Just got back from Arizona

 

Complaint re: Verizon

Sent to the Delaware Public Service commission:

Every month, Verizon sends me another bill for over $200. there are always extra charges on the bill for movies and services I have not ordered, such as service in Filipino. I am constantly on the phone with them, correcting their billing. The next month there is another extra charge for television programs and movies I have not ordered.

Every month I attempt to pay their bill, by phone or by credit card. They never credit my account with payment and are constantly sending me disconnection notices. About a week ago I paid their bill over the phone, plus a $3.50 charge for this service. Now I get another disconnection notice!

I would pay this bill over the phone yet again, using another credit card, even though I already paid it, but they seem totally unable to post my payments to my account. So why bother?

I recently called them and enrolled in a bundled program, where I am to receive phone, television, and internet service for $109 a month. This has not been put into operation, even though they agreed to set up the account this way.

These Verizon charges are making my life a living hell.

Can you please, please PLEASE ask them to straighten this out?

Bad bunny

 

What on earth did this bunny do, to cause his owners to string him up?

I swear I will not write about male undergarments again

after this.

Stink free underwear

The Japanese are testing “stink-free” underwear on the space station. Reuters reports that Koichi Wakata is trying them out the “J-ware”:

“He can wear his trunks (underwear) more than a week,” said Koji Yanagawa, an official with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Wakata’s clothes, developed by researcher Yoshiko Taya, are designed to kill bacteria, absorb water, insulate the body and dry quickly. They also are flame-resistant and anti-static, not to mention comfortable and stylish.

H t to Basil.

A women's seder

I went to a women's seder last night. The atmosphere was pleasant and friendly. The food was pretty good, too--always a good sign.

But what really moved me was the prayers, Torah passages and psalms. They are so beautiful--noble and profound. These words were written down so long ago, and despite every adverse circumstance, they have been preserved and repeated for centuries.

I'm a great skeptic. I find it difficult, as my life plays itself out, to believe there is anything but a great Indifference in the universe. It would be nice to believe in something, but most religious beliefs seem so far-fetched.

And yet, there are still Jews in the world, and every year they still celebrate their deliverance, despite all the hatred and genocide they have endured through the centuries--and continue to endure. The continued existence of this people seems to sugggest that the unlikeliest things can be true, perhaps.

Another figure from the painting, "Trio"

 

Violist

 

A portion of my painting, "Trio."

Tuesday was not my lucky day

Mr Charm was not doing too well....
No-one was returning my phone calls....
I parked in the street, at a meter. When I came to get the car, my cell phone fell under the car. I had to pull the car out and stop in traffic in the middle of the street, to pick it up. Then I noticed a parking ticket under the windshield.

I got home to receive another disconnect notice from Verizon. As I had paid them over a week ago, I was steamed.

Oh, well, we're all still alive.

Happy birthday to me--not

Another monumental sucky birthday. Not only is it the anniversary of my mother's death, but Mr Charm is in the hospital--serious stuff.

I don't have much loyalty to a particular place---nowhere is home, except where he and I are together.

How quickly things change: you're just starting to enjoy something, and it's gone.

Prayers, please, all you rock-ribbed Christian right wing nuts who actually read this stuff.

Portrait of three vegetables

 

New Castle honors Vietnam vets

 

Memorial in Brandywine Park, Wilmington DE, photographed 3/17/2009

The emergency ward

I had occasion to spend some time in the emergency ward of a downtown Wilmington Hopital. The daytime group was evidently made up of persons who consider this service a substitute for making an appointment with a regular doctor, and don't mind wasting three hours waiting to be seen, mostly mothers, children, and old people. The medical personnel were patient, sorting out those who had true emergencies and dealing with them first, but eventually getting to everyone. It was a very patient and orderly crowd.

At night it was a different story. For one thing, there were trauma injuries, some from car accidents or bar fights. I saw one young man with a bleeding head injury that was scary looking but possibly not as bad as it looked. There was more injury in the night crowd. They were younger and tougher looking: definitely the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. They also had worse injuries and the pace had picked up. More repressed anxiety. Still a three-hour wait, though. The scene was worthy of Goya.

Coming from a New Jersey hospital in a wealthy suburban setting, I had never seen anything like this: platoons of patients. It was an eye-opener.

The taxpayer's club holds their annual meeting

Washington, DC, April 15, 2012. Since President Obama and the Democratic Congress passed the Budget Omnibus Bill of 2011, the number of people who actually pay taxes has dwindled to .000012 of the population, making it possible for all of the actual taxpayers to convene in one room, albeit a banquet hall.

Featured speakers were Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and the guy who owns all those parking lots at airports.

Unfortunately, there were a large number of demonstrators outside the hotel where the event was held. They held handmade signs reading, "More medical care for less money," "How would you rich guys try to live 15 years on my lousy welfare check?" and "Free plastic surgery for all." The fellow carrying the sign protesting paying 80 percent of his wages for Social Security arrived on his $20 bicycle, having scrapped his car when gasoline reached $100 a gallon.

Chuckie Cheese is a behavioral sink

And I thought it was good clean entertainment!

In Brookfield, Wis., no restaurant has triggered more calls to the police department since last year than Chuck E. Cheese's.

Officers have been called to break up 12 fights, some of them physical, at the child-oriented pizza parlor since January 2007. The biggest melee broke out in April, when an uninvited adult disrupted a child's birthday party. Seven officers arrived and found as many as 40 people knocking over chairs and yelling in front of the restaurant's music stage, where a robotic singing chicken and the chain's namesake mouse perform.


