skin. (When a person who sells make-up / skin-care "does your colors" they call that type a "winter" ...)

The death was shocking news. Someone else's tragedy, but nearby. Caused by the same thunderstorm we had driven home in.

And I remember my father, who was the minister, returning home, that day or maybe another day, from visiting Karen's mother and grandmother -- the standard (I imagine) consoling, being there for the people, pray if they want it...
and when he got home he was unloading to my mother -- he was concerned / aggravated because he had the impression that the mother and grandmother -- this unprotected family of women -- were leaning toward buying (selecting?) funeral (what's the word, "accessories"? "products"?) that were more expensive than what they could sensibly afford.

Like -- the most expensive coffin, or whatever.
A person would be sort of -- expressing their grief, and acting out their shock, by -- spending a lot, by Getting The Best -- "Nothing's too good for Karen!" ...

I think he felt like the funeral person -- funeral director? undertaker? -- was -- either steering, guiding, these bereaved & shocked women toward spending more money than they could really afford, for profit's sake, OR -- at any rate, not steering them -- failing to guide them toward a sensible, realistic decision.
Fine line, maybe.

Maybe it's good for people to spend a lot and let part of the Grief Pressure out, that way.
But I think my father felt like, "Sure, now you're bereaved and shocked; by this time next week you're gonna be bereaved & shocked & broke." He didn't want to see that, and yet there was probably nothing he could properly say.
(Can hardly come out with, "Hey ladies! This dude be rippin' you off...!")

-----------------
The sun was very bright, the morning after that storm.

-30-

seat by the Eastern wall

2011-11-29T18:40:00.000-08:00

"Well! I think that's been absolutely smashing!"
said Bridget Jones's mother (mum) in a passage from The Edge Of Reason, sequel to the Diary.

"Absolutely smashing" would be a fun phrase to integrate into our American way to speaking but we don't...some things are just -- British.

"petrol" for gas
"mobile" for cell phone
"lift" for elevator
etc. etc.
It's the same language, and yet different...

Smashing.
smashing
"Absolutely smashing!"
"Absolute smashing...!"

I don't think it's a sell.
I like it when they say it, though.

-------------------------------------
I think, sometimes, about the difference between a day when you go to work and a day when you don't.
The thing is imperative.
When you have to be at work -- get to work -- it's an imperative. A thing you have to do, by a certain time. It's a push. An imperative.

When you like your job and the people you work with, and it gets to be Friday and you are HAPPY that it's about to be the Weekend, and you ask yourself, "Why am I happy to not come back here for two days? I LIKE to work here. I don't not-like to come to work, so why is the weekend then such a Joy?..."

Because humans need some days -- hours, time, when there is no imperative.
No place you have to be.
No thing you have to do.

We need a break from Doing Things, so that we can come back and Do Things again.

There's a wonderful book titled Waiting For The Weekend, which tells some history of how weekends and holidays got started in the world. You study back about the ancient times, and it was -- every 4th to 8th day, being set aside for market or rest, or both.

Religions and governments would give edicts, dictates, policy, (scrolls and the like) to say, "On this day, you will do no work." But really, it was mostly the religious and government guys observing what people naturally did anyway, and then making it their own policy -- sort of -- putting oneself More In Charge by -- "A-hem!" mandating --
stuff people were --
Already Doing.

Legislating common sense, one might say.
Or -- taking credit for a great idea by putting in writing what was happening anyway.

And the things we look forward to Doing in our free time!
Sometimes the planning and dreaming can be more fun (and possible) than the actual doing, even when the weekend does arrive. Recently I noticed the same idea in two different films -- in both Fiddler On The Roof, and My Fair Lady, a character imagines if they had financial security and (thus) leisure, one of the things they would do is -- spend more time on Religion.

I thought that was interesting.
In My Fair Lady, Eliza Doolittle sings,
"One day I'll be famous, I'll be proper and prim
Go to St. James so often I will call it St. Jim..."

and in Fiddler-Roof, Tevye sings,
"If I were rich I'd have the time that I lack
To sit in the synagogue and pray.
And maybe have a seat by the Eastern wall.
And I'd discuss the holy books with the learned men,
several hours every day.
And that would be the sweetest thing of all."

-----------------------
There's leisure, and --
the Imagining of Leisure.

-30-

hold on

2011-11-28T17:54:00.000-08:00

In recent months I was re-experiencing and -enjoying "If," the poem by Rudyard Kipling, then, recent weeks, I read some in Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason, by Helen Fielding and found that Kipling poem, bobbing up in a wild, typically Jonesian scene.

----------------------
[Bridget's on phone with her gay friend Tom -- Tom wants Bridget's mother's phone #]:
"What do you want it for?" I said suspiciously.
"Isn't she in a book club?"
"Dunno. Anything's possible. Why?"
"Jerome's sensing his poems are ready, so I'm finding him book club venues. He did one last week in Stoke Newington and it was awesome."
"Awesome?"...

"What is it about book clubs?" I said when I'd put the phone down. "Is it just me, or have they suddenly sprung up from nowhere? Should we be in one or do you have to be Smug Married?"
"You have to be Smug Married," said Shaz definitively.
...

"Oh, hello, darling. Guess what?" My mother. "Your friend Tom -- you know the 'homo' -- well, he's bringing a poet to read at the Lifeboat Book Club! He's going to read us romantic poems. Like Lord Byron! Isn't that fun?"
"Er...yes?" I floundered.
"Actually, it's nothing special," she sniffed airily. "We often have visiting authors."
"Really? Like who?"
"Oh, lots of them, darling. Penny's very good friends with Salman Rushdie. Anyway, you will be coming, darling, won't you?"

"When is it?"
"A week on Friday. Una and I are doing vol-au-vents hot with Chunky Chicken."
A sudden fear convulsed me. "Are Admiral and Elaine Darcy coming?"
"Durr! No boys allowed, silly. Elaine's coming but the chaps are turning up later."
"But Tom and Jerome are coming."
"Oh, they're not boys, darling."

"Are you sure Jerome's poems will be the sort of thing that..."
"Bridget. I don't know what you're trying to say. We weren't born yesterday, you know. And the whole point about literature is free expression. Ooh, and I think Mark's coming along later. He's up doing Malcolm's will with him -- you never know!"

-------------------- [and on the Night-Of]:
Was greeted by Mum, wearing a very strange maroon velvet kaftan which presume she intended to be literary.
"How's Salman?" I said as she tut-tutted about my lateness.
"Oh, we decided to do chicken instead," she said sniffily, leading me through the ripply-glassed French doors, into the lounge where the first thing I noticed was a garish new "family crest" above the fake stone fireplace saying "Hakuna Matata."

"Shh," said Una, holding a finger up, enraptured.
Pretentious Jerome, pierced nipple clearly visible through black wet-look vest, was standing in front of the cut-glass dish collection, bellowing belligerently: "I watch his hard, bony, horny...{some of my own deletions here}...I grab," --

at a semicircle of appalled Jaeger-be-two-pieced Lifeboat Luncheon Book Club ladies on reproduction Regency dining chairs. Across the room I saw Mark Darcy's mum, Elaine, sporting an expression of suppressed amusement.

"I want," Jerome bellowed on. "I seize his...{can't type it inthisblogtryingtobeopenminded}..
"Well! I think that's been absolutely smashing!" said Mum, jumping to her feet. "Does anyone fancy a vol-au-vent?"
Is amazing the way the world of middle-class ladies manages to smooth everything into its own, turning all the chaos and complication of the world into a lovely secure mummy stream, rather as lavatory cleaner turns everything in the toilet pink.

"Oh, I love the spoken and written word! It makes me feel so free!" Una was gushing to Elaine as Penny Husbands-Bosworth and Mavis Enderbury fussed over Pretentious Jerome as if he were T.S. Eliot.
"But I hadn't finished," whined Jerome. ...
Just then there was a roar.

"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you." It was Dad, and Admiral Darcy. Both paralytic. Oh God. Every time I see Dad these days, he seems to be completely pissed, in bizarre father-daughter role-reversal scenario.

"If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you," Admiral Darcy bellowed, leaping on to a chair to a flutter from the assembled ladies.
"And make allowance for their doubting too," added Dad, almost tearfully, leaning against the admiral for support.

The pissed duo proceeded to recite the whole of Rudyard Kipling's "If" in manner of Sir Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud to the fury of Mum and Pretentious Jerome who started throwing simultaneous hissy fits.
"It's typical, typical, typical," hissed Mum as Admiral Darcy, on his knees, beating his breast, intoned, "Or being lied about, don't deal in lies."
"It's regressive, colonialist doggerel," hissed Jerome.
"If you can force your heart, and nerve and sinew."
"I mean it fucking rhymes," rehissed Jerome.

"Jerome, I will not have that word in my house," also rehissed Mum.
"To serve their turn long after they are gone," said Dad, then flung himself on the swirly carpet in mock death.
"Well, why did you invite me then?" hissed Jerome really hissily.
"And so keep on, when there is nothing in you," roared the admiral.
"Except your nerve," growled Dad from the carpet. "Which says to you" -- he leapt to his knees and raised his arms -- "hold on!"

There was a huge cheer and round of applause from the ladies as Jerome flounced out slamming the door and Tom rushed after him. I looked despairingly back at the room straight into the eyes of Mark Darcy.
"Well! That was interesting!" said Elaine Darcy, coming to stand by me as I bent my head, trying to recover my composure. "Poetry uniting the old and young."
"The pissed and sober," I added.
At this Admiral Darcy lurched over, clutching his poem.
-------------------------------------
Excerpt from Bridget Jones: The Edge Of
Reason, by Helen Fielding. Copy-
right, 1999. Penguin Group, New York.

-30-

10 to 20 more years

2011-11-25T17:31:00.000-08:00

[excerpts from The Agenda]
"If you let 10 to 20 more years go on where the middle class keeps losing ground,...this won't be the America any of us grew up in."
--Bill Clinton. May, 1991

The Soviet threat was evaporating, and foreign policy would not play a big role in the campaign, he predicted. Instead, the economy would be the decisive issue. America's economic system was out of whack -- great for the wealthiest 20 percent, who were getting richer, but lousy for the other 80 percent, who were sinking or treading water. The working- and middle-class alienation could help him win in 1992. These groups constituted the vast majority of voters, and they felt insecure.

...Hillary Clinton watched the forces and ideas at work on her husband. ...He was indignant about what the Republican policies had done to the average person -- little or no wage increases, job insecurity, the fraying of the safety net. As governor, he had paid the price. He had told his wife once with some bitterness, "It would be great to be the president like Reagan, who cuts taxes so that every governor, including Republicans, had to raise them."

During a trip to Japan several years earlier, Hillary Clinton had overheard a conversation between her husband and a Japanese executive. "You could do a lot to stimulate your economy," the executive told Clinton, "if your executives in American industry weren't so greedy." Her husband replied that American executives were being given permission to grab the most at the top by the Reagan economic policies, which were designed so wealth would allegedly trickle down....

Professor Stanley B. Greenberg was devoted to studying the crisis in the Democratic Party and the defection of middle-class and working-class whites -- the so-called Reagan Democrats -- to Republican presidential candidates in the 1980s. These voters held the balance in national elections, and Greenberg argued that they wanted to return to their party, to come home. Party leaders had to reach out to this disaffected and forgotten middle class, which saw itself squeezed -- paying for programs for the poor and tax breaks for the wealthy, while getting little in return from government. The middle-class crisis presented an opportunity for the Democrats. Buried in the article, Greenberg also invoked the magic phrase "tax relief."

Later, when he asked Clinton for his reaction, the governor replied, "I've read it three times."

Clinton told Carville and Begala...that he was personally shy of a populist label. Populism seemed to him too anti-government and anti-business. He wanted to chart a course without reference to old labels. ...
----------- Begala had studied the strategies of Republican operative Lee Atwater and agreed with Atwater's analysis that politics was divided into populist and elitist issues. On social issues, Begala believed, the Democrats tended to take elitist positions and the Republicans populist ones; on economic issues, it was the reverse.

Both parties had nominated their elites in 1988 -- Dukakis and Bush. Neither man nor his ideas had been embraced by the public. The 1992 campaign had to be fought on economic ground....

When Clinton announced his presidential candidacy on October 3, 1991, at the Old State House in Little Rock Arkansas, he said that his central goal was "restoring the hopes of the forgotten middle class." He made ten references to the middle class in his seven-page announcement and promised a middle-class tax cut. "Middle-class people are spending more hours on the job, less time with their children, and bringing home a smaller paycheck to pay more for health care and housing and education," he said.
---------------- [end excerpt]

{The Agenda, by Bob Woodward.
Copyright 1994. Simon & Schuster,
New York.}

-30-

The Flexible Thinkers

2011-11-24T16:38:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, typing and trying to analyze-and-understand things -- and I thought and typed the following:

The vet called it "misplaced territorial aggression": because Genie couldn't get at the "foreign" outdoor cat, she turned her territory-protecting instincts on her housemate cat, with whom she ordinarily got along great. ...

