SATURDAY PHOTO
(See more here)

Old Mission Church, Zuni Pueblo, N.M.
by Timothy O’Sullivan (1840-1882)

Gadzooks,
it’s been ages since I did one of these. Going way back to the 19th
century, this photo is dated 1874 while the photographer worked for the
Army Corps of Engineers on a survey west of the One Hundredth Meridian.
On the trip he almost starved when some of the expedition’s boats
capsized, but 300 negatives he took survived the trip back East
afterwards to be developed. Photography then was as far from today’s
digital snapping, throwing on the computer, and printing as you could
get, requiring big bulky equipment that had to be set up.
This is an albumen print, 20.2×27.5 cm. O’Sullivan was born in Ireland
and his family emigrated to New York during the potato famines when he
was two. At 18 he apprenticed with Mathew Brady (famous civil war
photographer). When that war began he served at age 21 for a year and
then was honorably discharged and continued to photograph the war till
it ended in 1866. He then became a government survey expedition
photographer and would return to Washington DC in the winters to
develop his photos. At 36 he moved to Washington DC for good and became
the photographer of the Treasury till he died of TB of the lungs at age
42. Here is a page of his photographs. And this is his most famous photo. Seems like times haven’t changed much, have they.

Guess the Movie: “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”  Answer:  Jaws,  1975.  Winner:  HomerTheBrave.

The federalist prescription

FRIDAY FIVE

Appetizer – Which celebrity (or celebrities) do you think will make headlines this year?
Oh
cripes, as if I care, let’s see, reaching directly to my left I can
pick up a recent Entertainment Weekly. I got suckered into subscribing
to it sometime last year by a clever ploy at Best Buy where you got a
free 6 months when you purchased something or other. Then of course I
became immediately addicted to knowing what latest movies, books,
music, etc. were out and how they were reviewed. So let’s see, here are
three celebrities right off the first open page that I figure will make
headlines this year – Nicole Kidman (besides being a gorgeous and also
competent actress in her own right, she picks bodacious men to hang out
with), Justin Timberlake (omigod, he dumped Cameron Diaz – actually I
don’t know which way it went, maybe she dumped him), and Stephen
Colbert (I hope I hope).
Soup – They say that good things come in small packages? What is something little that you think is great?
The
first thing that popped into my head is some scallops I had over 40
years ago at an Ivar’s outside seafood bar on Seattle’s waterfront.
I’ve never forgotten them. I love shellfish with a deep and abiding
love.
Salad – Name a song that makes you want to dance.
For that I quickly turn to Pandora, and if you haven’t discovered Pandora yet click here.
It’s an online radio where you can plug in songs you know you like and
it will line up several different stations of music that its little
computer mind figures are similar. That way you can discover a whole
lot of music you might not have heard yet. So the first one that came
up that qualifies for me is one of my all-time all-life favorites -
Into the Mystic – Van Morrison – the Moondance album. I met the Van
once in a little store out in Marin County. I was with a musician from
the house I lived in with a little rock band at the time and we both
got to shake his hand. Across the road was a barn with “Freedom’s just
another word for nothin’ left to lose” painted on it in big red
letters. Yes, it was the late ’60′s.
Main Course – What is your favorite font?
Comic sans MS lately. It’s the font in my blog. Weird title, huh? No idea what it means.
Dessert – If you were to write a do-it-yourself article, what would it be about?
Oh
I guess one thing would be teaching yourself HTML. It’s not that hard
if you have that kind of mind. I started by using the View in the
toolbar you see above and going to View Page Source in any web page you
happen to be on. You can see how they did it. Then there’s nifty
javascripts you can copy from Dynamic Drive. If you can drive a car, play video games, or blog, you can learn HTML. Plus, there’s plenty of online tutorials.

Guess the Movie:
“Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in
cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There’s no escape. I’m God’s
lonely man.”  Answer:  Taxi Driver, 1976.  Winner:  buttermelon.

TUESDAY POLITICS

One
of the things I made it my business to do this Christmas season was to
sit down with my 15-year-old grandson and register him online as a
conscientious objector. His other grandmother and I have agreed that
starting the paper trail now is essential so that when and if this
country calls for a draft three years from now when we will probably
still be in Iraq or some other place full of innocent civilians
bringing and receiving death, he will have established that he (and we
as a family) objects. When Congress reconvenes this week, Bush (on John
McCain’s encouragement) will propose a surge of 30,000 troops and then
the excrement is going to hit the fan as the new Democratic majority
takes over. Senator Joe Biden will lead the Foreign Relations Committee
to block the surge and on that committee will be some fire-breathing
members such as Chris Dodd (Conn.), John Kerry (Mass.), Russ Feinfold
(Wis.), and Barack Obama (Ill.). I can hardly wait to tune in and see
this action. The photo is of Chuck Hagel, Senator from Nebraska, who is
also on that committee and one of at least 12 Republican senators who
are not pleased. To quote him, “It’s Alice in Wonderland. I’m
absolutely opposed to sending any more troops to Iraq. It is folly.”
For my grandson’s sake and all the other grandsons and granddaughters
who are potential cannon fodder, I’ll be hoping to see this country’s
democratic system do itself a favor and work for us this week, month,
and year.