Chuck E. Cheese's bills itself as a place "where a kid can be a kid." But to law-enforcement officials across the country, it has a more particular distinction: the scene of a surprising amount of disorderly conduct and battery among grown-ups.

"The biggest problem is you have a bunch of adults acting like juveniles," says Town of Brookfield Police Capt. Timothy Imler. "There's a biker bar down the street, and we rarely get calls there."

I've only been to Mr Cheese's establishment twice and nothing could induce me to visit it again. Simply, I don't like places where children run wild, such as the aforementioned C Cheese, the Liberty Science Center, or any children's museum in the country you want to name. I'm all for repressing the natural instincts of children to run wild. They need to be civilized, sooner rather than later.

The best part of the whole thing? Construction of two new Chuckie establishments in Lima, OH is subsidized by tax dollars from the State of Ohio.

Bernie Madoff is going to jail

He's going straight from the courtroom.

Cheer up, Bernie! Eric Holder is still on the scene. Maybe he can get you the same deal he got Marc Rich.

Rich was trading with the enemy. All Bernie was doing was what Barack Obama wants to do--fleecing the rich. After all, anybody who has a million dollars or more got it from stealing from the middle class, didn't they?

A musical note

I attended a concert Sunday--Mahler's Das Klagende Lied. To the Philadelphia Orchestra's credit, they have been playing a lot of Mahler recently.

From the program:

The work is scored for three flutes (II and III doubling piccolo), one offstage piccolo, two offstage flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two offstage clarinets, two offstage E-flat clarinets, three bassoons, three offstage bassoons, four horns, four trumpets, two offstage E-flat trumpets, four offstage flugel, three trombones, two tubas, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam, triangle), six harps, strings, soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor and bass soloists, boy soprano, boy alto, and mixed chorus.

Musicians must have worked cheap in Old Vienna.

What good are the humanities?

In this article, the case is made that PC has made the humanities dreadful and irrelevant to students. I won't argue with that.

Ms Cohen says that the "critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning that the humanities develop... are prerequisites for personal growth and participation in a free democracy," and of course I'd be happy to join her in that view of the humanities. But in saying so she seems completely out of touch with what is really happening in college humanities courses, for it is not this. Doesn't she know that civic and historical knowledge of American history and institutions is at a low ebb precisely because that knowledge does not mesh with the dominant politically correct ethos of the professoriate?

Also true, at least at some times and in some places.

But I reject the notion that the humanities are some particularly nasty-tasting medicine that the student takes because it makes him a better person, for his mental health, so to speak--for "personal growth," a tiresome phrase that reminds me of granola and whole wheat bread without additives.

I don't agree with that view. I regret many things I've done in my life, but I don't regret spending four years reading great literature. I enjoyed it, but I don't believe it taught me wisdom or goodness. Life teaches you those things, to the extent you can learn them. When I was 20 I had read all of Shakespeare's plays but I couldn't say boo to a goose.

Shakespeare and the rest don't need me to argue their case. Great art gives great pleasure.

Curses

When I was a child, I longed to be able to curse, it seemed so grown up. Mother told me I could not include curses in my vocabulary. I was too young to use bad language. She was evasive when I asked her how old I had to be, and I never got a satisfactory answer.

Bubbe did not use profanity but wished horrible fates on those who won her disfavor. One of her favorites suggested that the person she was angry with should go with his/her feet in the church and head in hell. Gay in dererd simply meant go to hell. Or she would wish cholera on people--a chalerya auf im! or she would wish a klog on someone. My Yiddish-English dictionary defines klog as a "lamentation," but as she used it, I would guess it meant curse.

She had lots of disparaging names in her arsenal: bahama (from the Biblical Behemoth," was literally a cow, but figuratively, a clumsy oaf. A naar was a dumbbell; mamzer was a really bad word, meaning a bastard, a gonif was a thief. A child who wouldn't sit still had shpilkes in toches (ants in her pants). A person who wouldn't listen was a goyishe kop, which translates into--well, it's hard to translate, but it's not good.

These are just a few I remember offhand, but bubbe know plenty more and was never at a loss for words.

The Itiderod race started today

I have never been particularly interested, until I read a book called "Murder on the Itiderod trail by Sue Henry.

The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race got off to its ceremonial start Saturday in Anchorage, Alaska, with mushers and their dogs going on short runs through the city.

The grueling 1,150-mile trek to Nome begins in earnest tomorrow with 67 mushers and more than 1,000 dogs competing, but intrigue and controversy are already mounting.

-- The recession has hit the famous race, with entrance fees rising as the purse declines to $610,000 from $935,000 last year. Fewer mushers are competing this year, with some saying the expense of training in tough economic times caused them to sit out.

Cranky

I have been cranky lately. I've been living in Toe World, with a bandage and a weird shoe. Sitting in the foot doctor's office, waiting to be seen, I was left to reflect on the decor's total lack of charm or interest.

Why do doctors do this--I mean, decorate their offices with graphic pictures of the respiratory system, the spine, or the foot? If I'd wanted to go to medical school that option was open to me. I chose to be an English major instead. It was a reasoned decision. I hate the sight of blood, guts, bones, muscles and circulatory systems. I don't want to be reminded that I have all that stuff inside of me. Ugh!

What started me thinking along those lines was a poster in the foot doctor's office showing a disgusting toe, whose nail was infected by a particularly ghastly fungus. The nail was about the size of my foot and in glorious living color.