That's what I wonder, if -- when we had the common enemy of Soviet communists, there was a balance in the world, a long-standing balance, crossing a couple of generations -- and then with that gone, it was like a vacuum, and some people's "territorial aggression" (or general, formerly submerged hostility) got "misplaced" onto their fellow Americans. And they became like Genie-the-cat, attacking their friends and neighbors and co-workers.

------------------------------------------------
In his book, Get Anyone To Do Anything, David J. Lieberman, Ph.D., writes -- in Chapter 21, "How to Get Any Group of People to Get Along" --
[quote]: Whether it's bickering friends or a feuding family, these techniques will quickly melt away disagreement and provide a core of unity among all members.

Numerous studies conclude that division among people dissolves when there is an opposing outside threat. External events arouse our need for affiliation and we will seek out support, creating a heightened sense of unity. Civil warring, intersocietal conflicts, and internal unrest often cease when a common outside enemy comes on to the scene. Conversely, individuals will turn their attention and hostility on one another when no outside forces are present. {italics mine}

[My own insert: Pres. Reagan (in 1989): "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" And -- great, they did, but then who were we supposed to be suspicious of, and mad at, if not Soviet communists? -- we lost our "outside threat," or common enemy, and people began turning on each other in our own country -- road rage, deteriorating atmosphere in some workplaces, hate-radio and rant-tv, etc. ...?...]

[back to Lieberman]
The fastest way to instill cooperation within a group is to (a) create an external threat or (b) simply set your group against another group in some form of competition. A common enemy brings opposing sides together faster than any other type of group cohesion technique.

This phenomenon is also characteristic of how people respond within their own lives and minds....It's for this reason that those who have nothing going on in their lives are often the most neurotic. Without an external focus to occupy their attention their mind begins to turn in on itself. But once an objective is created our attention is turned outward. So too do groups who are confronted with a serious issue find that infighting quickly gives way to this new objective.

Also interesting is a study done by Ross and Samuels (1993) who found that the name given to a game has greater influence on the level of competitiveness than the individuals' personalities. They found that when participants played a game they believed to be called Wall Street they were much more competitive than their counterparts playing the same game, believing it was called Community Game. This is so fascinating because something as seemingly minor as the name of the game can override the members' personalities. Therefore, we can reasonably conclude that within your group careful consideration should be given to the name of subsets as well as the overall group name. For instance, if you have two sections of your group with names such as The Righteous and The Victors, chances are you won't be inspiring as much cooperation as with names such as Common Ground and The Flexible Thinkers.

-----------[end quote]
{Get Anyone To Do Anything, by David J.
Lieberman. Copyright 2000. St. Martin's
Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.}

-30-

misplaced

2011-11-23T18:32:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago I was puzzling about some things, and I asked a friend what he thought about it -- recently I found a spot in one of my notebooks where I wrote down notes about that conversation:

-------------------- I asked R what happened in the 13 years when I was out of the Local Swirl -- working on a statewide level, as far as travel -- I said, Is it me? Did I get too accustomed to being only with people in a relatively narrow demographic and -- lose perspective? Or did society and daily culture become meaner and stupider in those 13 years?

R said people's style and behavior became meaner and stupider. He didn't think about it -- he spoke immediately and decisively.

He said, "I don't know why."
I asked, "Is it the whole country, or is it just the town where we live?"
R said, "It's the whole country."

And it wasn't like -- wanting to "put down" people -- it was just behavior we were wondering at. ...it was like, random, scatter-shot hostility, and deliberate rudeness -- not everywhere, but in a lot of places.

--------------
In September I read this -- when the book and tapes were coming out from Caroline Kennedy, with 1964 interviews given by Jackie Kennedy...this Comment was on the internet:

--------------------"When I read... during breakfast that May morning that Jackie had died, I ...cried, ...not just for Jackie's passing but more especially for the final passing of what was a better, more American era, one of hope, challenges to our better selves, far-sightedness and elegance. Had I known then how far we were to descend since 1994, I would have cried ... much longer."

------------------------
That Comment-er was noticing things similar to what I had noticed, I thought....

Trying to imagine a reason, or reasons, for these transformations, I've blamed reality shows, talk shows, economic changes that harm working people, Congress' lack of responsiveness to Real World Challenges, the undeclared war on America's middle class...

and an idea which keeps re-surfacing is this:
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, it was this -- seismic change on Planet Earth. Communism was no longer a threat. And it strikes me that maybe -- lacking the Soviet Union as Common Enemy, Americans unconsciously turned that warehoused Mistrust and Hostility on each other.

Like -- I used to have a cat named Genie who lived a long and happy Cat Life -- one of the few times when she was NOT happy was if she would see an outdoor cat walking by outside in the yard. She would freak out, on these occasions, and attack the other cat, Chess, whacking him with her paws, running at him, and snarling like a cheetah. It was really scary. Once she knocked over a piece of furniture in my writing studio.

The vet called it "misplaced territorial aggression": because Genie couldn't get at the "foreign" outdoor cat, she turned her territory-protecting instincts on her housemate cat, with whom she ordinarily got along great. ...

That's what I wonder, if -- when we had the common enemy of Soviet communists, there was a balance in the world, a long-standing balance, crossing a couple of generations -- and then with that gone, it was like a vacuum, and some people's "territorial aggression" (or general, formerly submerged hostility) got "misplaced" onto their fellow Americans. And they became like Genie-the-cat, attacking their friends and neighbors and co-workers.

I wonder if there is anything in this theory.
David J. Lieberman has a chapter on this type of bonding, and creating a sense of unity through opposition to a common enemy in his book, Get Anyone To Do Anything.
Going to look it up.

-30-

bud-cat

2011-11-22T19:11:00.000-08:00

Chess Pacific,
cat of thoughts;
alert and
flexible
and restful
and smart;
a man of affection
and style, courage, and
imagination --
warm,
with studied peacefulness
on the
blanket,
under the lamp-light
Tuned-in
to God and the universe.

-30-

hubris and pronouns

2011-11-21T18:45:00.000-08:00

I read this on the internet --
the pub. is called "InvestorPlace"
I'm re-typing it here, so that I can think about it and try to learn what there is to know.

---------------------
Bank of America CEO Takes Hubris to New Level by Chastising Public
by Jeff Reeves / October 26, 2011 3:34 pm

Bank of America is one of the most hated companies in America -- and for good reason. BAC stock is down 50% this year and over 85% from its 2008 peak. Bank of America plans on instating a $5-per-month debit-card fee at the beginning of next year. It took billions in bailout money while regular Americans continue to face stagnant wages, runaway inflation and no relief from the brutal realities of both the housing market and job market.

But apparently Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan thinks we are all being a bit too hard on him and his cronies.

"I, like you, get a little incensed when you think about how much good all of you do, whether it's volunteer hours, charitable giving we do, serving clients and customers well," Moynihan said to employees last week, according to a Bloomberg report. "You ought to think a little about that before you start yelling at us."

{Insert from BluCol. Lit.: that's a mixed up paragraph -- at the beginning the pronoun "you" appears to refer to Bank-America employees; then in the last sentence "you" suddenly seems to refer to someone else who's "yelling at" bank of am. ...These folks are mixed up -- or careless...And also -- "clients and customers"? Aren't those two words for same thing?}

[Reeves article, continued]: Really? Do you really want us to think more about the antics of Bank of America and expect that reflection to benefit you?

OK, fine. Here are a few musings citizens are chewing over:

Your predecessor, CEO Ken Lewis, was indicted by the SEC on civil charges but never faced jail time. Whatever fines and legal fees he ultimately will incur for his tenure are more than offset by a jaw-dropping $125 million severance package.
Even as you proposed to gouge consumers with a $5 debit card fee, Bank of America wrote a final paycheck worth $6 million to former wealth-management division head Sallie Krawcheck. Another manager, Joseph Price, got a $5 million payday. That means the first 2.2 million debit-card charges will go solely to paying off these BofA lackeys.

Your $5 fee just so happens to coincide with"tests" by JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo over a $3 fee, prompting calls for an investigation that the big dogs in the financial sector are colluding to roll out fees at the same time -- browbeating consumers into suffering through the charges because there will be fewer alternatives.

The government is suing BofA (along with 16 others) for its role in the mortgage debacle.
Bank of America placed 28th out of 30 in a recent American Banker survey of bank reputations.
The list goes on. And through it all, the pompous Moynihan is due up to $10 million in performance-based cash and bonuses this year.

{Blu.Col.Lit: "Performance-based." Hmm. Sounds like a phrase that gets attached to make it sound like somebody deserves the bonus they receive. If I paid someone a bonus, I wouldn't call it "a performance-based bonus"; I'd call it a "bonus." Period. I'd only be nervous about justifying it with a phrase such as "performance-based" if I thought it wasn't justified. And if I thought paying the employee a bonus was not justified, I'd just -- keep the money! - (hello?) There's definitely a nervous sort of language of trying to fumble around & make things sound legitimate. Hmmmmh.
When I think of "performance," think of singing - dancing: did Bank of America's Brian Moynihan perform "Proud Mary"?...}

[back to Reeves]: Sorry, Brian. It's not us -- it's you. And boneheaded comments like this one are just further proof that Bank of America's hubris knows no bounds. Maybe you had a sympathetic audience among your employees when you made that aninine statement, but the rest of America isn't fooled one bit.

--------------------------
This trend seemed like it started with the Enron thing -- what year was that?
It seems like after that you hear so much about two things:
-- executives basically looting companies, sometimes bankrupting them,
&, 2
-- business basically being adversarial to consumers: like -- How can we rip them off? What can we get them to believe? How can we batter money out of them? How can we trick them and fool them?

It's behavior unbecoming in this Free Country that we love.
We were supposed to be setting an example,
but since collapse of Soviet Union it seems like some sectors of our business community have run wild, in a negative way.

Instead of taking the opportunity to lead, and innovate, they took the opportunity to basically loot and rob companies, & cheat consumers, while screaming about "government regulation."

I asked a guy once, Why, after Pres. Reagan de-regulated the airlines, did air service not get better and cheaper, but instead became worse and more expensive?
I was like, 'That's the opposite of what we thought de-regulation was supposed to do.'
He answered, when companies are that big, de-regulation doesn't work; greed takes over.
He was a lobbyist, at the time -- (Oh, one of those bad words), and a --
Republican -- another bad word, to some folks, and, on the other hand,
something to be touted & worshiped, to other folks -- truth is,
[GGOOONNNGGG!] --
Neither! -- just ...folks...

-30-

smite me

2011-11-18T17:02:00.001-08:00

Idealistic Student, (to Reb Tevye): "Money's the world's curse!"

Reb Tevye, (to the Heavens): "May the Lord smite me with it --
and --
May I Never RECOVER!!"

("Fiddler On The Roof")

-30-

it's paradise

2011-11-17T18:51:00.000-08:00

Hoagy Carmichael.
Hoagy --
was the man's name.
Hoagy Carmichael --
wrote this song:

Memphis in June,
A shady veranda

Under a Sunday blue sky

Memphis in June
And Cousin Amanda ’s
Makin’ a rhubarb pie

I can hear the clock inside
Tickin’ and tockin’
Everything’s peacefully dandy

I can see old Granny
'Cross the street
Still a-rockin’
Watchin’ the neighbors go by

Memphis in June --
And sweet oleander
Blowing perfume
In the air

Up jumps the moon
To make it that much grander
It’s paradise
Brother take my advice
Nothing’s half as nice as --
Memphis in June

[Instrumental - piano]

Memphis in June
And sweet oleander
Blowing perfume
In the air

Up jumps a moon
To make it -- that much grander

It’s paradise

Brother take my advice

Nothin’s half as nice
As Memphis in June

-30-

fish or cut bait

2011-11-16T17:54:00.000-08:00

{excerpt}
During a discussion of funeral plans, Jackie was "very well composed," said Gore. She proposed that instead of a standard eulogy, the service include brief remarks with quotes from Jack's speeches and favorite passages from the Bible. She...requested...Ecclesiastes 3:1--8: "To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven...." (It would be two more years before "Turn, Turn, Turn," the hit song by The Byrds, would popularize those verses as a call for world peace.)

...Sorensen couldn't help being amused by Jackie's Ecclesiastes request. He remembered when Jack had read the verses to her with the coda, "and a time to fish and a time to cut bait."