Guess the Movie: “It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.”  Answer:  A Clockwork Orange, 1971.  Winner:  thenarrator.

SUNDAY GOOD NEWS

First
of all, Happy New Year to everyone! And be safe tonight. It’s actually
my favorite holiday – no gifts to buy, no house to clean, no
decorations to put up and take down, no big meals to cook. Just a brand
new leaf to turn over – all bright and shiny.

As for the good
news, in this last week of 2006, the Interior Department
proposed making polar bears an endangered species due to the speed of
ice melting going on in their Arctic home. Maybe you heard how a
40-foot-square ice shelf just broke off up there the other day. See,
polar bears have to be able to have enough land to hunt on without
falling into water every five steps. Duh. Interior Secretary Kempthorne
isn’t copping to having any say about global warming though. That’s not
his job. But gosh darn it, it’s pretty hard to get around presenting
the real reason in the proposal backed up with science. Kind of puts
everybody involved between a rock and a hard place. Well, the I.D. has
a year to make a final determination and a recovery plan. Absurd to
picture the plan not involving manmade emissions of heat-trapping
gases. Three environmental groups, including Greenpeace had to sue the
I.D. in 2005 to get it to move this far. There are only about 25,000
polar bears left in the world at this point and dropping fast. So it
will be interesting to see if the I.D. comes down on the side of the
new oil and gas drilling it’s proposed up there or on the side of this
gorgeous animal – money vs. bear – money, bear, money, bear, money,
bear. Stay tuned.

Guess the Movie:
“Take a look at yourself here in a worn-out Mardi Gras outfit, rented
for 50 cents from some rag-picker. And with a crazy crown on. Now what
kind of a queen do you think you are? Do you know that I’ve been on to
you from the start, and not once did you pull the wool over this boy’s
eyes? You come in here and you sprinkle the place with powder and you
spray perfume and you stick a paper lantern over the light bulb – and,
lo and behold, the place has turned to Egypt and you are the Queen of
the Nile, sitting on your throne, swilling down my liquor. And do you
know what I say? Ha ha! Do you hear me? Ha ha ha!”  Answer:  A Streetcar Named Desire.  Winner:  thenarrator.

MONDAY READING

Hope everyone is having a holiday that fits them warmly and well. 
Here are two items sent to me over the past week that toast the
season.  Click here and you’ll find a link for Christmas
music among others.  And here’s one called Totally Politically
Correct, which if you’ve ever worked in an office anywhere at this time
of year you can relate to:

FROM:    Patty Lewis, Human Resources Director

TO:         All Employees

DATE:    October 01, 2003

RE:         Christmas Party

I’m happy to inform you that the company Christmas Party will take
place on December 23, starting at noon in the private function room at
the Grill House. There will be a cash bar and plenty of drinks! We’ll
have a small band playing traditional carols…feel free to sing along.
And don’t be surprised if our CEO shows up dressed as Santa Claus! A
Christmas tree will be lit at 1:00pm. Exchange of gifts among employees
can be done at that time; however, no gift should be over $10.00 to
make the giving of gifts easy for everyone’s pockets. This gathering is
only for employees! Our CEO will make a special announcement at that
time!
Merry Christmas to you and your family.
Patty

FROM:  Joan Bishop, Acting Human Resources Director

DATE:   October  06, 2003

RE:        Patty Lewis and Holiday Party
I’m sure I speak for all of us in wishing Patty Lewis a speedy recovery
and I’ll continue to forward your cards to her. In the meantime,
management has decided to cancel our Holiday Party and give everyone
the afternoon of the 23rd off with full pay.

Deep Thought:   “I
think there should be something in science called the “reindeer
effect.” I don’t know what it would be, but I think it’d be good to
hear someone say, “Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example
of the reindeer effect.”
Today I am grateful for:  Senior discounts
Guess the Movie:  “Dare we
dream of a golden day when the bestial War shall rule no more. But
instead – the gentle Prince in the Hall of Brotherly Love in the City
of Peace.”  Answer:  The Birth of a Nation, 1915.  Winner:  thenarrator.
Es-Ka-LAY-Shun

by Christopher Hayes
Say it: escalation. More and more that’s what the geniuses in
Washington have come up with as a way of ending the war in Iraq.
Instead of calling it an escalation of the war, they are using the
military term of art, “surge.” Ok, fine. Surge, escalation, “reset”,
call it what you will. The fact is that the American people voted in
November to end the war in Iraq, and the White House has demonstrated
that, kabuki-style consultations to the contrary, it just doesn’t
care.  (Rest of article here.)