Hint to doctors: decorate your offices with soothing landscape paintings. Seascapes are good, too, as are depictions of tots gamboling in the sunshine of country estates. Portraits. Pictures of flowers, wine bottles or fruit, or a combination of the above. I'll even settle for paintings on velvet; but let's soft pedal the anatomy lesson, okay?

Twitter--or not?

Hitherto I have avoided twitter like poison.

What is it? Do I need it? Why do I need it? Will I become an even larger Internet weirdo than I am now? Jack explains:

I have been using Twitter for around a month and am slowly learning my way around it. For a long time I was reluctant to get involved with anything else that could serve as a time suck. As it is I feel like I am constantly searching for ways to turn a 24 hour day into 36 hours. So the idea of adding another responsibility bothered me.

But at the same time I find social media to be incredibly interesting so I wanted to dip my toes into the water and see what happened.

Thus far I have been pleased with it. It is fast and easy so I haven't found it to be particularly taxing...yet. Yet is the operational word because I can see a time and place when it becomes too time consuming so I have been relatively cautious about who I follow.

Thus I have fulfilled my obligation to link with Jack, ass today is Link with Jack Day.

The latest style

Notice the sweater. This is the latest look. See how snug it is? It's almost straining the buttonholes.

Lucky me! I don't have to buy it, because all my cardigans fit like that. Actually, all my clothes.

You too can be stylish if overweight. Just gain 10-20 lbs. It's easy.

What will we do if health care is rationed?

Realistically, we have much to fear from Obama's health care plan.

Obama’s budget would boost taxes on the wealthy and curtail Medicare payments to insurance companies and hospitals to make way for a $634 billion down payment on universal health care. That is a little more than half the money it would take to extend insurance to 48 million uninsured Americans.

One doesn’t curtail payments without curtailing benefits. I see rationed health care for the elderly and disabled. When I go on Medicare, I expect my benefits to be drastically reduced.

Canadians coped with nationalized health care by coming here for treatments that were denied or postponed--for instance, a patient who would have to wait for a coronary by-pass or a hip replacement could come here and have it done. When our health care is rationed, what will we do? Where will we go?

Get yourself a family doctor in Thailand. I understand procedures are much less costly there. Of course, it's a long commute, and if you have a health emergency you might croak before you got to the hospital, but we must consider the greatest good for the greatest number. Mustn't we?

March snow

 

Toes

I know this blog is somewhat dreary visually, and I was going to enliven it with a picture of a toe, but all the pictures of toes and even of feet were so Godawful ghastly I couldn't bring myself to do it. Toes in general aren't too good-looking, are they?

I bring up toes because I had surgery on one of mine. The toe in question is doing fine, thank you for asking.

I am squeamish and not particularly fond of looking at body parts in their less glamorous moments. SO I am not going to take a picture of my toe and post it here.

However, high tech has come to the world of the toe. The sore toe is sent home from the hospital with about 50 lb of high tech gear, including a machine which periodically circulates ice water around the poor wounded piggy. It's a marvel of ingenuity.

Then there's the rubber boot, which is designed to allow the patient to take a bath or shower or go deep sea diving, judging by the four-color illustration on the package insert, which shows pictures of happy, cheery swimmers gamboling in the surf.

The principle of the boot is this: there are two sizes of rubber boots for waterproof feet: small, for children, and large, for everyone else, from petite size 5 1/2 ladies to size 14 football players. Since it must fit all these feet, it is on the large size.

Attached to this gizmo is a small pump, with which you are supposed to pump all the air out of the boot after you put it on and before you get in the pool. This takes the air out, and then the boot is snug and keeps your foot dry. In theory.

In practice, it would take you a week to expel all the air from this object. I managed to get the thing over my foot, even though the opening is about 4 inches in diameter (that's so no water gets into it). I ended with the object flapping off my leg and putting me off balance since it weighs a good 20 lb. It kept the water off my foot, but unfortunately its outside held enough water to thoroughly flood the bathroom floor.

I believe this was invented by those who brought us the stimulus bill.

Brilliant comment

In a post referring to Gavin Newsom's incredible offense of drinking bottled water, This commenter hits the nail on the head:

Religions have plenty of arbitrary rules.

The modern environmental movement has it all: sins (including original), heretics, commandments, ostracism, confessions, indulgences, tithing, prophets, high priests (of unquestioned authority), blind faith, and guilt by the sackful.

By God, I wish I'd said that!

Courtesy of James Lileks.

Two may keep a secret...

if one of them is dead.

Good luck with hiding the details of the defense budget--or anything in Washington.

New California dream

People are leaving.

The buffoonish current governor and a legislature divided between hysterical greens, public-employee lackeys and Neanderthal Republicans have turned the state into a fiscal laughingstock. Meanwhile, more of its middle class migrates out while a large and undereducated underclass (much of it Latino) faces dim prospects. It sometimes seems the people running the state have little feel for the very things that constitute its essence — and could allow California to reinvent itself, and the American future, once again.

I understand a popular destination is Seattle. If they reproduce the government which led them to leave in the first place, Seattle will be California without the sunshine.

Mother and the courthouse

Mother never separated her private life from her professional life. One of the most annoying things about life with her was the incessant stream of phone calls from her clients. There was no such thing as Caller ID or voice mail, so we always picked it up. One of the conversations, related to me later:

Saturday night caller: Miz Goldie, my husband's in jail! Can you get him out?
Mother: When did this happen?
SNC: Last Thursday.

