Month: May 2004

  • Time 100

    On the magazine’s list of the 100 most powerful and influential people of 2004 are 23 women. The photo is of Samantha Power who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book A Problem of Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. If you want you can read an interview with her here. These are the remaining 22:
    1. Wu Yi – Vice Premier and Health Minister of China
    2. Condoleezza Rice – National Security Advisor
    3. Luisa Diogo – Prime Minister Mozambique
    4. Hillary Clinton
    5. Carly Fiorina – CEO Hewlett-Packard
    6. Meg Whitman – CEO eBay
    7. Belinda Stronach – CEO Magna International – running for Parliament in Canada
    8. Abigail Johnson – CEO Fidelity Management & Research
    9. Nicole Kidman
    10. Norah Jones
    11. J.K. Rowling – author
    12. Aishwarya Rai – Bollywood star
    13. Katie Couric
    14. Julie Gerberding – Director CDC
    15. Sandra Day O’Connor
    17. Louise Arbour – Canadian judge – chief prosecutor of war crimes before International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia
    18. Jill Tarter – Director of Research at SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence)
    19. Shirin Ebadi – Nobel Peace Prize 2003 – judge Iran
    20. Oprah Winfrey
    21. Paula Radcliffe – British marathon runner – world best
    22. Queen Rania – Jordan
    23. Aung San Suu Kyi – moral leader Burma
    I’ve heard of half of these women. Doesn’t it make you wonder if they figure influential women are 25% of the population in general? And why don’t we ever see these women being interviewed on their opinions of world affairs instead of the endless list of retired military men? Why aren’t they all household names? Hmmmm…………
    Deep Thought: You might think that the favorite plant of the porcupine is the cactus, but it’s thinking like that that has almost ruined this country.
    Today I am grateful for: National Public Radio

  • THINGS THAT REFRESH MY SOUL

    Nature

    This is the river that runs through the city where I live now and also ran beside the farm where I grew up from about age five till I left home for college. I’ve lived in big cities a lot in my life – Seattle, Oakland, New York City (where I was born), San Francisco, Moscow (Russia), Paris (France), and of course Portland, Oregon since 1984. And running through it all, like the Willamette River, is that experience of spending hours and days and weeks and months and years with the silence of nature. It was pretty much my only entertainment as an only child of very busy parents who were keeping the farm running. I sat by the water, collected bird nests after watching the eggs hatch and the babies grow and leave, almost got stung by bee swarms, fished for pollywogs in muddy sloughs, fell out of barn lofts, and mainly wandered daily over the 200 acres breathing in the balance and steadiness of it, and the birth, growth, and dying cycles. The river flooded some years, the summers were very hot, we ate fresh vegetables and fruit from our gardens and trees and ate meat from our own cows and pigs and eggs from our chickens. We didn’t even have supermarkets in those days and I have no memories of shopping for food in stores as a child. Today I am trying to turn my tiny city back yard into a place where I can close out the city noises and the sight of neighbors I don’t know and bring it back – it only takes the sound of one bird some days just at dawn.
    Deep Thought: One way I think you can tell if you have a curse on you is if you open a box of toothpicks and they all fly up and stick in your face.
    Today I am grateful for: English Laurel

  • Troy

    Out to the cineplex with three female friends I went day before yesterday to see this movie. It was the choice of one of them, not me, but I’m game for pretty much any movie that doesn’t get D ratings and below. I think our local paper gave this one C+. I had read an online review that mentioned the constant ululating (don’t you love that word?) voice singing in the background soundtrack and it did indeed get on my nerves a bit. I hadn’t thought about this part of history/myth for years, well not really since college, and had forgotten most of what I ever knew, but it reminded me that I’m so glad I learned all that stuff in college that seemingly has no bearing on my daily life, but at some deeper level enriches everything I see. I was even reminded of the great archeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, whose obsession it was to find Troy, dig it up, and prove its existence. The four of us were trying to figure out what part of the world today is where Troy was on the map shown in the movie. And guess what – it’s Turkey on the other side of the Aegean Sea from Greece. I just checked my grandson’s globe. So anyway, as far a film review goes, it reminded me of those 50′s movies like Spartacus with probably more bucks in the budget for the casts of thousands. It also seemed like a parody of today’s hawk mentality on the world war scene – all the things men tell each other to encourage themselves to be violent. Greed, testosterone, rage hiding behind great slogans like courage, freedom, patriotism. And in the end, lots of funeral pyres. Oh, and yes the film was hunkalicious. Mr. Brad was the most buffed I’ve ever seen him and I especially liked a few of the leaps and kicks he did when stabbing much bigger guys to death. There were a few pretty scary-looking old(er) people like Peter O’Toole and Julie Christie who made me hope they were just a bit older than I am. Oh I know, Old is Beautiful in some country other than here. All in all, it was kind of fun sitting with four friends letting the mind take a vacation and just bearing witness to it all.
    Deep Thought: I think it should be a law that if you ever get sucked up into a tornado, whatever you can grab with your hands while you’re swirling around up there, you get to keep.
    Today I am grateful for: History

  • a poem by Mary Oliver:

    Wage Peace
     
        Wage peace with your breath.
      Breathe in firemen and rubble,
       breathe out whole buildings
        and flocks of redwing blackbirds.
        Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping
       children
       and freshly mown fields.
       Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
        Breathe in the fallen
        and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
       Wage peace with your listening:   hearing sirens, pray loud.
       Remember your tools:
       flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
        Make soup.
     Play music, learn the word for thank you in three
        languages. Learn to 

       knit, and make a hat. Think of chaos as dancing
       raspberries, imagine 
        grief as the outbreath of
      beauty or the gesture of fish.
      Swim for the other side.
        Wage peace.
      Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.

       Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
      Act as if armistice has already arrived.
       Don’t wait another minute.
    (borrowed from nessi1 who keeps posting great stuff)
    Deep Thought: I’m just guessing, but probably one of the early signs that your radarscope is wearing out is something I call “image fuzz-out.” But I’ve never even seen a radarscope, so I wouldn’t totally go by what I’ve just said here.
    Today I am grateful for: Veins

  • Remember to Laugh


    Click here


    Deep Thought:  The other day I got out my can opener and was opening a can of worms when I thought, “What am I doing?!”
    Today I am grateful for:  Going to .5 FTE starting next week for the rest of my life

  • The Fruit of Peace

    The Catholic Church weighs in

    Deep Thought: As I felt the soft cool mud squish between my toes, I thought, Man, these are not very good shoes!
    Today I am grateful for: Garden hoses

  • Makes My Day

    Disney close to deal on “Fahrenheit 9/11″
    Tue May 25, 2004 05:00 AM ET
    LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Miramax chiefs Harvey and Bob Weinstein are close to buying “Fahrenheit 9/11,” the anti-Bush documentary that won the top prize at Cannes, from Walt Disney.

    Filmmaker Michael Moore took the Palme d’Or, the top prize at France’s Cannes film festival, over the weekend for the picture, which criticises U.S. President George W. Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq and the “War on Terror” he declared after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

    Disney Chief Executive Michael Eisner said he declined to distribute the movie because it was too political. But he agreed to selling the roughly $6 million (3.3 million pounds) film to the Weinsteins, the heads of Disney’s Miramax unit, which originally backed it, spokeswoman Zenia Mucha said by e-mail.

    Miramax declined to comment on the deal.

    The Weinsteins will be free to find a new distributor once they own the film. The deal with Disney is expected in the next day or two, the person familiar with the talks said.

    Moore made the Oscar-winning documentary “Bowling for Columbine” and blasted Bush when he accepted the award two years ago.
    Deep Thought: When we were kids, I used to make fun of my friend Kevin whenever he had to go to his piano lesson. But look where he is now and look where I am. Actually, I don’t know where his is now. But look where I am, that’s my point.
    Today I am grateful for: Pests

  • A Letter from Michael Berg


    A father speaks out.


     


     


     


     


    Deep Thought:  Whenever I need to “get away,” I just get away in my mind. I go to my imaginary spot, where the beach is perfect and the weather is perfect. There’s only one bad thing there: the flies! They’re terrible!


    Today I am grateful for:  Pins and needles

  • THINGS THAT REFRESH MY SOUL

    Memories

    Guess this choice dates me, although young people have memories too – they just don’t seem to cherish them quite so much. When I was choosing previous topics in this Sunday project, I had to check the dictionary for ideas most of the time, but for M the ideas just seemed to come rolling in – Music, My Mother, Men, Money, Moderation, Mental Health – oh stop. So here are a few of my memories of all of these…My mother was illumined from within with a great passion for peace and justice and freedom and all those Aquarian ideals. She kept me on track with piano lessons for 13 years, sweating through recitals, and playing our old upright at home, so that today a Chopin prelude eases my heart. The men in my life occasionally set out to wreak havoc, but more often they let me love their tenderness, and two of them gave me children. Money was best known in my journey for its capacity to bring sudden relief from the despair of poverty until one day I learned to stay put and pin those bills to a bulletin board and pay them. That was a good day. Mental health has been tricky all my life, but much improved since I put away the use of chemicals for that purpose and turned to a spiritual recovery instead. I count this the greatest accomplishment of my life – to have made the phone call that would bring me in from the cold on 12/5/84. And as for moderation, in the years I have left I must build on it, even while looking back at the lack of it early on that nearly took all the memories away.
    Deep Thought: If you’re being chased by an angry bull, and then you notice you’re also being chased by a swarm of bees, it doesn’t really change things. Just keep on running.
    Today I am grateful for: Still being here

  • Nerds

    kateseyeview was discussing this subject, so I thought I’d throw in my take on it. About 8th grade (see photo) was when I first heard the term or its various equivalents. I qualified easily by being too tall, having acne, wearing glasses and homemade clothes, and being smart and an only child. It didn’t help that I preferred reading to sports. (The real clincher – that my parents were communists – was thankfully a secret.) Ten years later here I am modeling for Moses Soyer, a well-known New York painter, with my daughter’s soon-to-be father who would become a world-famous tattoo artist. How cool is that? So I figure that nerds are actually people who stand out by following some inner spark that isn’t seen by the “in crowd.” Oh, let’s see I have the issue of Time with 100 Leaders & Revolutionaries in front of me for 2004 and here’s Bill Gates, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Oprah Winfrey, Peter Jackson, the Dalai Lama, Yaoming, among so many others we’ve never heard of because they don’t specialize in being household names. Hmmm, quite a colorful, bright, creative, world-shaping group. Nerds all. All Hail Nerds! (P.S. I just have a hunch there’s a goodly proportion of nerds here in Xangaland).
    Deep Thought: Grandpa used to describe the size of everything in terms of a calf. For instance, if he was describing a large dog, he would say it was “about as big as a calf.” Or about a car, he would say it “could seat four calves comfortably.” (Oh, that was another thing: how many calves could ride in something.) One time he was talking about a calf he had, and I asked him how big it was. He said it was “about three-quarters as big as a calf.” Sometimes Grandpa would tell time by calves. If you asked him how long something would take, he’d say, “About as long as it takes a calf to drive over here.”
    Today I am grateful for Roads less taken