WEDNESDAY MOVIE

The Queen

Most
of us folks here in the colonies got to know Helen Mirren in her role
as Inspector Jane Tennison in the wonderful British series Prime
Suspect, having risen to 54-year-old Detective Superintendent at the
London Metropolitcan Police by “Prime Suspect 6.” This is not only a
highly respected actress but a woman who puts the “m” in
middle-aged-babe-ilicious. Sexy and smart she skewers her way through
the male
police population like a knife through butter. Well….in The Queen the
skewering part is still fully functional, except in this case it’s all
tricked out in the incredibly dowdy but royal costume of
the most powerful woman in England. With a little emphasis on double
chin and an excellent silver wig, Helen Mirren disappears into Queen
Elizabeth II as she copes with the death of Princess Diana in 1997, the
same year that Tony Blair was elected by a landslide as Prime Minister.
Elizabeth had ruled through nine Prime Ministers before Blair, and he
was the first who was younger than her own children. Mirren is 61 now
and is playing the Queen at 71 when all this happened. Blair is 27
years younger than the Queen. So the film is really a character study
of how these two dealt with each other and the national tragedy, how
the withdrawal of the Royal Family from the public almost got them
“fired” if it hadn’t been for Blair’s deft handling of the PR necessary
to turn things around. It’s an all-British cast, most of them folks
we’re just beginning to see in American films. There is actually very
little about the accident that took Diana’s life or any fleshing out of
the two boys she left behnd. It’s The Queen and the P.M. and the
exquisite English countryside that will take your breath away. Don’t
miss it.

Guess the Movie: “Oh no, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.”  Answer:  King Kong, 1933.  Winner:  RnBoWSPOT.

SUNDAY GOOD NEWS

He
has such a sweet face. These days when it seems like we’ve come to
expect that every person who works in the world of money is a greedy
corrupt son-of-a-gun you just have to wonder where does a guy like this
come from. Bangladesh is a tiny independent country (since 1971) almost
totally surrounded by India. Muhammed Yunus, now 66, was born in a
village there to a father who was a jeweler. He was able to go to high
school and graduated 16th out of 39,000 students in East Pakistan. He
then got a BA and MA in economics at Dhaka University and joined the
Bureau of Economics. In 1969 he acquired a PhD in economics from
Vanderbilt University in the U.S. He returned to Bangladesh to teach
economics at university. He got involved in fighting poverty during the
famine of 1974 in Bangladesh. (Remember the Concert for Bangladesh back
then given by Ravi Shankar and George Harrison et al?) Yunus got the
brilliant idea that very small loans could make a huge difference to a
poor person. His first loan was $27 out of his own pocket to the women
of Jobra to make bamboo furniture. Later came the “telephone ladies”
who borrow money to own a mobile phone and now provide service to 80%
of villages in Bangladesh. A few years later, he founded the nonprofit
Grameen Bank that has now issued more than $5.1 billion to 5.3 million
borrowers. Together they received the Nobel Peace Prize today and
already China has asked Dr. Yunus to try out the microcredit program
there to see if it will work.  Sweet. (Read more about this remarkable man here.)

Guess the Movie: “When two people love each other, they come together – WHAM – like two taxis on Broadway.”  Answer:  Rear Window, 1954.  Winner:  pray14me.

SUNDAY GOOD NEWS

This
just in from a BBC radio interview with Stephen Hawking, famous British
scientist who published A Brief History of Time (which you can dip into
here)
in 1988 – packing our bags and getting the hell out of here and I mean
off the planet is not only possible, but inevitable. And here’s the
best part – he says propulsion like they used on Star Trek where you
had the warp drive is how it would work. NASA has been working on this
for years by the way. Hawking says nuclear war or asteroid collision
(let alone global warming type stuff) could make long-term survival of
humans impossible unless we could reach other solar systems with
livable planets. It’s scientifically impossible to travel faster than
light but S.H. believes people could eventually go just under that
speed using matter-antimatter annihilation and reach the closest star
in a time of about six years. Hawking is 64 now and has survived
paralysis from a terrible neurological disorder since he was 21 and
he’s optimistic enough to say his next goal is to go into space. It
could be decades before we all get a chance to go, but in the meantime
I’m going to hope that instead of getting drafted to go die in some war
one day, my grandson (or his grandson) will get to say instead, “beam
me up, Scotty, I’m coming home.”

