Quotes, URL's, Links And References-by:older Femmes, Butches, Ftms, Mtfs, Queer, Etc.

[sweetlady]

(y)



Garrison Keillor: Let the leader lead


By Garrison Keillor

Published: October 16, 2008


The Scripture reading in church Sunday gave me a jolt - Exodus 32, which refers to the Chosen People wearing earrings, men as well as women, and I twitched when the lector read it. Yikes! Moses got his ears pierced? What else didn't we know???


And then a bigger jolt. God is so furious at the C.P. for worshiping the golden calf (forged from their earrings) that He talks about consuming them with fire, but Moses talks Him out of it, which sort of dents one's faith in divine omniscience, does it not, the Lord taking a sharp turn like that? ("Oh, I hadn't thought about that - O.K., cancel the thunderbolt!")


But I didn't jump up in my pew and point this out - we like to keep things moving along in church, recite the Creed, confess our sins, pass the plate, sing the doxology, not stop for questions along the way - so I just brood over it, as I do about more and more these days. Walk at night down misty streets through yellow leaves and question everything and keep it to myself.


I let other people carry the conversational ball when it comes to religion, or politics.


I've known enough old bores to want not to be one of them. Old honkers with ratchety voices who hold everyone hostage and make their point 16 times and lay waste to the dinner hour.


Not me, dear hearts. As I write this, the sun is coming up over the Mississippi Valley, and in the orange swashes at the horizon is a long string of clouds that one could imagine are mountains.


It rises on people facing challenges far beyond anything I've known in my rackety life. A beautiful, cheerful woman of 26 has been handed a jagged diagnosis of cancer like a big, wet albatross on a necklace. A friend struggles with severe depression, slogging through the day, wishing the meds would kick in.


And then there is Patrick, whom I met on Saturday, a very bright boy who lies speechless on a gurney, a trach tube in his windpipe, a pump humming softly on a shelf below. His parents explain that he was stricken by a rare neuromuscular disease and that's all they say about that. They're both animated, buoyant, jokey, and Patrick smiles and raises his eyebrows - and suddenly one's own tiny troubles aren't worth mentioning.


The existence of human suffering seems to me to affirm the Christian faith. It's the sacred duty of the faithful to uphold the Patricks of the world and their heroic parents against the prevailing Darwinist forces, but a Patrick shouldn't be asked to sit by the roadside waiting for a kindly Christian motorist to stop - he is entitled to mercy as a basic human right, and it is merciful of Christians to expect government to carry out this duty.


The safety net has become seriously frayed, as the parents of the Patricks of America know very well, and now the sun has risen on an October day of pure blue sky and yellow and red boughs raised against it, and the day must be acknowledged. What a gorgeous life we lead, here in this gaudy forest, the smell of smoke and apples in the air, and three weeks to go before the election.


The American people are poised to do something that could not be imagined 10 years ago, or even five, which is to vote for the best man regardless of his skin color and elect him president.


The campaign against him is not one that anybody will point to with pride in years to come. It is a long trail of honking and flapping and traces of green slime, as if a flock of geese had taken up residence in the front yard.


But Barack's cool poise in the face of blather is some sort of testament to American heart and humor. The man has walked tall and his wife has turned out to be the brightest figure in the whole political parade, an ebullient woman of quick wit and beautiful spirit.


Bravo, Michelle.


Onward, America. We've all seen plenty of the worst - the sly cruelty, the arrogant ignorance, the fascination with trivia, the cheats, the weaselish and piggish and the buzzardly - but we can rise above it if we will only recognize a leader when one comes along and have the sense to let him lead.


Garrison Keillor is the author of a new Lake Wobegon novel, "Liberty."


http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/16/opinion/edkeillor.php


(y)




Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.



Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:o:o


;)



Enough with all the discouraging words about the economy (see "The latest blues reviews"). Let's close out another tumultuous week on a positive note with some voices from the glass-is-half-full side of the aisle.


http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2008/10/the-latest-blues-reviews.html



Paul Graham, of startup incubator Y Combinator: "A recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I'm not claiming it's a particularly good time either. The truth is more boring: the state of the economy doesn't matter much either way. If we've learned one thing from funding so many startups, it's that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders. The economy has some effect, certainly, but as a predictor of success it's rounding error compared to the founders. ... But for any given team of founders, would it not pay to wait till the economy is better before taking the leap? If you're starting a restaurant, maybe, but not if you're working on technology. Technology progresses more or less independently of the stock market. So for any given idea, the payoff for acting fast in a bad economy will be higher than for waiting."


http://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html



http://ycombinator.com/



Don Dodge at The Next Big Thing: "Now is a great time to start a company. Why? Because great people are available to join you, VCs are loaded with cash, and office space is available cheap. Everything is cheap and readily available in a recession. ... Expectations are lower during bad times so it is a good time to be in development mode, building a product, getting an audience, and starting a tiny revenue stream. Customers are willing to try new things to save money in bad times. When things are going great they don't want to take risks on a tiny startup. If you can save them money in bad times, they are happy to deal with a startup. Go for it!"


http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/10/start-a-company-in-a-recession-absolutely.html




Warren Buffett, the world's richest man: "The financial world is a mess, both in the United States and abroad. Its problems, moreover, have been leaking into the general economy, and the leaks are now turning into a gusher. In the near term, unemployment will rise, business activity will falter and headlines will continue to be scary. So ... I've been buying American stocks. This is my personal account I'm talking about, in which I previously owned nothing but United States government bonds. (This description leaves aside my Berkshire Hathaway holdings, which are all committed to philanthropy.) If prices keep looking attractive, my non-Berkshire net worth will soon be 100 percent in United States equities. Why? A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful."


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/opinion/17buffett.html?_r=1&oref=slogin



http://www.forbes.com/2008/03/05/buffett-worlds-richest-cx_mm_0229buffetrichest.html



(y)



Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(p)(l)(p)



Fall Foliage in Focus

Live webcams nationwide

Celebrate the beauty of fall. Take a few minutes to check out these live webcams that showcase fall foliage in all its glory. Reminder: these are live shots, so check it out during the day........



Acadia National Park, Maine – 2 cameras

http://hazecam.net/acadia/widezoomed.html





Glacier National Park, Montana – 6 cameras

http://www.nps.gov/glac/photosmultimedia/webcams.htm





Pennsylvania foliage – 4 cameras

http://www.fallinpa.com/fallinpa/fallFoliage.jsp





Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky – 1 camera

http://www.nature.nps.gov/air/WebCams/parks/macacam/macacam.cfm





Indiana Leaf Cams – 5 cameras

http://www.in.gov/visitindiana/leafcam/





EarthCam Fall Foliage Cams – 100s of cameras nationwide:

http://www.earthcam.com/features/fallcams/2008/



(l)(l)






Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.



Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:)



In Quotes lets you compare speech and interview quotes from various political and government figures on various topics. Browse by subject or hit the Spin button for extra randomness. The U.S. version starts with Obama and McCain by default, but the appropriate cast of characters shows up on versions for the U.K., Canada and India. (The U.K. default start page, at least at the moment, is pretty amusing. comparing Prime Minister Gordon Brown with opposition leader David Cameron and indicating that as far as Google knows, Cameron has never said anything of note on the subjects of China or Afghanistan.)


http://labs.google.com/inquotes/



:coffee:





Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)



Q U O T E D


"We immerse the individual in a virtual world to allow him or her to vividly reexperience the episode in a safe and controlled way. In Virtual Iraq, a soldier with PTSD recounts what happened, and a therapist seated before a computer then creates an environment that captures the essential elements of the episode. Say the soldier was driving in a Humvee convoy when the vehicle in front of him blew up. By donning special goggles, he can see a reenactment: To the left he sees a desert landscape; straight ahead, the Humvee. The simulation is done on a vibrating platform, so he feels the humming of the vehicle's motor or the rumble of the exploding IED [improvised explosive device]. We also pipe in sounds and smells: the call to prayer in Arabic, diesel fumes, even the body odor of the guy next to him. The simulation starts off relatively tame. Then, over the course of several weeks, the therapist monitors the patient's response and more elements of the episode are introduced until the individual can finally go through an intensely vivid recreation of it without being overpowered by terror."