----------------- {end Excerpt}
[Grace And Power, by Sally Bedell Smith.
Copyright, 2004. Random
House, New York]

----------------------------------
To every thing
there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born,
and a time to die;
a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak...

-30-

disappearing railroad blues

2011-11-15T17:42:00.000-08:00

Thinking yesterday of Carl Sandburg, then reading up a little about him (doesn't feel right to say, "I googled Carl Sandburg" -- sounds a bit disrespectful, or improper...) -- come to find out, among the things he wrote is an epic poem entitled "Good Morning America" --

that only makes the song "City Of New Orleans" run on an obsessive endless loop in brain...

good morning America, how are ya?
Don't you know me, I'm your native son?
I'm the train they call the City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone 500 miles when the day is done. ...

Willie Nelson, Arlo Guthrie, and all the boys...

...and turns out was written by Steve Goodman
(whose name I can't forget because of the song, "You Never Even Called Me By My Name" -- David Allen Coe, "...now a friend o' mine named Steve Goodman wrote that song, & he told me it was the perfect country and western song..."

back to top -- it seems reasonable to me to imagine that the phrase "good morning America" was probably borrowed by songwriter Steve Goodman from Carl Sandburg's poem title...
cool

somewhere read that Bob Dylan traveled down to North Carolina in early 1960s, to meet Carl Sandburg. At that time, Dylan was very young, and Sandburg very old. ...Bob turned up with some friends on the Sandburg front porch, and the newly popular folk singer ("Blowin' in the Wind," "The Times They Are A-Changin'...) told Mr. Sandburg, "I'm a great admirer of your work" -- Carl Sandburg had no idea who Bob Dylan was, but invited him and his posse in for tea and sandwiches and apparently sat around and visited for a while.
would love to have heard that conversation ...
[where's a 'reality-tv' yahoo with camera-and-recording-equipment when you NEED him?? they record all the wrong stuff...!)

------------------------------------------
"Fog" is the well-known, short Sandburg poem -- fog comes on little cat feet...
sometimes people joke -- The cat comes in on little fog feet ...

-30-

little feet

2011-11-14T19:50:00.000-08:00

76. Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

--Carl Sandburg

-30-

...like overheard party conversation...

2011-11-11T18:56:00.000-08:00

Some people who influence your life, clearly and straightforwardly say and do things to
teach
you
and
help you, and encourage you. Others have a more round-a-bout path -- you learn from them, too, if you're listening and can "dig" it -- they aren't directly engaged in Your priorities or enthusiasms, but they share theirs, along with their knowledge and stories and observations, aloud mostly because they like telling it.

And you can be entertained / enlightened or not -- you may absorb at will. Like crackers on a plate -- you can take one if you want to.

------------- The vagaries of fortune, the gratuitous bitchery, and random meanness people may encounter; whether an individual allows events and jerks to "beat them to death" psychologically, is partly in the individual's control (we can consciously choose our response) and partly not.

------------------------------------
[selection / "Ulysses"]

Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world...
...for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Off all the western stars, until I die...

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, --

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
-------------------
[Alfred Lord Tennyson,
from the poem "Ulysses"]
-30-

proportion

2011-11-10T19:03:00.000-08:00

"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves."

-- Emund Burke
Irish political philosopher
1729 - 1797

-30-

goodtrend

2011-11-09T19:29:00.000-08:00

The power of
trend
is amazing:

this moment in human history is an Opportunity
(it seems like)
for Business leaders in the "Real World"

to take the lead
and build their own power,
and rival Wall Street banks-too-big-to-fail and other corrupt organizations,

by modeling
civilized behavior
and
positive accomplishments.

Congress doesn't lead;
Real People in the Real World
can build positive power,
by leading.

By -- just doing it.

-30-

forgotten mantra

2011-11-08T19:20:00.000-08:00

Yoga is difficult.

Ehrm -- A-a-ack.

Think I wasn't cut out to be a Zen Buddhist yogi.

(If I were practicing meditation, I'd probably wind up like the Jeff Goldblum character with the cameo in the film Annie Hall: at a swingin' Los Angeles party, he is intense on the telephone (a "cord-ful" phone), his back turned toward the crowd noise, speaking urgently into the receiver, "Uh, yes I -- forgot my mantra!"

That'd be me. ...)

Doing it (yoga) on bedroom carpet this morning, thought -- how LONG can thirty seconds last??!
On a sheet of paper pulled from a magazine I had, are -- 6 or eight pictures, showing a position, or pose that you're supposed to get into and then hold for 30 seconds.

Then you go to the next pose, and do that one for 30 seconds.
And that's exercise.
It really is.
In Western-world-mind, we're used to exercise being -- go, go, go. Step, step, step. Pedal, pedal, pedal. Jump, kick, twist, bounce -- lift, lift, lift.

In the Eastern-style, it's supposed to be -- stretch, make effort, and Relax-in-the-effort. And hold.
And the ubiquitous admonition: "Don't forget to breathe!"
(At least when I follow the pictures from the magazine I don't have annoying exhortations like that coming at me from the TV, as is the case when following a show...)

I keep a clock with a second-hand next to me, & position it, with each new Yoga position so that wherever my face is, I can SEE that clock so I know when I'm done holding the pose.

I adjusted the 30-seconds to 25, for each pose.
Enough already.

-30-

there ain't no time to wonder why

2011-11-04T18:51:00.000-07:00

A recent article in the New York Times about the "Occupy Wall Street" movement attracted Reader comments.

I copied-and-pasted two of those comments here -- to contemplate.

Comment 1 refers to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision: that decision said that a corporation is a person.

One might think, Well, it doesn't seem like that's true -- why would our Supreme Court say that?
Apparently that decision let down the flood-gates that had been preventing powerful multinational corporations from drenching political candidates in financing.

Comment 2 mentions farm subsidies. (Now, since I live in a state where agriculture is an important industry, I tend to buy into the idea that farm subsidies are in essence a "cheap food" policy: if we [our government] didn't help farmers stay in business, then two multinational corporations (or should I say, two "persons") would own all the land, hire the farming done, and maximize profits to themselves: i.e., a loaf of bread would cost $1400, etc. ...)

Comment 2 also mentions the 99% and the 1% -- looked it up, they're referring to statistics which say in the past 25 years 1% of Americans have increased their wealth while the other 99% have slid back. (It isn't 'cause folks aren't working harder, that's for sure!)

------------------------------
COMMENT 1:

These people hate that they have no voice, they have lost any chance to express their opinion, and have it matter to those who no longer represent them. The systems sells its influence to the rich because they alone can afford it. The corporations, take Pre-Tax profits and buy their influence, and the Supreme Court rubber stamps this undermining of the fundamental democracy that is supposed be the government OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE and FOR THE PEOPLE, by ruling that the corporation and all its money to undermine the nation is a person, a citizen. When did we last see a corporation return from war in a body bag ? If this doeasn't outrage you, you aren't much of an American.

------------------
COMMENT 2:

I believe we currently live in a Corpocracy not a Domocracy, our country currently is run for the large corporations not the people. The Corporations get the tax breaks. Even Congress, takes the tax breaks away with one hand and gives them back to the large corporations with the other hand. Just Sleight of Hand. For a current example look at the farm subsidies. We are 99% supporting the 1%
------------------------------ [end NYT Reader Comments]

People are upset, or psyched up, when they write, we can hear it when we read it. That doesn't make them right; it also doesn't make them wrong.

I don't know -- in the past four years I've met so many people who Don't Vote (I had no idea) and when the automatic words comes out of my mouth reminding them that their vote counts, they should vote, go-team!, whatever -- the person will say, "It doesn't make any difference." "There are no people like us in Congress." "They don't care." And it hurts to admit in my mind that they're not wrong.

-30-

blind love

2011-11-03T18:32:00.000-07:00

Thinking about people doing things they feel stupid (and embarrassed) about later, made me think of Blind Ambition, and made me think next of "blind love"...

Blind Ambition was the name of a book written by John Dean, of the Nixon administration. Dean wrote the book about his own experiences during the events encompassed in what we called
Watergate.

The title of that book sums up the author's predicament, for which he blamed no one but himself.
blind ambition
It's like -- you don't see that you're doing wrong, because you want to
either
go to the top
or
achieve the high goals of your president.

Really, when you think about it that way, the crimes & misdemeanors of today's wall street crowd -- the "banksters," some call them -- are all for the simple goal of

their personal stratospheric Wealth

...
at least the Nixon crowd did the stuff they did for a Goal
of serving their president -- and, of course, they thought -- the country ...
(yikes -- Somebody, call Charles Colson! - we got somebody worse! -- seriously, just kidding...)

----------------------
There's a theory that the Personality of a Politician / Would-Be Leader includes
1) a love for people
and
2) a need to be loved by people

...like a singer or dancer or actor, etc. -- the candidate meets the cheers of the crowd as something he loves, craves, needs, and never wants to lose...

on the
flip side
of that, the candidate greets, smiles, shakes hands, hugs, laughs, and rubs-shoulders-generally with the crowds because he Loves Those People.

Even his opposition -- the people who compete against him, and sometimes call him names -- he loves them, TOO, damn it--he can't help himself...!

That's just a trait that -- if a person has it, they have it -- like being left-handed...

And if a person's organization and discipline of their sexual feelings is not strong -- if sex and love overlap and mix in -- and if the person has any history-or-habit of casual physical promiscuity, it's a pretty simple recipe (easy-bake!) for making some silly mistakes.

-------------------
I know one thing, if I live to be a thousand years old,
and I NEVER
have to read or hear
about the sex life or romantic life of ANY
politician or other public figure,
it'll-be-too-soon!

...

-30-

that highway sound

2011-11-02T19:04:00.000-07:00

The motor cooled down, the heat went down
That's when I heard that highway sound.
Cadillac settin' like a ton of lead
A hundred and ten a half a mile ahead.
...
---------------------
Lyric from Chuck Berry's song, "Maybellene." Many rock experts call that the first rock-and-roll song.

I was reading, lately, two books by Bob Woodward (the Washington Post reporter who, along with fellow reporter Carl Bernstein, stumbled upon the events which came to be known as "Watergate"):
Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate
and

The Agenda.

Woodward's writing style is plain, straightforward -- reporting:
This happened.
This other thing happened.
These people planned this;
these other people tried that;
so-and-so said this.

Not elaborate, or flowery. The style is impartial. He doesn't write to "lobby for" anything. He tries to present facts, and what they may mean.

[From The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House]: -----------------There was lots of resistance from the economic team.

"That's Nixon," said Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, comparing Magaziner's idea to the Republican president's largely unsuccessful price freeze in the early 1970s.

Hillary argued that an immediate freeze would save an estimated $28 billion.

President Clinton backed his wife.---------------- [end excerpt]

-------------------
Chuck Berry's songwriting is like that, too -- the straightforward, This happened, then this, then -- THIS!-style.
You might call him the Bob Woodward of Rock and Roll.
Or -- Bob Woodward could be known as the Chuck Berry of journalism.

-----------
Maybellene, why can't you be true?
Oh Maybellene, why can't you be true?
You done started back doing the things you used to do.

As I was motivatin' over the hill
I saw Maybellene in a Coup de Ville.
Cadillac rollin' on the open road,
Nothin' out-run my v8 Ford.
Cadillac doin' about ninety-five,
It was bumper to bumper, rollin' side to side.

Maybellene, why can't you be true?
Oh Maybellene, why can't you be true?
You've done started back doin’ the things you used to do.

Peeked in the mirror at the top of the hill,
just like swallowin' up a medicine pill.
First thing I saw that Cadillac grille
Doin' a hundred and ten, droppin' over that hill.
Uphill curve, downhill stretch,
Me and that Cadillac neck and neck.

Maybellene, why can't you be true?
Oh Maybellene, why can't you be true?
You've done started back doing the things you used to do.

The Cadillac pulled up to hundred-and-four,
The Ford got hot and wouldn't do no more.
It then got cloudy, it started to rain,
Tootin’ my horn for the passin' lane
Rain water blowin' all under my hood,
But I knew that was doin' my motor good.

Oh -- Maybellene, why can't you be true?
Oh Maybellene, why can't you be true?
You done started back doin’ the things you used to do.

Now,
The motor cooled down, the heat went down
That's when I heard that highway sound.
Cadillac settin' like a ton of lead
A hundred and ten a half a mile ahead.
Cadillac lookin' like it's settin' still
And I caught Maybellene at the top of the hill.