If it was possible to get him out, mother would often do it. To make herself presentable, mother would put on a coat over her nightgown, cram her feet into shoes, and put a hat atop her head. She was then perfectly groomed for a Saturday night jail visit.

We often tried to discourage her clients from calling at all hours. We didn't understand that her profession was like crack to her, that she needed it to feel alive. Her clients, black and white, were poor people such as you never see nowadays, uneducated and working at menial jobs. They loved her and trusted her completely, and she never let them down.

I went with her to the courthouse on more than one occasion, and saw how she relished the milieu: the stew of clients, judges, clerks, policemen and lawyers, the peeling walls and worn out stair treads, the statue of justice with a blindfold on. Phones rang, people shuffled to and fro, doors opened and closed. She was at home there; that was her place and she flourished there, like a fish in an aquarium.

Once, during a blizzard, mother drove through the town, stopping at about 90 traffic lights, from the extreme east side to the center of Columbus, a large, spread out city. When she got there, the court was closed: the judge was not there, neither was the prosecutor, nor the clerks and secretaries. Only mother had come to court. She was about 70 at the time.

Wifeswap doesn't work out

The striking thing about this couple is that they actually make money at their respective professions: he as a "biofuel entrepreneur" and she as a--wait for it-- "weight loss lifecoach." Only in California would you find anyone who would trust either one of them with a potted plant. And yet, they earn a living! a comfortable one!

According to the male half of this caring, concerned couple: "I probably make more in a week than you make in a year."

Take that, you proletarian redneck.

Too much fuss?

The assimilated Negro thinks so.

These images [of monkeys and other simians] strike me as racial Rorschach tests; they reveal more about your own personal racialized perspective, than actual objective truth on malicious racist intent.

Also, in the post I didn't get to include my two scientific nits on this matter:

1. monkeys and chimps aren't the same. check the wiki.

2. monkey scientists are telling us there's only 2% difference between the DNA of chimps and humans, so technically, the insult wouldn't be that far off from the truth. And is universally applicable to blacks, whites, asians etc.

But the Reverend Al needs something to fuss about, or he will be out of a job. Since Al can't pass as a Muslim, being a Christian Rev and all, (where's his church?) he has to settle for the next best thing, resenting unintended slurs as an offended African American.

Income tax

All week I have been grappling with my income tax, and I believe I've got it beaten into submission now. I e-filed it all. Every year, at tax time, there is a problem with the printer. It's not always the same printer, either. A gremlin must visit the corner where my printer resides at about this time every year. One year it declined to download the proper version of Adobe; this year the roller doesn't pick up the paper properly, so I have pleated sheets of paper, suitable for making Japanese fans but not much else.

Doing your income tax online is not an intellectually challenging task. It is more like something tedious and detailed, boring but demanding full attention, like cleaning the bathroom grout with a toothpick while standing on one foot. I'm not sure that sentence is grammatical, but I'm going to let it stand anyway.

However, I am happy to be getting a refund. I was praying some money would descend on me somehow, and the Almighty came through handily. Unfortunately I cannot use it to stimulate the economy because I already owe it to the guy who installed a new bathroom floor, and the plumber. Sorry, Barack. Better luck next time.

Speaking of Obama, does the man ever let a day pass without making a speech somewhere to a group of adoring fans? He zigzags across the country, going back and forth in it, like the devil in the Book of Job. I can't figure out whether he is running for student council president or King of the World.

Advice to BHO: put in some time at your desk. You might like to read some of the legislation you have signed, are signing, or are going to sign. How about simplifying the tax code, so Tim Geithner and I can understand it?

Moderating comments

On the whole, I think moderating comments works well. For one thing, no house cleaners in Iowa comment on my ideas, which is on the whole a good thing. Another good thing--someone linked to a blog which is obsessed with what my grandson would have called doody and I erased it without a qualm.

The best kind of comments are favorable. If you disagree with me, try to be polite, at least. Telling me what a contemptible person I am is unlikely to change my views, nor is calling me a dirty Jew. Why would I publish nasty unpleasant comments? I myself only read blogs the authors of which are witty and funny or agree with my ideas, which makes them witty and funny. I don't pay much attention to those who have different opinions, as my mind is made up already about a great many things.

But someone made a point of disagreeing with me about the New York Times and its celebration of those who wish to save the planet. Their pretentiousness made me want to go out and burn some tires, just out of spite.

Actually, I don't get much pleasure out of squandering electricity or gas. Would I hang my newly washed clothes on a clothesline? No. Would I turn off the refrigerator, putting my eggs and milk outside in winter? Again, no. I believe all these conveniences exist because they are--erm, convenient. And there is no way I would plunder someone else's garbage--that's nasty.

I'm not going to put myself out because I have lived long enough to learn something I didn't know when I was young. Here it is: You can buy anything, gas, electricity, refrigerators, cars, houses. All you need is money, which you can get if you want it badly enough. The one thing you can't purchase at any price is time. And time goes by swiftly. Where, for instance, are the snows of yesteryear?

Instead of wasting my time over something which makes no difference at all in the great scheme of things--contra Al Gore, I don't feel responsible for global warming--I would rather spend my allotted hours reading, blogging, listening to music, playing with my grandson, or just hanging out.

Do I care about the big three automakers?

Some little mean part of me doesn't. None of their dealers ever gave me a break when I brought the car in for servicing. Or when they gave me an "estimate" that cost $150. Or when the diesel Oldsmobile--yes, they made one-- wouldn't start and they could never find anything wrong. Or when I ordered a part that took three weeks to come in. Or when they told me replacing the side mirror was "body work" and I'd have to leave the car for three days. Or during the good old days before Japanese cars took hold when they would sell any damn poorly functioning thing because we didn't have a choice....