http://www.defense-update.com/products/v/VR-PTSD.htm




-- USC research scientist Albert "Skip" Rizzo on the therapeutic use of virtual reality


http://discovermagazine.com/2008/oct/17-curing-the-wounds-of-iraq-with-virtual-therapy


(l)(l)






(f)


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:D



You won't get formal credits, but Stanford is making some of its most popular computer science and electrical engineering courses available online for free. The first batch of programming includes lecture videos, syllabi, handouts, homework, and exams for courses under the headings of Introduction to Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Linear Systems and Optimization.

http://see.stanford.edu/



(f)




Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:)



Scrolling slices of space:

http://cas.sdss.org/dr6/en/tools/scroll/





Robotic Plants:

http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200810/200810160007.html






Maze Frenzy: Free online game

Click on the red dot and guide it through the maze. Watch out for the moving objects. Go off the path and you have to start all over. If you make it through, see how fast you finish.

http://www.mazefrenzy.com/






Green Guide: It's not hard being green

National Geographic offers this comprehensive site to help guide you to a greener lifestyle.

http://www.thegreenguide.com/






100 Best Places to Live : 2008 Money magazine list

What small city tops the list? Which places have the most affordable homes? The most singles? The skinniest residents? It's all here, with a methodical catalog of elements that makes each place a great place to live.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bplive/2008/index.html






Top 10 World Series Moments: Sports Illustrated Photos

Not sure how the series is going to go this year, but there have been quite a few memorable World Series moments in the past.

http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/gallery/featured/GAL1145633/1/index.htm






Unusual, very quiet places to stay alone.......


http://www.brigidine.org/Brigidine/preparePage.do;jsessionid=59EC43AFB85EE43350B03CA2 1AE2A8AB


http://www.brigidine.org/Brigidine/343/348/Iver+Heath.html


http://www.brigidine.org/Brigidine/264/266/Czestochowa.html


http://www.brigidine.org/Brigidine/259/256/Lugano.html







How to build a Web server the size of a business card:

http://hackaday.com/2008/09/25/web-server-on-a-business-card-part-2/








Winners of the 2008 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/index.jsp?id=win2008







For better or worse, the Twitter election stream:

http://election.twitter.com/






Science Raps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL3lhm6oy5I






The Dictionary of Carny, Circus, Sideshow & Vaudeville Lingo:

http://goodmagic.com/carny/index.htm








Google's 10 to the 100th initiative, looking for world-changing ideas that benefit the maximum number of people:


http://www.project10tothe100.com/index.html


http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/project-10100.html








The readers of Stack Overflow offer up their favorite programmer cartoons:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorite-programmer-cartoon






A couple of games that should stimulate dendritic growth: Light-Bot and Loops of Zen:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Coolio_Niato/light-bot


http://www.kongregate.com/games/ahnt/loops-of-zen







;) The perfect accessory for the windowless office:

http://pipeline.gnr8.biz/index.php?task=home&id=92






:coffee::coffee:



Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(f)




http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2008/10/19/style/t/index.html#pageName=19samurai



(y)




:coffee::coffee:




Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.



Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)



http://www.bentocorner.com/roller/page/bentoblog?entry=chicken_katsu_don



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katsudon



http://food.3yen.com/2007-01-04/chicken-katsu-don/



(l)(l)




:coffee::coffee::coffee:




It's Fall!

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)(l)





http://www.chooseyouritem.com/classics/files/109000/109054.html



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_Polara



http://www.dodgepolara.com/



(l)(l)(l)(l)





Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.



Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)




http://www.hazecam.net/mtwash.html



(f)




Have a lovely Friday and weekend.