Maybellene, why can't you be true?
Oh! Maybellene, why can't you be true?
You done started back doing the things you used to do.
--------------------
"Maybellene," Chuck Berry

-30-

21st century anxiety blues

2011-10-31T19:34:00.000-07:00

Car at shop.
Variety of symptoms.
Worry.
Mechanic never called...
?? -- !?
Is that ominous?
or were they just busy?
Hope car is resting comfortably.
Shared with Man In Front
diagnostic opinions of
Mechanics At (My) Work;
Man In Front seemed to be
honing
his Facial Expression of
Being Unimpressed.
(He said, "No it's not that," --
almost --
before I'd finished talking...!?)
[What's that about?
...Territorial, I suppose...]
{Languages I speak:
English
Spanish (only a little)
Italian (only a little)
Karen (Very little)
Male-Automobile-Repair-Speak (Very Very little)}
--------------------
Experts From Work:
"Take off the radiator cap and look in,
and see--"
"What you do is, check & see,
take off the radiator cap,
then --"
(Me: "What?")
"First, just take off the radiator
cap and see if..."
Rumble Of Authority: "Take
off the radiator cap and drive

a new car under it."
...

-30-

"...worth all they cost us..."

2011-10-26T17:05:00.000-07:00

[Here is the rest of Franklin Roosevelt's first inaugural address, given over the radio in 1933. You can get a good feeling of it if you read it out loud.
(The words and phrases that are highlighted were emphasized by me, not FDR.) ...]

True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing.

Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now.
Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.

Hand in hand with this we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land. The task can be helped by definite efforts to raise the values of agricultural products and with this the power to purchase the output of our cities.

It can be helped by preventing realistically the tragedy of the growing loss through foreclosure of our small homes and our farms. It can be helped by insistence that the Federal, State, and local governments act forthwith on the demand that their cost be drastically reduced. It can be helped by the unifying of relief activities which today are often scattered, uneconomical, and unequal.

It can be helped by national planning for and supervision of all forms of transportation and of communications and other utilities which have a definitely public character. There are many ways in which it can be helped, but it can never be helped merely by talking about it. We must act and act quickly.

Finally, in our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order; there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people's money, and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency.

There are the lines of attack. I shall presently urge upon a new Congress in special session detailed measures for their fulfillment, and I shall seek the immediate assistance of the several States.

Through this program of action we address ourselves to putting our own national house in order and making income balance outgo. Our international trade relations, though vastly important, are in point of time and necessity secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy.

I favor as a practical policy the putting of first things first. I shall spare no effort to restore world trade by international economic readjustment, but the emergency at home cannot wait on that accomplishment.
The basic thought that guides these specific means of national recovery is not narrowly nationalistic. It is the insistence, as a first consideration, upon the interdependence of the various elements in all parts of the United States — a recognition of the old and permanently important manifestation of the American spirit of the pioneer. It is the way to recovery. It is the immediate way. It is the strongest assurance that the recovery will endure.

In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor — the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others — the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.

With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.

Action in this image and to this end is feasible under the form of government which we have inherited from our ancestors. Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced. It has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations.

It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.

I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.

But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis — broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

For the trust reposed in me I will return the courage and the devotion that befit the time. I can do no less.

We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of the national unity; with the clear consciousness of seeking old and precious moral values; with the clean satisfaction that comes from the stern performance of duty by old and young alike. We aim at the assurance of a rounded and permanent national life.

We do not distrust the future of essential democracy. The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I take it.

In this dedication of a Nation we humbly ask the blessing of God. May He protect each and every one of us. May He guide me in the days to come.

[END OF THE SPEECH]
--------------------------
Where he says,

"Finally, in our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order; there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments..." -- I think that's referring to what became the Glass-Steagall Act.

As I understand it, the Glass-Steagall Act was put in to keep banks from failing and becoming totally screwed up;
then they removed it -- in the late nineties -- then here we went in 2008 with another "Crash."

It's like -- hello?! Like if we got rid of the law against burglary, and then the rates of burglary went up -- people going to sleep at night and waking up on the floor 'cause someone broke in and stole their bed... And we said, Gosh, that's awful! Why did the rate of burglary go up?? That isn't very nice - !! D-uh.

And you ask yourself, if we had a law that stopped economic chaos from happening, and that worked for 65 years, and then you REMOVE the law, and in a few years you GET economic chaos, then -- WHAT WAS THE WISDOM / REASON FOR REMOVING THE LAW??!!?

Somebody benefitted.
Glass-Steagall was not removed for the public good.
It was removed for some folks to get a lot of money for as long as the people tolerate it. They only have the deal for as long as they have the deal.

---------------
I admire the sometimes majestic flow of language in this speech.
And also it's amazing to imagine the strength of that lonely courage to say, "No, we're not giving in to an economic debacle. And Yes, we are Insistent that our nation survives and thrives.

Similar to the courage and firmness and lonely-and-determined stepping forward that Winston Churchill had to do when he had to "just say no" to Hitler. (...No, you will NOT take over the world with your murderous tyranny; lo siento, Adolf.)

The flow of history, and the clashes of greed-and-hate, vs. the public good & civilization, create iconic moments; and I think each person rises to meet the moment, and the need, and to do their best, not only the ones with famous speeches. The speeches simply give us something to work with. And to be inspired by.

-30-

rulers of the exchange

2011-10-25T18:09:00.000-07:00

I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels.

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today.

This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties.

They concern, thank God, only material things.

Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.

More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.

Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

[that's the first part of the inaugural address given by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on Saturday, March 4,1933]
-------------------------

Now there's a talk with some oomph --
We are stricken by no plague of locusts!
...We have still much to be thankful for!
Frankly and boldly - !
Nor need we shrink...!
honestly facing...!
frankness and vigor!
our common difficulties... "They concern, thank God, only material things."
(!! what a sentence...!)
essential to victory
critical days
my firm belief
This great Nation
will endure
will revive
will prosper...

Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.
(holy crap!)
...the only thing we have to fear is fear itself...

-30-

so how are we helping?

2011-10-24T19:19:00.000-07:00

"If you're not part of the solution

you're part of the problem."

-- thought for the day

-30-

don't think twice, it's all right

2011-10-21T17:48:00.000-07:00

...And I feel like when we read history, we learn ways things can be done which -- worked (!) -- you know they worked, because you can read the history, or hear it from someone who was there, & see the results after.

We can take some knowledge and wisdom from history and implement it, so we're not always constantly trying to "reinvent the wheel."
(When I worked as a lobbyist, our state legislators used that phrase sometimes: ideas get brought up in the form of bills being sponsored, sometimes, by someone who's new to the legislature -- someone with more experience would point out that this idea has been brought up before, & here's what happened -- or the idea was brought up before and passed, and then here's what happened. And then say, "We don't need to spend time trying to reinvent the wheel, here."

[Then after the voters passed Term Limits, we had such a high percentage of newly-elected people all the time, the institutional knowledge was gutted and legislators in general had no concept of 'reinvent the wheel' and they'd run around reinventing all the time, it seemed -- getting "ticked," talking louder to seem more right -- reinventing the wheel so much that after a while they seemed to be simply "spinning their wheels"...all term limits does is lift power from the legislative body and distribute it between the executive branch and the bureaucracy.])

---------------
A guy I used to know said to me once, "Why would I want to read history? That happened already, it's over."
(Merrmmfph.)
------------------
Some might say, "Past is past; I'm only interested in the future!"
People talk about the future,
predict the future,
make plans / promises for the Future,
and they're all full of baloney.
The "Future" is blue sky.

Like in the 90s when nafta - cafta was gearing up. "The lower-paying, plain regular jobs are going to be sent overseas, while here in America, we're going to be highly-paid knowledge workers." (I'm serious, I know I heard that phrase "knowledge workers" -- maybe on CNBC -- and it sounded kind of silly and more importantly unconvincing, even to me, Not An Economist.) ...

Artists for some reason usually portray stuff in "the future" in a depressing light -- movies, books about the "future" -- I don't reademorwatchem -- too scary.

Meanwhile some business dudes (masters of the universe) and their selected economists will sometimes portray "the future" in happy, optimistic, glowing terms ("knowledge workers"!!) -- in order to sell the public on new arrangements which will be good for them and bad for us.

-30-

doing my thing

2011-10-20T18:29:00.000-07:00

"Why aren't you a history teacher?" my hairstylist asked me a couple of weeks ago, as I sat in her chair, showing her pictures (in a book) of Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, and Richard Nixon, & telling her stuff about them.
----------------
Why aren't I a history teacher?
?
Same reason I am not a professional ice skater, or waitress, or boat salesperson. I never aimed for those things.

At Boston University my minor was American History (major, English literature).
Why did I not select Teaching as a career?
Didn't want to, at the time.
Maybe I have more tendencies now, in conversation, that the listener sometimes takes to be "teaching" which I only consider to be sharing something kind of cool and interesting. Just offering / sharing thoughts and info...is how I mean it. Intend it.

Come to think of it, I've been "accused" of teaching, at work, by people who didn't want to "learn stuff" during their break:
"Go away!" ...

It made me think, and consider: when I graduated with a B.A. (bachelor of arts), I had been in school for 17 of the 22 years I'd been alive -- K-12 plus four years at B.U. The school-experience was generally good, for me: I couldn't be categorized as a girl who "didn't like school," yet some of it was boredom -- waiting for things to be over -- and I wanted to be out-on-my-own, go-go-go, out in the "real world," whatever that is.

(One could make the argument, some days, that the real world is overrated. Like the old story where John Kennedy was campaigning for congress (house or senate) in Massachusetts -- standing at the factory gates shaking hands with workers as they went in, in the early morning, one man was overheard to challenge the candidate from the wealthy family -- "I hear you never worked a day in your life!" While Kennedy took a few seconds to select an answer the guy followed up with, "Let me tell you, y' haven't missed a thing." lol )

Real world. Yeah.
I thought of law school, only briefly.
("Do I want to be in school for three more years?"
At that point, I didn't.
And -- "Does the world need another lawyer?")
I took the LSAT. (There you are, back in a room, taking a test with a bunch of other kids. Or rather, grown-ups. Sort of. Barely.)
And my LSAT score was good enough that I could have got into law school.

I can vaguely remember the mixed feeling of --
I did well enough on the test -- Success; and
at the same time -- I don't want to go to law school right now. Or ever.
Moving toward realizing what you want,
by learning what you don't want.

I wanted to -- work. To go out into the world and do a good job, get money, and accomplish something and find some type of success.
(My optimism and positive-thinking and general excitement was "running amok," I think...!)
--------------------

And what I wanted to do, since I was about 8, maybe, was "be a writer."
And then, in adult life, it was like -- 'I can sit down and write books after I make enough money. Later. Sometime. Maybe.' And -- 'it's too hard to find success in that area, too many people doing it, too much rejection.'

I sort of allowed myself to be intimidated away from What I Really Wanted To Do.
Now that I am eight hundred and fourteen years old, I see, and feel inside of myself, that that was bullshit.

-30-

scoop

2011-10-19T18:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a man named Mark sent this Comment in to the New York Times:

---------------I don't think we would have seen these protests if heads had rolled in the financial community, and if we had seen criminal investigations and jail sentences. Instead we saw golden parachutes and record high bonuses. We MUST get back to creating wealth by creating a product. Will someone explain to me in simple English why hedge funds managers who make astronomical salaries are Good for America? I am not saying hedge funds are bad, but please tell me (since we seem to have so many of them now) why is this good for America?----------------[end quote]

(Boy, I'd be the last person with an answer to that question, but I know a Good Question when I see one...)
-----------------------------------

Remember when the pooper-scooper law was first passed in New York City in the 80s? It provided fodder for late-night comedians and other jokesters and commentators -- Paul Harvey had a field day -- oh! did he have fun with that!

(Think probably most major cities have that law, now: funny to think of, or not, it does make sense where you have concentrated population -- people go out and walk their dogs -- you CAN end up with too many dogly "calling cards" around...)

In the Stephanie Plum novel Hot Six, author Janet Evanovich riffs on the pooper-scooper law Phenomenon. Showcased here are two excerpts: the pooper-scooper sequence is in the second excerpt; we need the Excerpt 1 to introduce characters Mitchell and Habib.
(Hah - BEEB.
Ah yes. Just so.)

[excerpt 1 -- setting: Trenton, New Jersey]------------ I left Moon to his retrospective and had my fingers wrapped around the door handle of my car when a black Lincoln pulled alongside me.
The passenger-side window rolled down and a man looked out. "You Stephanie Plum?"
"Yes."
"We'd like to have a little chat with you. Get in."

Yeah, right. I'm going to get into the Mafia staff car with two strange men, one of whom is a Pakistani with a .38 tucked into his Sansabelt pants...and the other is a guy who looks like Hulk Hogan with a buzz cut. "My mother told me never to ride with strangers."