US Steel went under didn't they?

Curses on you, Brogan Cadillac!

Hopeless situation

Stuck.

Watch out who you mess with

There's life in the old girl yet.

Our new president preaches

Obama is starting to sound like one of those preachers who warn you that you will go to hell if you don't accept Jesus. Or the stimulus bill. Dire.

The tides have risen

Thanks, Barack Obama.

Scores of people had to be evacuated from their homes in Essex as the Environment Agency issued a sever flood warning for the Rivers Chelmer and Can at Chelmsford.

Head of flood defences, Craig Woolhouse, said a combination of heavy rain, snow melt and "tide-locking" of rivers caused by high tides off the southern coast of England had come together to create the risk of floods.

Now if you could just get them to recede the tiniest, little bit?

The New York Times does it again

More bullshit from the planet saving crowd.

I managed to control myself after the Times published an admiring story about people who dived in dumpsters for sustenance, despite living in one of the richest cities in the world, with marketable skills they could have easily used to earn a decent living. My mother told me that garbage was full of dirt and germs, but if they don't mind being exposed to disease, my hat's off to them.

Then there was the family who tried to live sustainably in a New York apartment eating local produce and avoiding the use of toilet paper. If concerned citizens want to eat locally grown food, they can dig up potatoes in Central Park during February--that's the only locally produced food available in Winter. I would rather have fresh fruit flown in from Chile, but that's just me. As for the toilet paper, I'm just going to draw a curtain on that one.

But I have blown a gasket over the refrigerator deniers, who are saving about $40 a year on the average by inconveniencing themselves and being sanctimonious about it.

All these folks are like the aristocrats in Louis the Fourteenth's court, dressing up as shepherdesses and playing at being poor, humble peasants. They make a mockery of human beings who live in poverty, filth and hunger because they have no choice.

The game doesn't cost them anything; they can plug in the fridge, buy food--even toilet paper--at the supermarket, even go on welfare and food stamps if they need to. Poor people in other countries don't have those choices.

Who in the world...

 

Can these people be? I think thy're from the 1930's, judging by their clothes.

Label your photographs!

This deal is only available for a limited time!

Obama's urgency about the stimulus package reminds me of nothing so much as a used car salesman warning you that the deal is going to slip through your fingers if you don't act immediately. With the added threat that if he doesn't get his way right now, the World as We Know It will come to an end.

Or perhaps he more closely resembles one of those television pitchmen selling a gadget that will cut your hair, trim your toenails, and put out the cat. And if you call this toll-free number right away, you get a free ginsu knife and a month's supply of Nutrisystem. Just pay shipping and handling!

But act now!

A new tax cheating record

Seventeen states! His parents must be so proud of him; Daschle and Geithner only cheated the federal government. Pikers!

What happened to AIG

The two cows explanation.

Unfair to Caroline Kennedy

I think the press is being hard on this poor woman. She hasn't got anything wrong with her that many of our most prominent statesmen don't have.

In many ways, she has had an unfortunate life. Yes, she has money. But she lost her father when she was six, and her only brother died an untimely death in the flower of his youth.

The quality she lacks is shamelessness, or effrontery. My bubbe would have called it chutzpah. Call it high, or unwarranted, self-esteem. Without this attribute, Barack Obama would never had run for the presidency. Nixon lacked this attribute, and that is why he slunk away from the presidency like a whipped dog after Watergate.

Bill Clinton has it in spades. When the Monica Lewinsky scandal came along, I, for one, thought he would resign. He determined to brazen it out, and rightly so. When Ted Kennedy got caught in a scandal that would have ruined most political careers, he had the brass balls to fight, and win!

In fact, most of the Kennedy family have high self-esteem. Look at Patrick, a man who should have sought obscurity long ago--still a Congressman. Look at all that bunch of Kennedys in Massachusetts, one or more of whom-I can't remember who at the moment, there are so many of them--put themselves forward as worthy candidates for higher office, despite lack of intelligence or accomplishments.

For God's sake, look at Rod Blagojevich!

On the other side of the aisle, there is plenty of arrogance to go around. Larry Craig and Duke Cunningham spring to mind, and there are plenty of others. All of Abramoff's buddies.

But I digress. Poor Caroline! Modesty, or shyness, held her back. When interviewed, she could not boast of any accomplishments, because she didn't have any. She had had a couple of books ghostwritten for her, and had never been arrested. She had raised children, none of whom are presently in jail. She wasn't kissing up to Hugo Chavez. For a Kennedy, that's a sterling record. But she lacked the gigantic ego and total lack of shame which would have carried her to victory. The one man whose vote she needed, David Paterson, was not impressed.

We're going to lose 500 million jobs!

Every month! According to Nancy Pelosi, a woman with not too firm a grasp on arithmetic--or reality.

Pelosi says that if legislators don't move quickly to pass President Barack Obama's stimulus package, "500 million Americans lose their jobs". According to her, this sobering scenario will occur every month without proper government action.

However, according to the US census bureau, the current population of residents in the country stands at about 305,000,000....

[T]there could be many a wayward American (almost 200 million of them) in other parts of the globe, who soon will lose their jobs just because of the simple fact that they're American. And everything that goes on within US borders will always affect them, no matter where they dwell.

But basically, all Americans (and then some) will be unemployed if the Senate doesn't get moving on this legislation.