SL

[sweetlady]

:geek: :geek:





Music lovers might be inspired to come up with their own:

http://magazine.jamsbio.com/2008/10/30/riff-offs-10-songs-that-resemble-other-songs/







And speaking of music: Top 10 songs from beyond the grave include songs by Tupac, Jimi Hendrix, Notorious B.I.G. released posthumously.

http://www.prefixmag.com/features/2pac-bob-marley-elliott-smith-jimi-hendrix-joe-strummer-marvin-gaye-notorious-big-queen-roberta-flack-the-beatles-various-artists/top-10-posthumous-songs-from-beyond-the-grave/22617/







Buddhist temple made of recycled beer bottles:

http://greenupgrader.com/4262/one-million-beer-bottles-later-and-its-a-buddhist-temple/







Daylight Savings and Your Heart:

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/359/18/1966






Finger Socket Set:

http://gizmodo.com/5070955/finger-socket-set-tight-bolts-and-compound-fractures





Popular Films recreated in Legos:

http://www.cinematical.com/photos/popular-movies-recreated-in-lego/1125515/






Fascinating archive of presidential campaign commercials:

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/







Cartoons about the economic malaise:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/11/03/slideshow_081103_tryingtimes?viewall=true#showHead er






For you gamers who are in the spirit: Best Video Game Pumpkins & Jack-O-Lanterns:

http://blog.jjgames.com/2008/10/best-video-game-pumpkins-jack-o.html





Best Costumes for Geek or Nerd:

http://chris.pirillo.com/2007/10/26/top-5-halloween-costumes-for-a-geek-or-nerd/






Best URL shrinking tools:

http://lifehacker.com/5068945/five-best-url-shrinkers







Tech Layoff Tracker:

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/10/the-wiredcom-te.html






"When Flash Goes Evil: 10 Online Nastimations for your Perverse Pleasure" includes an animation of Sarah Palin in the Oval Office, complete with "Maverick" movie poster and, when you look out the window, a dinosaur roaming around the White House lawn.


Yikes!! Palin one is SCARY!!

http://www.webupon.com/Web-Design/When-Flash-Goes-Evil-10-Online-Nastimations-for-Your-Perverse-Pleasure.314667







Redistribute This!

http://cosmicvariance.com/2008/10/27/redistribute-this/







A house that can walk away from trouble:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3235261/Walking-house-can-escape-floods-or-unruly-neighbours.html






Famous art works recreated in sausage:

http://www.russiatoday.com/features/news/31971







1,000-mph cars:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7685049.stm







Podcasts from Oxford University:

http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/






Save the Sea Kitten?:

http://www.peta.org/Sea_Kittens/






Bizarre broccoli packaging:

http://bread-and-honey.blogspot.com/2008/10/wtf-broccoli.html






The Poladroid image maker:

http://www.poladroid.net/






Designate, when you need help making a decision among multiple options:

http://www.godesignate.com/






Phone spam filtering equipment:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7682111.stm






A test of your hue IQ:

http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=77





Think Geek Toys:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/cubegoodies/9b78






Richard McMahan's Mini Museum of tiny art reproductions:

http://www.cofc.edu/halseygallery/minimuseum/index.html







Microsoft-Cray personal supercomputer:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1589







StopForwarding.us, the coward's approach to telling friends they're sharing too much:

http://www.stopforwarding.us/









Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

;)




Bill Tancer, general manager of research at Hitwise, has a new book out called "Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters," and as best I can tell from the summaries and reviews, he reaches the unsurprising conclusion that in aggregate, our online searches reflect our current interests and that search trends can reveal things about us as a society. Unfortunately, it's also territory dotted with correlation-causation traps like the one Tancer falls into in citing a factoid about porn and social networking sites. Tancer says the hunt for porn, which 10 years ago made up 20 percent of Web searches, now accounts for a mere 10 percent, while searches involving social networking sites have soared. "As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased," Tancer told Reuters, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn. "My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don't have time to look at adult sites."


http://www.hyperionbooks.com/titlepage.asp?ISBN=1401323049&SUBJECT=business



http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20080916/wr_nm/internet_book_life_dc



Well, maybe. Or maybe porn surfing is a newbie novelty that fades in interest. Or maybe porn is easier to find, requiring fewer searches. Or maybe people figured out that Googling "hot naked chicks" leads directly into an embarrassing thicket of pop-up come-ons and malware infestations (or so I've been told). Or maybe the hard-core fans of hard-core have all moved on to peer-to-peer sources.