"We aren't so strange," Hulk said. "We're just your average couple of guys. Isn't that right, Habib?"
"That is just so," Habib said, inclining his head in my direction and smiling, showing a gold tooth. "We are most average in every way."
"What do you want?" I asked.
The guy in the passenger seat gave a big sigh. "You're not gonna get in the car, are you?"
"No."
"Okay, here's the deal. We're looking for a friend of yours. Only maybe he's not a friend anymore. Maybe you're looking for him, too."

"Uh-huh."
"So we thought we could work together. You know, be a team."
"I don't think so."
"Well, then, we're just gonna have to follow you around. We thought we should tell you so you don't get, you know, alarmed when you see us tailing you."

"Who are you?"
"That's Habib over there behind the wheel. And I'm Mitchell."
"No. I mean, who are you? Who do you work for?" I was pretty sure I already knew the answer, but I thought it was worth asking anyway.

"We'd rather not divulge our employer's name," Mitchell said. "It don't matter to you anyway. What you want to remember is that you don't cut us out of anything, because then we'd be annoyed."

"Yes, and it is not good when we become annoyed," Habib said, wagging his finger. "We are not to be taken lightly. Is that not so?" he asked, looking to Mitchell for approval. "In fact, if you annoy us we will spread your entrails across an entire parking space of my cousin Muhammad's 7-Eleven parking lot."

"What are you, nuts?" Mitchell said. "We don't do no entrails shit. And if we did, it wouldn't be in front of the 7-Eleven. I go there for my Sunday paper."
"Oh," Habib said.
----------------------- [end Excerpt 1]

--------------
-----------------------[Excerpt 2]: I wanted to check on Hannibal's town house, but I didn't want to drag Mitchell and Habib over with me.
"I need a diversion," I said to Lula. "I need to get rid of those guys in the carpet car."

"Do you mean you want to get rid of them? Or do you mean you don't want them following you?"
"I don't want them following me."
...Vinnie stuck his head out of his office. "How about the burning bag thing?"

We swiveled our heads in his direction.
"Usually you do it as a gag on somebody's front porch," Vinnie said. "You put some dog shit in a bag. Then you put the bag on the sucker's front porch and ring the bell. Then you set the bag on fire and run like hell. When the mark opens the door he sees the bag burning and stomps on it to put it out."
"And?"
"And then he get dog shit all over his shoe," Vinnie said. "If you did it to these guys and they got dog shit all over their shoes they'd be distracted, and you could drive away."

...
Lula said..."Only thing is, we need some dog poop."
...
Connie took a brown paper lunch bag from her bottom drawer. "I've got a bag and you can use the empty chicken bucket as a pooper-scooper."
...

The park was only two blocks away, so we walked Bob to the park and stood around waiting for him to answer nature's call. Only nature asn't calling Bob's name.

"You ever notice how when you don't want dog poop it just seems to be everywhere?" Lula said. "And now when we want some..." Her eyes opened wide.

"Hold the phone. Dog at twelve o'clock. And it's a big one."
...The dog was big and black. The old woman at the other end of the leash was small and white. ...

The dog suddenly stopped walking and hunched over, and Lula and Bob and I took off across the grass. I had Bob on the leash, and Lula was waving the chicken bucket and paper bag, and we were running full tilt when the woman looked up and saw us. The color drained from her face, and she staggered backward.

"I'm old," she said. "I haven't got any money. Go away. Don't hurt me."
"We don't want your money," Lula said. "We want your poop."
The woman choked up on the dog's leash. "You can't have the poop. I have to take the poop home. It's the law."

"The law don't say you gotta take it home," Lula said. "It's just somebody gotta do it. And we're volunteering."
...

"I don't know if that's right," the woman said. "I never heard of that. I think I'm supposed to take the poop home."

"Okay," Lula said, "we'll pay you for the poop." Lula looked over at me. "Give her a couple bucks for her poop."
I searched my pockets. "I don't have any money on me. I didn't bring my purse."
"I won't take any less than five dollars," the woman said.
------------------------ [end Excerpt]
...
They scoop up the stuff & take off back for the office -- the lady is going, "Help! They're taking my poop! Stop! Thief!"

-30-

reform, please-and-thank-you

2011-10-18T18:54:00.000-07:00

Last week someone wrote this about the "Occupy Wall Street" movement:
---------------- [quote]
They have something happening in New York City called

"Occupy Wall Street."

OWS

It's supposed to be a protest.
It's in a park.

Reading a little on the internet --
it doesn't sound like a real thing,
to me.
------------------------[end quote]
Who would write something so silly and off-base?
Oops, it was me.
Well??
(I didn't know...)

Reading about this movement, they're just talking about the same things we've all been talking of and wondering about, recent years --

I think a list of items to change is this:

reinstate the Fairness Doctrine
put the Glass-Steagall Act back in
cap run-away health care costs
infrastructure (build; do not allow to rot)
repeal "citizens united" Supreme Court decision (made legal for corps to bribe pols)
campaign finance reform
(and I add) civility -- no one talks about that except Pres. Obama (in his book) and me. That's OK ...

That's only 7.
And the only thing on that whole list that's new is campaign finance reform -- the other six are just -- put it back, put it back, put it back; do what works.

Even campaign finance reform isn't really new; John McCain rode that horse clear across the range, for decades.
Do-able.

It seems like it is a question of saving our democracy.

And when I look at the list, it isn't even "change" -- which can be difficult. It's only putting stuff back. That's EASY!

Like if some teenagers played in your living room and knocked stuff over and messed things up -- you could pick it up and put it back -- you know where everything goes.

OK, nation's economic problems solved -- now, what's for dinner? -- Salad!

-30-

hatless

2011-10-17T19:07:00.000-07:00

I went into a restaurant
Lookin' for the cook
I told them I was the editor
Of a famous etiquette book
The waitress he was handsome
He wore a powder blue cape
I ordered some suzette, I said
"Could you please make that crepe"
Just then the whole kitchen exploded
From boilin' fat
Food was flying everywhere
And I left without my hat...
----------------
[from "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," on the album, Bringing It All Back Home,
March 1965, Columbia Records]

...A stanza which describes -- or celebrates -- some challenging moments in life.

-30-

don't know why...

2011-10-14T15:27:00.000-07:00

"I like you, I don't know why."
A Mexican woman told me that, once -- in her little voice with the little accent.
(Like -- right, why would anyone like me??!
But I knew what she meant.)

I like names, and I don't know why...
NAMES, names, names
When I was in elementary school I sometimes made lists of first names.
The pleasure and organized-feeling of writing them.

A woman I work with feels strongly that a person should not have two first names. Like -- if their last name is more often heard as a first name.
(I think she told me once that she turned down a date with a guy because his last name was a first name.)

Married couples whose first names are the masculine - feminine variation on each other:
I've known a Robert and Roberta,
a Michael and Michelle,
a Chris and Christy...
even a Leslie and Leslie! --
What does it all mean?? Nothing! -- but cannot help noticing.

(When you think of creating the feminine version of a man's name -- a friend of mine named Rodney used to say that he wanted his first granddaughter to be named
Rod-nina...joking...)

Tina Brown wrote an article for Vanity Fair in the 80s, reporting on the royal marriage (Prince Charles and Princess Diana) -- in the book, The Diana Chronicles, she recalls:

------------- {excerpt} Two days after "The Mouse That Roared" hit the newsstands, I was woken up in New York by the gravelly voice of a Daily Mail reporter called Rod. (All reporters at the Mail, it seemed, were called Rod at the time.) "Is that 'Urricane Tina?" said the voice...You've certainly caused a ruckus over here."...{end excerpt}------------------

Once I met someone whose last name was Kuhl. Pronounced "Cool."
My NAME is COOL. (oooooh. yeah)
People named Kuhl ("Cool")
People named Hott
Someone named Church
Korey,
Corrie,
Scarlett O'Hara (the perfect name for the character!)
Addison DeWitt (a witty, sardonic character in All About Eve, masterfully played by actor George Sanders)
Mr. Butt -- and there is where you draw the line. If one's name was actually Butt, one would go on down and get it changed -- to Smith, to Jones, to Bozotheclown, anything other than "Butt" -- that's why God invented courthouses.

Channing. It is the perfect show-business name. And the only two people I can think of whose last name is Channing are in show business: one real, one fictional. The real one is Carol Channing -- (she used to sing, "Diamonds are a girl's best friend,") and "Margo Channing," the main character in the film All About Eve, played by Bette Davis:
"All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years!"
and
"Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night."
Margo Channing. Carol Channing.
Channing, Channing, Channing,
Bouvier.
Bouvier.
Jacqueline Kennedy's maiden name.
Boo-vee-ay.
Glamorous.
Elegant.
Sophisticated.
It means "cow-herd."
In French.

Calling him names. Say my name. What's in a name?
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
-- Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

Styles Bridges was the name of a U.S. senator who served with Lyndon Johnson back in the 50s. His name was noted in a Johnson biography I was reading and typing from earlier this week. Looking up Styles Bridges on the internet, turned out his first name was actually Henry, but he was apparently one of those people who is called, and known, by his middle name instead of the first.

And the two names are both words, as well as being names:
like -- styles. The new fall styles.
and bridges. Of Madison County. Over troubled water. Whatever.
a U.S. senator named Styles Bridges.
"A Boy Named Sue," written by Shel Silverstein: ("My name is Sue! How do you do?!")

In Ohio many of my Snow ancestors were teachers, in the local country schools, through the 1800s. One year in the school district there were three teachers, Mr. Snow, Mr. Freese, and Mr. Frost.
Significance in The World? None, whatsoever. Yet somehow you want to write it down, and / or do hand-stands. ...

-30-

Think fast, Mr. Moto

2011-10-13T19:20:00.001-07:00

They have something happening in New York City called

"Occupy Wall Street."

OWS

It's supposed to be a protest.
It's in a park.

Reading a little on the internet --
it doesn't sound like a real thing,
to me.

-30-

hear ya, Ike

2011-10-12T19:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday when I was typing on my blog a passage from a Lyndon Johnson biography, my favorite sentence was when Pres. Eisenhower wrote, "in a note to a friend" about a difficult senator:

"It is a pity that his wisdom, his judgment, his tact, and his sense of humor lag so far behind his ambition."

That speaks toward a phenomenon I've occasionally noticed and tried to analyze and understand, but I get lost. Can't find the path-to-logic, or the right words.

But I know what he's talking about.

-30-

sanity

2011-10-11T17:49:00.000-07:00

In an e-mail I received, it said,

"Another comment about LBJ: When Dwight Eisenhower left office he complimented Democrat Lyndon Johnson for working in a bipartisan manner to helping Ike get legislation passed that was good for the country. A Republican sincerely praising a Democrat; can you believe it...? Now the world is turned upside down!"
--------------------

Reading that e-mail made me think of the following passage from Robert Dallek's first Lyndon Johnson book, Lone Star Rising.
As I read this
(from Chapter 13, "Bipartisan Politics")
certain words or phrases seemed to stand out, to me:
moderate
reactionary
service
in the service of the nation
wisdom
judgment
tact
sense of humor
statesman
responsibility
loved.
-------------
{excerpt}------ Domestic affairs was a less promising arena for Johnson's bipartisan strategy. As George Reedy observed, "Eisenhower was an economic conservative and, on domestic legislation, his heart belonged to the moderate right wing of the Republican party." With the exception of a Labor Secretary who had been head of the plumbers' union, the President principally appointed conservative businessmen to his Cabinet, including three men tied to the automobile industry. The New Republic described the Cabinet as "Eight millionaires and a plumber," and Adlai Stevenson complained that "the New Dealers have all left Washington to make way for the car dealers."

Yet even on domestic issues, Johnson made it seem that the President and the Senate Democrats were joined in a struggle against reactionary Republicans. Johnson held "Democratic" legislation to a minimum, and turned Eisenhower's bills into "New Deal-ish" laws with amendments spawned by the Democratic Policy Committee. By leaving Eisenhower's stamp on the bill, Johnson accurately calculated that the President wouldn't intervene in the Senate debate or veto the measure. "It also meant," Reedy says, "that the Senate Democrats were pitted solely against Senate Republicans and, as the Democrats were fighting only for amendments, the picture before the public was that of a Republican president and a Democratic Senate cooperating in the service of the nation while a small group of GOP partisans were trying to throw sand in the gears."

The shift in Republican Senate leadership from Taft to Knowland in 1953 partly made this possible. Taft himself was unsympathetic to much of what Eisenhower proposed at the start of his term. When the President told Taft at a White House meeting in April that his first budget would be $5.5 million in the red, the Senator pounded his fist on the Cabinet table and shouted: "With a program like this, we'll never elect a Republican Congress in 1954. You're taking us down the same road Truman traveled. It's a repudiation of everything we promised in the campaign."