We'd better encourage both legal and illegal immigration ASAP if we want to meet Speaker Pelosi's quotas.

Another old photo

 

There goes the image of the United States!

Oy vey! I've set foreign relations back at least a decade.

I just noticed that a bunch of people on a Polish social networking site called Grono are visiting this particular post. I hope they are not taking this as gospel. How do you say "It's a joke" in Polish?

I wonder what people in Warsaw and Bialystok think of it.

In related news, I am still getting visits to my post, Miriam's porn site. I'm wondering if I should take it down? It must be very disappointing.

Welcome, Polish readers!

Defiling the environment

I happened to mention today in art class that I don't like fluorescent light bulbs, and they all looked at me like I was Mussolini come back to life. I mentioned that incandescent bulbs give a nicer light, and they all protested. I do have one fl bulb, and it makes everybody look like one of the pictures in the post office.

Case closed.

I've been losing sleep over this

Whew! Foreigner who teaches at a mediocre local university reassures Americans:

America's tarnished star got some needed polishing overseas last month, thanks to recent actions by President Barack Obama, according to foreigners living in Delaware.

From his visit to the U.S. State Department and his first formal White House interview with Arab news agency Al-Arabiya to reversing several policies of George W. Bush's administration, he helped the United States regain the credibility it lost over the past eight years, said Muqtedar Khan, an international relations professor at the University of Delaware.

"You can argue that Obama's election has caught most of the world on the wrong foot, and so right now they are much more positively predisposed to the United States," Khan said, noting an international perspective that thought Americans' prejudices would prevent them from sending a black person to the White House.

You can also argue that he is full of s--t. The article certainly gives us no reason to believe that he knows what he is talking about.

Who is this guy? What is his area of expertise, that he can bloviate over how the world sees America? What are his associations? For that matter, since he is a foreigner, what is his country of origin? Is he a member of a terrorist group, for instance, like Sami Al-arian? And why are his vaporous musings printed above the fold in a Delaware newspaper?

Just asking.

Octuplets--should there be a law?

This woman is crazy, not to put too fine a point on it. She has certainly taken advantage of "the right to choose," although Gloria Steinem probably would not agree with her choice.

This is one of those instances when hard cases make bad law. The situation is deplorable. Her children's future looks bleak. The government's options are all bad. But meddling with the rights of women to conceive and bear children by legislating or regulating or harassing doctors would make matters worse.

Fortunately, very few women will be inspired by this woman's example. I don't think there are going to be too many imitators of a woman who can certainly be classified as a breeder, if anyone is.

Blogroll Amnesty Day or weekend, whatever

Jon Swift and a bunch of others have declared this weekend Blogroll Amnesty Day.

We little tiny blogs are supposed to link to five really really wee blogs that we really like and want to list on our blogroll.

Truthfully, I don't know of any little blogs because I don't know what the traffic of other blogs is, being obsessed with only my own traffic. But I do like and regularly read lots of blogs. I don't read blogs that don't agree with me politically; since I've already made up my mind, I find that skipping the insights of left-wingers saves time and keeps my blood pressure on an even keel.
I'm going to recommend two bloggers, since it's late at night and I'm tired. Maybe later I'll think of more.

My first pick is a fellow librarian who calls himself Akaky Bashmachkin, but I have always suspected this an alias stolen from Gogol. Anyway, he attended the same library school I did but managed to get out without totally muddling his brain, which is more than I can say for myself.

You've got to like a fellow who writes a line like this:

After all, Barack Obama probably doesn't hate white people no matter what 20-years in the pews of a racial separatist church suggests. It's just far harder to see a bunch of white people against ice and snow.

At least I do. But I'm breaking the rules, I don't believe he's small. I suspect he has more readers than I do. So what? A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

And so to bed.

You call that snow?

Just a normal Winter day in Albany, NY

Mother, English, Yiddish, being American

Both mother and uncle Moe were born in Russia and came to the US when they were small children. While Uncle Moe spoke of his Russian grandmother, Laya Fagel, Mother would never admit being born in Russia, even if cornered. Only by chance do I know where she was born; it says on my birth certificate: Pinsk, Russia.

I had to fill out a questionnaire in school which asked for parents' nationality. I asked mother what to write in this space and she said, "Put in American." Neither she nor Moe, her older brother, spoke with a hint of an accent. Mother, in particular, could have been employed by the BBC. She spoke full sentences in grammatically correct English. In fact, she said she decided to be a lawyer because everyone said she was "such a good talker."

She was also fluent in Yiddish, which she spoke to her parents. Bubbe and Zayde had heavy Yiddish accents, although Zayde did attend and successfully complete English classes in the Columbus public schools, according to a certificate I now have hanging on my wall. But Yiddish was what they spoke at home, which makes it even more remarkable how good an English speaker mother was.

I could speak Yiddish too, and used to read the Yiddish newspaper to bubbe occasionally, a skill which I have tragically lost. I can't read Hebrew very well either, which is another story.

Russian was the language of secrets in our house. When mother and bubbe didn't want me to understand what they were saying, they communicated in Russian. I found this frustrating, and so did my father, who was born in Youngstown OH and never spoke a word of Russian in his life. His parents came from Hungary, but they also spoke Yiddish. Dad didn't have an accent either, but then he grew up in the US in various places including Peoria and Denver.