Guess the Movie: “Hold my hand and we’re halfway there, hold my hand and I’ll take you there. Somehow! Someday!”  Answer:  West Side Story, 1961.  Winner:  buttermelon.

MONDAY READING

Not
long ago, in the first copy of The Sun that I read, I came upon the
work of Sam Harris, author of the New York Times bestseller, The End of
Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason and Letter to a
Christian Nation. It was the first time I can say I really read an
article by a self-labeled atheist. In most circles, the A-word is
rarely mentioned, something to recoil from as one would from an
untimely belch or other impolite bodily function. Having been a
spiritual seeker all my life in one way or another but having also come
from a political family, I’m well aware that religious folks are not
the only idealists in the world. Still, I thought to myself that
atheism was definitely not where I would fit. So to my surprise, I
found
myself feeling strangely sympathetic to what I found in that article.
Harris is a philosophy graduate from Stanford and now completing a
doctorate in neuroscience. He lives in New York and writes for many
publications. Here is his web site. And here are the first few paragraphs from his article, An Atheist Manifesto:

Somewhere
in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape,
torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at
precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most.
Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that
govern the lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also
suggest that this girl’s parents believe at this very moment that an
all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family.
Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?
No.
The
entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a
philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal
to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the
obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle. The obvious must be
observed and re-observed and argued for. This is a thankless job. It
carries with it an aura of petulance and insensitivity. It is,
moreover, a job that the atheist does not want. (Read on.)

P.S. I’m still not an atheist.

Guess the Movie: “I don’t like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me.”  Answer:  North by Northwest, 1959.  Winner:  thenarrator.

WEDNESDAY MOVIE

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill


It’s been so long since I posted on a movie that I’ve actually seen
several I really liked.  The Departed has got to finally win
Scorsese an Oscar this year – knockout cast (Pacino, DiCaprio, Damon,
Wahlberg, and on and on), genius plot twists, breathless pacing. 
On DVD, I saw The Proposition, an Australian film starring the
hawk-faced Guy Pierce as an outlaw forced to assassinate his older
brother in order to save his younger brother from execution – all this
in the outback of the late 19th century.  Character actor Ray
Winstone (getting lots of work lately) shows up in both films. 
The Proposition surprised me.  Again, the action was
lickety-split, the running out of the plot line riveting.  So if
you can take the R-rating for violence in both of them, they’re top of
their genre.  But turning to something completely different is The
Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, the true story of Mark Bittner,
homeless former street musician in San Francisco, and his relationship
with a flock of wild green-and-red parrots.  The filmmaker asks
him during the film why he doesn’t work or pay rent or cut his hair,
etc.  And you learn that this isn’t a shiftless bum or a drug
addict or a mentally ill person,  but a thoughtful, gentle,
compassionate, stubbornly individualistic and searching, big old
sweetheart.  Happening upon free rent in a cottage on this famous
landmark hill in SF, he begins to make friends with the parrots who
live there and to feed them and care for them.  He becomes a kind
of landmark himself, publicized eventually in the media, and we learn
how he painstakingly gathers information about these elusive birds and
how they live and relate to each other.  It’s a family movie for
sure (and I watched it with my daughter and grandchildren), role
modeling that there are many paths to fulfillment and they are not all
corporate.  It’s beautiful to watch and has a lovely ending even
though there are some sadnesses and losses, like we must all expect in
life.  The perfect holiday film.  You can read more about
Mark Bittner and his current projects here.
And Happy Thanksgiving!  May it be just how you want it to be.

Deep Thought: 
“One Thanksgiving my parents did something I don’t know if I can ever
forgive them for. We were eating our turkey dinner when suddenly I
realized I hadn’t seen my pet turkey all day. “Where’s Mister Gobble?”
I asked. Dad seemed confused. “Mister Gobble?” “Yes,” I said. “My
turkey. The one I picked out at the supermarket, and then after he
thawed out I made him do a funny little turkey dance. Mister Gobble.”
Dad’s silence said it all. We were eating Mister Gobble! I ran crying
from the table and locked myself in my room. Later, Dad knocked on the
door and said he had some dessert for me. When I opened the door, I
couldn’t believe it. It was a slice of Pumpkie, my pet pie!”
Today I am grateful for:  Somewhere to go tomorrow and be thankful.
Guess the Movie:  “You lay life on a table and cut out all the tumors of injustice. Marvelous.”  Answer:  Doctor Zhivago, 1965.

Iraqi deaths hit new high, many emigrate

Wed Nov 22, 2006 6:25 PM GMT20

By Claudia Parsons
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraqi deaths hit a new high in October and 100,000
people are fleeing abroad every month to escape worsening violence that
is segregating the country on sectarian lines, a U.N. report said on
Wednesday.   (Rest of article here.)