Knowland was even more of a problem. Former governor of New Hampshire Sherman Adams, who had become "Assistant to the President," said, "It would have been difficult to find anyone more disposed to do battle with much of the President's program in Congress" than Knowland. In addition to being so conservative, he was also inept. In the view of one Democratic senator, Knowland "possessed little skill or finesse" for the Majority leader's job. "The blustery Knowland was a man of principle, to the point of bullheadedness. So often did he cross paths with his president's program, that Dwight Eisenhower soon found he could work more comfortably with the Senate's Democratic leader than with the Republican Knowland."

In a note to a friend, Eisenhower himself said of Knowland: "It is a pity that his wisdom, his judgment, his tact, and his sense of humor lag so far behind his ambition."

As time passed, Eisenhower became even more critical of him: "In his case," the President confided to his diary, "there seems to be no final answer to the question 'How stupid can you get?'"

Republican senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire once told Johnson, "Don't think you can pull the wool over my eyes the way you do with Bill Knowland."

In the summer of 1953, after Congress adjourned, Lyndon publicly emphasized that the President's real friends on domestic legislation were the Democrats. He described the session as "a shakedown cruise" and said that its principal bills were extensions of New Deal--Fair Deal measures: the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act -- "the monument to the great Democratic statesman, Cordell Hull" -- was extended for a year; a grant of authority to reorganize executive agencies was "the same authority granted to predecessor Presidents"; and the excess profits tax represented a six-month extension of an existing law.

Yet "a majority of the basic issues" had been put off until the next session with the agreement of the President. Johnson described the outstanding feature of the first session as the responsibility displayed by the minority Members of both Houses. "The great majority of the President's program was put through only because of Democratic support." Most of the opposition came from "the ranks of his own party."

The Democrats had "acted upon the conviction that the future of the Nation was far too important to be jeopardized for the sake of a narrow partisan gain."

And "through a strict adherence to the politics of responsibility, the Democrats achieved almost unprecedented heights of unity during this session." Johnson's Democratic colleagues agreed with him. As Time reporter John L. Steele told his New York office, "Congress ended on the sweet note of unity. Everyone loved everyone else."
----[end excerpt]
[From Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and his Times, 1908 - 1960.
Robert Dallek. Copyright, 1991. Oxford University
Press. New York.]

-30-

Yes!

2011-10-10T18:28:00.000-07:00

[excerpt]--------- ...to give special emphasis to a slide show at the museum that had a voiceover by the famed French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson:

"I love life....I love human beings. I hate people also...I enjoy shooting a picture, being present. It's a way of saying, 'Yes! Yes! Yes!'...And there's no maybe."

Photography helped Cartier-Bresson overcome his shyness by his engagement with the subject of the picture. ...
----------------

{Reading Jackie, by William Kuhn}

-30-

the stormy present

2011-10-07T19:03:00.000-07:00

CONCEPT:
Each person who gets elected to Congress,
all the members of the House, and
all the members of the Senate,
the framework of their public service will be this:

each year they're in,
10 months of that year are spent working in Washington and going back to their home state, like what they presently do.

The other two months of their year are spent in an "exchange" with a working person somewhere in America, not in the legislator's home state.

For those two months the senator does the job of the working person and earns that person's amount of money.
The working person sits in for the senator in Washington, and makes his amount of money, for the two months.

Each legislator's two-month "tour" would be staggered so that all year around Congress would be made up of -- mostly elected legislators, but there would be some private citizens sitting in too.

(I have to get someone who is good at math to figure out how many legislators could be out "in exchange" for which time periods...I know something needs to be figured out, & I don't know how to do it.)

With the 10 months & two months, guess I didn't build in Vacation time.
(They can work it into the 10-month period. And -- what they do, as a legislator, is a vacation -- it is an honor and privilege to serve in Congress.

I contend:
1. It should also be an honor and a privilege to spend two months every year literally experiencing what many citizens in our country experience. It would be exponentially educational. People who think they are too fabulous to do that would spare us their megalomaniacal presence in our government and go to Hollywood or murdoch-media (really the same thing) instead.

and 2. They will have time to vacation in Bermuda after they are finished serving in Congress.
-----------------------------

Abraham Lincoln said this:
"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

-30-

two strong men

2011-10-05T19:29:00.001-07:00

Came across another "saying," or line that have heard many times and didn't know the rest of it and -- guess the author?! -- Rudyard Kipling, again!
(Seems like everything I remember this week comes from that guy...!

-----------
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently, at God's great Judgment Seat;
but there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth!
[The Ballad of East and West, by Rudyard Kipling.]

--------------------Those lines begin the "ballad" -- and end it, too.

The only part I remembered was that first line -- heard it somewhere, and somewhere else -- some people apply it, like a common saying, to various situations...

-30-

stay hungry

2011-10-04T18:18:00.000-07:00

In the short story I was studying / celebrating last week, you can just wrap yourself in the majesty and music of the author's phrases, and telling-style.

[excerpts from Rudyard Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi]

He was a mongoose, rather like a little cat in his fur and his tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and his habits. His eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink; he could scratch himself anywhere he pleased, with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use; he could fluff up his tail till it looked like a bottle-brush, and his war-cry, as he scuttled through the long grass, was: ``Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!''

One day, a high summer flood washed him out of the burrow where he lived with his father and mother, and carried him, kicking and clucking, down a roadside ditch. He found a little wisp of grass floating there, and clung to it till he lost his senses. When he revived, he was lying in the hot sun on the middle of a garden path, very draggled indeed ...

It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity. The motto of all the mongoose family is ``Run and find out''; and Rikki-tikki was a true mongoose.

…They gave him a little piece of raw meat. Rikki-tikki liked it immensely, and when it was finished he went out onto the verandah and sat in the sunshine and fluffed up his fur to make it dry to the roots. Then he felt better.

--------------------

...he thought he could just catch the faintest scratch-scratch in the world, -- a noise as faint as that of a wasp walking on a window-pane, -- the dry scratch of a snake's scales on brick-work.
------------

...Angry as he was, Rikki-tikki was very frightened as he saw the size of the big cobra. Nag coiled himself up, raised his head, and looked into the bath-room in the dark, and Rikki could see his eyes glitter.
--------------

"...I shall wait here in the cool till daytime.''

Nag coiled himself down, coil by coil, round the bulge at the bottom of the water-jar. [shiver]

When morning came he was very stiff, but well pleased with his doings.
---------------------
[at the end of the story when he has won the battle with the evil, mean snakes]:

Rikki-tikki had a right to be proud of himself; but he did not grow too proud, and he kept that garden as a mongoose should keep it, with tooth and jump and spring and bit...

-------------------------------
Where it says that he "had a right to be proud of himself; but he did not grow too proud..." it echoes the Kipling poem "If" and it's kind of like a T-shirt they have in one dept. where I work: it reads, "Stay hungry, stay humble."

----------------- [from "Rikki-Tikki]:
...he danced up to Karait with the peculiar rocking, swaying motion that he had inherited from his family. It looks very funny, but it is so perfectly balanced a gait that you can fly off from it at any angle you please; and in dealing with snakes this is an advantage. If Rikki-tikki had only known, he was doing a much more dangerous thing that fighting Nag, for Karait is so small, and can turn so quickly...
------------------ [stop excerpt]

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi also "stays hungry," come to think about it:
"That bite paralysed Karait, and Rikki-tikki was just going to eat him up from the tail, after the custom of his family at dinner, when he remembered that a full meal makes a slow mongoose, and if he wanted all his strength and quickness ready, he must keep himself thin."

-30-

Arabia

2011-10-03T18:14:00.000-07:00

Last time writing on this blog, was honoring the story-telling of Rudyard Kipling. He lived from 1865 to 1936. English --
so much lasting, quality literature came out of England. Rudyard Kipling; Jane Austen; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -- songwriting (The Beatles, the Stones...).
England and America: we contribute a lot of art and culture to the world.

When we first started hearing about Muslim problems in the world -- Ayatollah Khomeini, and the subsequent delinquents -- when problems exploding out of that part of the world in the form of bizarre and (it seemed) sort of mindless hostility and destructionism (?) -- I used to think, Those people don't do anything. They don't contribute any art or culture -- anything to bring people up. They just kill other people and each other and make up dumb rules to justify bullying and cruel behavior. I used to think, the wealth they have is just from oil, and they didn't earn or create that. They just Have it. (Like the guy who doesn't know how to make money, but darn well knows how to inherit it...)

I mean, what do they contribute that's positive??

They can be creative, though. Before 911, (some time between 1997 and 2001, I'm going to estimate) the Chamber of commerce in the community where I live had an event and the Entertainment was a middle-eastern comedian.

(First time any of us, probably, had seen that -- certainly the first time, in person...) [I wondered What is this guy going to joke about??] -- Well, his own culture, that's what.

He wore a suit (not robes or anything like that), and talked and story-told and riffed on middle eastern rage and he would punctuate his monologue with the phrase "Holy war!!" And when he said those words, he didn't really say them, he would throw his head back and sort of shriek / wail heavenward, "Holy war!!!!"

I think at first we were a little afraid to laugh because it seemed like he was joking about something very serious and scary, and also it seemed "incorrect," like you're being intolerant, laughing at their "culture."

But the guy was hilarious, and everyone ended up laughing. (As I said before, the World Trade Center towers were still -- up. So it was a bit of a different "era.")

He would go, with exaggerated middle-east accent and wild emphasis,
"Your tribe is different from my tribe! We cannot tolerate you -- HOLY - WAR!" (Sort of howling / shrieking the words holy war...)
And --
"The economy is bad, food is too expensive -- HOLY - WAR!!"
"Traffic in our city is too congested -- HOLY - WAR!!"
"The dry cleaner ruined my coat -- HOLY - WAR!!"

And he had little stories and build-ups in between that made it very good -- this is only the gist.

He was funny -- and I thought about him a few days after September 11th, in 2001 -- sitting at my desk in my home office, it struck me: that guy is going to have to write a whole new act, because "holy war" isn't going to be funny -- for a while.
----------------------

Thinking of that made me recall another joke from that era. Sometime in 2002, I think someone told me this one: a terrorist, Achmed something, was planning a big explosion, tied a bomb to his body, and he had been inspired by the people who trained him: they said he would be greeted, upon reaching heaven, by three virgins.

Ahh. So he carries out the bombing and arrives in Heaven and first thing you know, he meets George Washington. Soon, into the room comes Thomas Jefferson, and a minute after that, James Madison.

So Achmed is standing here with Madison, Jefferson, and Washington, and he realizes he's meeting historical figures, but he's really more interested in -- Where Are The Virgins?!

But pretty soon they have to explain to Achmed, he misunderstood -- it was three Virginians who were greeting him after his death . ...
(People in Roanoke think that's very funny...)

-30-

in through the sluice

2011-09-30T17:56:00.000-07:00

-------------------- "Can't you hear, Rikki-tikki?'' [the musk-rat asks the mongoose]
Rikki-tikki listened. The house was as still as still, but he thought he could just catch the faintest scratch-scratch in the world, -- a noise as faint as that of a wasp walking on a window-pane, -- the dry scratch of a snake's scales on brick-work.

[a passage from "Rikki-tikki-tavi" - short story by Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book.]

``That's Nag or Nagaina,'' he said to himself; ``and he is crawling into the bath-room sluice. You're right Chuchundra ...
He stole off to Teddy's bath-room, but there was nothing there, and then to Teddy's mother's bathroom. At the bottom of the smooth plaster wall there was a brick pulled out to make a sluice for the bath-water, and as Rikki-tikki stole in by the masonry curb where the bath is put, he heard Nag and Nagaina whispering together outside in the moonlight.

…
``I had not thought of that,'' said Nag. ``I will go, but there is no need that we should hunt for Rikki-tikki afterward. I will kill the big man and his wife, and the child if I can, and come away quietly. The the bungalow will be empty, and Rikki-tikki will go.''

Rikki-tikki tingled all over with rage and hatred at this, and then Nag's head came through the sluice, and his five feet of cold body followed it. Angry as he was, Rikki-tikki was very frightened as he saw the size of the big cobra. Nag coiled himself up, raised his head, and looked into the bath-room in the dark, and Rikki could see his eyes glitter.
``Now, if I kill him here, Nagaina will know; and if I fight him on the open floor, the odds are in his favour. What am I to do?'' said Rikki-tikki-tavi.

Nag waved to and fro, and then Rikki-tikki heard him drinking from the biggest water-jar that was used to fill the bath. ``That is good,'' said the snake. ``Now, when Karait was killed, the big man had a stick. He may have that stick still, but when he comes in to bathe in the morning he will not have a stick.