Mother didn't make a show of patriotism, but she loved living in the USA, particularly in that most desirable spot in the world, Columbus, OH. When the whole family moved, in stages, to Bexley, OH, she liked that even better. When we drove her through posh neighborhoods in upstate New York or New Jersey, she conceded that they were almost as nice as Bexley. High praise, indeed.

grounded

 

I did a recent painting based on a photograph of my younger daughter. At the time she was grounded, confined to quarters, incarcerated, made to stay home. She was always being grounded, because what else could you do? She was always violating her curfew; the grounding was meant to improve her behavior. It had the same effect as telling a stream to run uphill--none whatever.

While she was grounded she sulked, read Harlequin romances, and ate lots of Slurpees purchased by me at the local 7-11 because I was sorry for her.

I took a photo of her once when she was grounded. I liked the way she looked in the photo. The painting does not look much like her, except for the long legs and big feet.

She grew up to be a very sweet, nice, intelligent person, but the stubbornest person I've ever met, until she had a baby, who is now seven. In this child she has met her match. He has her beaten in the stubborn sweepstakes.

 

Here is the original photograph.

Mother as a young woman

 

Here she is, with a nice-looking young man whom I can't identify. I know she had lots of boyfriends and loved to go out dancing. I like the dress, the hairdo and the smile. She was very proud of her legs and her small, shapely feet.

I inherited my love of shoes from her. She had dozens of pairs, in lots of colors. When I was a child I used to line the upstairs hall with them and play shoe store.

Sic transit gloria mundi

 

Ruins, Agrigento, Sicily, May 2008

Born too late

I wish I could wear something like this, but I am a couple of centuries too late. Apparently you can purchase Renaissance clothing from this website, but it doesn't exactly suit my present lifestyle--which features ye olde jeans and sweats. I am sorely tempted, though.

They sell everything you need to lead the Tudor lifestyle: clothing for men and women, shoes, chains of office, drinking implements, and last but not least, weapons. Isn't the Internet great?

Unidentified

 

This nice-looking young man (who?), with a confident smile, was photographed on July 25, 1932 (where?)according to the information written on the back if the picture. He looks happy and cheerful, standing there in the sunshine getting his picture taken, before I was born. I wonder who he was and what became of him. Probably he perished in Hitler's war machine, but I hope not.

Again--label your photographs!

When bubbe died, my cousin and I tried to bring order to her possessions. Her dresses, shoes and coats were easily given away. Linens, dishes, and silver were divided among us. There were only a few photographs, but one in particular had us scratching our heads. It was a formal group portrait. We decided that they were relatives of my grandfather, probably. But when we showed it to mother, she said, "Oh, those were some people who worked for papa."

Let me reiterate: label your photographs. Some day you and I will be gone, and someone will be staring at our pictures and trying to trace a family connection.

Michelle's gown

It looks like she stole the bedspread from the Lincoln bedroom.

Thingy

 

My decorator is called Will, as in Good Will, and it was there I got the above thingy, or whatchmacallit, or whatsit, for 2.00. Plus tax--my Good Will in in Pennsylvania. It's aboout 24 inches long.

I thought it might make a statement, or rather a Statement, if displayed in the right place. I haven't found the right place yet. Maybe there is no right place. I bought it because I like pictures of fruit, particularly grapes, because my family is in the wine business. They don't collect representations of grapes, but I do.

So call it ugly, if you will. But in the right place....

In memoriam

"Golden lads and lasses must, like chimney sweepers come to dust."

By happenstance, I found out that one of my old boyfriends had died. He was always a romantic figure to me, good-looking, smart and rebellious. He always did the unexpected. He wasn't exactly mad, bad, and dangerous to know, but close enough for southern Ohio. I broke up with him because I couldn't stand the ups and downs of a relationship with someone basically undependable. I don't even know if he realized I had broken up with him, because he kept coming in and out of my life. The last I saw of him was when we both graduated and he went hurtling into the world like a rocket. I heard of and from him once in a while afterwards, then I went off somewhere and lost touch with him. I always wondered what had become of him.

Well, he is dead, and has been for quite a while. That certainly answers the question of why he was not at our last reunion. But I was amazed to discover that this iconoclastic figure had ended up as a small-town school superintendent.

How I became a big reader

When I was four years old, it was determined that I had been hanging around the house too long, so my parents sent me to a pre-school run by two old ladies, Miss Louella and Miss Virgilia. They lived and did business in a formerly swanky neighborhood of Columbus, in a great old house with a turret that had a stained glass window on the landing. A pleasurable shiver of fear went through me when I went by this window. It was mysterious but exciting.

Miss L and Miss V taught me to set a table properly, to use napkin rings, to say "Yes please" instead of "yes," and "No thank you," instead of "no." They also taught me to read, a skill I learned rather quickly.

When my mother saw that I could read, she started me in school in the second grade, skipping first grade entirely. Mother believed that you shouldn't spend too much time in school, should get it out of the way, graduate from college and go to work as soon as possible. She herself had done this, never taking a summer off, zipping through high school at the age of 14 and graduating from law school before she was old enough to pass the bar exam. (You had to be 21.)

My father also got out of high school at the age of 15 and proceeded to Madison WI, where he went to college. His father was mad at him because they lived in Illinois and he could have attended the University of Illinois a lot cheaper.

I went to school which was very "progressive," which meant they didn't teach you much about anything except the triumphs of the Soviet Union, and let you do more or less what you wanted. Anything practical you wanted to know you taught yourself. For instance, I taught myself the alphabet because I wanted to look up things in the dictionary. Try looking up words if you don't know the alphabet. It's hard.