Questionable assumptions aside, the book is apparently full of info-nuggets ranging from the predictable (searches regarding tropical storms have increased since Katrina) to the surprising (apparently a lot of people are frightened of ceiling fans) to the disheartening (election-related searches are overwhelming focused on images and personal trivia, with issues far behind). Given the human tendency to see patterns in chaos, I suspect the desire to connect some of the dots is irresistable. Scatter enough of these sparkling factoids across the sky and you're bound to start seeing constellations.



http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080916-researcher-social-networking-trumps-porn-in-web-searches.html




:o





Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(y)




It's been quite a week for Silicon Valley company announcements that go beyond selling tech. Just a couple of days ago, Google and Yahoo, along with Microsoft, announced a code of conduct relating to freedom of speech and expression in their overseas dealings. (See Google, Yahoo and Microsoft unite) Now, says BoomTown's Kara Swisher, a new coalition of tech leaders and venture capitalists -- including those from Google and Apple, which previously contributed to the fight against Proposition 8 -- has formed to fight against the California initiative that seeks to ban same-sex marriage. (See And one more thing - No on Prop. 8) Other notable leaders who have signed on: Yahoo's Jerry Yang, eBay's Pierre Omidyar, Adobe's Chuck Geschke, former eBay exec Steve Westly, former Cisco chairman and CEO John Morgridge. The group is running a full-page ad in the main section of tomorrow's Mercury News that will say, in part:

We are opposed to Proposition 8 because it would change our state constitution to take away rights from one group of people. It would set our state, and our country, back in the fight for fundamental fairness and equal rights.


From a business standpoint, some might say that because there is quite a large number of people who have signed on to this ad, no one is truly sticking his or her neck out. That it might be a little bit "safer" now to take this stand when one is among many peers. What will advertisers and customers who agree with Proposition 8 do -- stop doing business with all the companies this new coalition represents? Still, it's refreshing and laudable that this group has been formed, and quite encouraging that so many valley leaders have signed on. Says Jerry Yang: "Silicon Valley has always been an example for the rest of the country of how diversity and openness help to drive innovation and value creation. This divisive measure is the antithesis of those values that make Silicon Valley so unique."



http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2008/10/google-yahoo-and-microsoft-unite.html



http://kara.allthingsd.com/20081030/silicon-valley-leaders-say-no-to-proposition-8/



http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2008/10/and-one-more-thing-no-on-prop-8.html



http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/10-30-2008/0004915350&EDATE=




(y)






Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(y)




The morning after the night before.


Barack Obama is the favourite to win the US general election tomorrow, but what will be the mood if he does? And what if he doesn't? Five writers imagine what might happen next

The Guardian, Monday November 3 2008



http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/11/02/us-election-460x276.jpg




Danit Brown

The day after the election, I saw Barack Obama standing in the produce aisle of my local grocery store, wearing an "I voted" sticker and holding a cantaloupe. Outside, his wife waited in a station-wagon pointed north. "What's he doing in Michigan?" my husband wanted to know. "Where are his bodyguards?" Already, someone had driven through our town and taken down all the signs promising change, requisitioning them for fuel for a bonfire so large that the planes taking off and landing at the airport two towns over were going to be able see it. Even now, we could catch faint whiffs of burning posterboard whenever the A/C kicked on. "Change, my ass," said the cashier who rang up our bottled water, first-aid kit and the masking tape we were going to use to keep our windows from shattering. "I hear they're closing the border to Canada." In the produce aisle, Obama set down the cantaloupe and picked up a tomato. We all pretended not to see. I imagined walking up to him, taking his hand, saying, "Come to my house. Stay with me. We have cable and a foldout sofa, and a gun for protection." I imagined his fingers, warm and dry, in mine. I liked him. He was handsome: tall, thin, a father of girls. In the voting booth, the day before, I'd pictured White House interns flashing their thongs, the leaders of nations peeling grapes and swooning, the Oval Office a den of love. How could they help it? I was miles and miles away from Washington, my finger poised over the lever, and on the other side of the privacy curtain, my husband - short and white and blotchy - was coughing politely: I'd already taken too long. Behind us, the line of voters stretched out the door, across the parking lot. I thought I was the only one, but later, on the news, they'd reported I wasn't, that thousands of us had turned in blank ballots, unable, finally, to cast a vote for a world whose rules we didn't know. "Who does that?" my husband had muttered, his nostrils flaring the way they do when he lies. "Beats me," I said. "Beats me."