I shall wait here till he comes. Nagaina -- do you hear me? -- I shall wait here in the cool till daytime.''

There was no answer from outside, so Rikki-tikki knew Nagaina had gone away. Nag coiled himself down, coil by coil, round the bulge at the bottom of the water-jar, and Rikki-tikki stayed still as death. After an hour he began to move, muscle by muscle, toward the jar. Nag was asleep, and Rikki-tikki looked at his big back, wondering which would be the best place for a good hold. ``If I don't break his back at the first jump,'' said Rikki, ``he can still fight; and if he fights -- O Rikki!''

He looked at the thickness of the neck below the hood, but that was too much for him; and a bite near the tail would only make Nag savage.
``It must be the head,'' he said at last; ``the head above the hood; and when I am once there, I must not let go.''

Then he jumped. The head was lying a little clear of the water-jar, under the curve of it; and, as his teeth met, Rikki braced his back against the bulge of the red earthenware to hold down the head. This gave him just one second's purchase, and he made the most of it.

Then he was battered to and fro as a rat is shaken by a dog -- to and fro on the floor, up and down, and round in great circles; but his eyes were red, and he held on as the body cart-whipped over the floor, upsetting the tin dipper and the soap-dish and the flesh-brush, and banged against the tin side of the bath.

As he held he closed his jaws tighter and tighter, for he was sure he would be banged to death, and, for the honour of his family, he preferred to be found with his teeth locked.

He was dizzy, aching, and felt shaken to pieces when something went off like a thunderclap just behind him; a hot wind knocked him senseless, and red fire singed his fur. The big man had been wakened by the noise, and had fired both barrels of a shot-gun into Nag just behind the hood.
Rikki-tikki held on with his eyes shut, for now he was quite sure he was dead; but the head did not move, and the big man picked him up and said: ``It's the mongoose again, Alice; the little chap has saved our lives.'' Then Teddy's mother came in with a very white face, and saw what was left of Nag, and Rikki-tikki dragged himself to Teddy's bedroom and spent half the rest of the night shaking himself tenderly to find out whether he was really broken into forty pieces, as he fancied.

When morning came he was very stiff, but well pleased with his doings. ```Now I have Nagaina to settle with, and she will be worse than five Nags....
--------------------------------

-30-

a placid sky

2011-09-29T17:57:00.000-07:00

Communication styles.
-----------------------

A person can
speak
ask
tell
(don't-ask-don't-tell)
rant
complain
make a big deal, haranguing, demanding, about a small thing
take an important thing in calm stride
affect a style of cool unconcern -- a light touch
dramatize ("I'm-freaking-out-here!")
clamor

A wonderful Newsweek article about Bunny Mellon contains this: Mrs. Mellon is quoted as saying to the reporter, "I'll have to put my trust in you and God. Write it nice, friendly, nongossipy. Be kind. Calm it down, calm it down."
Got my vote.

-30-

"scary" three

2011-09-28T17:45:00.000-07:00

three things "scary" --
(but not really)

1. Last night, poached an egg for the first time in my life. Consulting Professor Google, got some instructions for egg-poaching (put that way, it sounds illegal -- out "poaching eggs," hope game warden doesn't catch us...) --
but the first set of instructions went on and on
and on
and on
and
on
seemed like I could "scroll down" forever and not reach the end!
(I quickly become impatient and exasperated with food-prep. instructions that are too complicated. Sometimes experts, and hobbyists, enthusiasts make things complicated out of -- love, I think. They love doing it and describing it, and they make it too intimidating and scary for the likes of me.)

Tried a different web location, and found simpler instructions.
After work, poached one egg, enjoyed it with salad, delicious, success.

2. Have been listening, since last weekend, to a Rolling Stones CD (album) with the "scary" (off-putting) title "Stripped." It is a great record -- even though many of the songs are upbeat, the overall mood is laid-back, somehow: in a funky, bluesy groove. When you listen to it, it helps you feel confident.
Songs on it: "Street Fighting Man,"
"Like a Rolling Stone" (a Bob Dylan song)
"Not Fade Away" (a Buddy Holly song)
"Shine A Light"
"The Spider and the Fly" (blues)
"I'm Free"
"Wild Horses"
"Let It Bleed"
"Dead Flowers"
"Slipping Away"
"Angie"
"Love In Vain" (blues)
"Sweet Virginia" (country blues)
"Little Baby" (blues).

3. Someone commented about "news" that blasts at us in the modern world (21st-century-land), saying, "They always want us to be afraid of something. If not one thing, then another. They try to keep us afraid."
Scare us. Shock us. Make us mad. (Media wants to attain our attention.)
Newsman Al Neuharth, former Gannett exec. & founder of USA Today, writing in his 1991 autobiography Confessions of an S.O.B., called it "Holy shit journalism" -- ya read-it, and ya-go, "Holy shit!"

-30-

living stories

2011-09-27T18:51:00.000-07:00

If a person examines three Rudyard Kipling works --
"If";
"Gunga Din";
and
"Riki Tiki Tavi"
they can notice the rhythmic force and lumbering power in the style, evident in all of these works, even "Riki Tiki Ravi" which is not a poem, but prose.

[If]:
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings -- nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much....

------------
[Gunga Din]
When the sweatin' troop-train lay
In a sidin' through the day,
Where the 'eat would make your bloomin' eyebrows crawl,
We shouted "Harry By!"
'Til our throats were bricky-dry,
Then we wopped 'im 'cause 'e
couldn't serve us all.
It was "Din! Din! Din!
"You 'eathen, where the mischief
'ave you been?...

----------- It seems to roll forward, with momentum like the song, "Like A Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan ...

------------------
Riki Tiki Tavi is the name of a mongoose, the natural enemy of snakes, in India. In the story, (from The Jungle Book, a collection of short stories for children), Riki Tiki is rescued by an English family (father, mother, and young son) living in India -- even though there's very little physical description, somehow the reader absorbs the feeling of being in India in colonial times (that's the magic...)

And it is scary, because there are snakes in the garden near the family's bungalow. (Snakes in a garden -- hmmh. An allusion to Garden of Eden? When I experienced the story in childhood, think may have missed allusions -- preoccupied with hiding under bed when snakes came on the page. ...)

And I think now maybe that story is a meditation on nature --
the mongoose, the Nice, or Good, in Nature protects the people from
the snakes -- Nature's bearers of malevolence.

What's the message?
We have to work the good,
watch out for the bad.

And the story discusses motives, in a very elementary way: you feel like the mongoose fights and kills snakes because he wants to protect the nice family; but you realize, at the same time, that the mongoose fights and kills snakes because -- that's what mongooses do.

The reader feels the sentiment & emotion and also has laid on him the truth of nature and life: inexorable fortune and fate.

-30-

in Injia's sunny clime

2011-09-26T17:16:00.001-07:00

And, as Rudyard Kipling has wandered into my blog, I was thinking last week, "What do I know, by him?"
He wrote a lot of stuff: poems, stories, etc.
Nobel Prize.

Kipling works I could remember:
-- the poem "If"
-- the short story "Riki Tiki Tavi" and
-- "Gunga Din"

...and by "remember," I don't mean Memorized, but only some familiarity with...

"Gunga Din" is gritty.

begins:
You may talk o' gin and beer
When you're quartered safe out 'ere,
An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it.
Now in Injia's sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin' of 'Er Majesty the Queen,
...

[further on]
'E would dot an' carry one
till the longest day was done;
An' 'e didn't seem to know the use o' fear.
If we charged or broke or cut,
You could bet your bloomin' nut,
'E'd be waitin' fifty paces right flank rear.
With 'is mussick' on 'is back,
'E would skip with our attack...

When 'e went to tend the wounded under fire!

It was "Din! Din! Din!"
With the bullets kickin' dust-spots on the green
When the cartridges ran out,
You could hear the front-ranks shout,
"Hi! ammunition-mules an' Gunga Din!"

...
'E carried me away
To where a dooli lay,
An' a bullet come an' drilled the beggar clean.
'E put me safe inside,
An' just before 'e died,
"I 'ope you liked your drink" sez Gunga Din.
So I'll meet 'im later on
At the place where 'e is gone
Where it's always double drill and no canteen.
'E'll be squattin' on the coals
Givin' drink to poor damned souls,
An' I'll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!
Yes, Din! Din! Din!

... [and at the end]:
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!
------------------------

(Does everyone in the World know that last line, even if they don't really know the poem? Everyone in the English-speaking world, anyway? I feel like they do, but -- I used to think all Americans voted in every presidential election, and it turned out it wasn't true. So now -- I don't know what I know.

Assume nothing.
Watch back.

-30-

all men count but none too much

2011-09-23T18:27:00.000-07:00

Speaking of memorizing poems so that you can recite them,
there was a poem I'd barely heard --
read aloud by my mother when I was a child, maybe,
or school --
and hadn't thought of in a long time, and
one evening,
in a room with a fire in the fireplace,
a man who was about 90 at the time
recited that poem when the topic of the first lines

("if you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you...")

came up in conversation.
He had learned that poem -- memorized it -- in public school so long ago -- the
1930s (if not the 20s - !) and could say it to us that night, which was -- probably sometime between the years 2000 and 2003. It was pretty unexpected, and amazing.

The poem was "If"
by Rudyard Kipling.

--------------------------
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
to serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

-------------------
In that earlier era, educators thought that having students memorize things was good. They don't believe in that much anymore -- that approach has been gone since -- probably the 1950s.

-30-

the sweetness of you

2011-09-22T18:28:00.000-07:00

(You used to hear the term "status quo" (the way things are -- the current state of affairs). I never hear it anymore. ..."Let's keep it status quo"...like that.)

----------- Thinking about relationships and Love, I remembered things I had read about John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie.
When they got married in 1953, he had already served as a congressman, & been elected to the Senate in 1952. The Plan was in Motion to get him elected president, so Jacqueline Bouvier, 12 years younger than JFK, entered a Career Situation that was already very much up-and-running.

She was "home alone" a lot, because he campaigned (and "senator-ed") much of the time. "We had absolutely no home life," she said later.

Once at a luncheon where Sen. & Mrs. Kennedy were together, JFK said to a colleague, to tease his wife for her shyness about campaigning, "Senator such-and-such, Mrs. Kennedy is superb in her personal life; do you think she will ever amount to anything in her public life?"
And Jackie smoothly and immediately asked the guy, "Senator, Jack is superb in his public life; do you think that he will ever amount to anything in his personal life?"

As he entered the presidency in 1961, JFK and his advisors monitored press coverage and curiosity about Mrs. Kennedy -- there was concern that her "rarefied" tastes -- intellectual, exotic -- (some people call it "arty") might alienate some voters ...and the new president was heard to joke, "She's got too much status and not enough quo"...

I read that when Jackie was reading a book, if JFK thought it looked interesting he would "snatch it up" when she laid it down, & read it himself.

They both enjoyed reading and discussing
history, and poetry,
and they "competed" at memorizing each other's favorite poems.

---------------------------
To the modern listener, that can sound kind of -- different.
Competing? At memorizing poems? All right, then...
"I memorized your favorite poem" -- and then -- recite it aloud.
And the other person answers, "Hey, I memorized two of your favorite poems!"
(Take that!)
Quaint. That's the word I wanted.

Memorizing the other person's favorite poems is actually a pretty cool way to express love, and value of the person.
It says,
"You like it? Then I honor it!"

Some people might scoff and say, "Hey, those were wealthy, privileged people who could take time to sit around memorizing freakin' poetry."
But really, the truth is a person doesn't have to be rich or have a B.A. from Harvard to do cool things like that. If we want to do them, we can do them.

You do not have to be rich to be classy.

-30-

make it home

2011-09-21T17:45:00.001-07:00

Searching for the meaning and essence of Love,
I found myself
looking for love songs "in all the wrong places"...

many songs they list as "love songs" are actually
sad songs
depressing songs
songs of loss and lonesome - ness

so I selected the following song which, to me, is an excellent love song
although probably most of the Love Song Listers don't include it:

Well, I pulled out of Pittsburgh,
Rollin' down the Eastern Seaboard.
I've got my diesel wound up,
And she's running like never before.
There's a speed zone ahead, all right,
I don't see a cop in sight.
Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight.

I got ten forward gears,
And a Georgia overdrive.
I'm taking little white pills,
And my eyes are open wide.
I just passed a 'Jimmy' and a 'White':
I've been passin' everything in sight.
Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight.

Well it seems like a month
Since I kissed my baby good-bye.
I could have a lot of women
But I'm not like some other guys
I could find one to hold me tight,
But I could never believe that it's right.
Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight.