I emerged from this den of iniquity at the age of 11, when mother gave in and enrolled me in public school junior high. For some reason, perhaps a coin toss, I was placed in the eighth grade. The other kids were 13. Mother also made me wear braids and knee socks. Still, I had friends. I didn't mind junior high; I was in the glee club and practically the citywide spelling champion. I could have aced the spelling competition if I had not been dubious about the spelling of the word "acquaint." I knew there was a C in there but it didn't seem right somehow, so I left the C out. I've always felt bad about this, because within a nanosecond of spelling the word wrong I realized the C definitely belonged in the word.

After junior high came a new town, a new school, a departed father, and High School. When I tell you that I, at age 13, was the champion dork of Central Ohio, I am not exaggerating. I was 13 and a sophomore, alone and miserable and friendless.

So one day I picked up a copy of Pride and Prejudice and read it from cover to cover. It was so good I re-read it immediately. Then I read all the tripe in the school library, much of it consisting of stories of young girls or women who became interested in a career in photography, dance, the theater, or interior decoration while at the same time falling in love with a cute guy. Then I read all the works of P G Wodehouse that the public library---which never discarded a book--had on their shelves.

Ever since then I have had to have two lives going, my real one and the one in the book I was reading. I like to take refuge in a book for a couple of hours a day. If I don't have a book to read, and a stack of other books waiting to be read, I start feeling panicky.

Television, talking books, even music--they don't do it for me. I like all those things, but I need a real book. Hard-covered, paperback, clean, dirty, old or new, trash or masterpiece, I need a book waiting for me to read.

Customer service

All my interactions with Hammacher Schlemmer have been courteous and helpful. Every time I buy something from them, it does not do the job it was purchased to do, and I have to send it back. They accept returns willingly. Their customer service is a pleasure--polite, helpful, timely. The staff also speaks excellent American English.

The only problem is with the merchandise. Everything they sell is over-priced, unnecessary, or too expensive. I worry that the polite, helpful customer service staff will shortly be unemployed. I mean, who would buy that stuff?

Dell ought to hire the whole bunch en masse. It would be so nice to speak to someone whose English is comprehensible.

Will it ever be summer again?

 

A garden in Sicily

Mosaic seen in the ruins of a Roman villa, Sicily

 

Now there's a mosaic. Or part of one.

A mural at the Charleston airport

 

Bessie Coleman, aviation pioneer.

You've got to admire a guy like that

I mean Blago. I thought it was a smart move to appoint Burris. I also admire his spunk for sticking by his post. I seem to remember Bill Clinton responding to pressure to resign in the same way.

Suppose Blago is tried and found innocent. What then? I don't trust Fitzgerald, who made a big to-do about the Valerie Plame kerfuffle, spent tons of money, and put Scooter Libby in jail for, essentially, nothing. I don't trust the guy, and am surprised to see him still holding a government job. To me he seems like one of the pod people. Did anyone spot him disembarking from a spaceship lately? Or is he just a zombie?

I suspect he jumped the gun on Blago, and now needs extra time to figure out whether Blago used the office postage meter for personal business, or whatever other crime he can pin on the guy. Maybe he lied to somebody or other about Valerie Plame? Or Valerie Jarrett? Or Valerie Schmidlapp, queen of the cheerleading team at my old high school? Fitzgerald decides to prosecute someone and looks for a reason. He's creepy.

And now the Illinois Assembly in their purity and innocence are shocked--shocked! to find that corruption is taking place in Illinois politics! and recoil from Blago in dread that they will be tainted.

What a herd of independent minds!

My latest painting

 

This is the only one I ever finished to my satisfaction. Art class starts again next week.

New CIA boss stops inhumane practices

Waterboarding is a thing of the past.

The selection of Leon Panetta, who was Bill Clinton's chief of staff, was intended to tell Americans the era of waterboarding, warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary renditions and secret prisons was now over.

Don't worry, the miscreants will still suffer. Panetta will force them to listen to John Kerry's speeches.

Bits and pieces

Don't you feel a little depressed when you see a picture, say a wedding photo or a baby with a bow in her hair, for sale in a garage sale or thrift shop? I do. That's one reason I am scanning all the family pictures into my computer. To my future descendants: don't ever throw a cute picture of me away, or I'll put a hex on you. Ugly picture, okay, get rid of it. Always picture great-great-grandma (me) as a roaring, tearing beauty.

I saw a commercial warning the public to save energy by unplugging your cell phone charger. Boy, did that annoy me! The smug, smarmy self-righteousness of it. I felt like going out and burning a tire, just for spite. Take that, environment! Heat up, you stupid planet!

Every week I fill up another two bags of stuff and take it to the Good Will. But the stuff just keeps coming. You have to be vigilant or it will take over the house. My younger daughter confessed to me that she and her husband have two storage units. Their garage, where they parked their cars a couple of years ago, is now full of stuff which is threatening to invade their living quarters.

My basement is full of half-empty paint cans, left behind by the sellers of the house. Once upon a time, I would have carefreely (is there such a word?) thrown them away. Now I have to schedule a hazmat team to come and deal with them correctly.

The reason I don't have a dog is that I don't want to walk around the streets carrying a baggie full of doggy doo. That and the fact that Mr Charm won't let me get one.

One from my college days, long long ago:

 

That's me, second from the left.

Scanning

A lot of things are going on now that are rather upsetting, so to distract myself I've been scanning old photos. This is a really nice one of my younger grandson, who's a big boy of seven now.

 

Happy New Year!

 

And good sledding!