I.C.C. is checking on down the line.
I'm a litle overweight and my log's three days behind.
But nothing bothers me tonight
I can dodge all the scales all right,
Six days on the road and I'mk gonna make it home tonight.

Well my rig's a little old
but that don't mean she's slow.
There's a flame from her stack
And the smoke's rolling black as coal.
My hometown's coming in sight,
If you think I'm happy you're right.
Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight.
Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight.
Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight.

-30-

what religion are you?

2011-09-20T17:30:00.001-07:00

A correction on what I wrote in my blog last night:
that song from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" did not say,

"you can have a town" -- it was "you can never tell" --

"Love is all around, no need to waste it,
You can never tell, why don't you take it?
You're gonna make it af - ter all..."
etc.

"You can have a town" -- ??!
What the hell would that mean??

I was thinking about it last night, and I realized, I typed out the lyrics to that song (which I totally know from memory) but I took them off of a web-site that had Lyrics to all different songs on it.
It said "Lyrics" at the top and seemed all Officialized.
So I allowed that web-site to be the authority, when I actually knew better.
(That isn't right. I felt kind of weird about it. I thought, You know, that's how the Third Reich got rolling -- people taking orders and not questioning authority, even though they knew better.)

The thing to remember about the internet is, Just because something's on there, doesn't mean it's true. It's kind of like a giant, world-wide wall that's open to writing, pictures, graffiti, whatever.

Someone's web-site does not have the authority and credibility of a real Encyclopedia or reference book. It's just People Typing. (I should know, I'm one of 'em.)

There are many things in this world that I don't know much about --
calculus
couture
WD-40 --

but ...
"The Mary Tyler Moore Show" is not one of them!
That,
I know.
----------------------------
(Mary Richards, Murray, and Lou Grant [Ed Asner] brainstorming ideas for a TV feature program --
Mary (all cheery and enthusiastic): Mr. Grant, what about nostalgia, as a topic? You know, all the styles, the trends, the music, and how funny they all seem now... [big smile]
Mr. Grant (in a decisive growl): I hate nostalgia. I didn't like it then. I don't like it now.

---------------------------
In the first or second episode of the show, Mary goes in to interview for the newsroom job: she sits nervously in a chair facing Lou Grant's desk; he sits behind the desk, asking questions.
Question - answer.
Question - answer.
Question - answer.
Lou Grant: "What religion are you?"
Mary (her voice is thin and respectful and cautiously firm): "Um, you're not allowed to ask that, when someone's applying for a job. It's against the law."

Lou Grant: "You wanna-calla-cop?"
-- Er, no.
-- Are you married or single?
--Presbyterian.
??
-- I was -- um -- answering your religion question...

-30-

L is for the way...

2011-09-19T17:46:00.000-07:00

I was trying to think,
What is Love?

How do you define it?

What is the Great Love?

Is it admiration?
Fascination?
Familiarity and agreeing on things?

Affection?
Confection?
Dejection?
Inflection? ("I lu -uh-ve you...!" ??)

Dancing?
Hugging and kissing?
Helping?
Making sure the Object of Love is OK?

Cheering someone on?
Being genuinely happy for someone's success?

Things I love:
a Bob Dylan concert
Bob Dylan's music
Rolling Stones music
Grateful Dead music,
my Cat,
dogs and cats generally

"The Sound Of Music"
"My Fair Lady"
"Oklahoma!"
"South Pacific"

oh, man this isn't working. Well maybe it is -- maybe Love is general, and Everywhere, like God.

Like that song at the beginning of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show":

Who can turn the world on with her smile?
Who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile --
Well it's you, girl, and you should know it,
With each glance and every little movement
you show it --

Love is all around, no need to waste it,
You can have a town, why don't you take it?
You're gonna make it after all...
(hmm mm mmm--)
You're gonna make it after all... (Ta-da!)
--------------------
Is it possible to write something half-way intelligent and useful about Love?
(Not today, apparently.)
It's one of the Great Mysteries.

-30-

in the land of the dollar bill

2011-09-16T19:30:00.000-07:00

"Rational Irrationality"
is the title of an article in
The New Yorker
on-line
which I need to read.

Topic: economic situation, U.S.

---------------------------------
"Money doesn't talk, it swears."
-- Bob Dylan

-30-

you're invisible now

2011-09-14T18:43:00.000-07:00

I am always always always always always always always always always always always always surprised when I hear someone is getting divorced.

And when you think about statistics and realism and the outside world, Logic tells us that I should never never never never never never never be surprised when I hear people are getting divorced.

Logic Brain sees that this is not surprising news.
Ever.
Romantic idealistic Brain is always surprised.

I am such an idiot that I'm even surprised when I hear that celebrities are getting divorced.
When you think about it, that's funny.

I see -- "see" / imagine -- ideal happy families and relationships marked by kindness and supportive actions and shared humor.

When people seem like they have everything, and you hear they are getting divorced, you automatically think to yourself,
"Why would they want to 'f' that up??"

(When we say people "have everything," what is "everything"?
It's these things -- not necessarily in this order, but in whatever order the people themselves value them:
1. happy, healthy children;
2. financial security / wealth;
3. some version of physical beauty.)

And people who are on the outside of that think, "Why would they want to throw that away?"
But of course people don't want to throw anything away --
they just want to live, probably, and they think they can't, in their situation.

I find it difficult to imagine how desperate a human being would have to be, or the reasons for it, that they would think they can't live, when they have all the Everything.

But -- in a world where "Privacy" has come to be a rare thing because of all the media - electronics - etc. - and apparent obsession for spying, finding out problems of others, and then heaping derision on them, one thing can be said for the Space of Relationship between husband-and-wife: it's probably the last frontier of Privacy. No one really knows what goes on in a marriage because there are too many -- components.

And there's that stereotype that when people get divorced they are going to have conflict over possessions -- who gets what.
It appears to me that there's another contest that sometimes goes on, that's more important to people than who will get the dining room table: the "public relations" competition.
Which one can put "the word out" first and fastest, to say "I left" the other person. If you can say that you're the one who left, then there must be something wrong with the other person (is the unspoken implication that the person -- the "leaver" wants the listener to have, about the -- "leave-ee" (person who got left).

And that awful feeling that you get when people tell you this stuff: like flies on your food. Blick.
(Why are you telling me something sad about other people? Tell me something Happy about You!!...)
A state senator told me once that most problems in marriages occurred when one of the people doesn't feel Valued by the other one.
You don't have to be married to understand that dynamic. That senator has a lot of wisdom.

-30-

invincible summer

2011-09-13T17:07:00.000-07:00

In The Art of the Possible, Alexandra Stoddard writes about proactive, non-drug-pushing health:
------------- {excerpt}: Taking care of our physical body is not enough for radiant good health. Our thoughts have a tremendous effect on our bodies and our emotional health, too. Each thought, emotion, and mood releases chemicals from the brain that in turn affect our body and our spirit. In recent years there have been many books, articles, and television shows that explore this powerful mind / body connection. Doctors like Bernie S. Siegel, the author of Love, Medicine, and Miracles; scientists and healers like Joan Borysenko, the author of Minding the Body, Mending the Mind; and thinkers like writer and television producer Bill Moyers have revealed powerful evidence of the mind's ability to heal the body. The stories they share about the lives of people who have overcome terminal illnesses, people who had been given six months to live but who went on to live for years, or people who have slowed the deterioration process, are an inspiration to us all.

Feelings are chemical. When you get scared, for example, your fear sends a chemical message from your brain to your body telling it to sweat, tremble, flee, or feel faint. Persistent negative thoughts affect the immune system perhaps because they tax the system too much and weaken it so that we become vulnerable to illness. Often chronically depressed people become chronically ill with colds, ulcers, viruses, pain, and a host of unexplainable physical complaints. Few of us can be perpetually cheerful or optimistic; that's not where the problem lies. The problem comes from a pattern of attitudes, of constantly thinking and judging yourself weak, sick, helpless, fearful, and incompetent, or always feeling angry and irritated. Illness can also come from demanding too much of yourself, insisting that you always be perfect, happy, and on top of everything. These attitudes can put a strain on your system. Mind-sets determine whether we approach life with a sunny disposition or a bleak one, and that in turn affects our health. Henry David Thoreau seemed to have understood this when he wrote: "Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring."

Our capacity to adapt to life's challenges is key to our health and well-being. We become vulnerable when we fail to meet our problems in a balanced way. According to Dr. Richard Totman, author of Mind, Stress, and Health, whenever we become stuck -- which he calls a "blocked action" -- an overwhelming sense of hopelessness takes over. When we are unable to initiate and carry through activities that express our aliveness, it causes stress. This stress then upsets our chemical balance, weakening the immune system. It is not how much life stress we have, but how we manage it that determines our health.
-------------------- {end excerpt}
[The Art of the Possible, by Alexandra Stoddard. Copyright 1995. William Morrow, New York.]

Also excerpted from Stoddard's book, the following quotations from the "Health and Healing" chapter --

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
-- Albert Camus

"Know how sublime a thing it is / To suffer and be strong."
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(On that one I feel like I would like the even More "sublime" feeling of Not Suffering -- and being strong...! I'm with Woody Allen, who said, "I'd like to achieve immortality by -- not dying.")

"There is no education like adversity."
-- Walt Disney

And --
"Do you imagine the universe is agitated? Go into the desert at night and look at the stars. This practice should answer the question."
-- Lao-Tzu.

-30-

low profile

2011-09-12T18:32:00.000-07:00

"...Who we breaking in on, anyway?"

"Hannibal Ramos."

"Say what? You mean like the brother of the dead Homer Ramos? And the number one son of the Gun King, Alexander Ramos? Are you freakin' nuts?"

"He's probably not home."
"How are you gonna find out?"
"I'm going to ring his doorbell."
----------------
[excerpt, Hot Six. Janet Evanovich. 2000. St. Martin's Press. N. Y.]
---------------------------
...Lula and I stood on the sidewalk and studied Hannibal's house. Drapes still drawn. Very quiet. The houses on either side of Hannibal were quiet, too. Sunday afternoon. Everyone was out at the mall.

"You sure this is the right address?" Lula asked. "This don't look like no big-ass arms-dealer house. I was expecting something like the Taj Mahal. Like where the Donald lives."

"Doanld Trump doesn't live in the Taj Mahal."
"He does when he's in Atlantic City. This turkey don't even have no gun turrets. What kind of arms dealer is he, anyway?"
"Low profile."
"Fuckin' A."

...I hadn't found any weapons in the upstairs rooms. Since I knew, firsthand, that Hannibal had at least one gun, this probably meant he had the gun with him. Hannibal didn't seem like the kind of guy to leave his armaments in the cookie jar.

...I went to the refrigerator and looked at the wrapper on the cold cuts. They'd been bought at the ShopRite two days earlier. "This is really creepy," I said to Lula. "Someone's living in this house." And my unspoken thought was that they could be home any minute.

"Yeah, and he don't know much about cold cuts," Lula said. "He got turkey breast and Swiss cheese when he could have got salami and provolone."

...There was the sound of a lock clicking open,a nd Lula and I both stood up straight.
"Uh-oh," Lula said.
The door opened. Cynthia Lotte stepped into the room and squinted at us in the dim light. "What the hell are you doing here?" she asked.

...She kicked at a pair of red silk paisley boxers lying on the floor. "You see these boxers?" She took aim and fired five rounds into the shorts. "These were Homer's."
"Dang," Lula said. "Don't hold back."
"He could be very charming," Cynthia said. "But he had a short attention span when it came to women."

...
Cynthia opened the door and flicked the light on in the garage. And there it was . . . the silver Porsche.
"My Porsche! My porsche!" Cynthia yelped. "I never thought I'd see it again." She stopped yelping and wrinkled her nose. "What's that smell?"
... Cynthis ran to the car. "I hope he left me the keys. I hope --" She stopped short and looked in the car window. "Someone's sleeping in my car."
Lula and I grimaced.
And Cynthis started screaming. "He's dead! He's dead! He's dead in my Porsche!"

..."Do you recognize him?" I asked Cynthia.
"No. I never saw him before. This is terrible. How could this happen? There's blood on my upholstery."

..."Hey, wait a minute," I said. "This is a crime scene. You should leave everything alone."
"The hell I will," Cynthia said. "this is my car, and I'm driving away with it. I work for a lawyer. I know what happens. They'll impound this car until the world comes to an end. And then his wife'll probably get it."

------------ ... The garage door slid closed, and Lula and I were left with the dead guy.
Lula shifted foot to foot. "Think we should say something over the deceased? I don't like to disrespect the dead."
"I think we should get the hell out of here."
"Amen," Lula said, and she made the sign of the cross.
"I thought you were Baptist."
"Yeah, but we don't got any hand signals for an occasion like this."

-30-