• Danit Brown is the author of Ask For A Convertible, a collection of short stories.


Hari Kunzru

Here in New York, we're still reeling. The victory celebrations had a tinge of mania to them. For one night, we allowed ourselves to believe that it was the beginning of a new era. Post-racial! Post-feminist! Post-culture wars! Post-Bush! Grumpy Grampy and Caribou Barbie didn't win through, at least not here. But the real undercurrent of hysteria wasn't the thwarted assassination attempt by that splinter group from the Michigan Militia, but the unwelcome knowledge that we've entered the Post-Boom. America's world dominance is over. There'll be no new buildings in NYC for at least 10 years. Brooklyn thirtysomethings are resigning themselves to being in debt for ever. Upper East Side pre-schools are offering Chinese as standard. The bank back-office staff are carrying their cardboard boxes to the door and the hipsters are rubbing their hands in anticipation of a revival of the golden era of downtown - cheap rents, cheap drugs, empty spaces to hold parties. Yes, once the yuppies retreat there shall be punk poetry and DIY experimental sound-art for all. One vast pop-cultural reenactment - every nuance of No-Wave studied and recreated. We're only a month in, and Obama's decision to raise tariffs to "save the economy" hasn't really hit home. There's no money for social programs (we gave it all to bail out Goldman Sachs, remember?) so we can kiss goodbye to free healthcare, or indeed any social protection for the poor. It's dog-eat-dog time, and the big dogs have the best lobbyists. The president's got a timetable to leave Iraq, but economists are beginning to point out that America only got out of the last Depression by having a really big war. Lend-lease 2.0? i-Munitions? It's definitely the way to go. All we need is an enemy. The ragheads didn't really work out. But hey, things are hotting up in the Russian border states. It's a long-shot, but it might just work ...

• Hari Kunzru is the author of three novels, including My Revolutions, and the short story collection Noise. His debut novel, The Impressionist, won the Betty Trask award and the Somerset Maugham award.


Kevin Brockmeier

As late as November 3, no one could have imagined that the election would culminate the way it did. Certainly I couldn't.

After all, who would have guessed that the worst accusations lobbied against John McCain by Barack Obama's most fervent supporters, and against Barack Obama by John McCain's, would turn out to be true? That Barack Obama was indeed a covert Muslim terrorist - and also, simultaneously, a radical black Christian - whose true agenda was to disenfranchise white Americans, institute a broad-based socialist agenda of government hand-outs and immense taxation, then hand the whole nation over to the terrorists and retire to an island in the Caribbean? That John McCain was in fact a doddering old fool - and also, simultaneously, a vicious ultra-conservative mastermind - whose actual goal was to deprive middle-class Americans of healthcare, job opportunities and all their hard-earned social freedoms before dying a year into office and allowing Sarah Palin to assume the mantle of power, appointing Dick Cheney her vice-president and puppet-master? And that it would all come to light on the afternoon before election day, in a fashion so conspicuous and indisputable?

It was a dispiriting turn of events, to say the least.

Of course, most Americans, horrified by the choice with which they suddenly had been presented - a terrorist on one ticket and a dictator on the other - and unable to fathom voting for the Libertarians or (God forbid) the Greens, chose to stay home, away from the polls on November 4. But as for the rest of us, and I number myself among them, what were we to do? In the privacy of the voting booth, how were we to make our decision?

I'm sure you'll recall the chaos of election night, as poll workers across the nation counted by hand the tens of millions of write-in candidates whose names marked our ballots. It was several weeks before every vote was recorded and the tabulations checked and rechecked.

As the whole world now knows, the winner, by some 10,000 ballots, was America's most beloved movie personality, Tom Hanks. Mr Hanks is neither a radical black Christian Muslim terrorist nor a near-dead senile ultra-conservative, but a patriot. He has announced that he is prepared to accept the responsibilities of high command and is scheduled to be inaugurated on January 20 which, according to Entertainment Weekly, should give him just enough time to finish his voiceover work for Toy Story 3 before assuming the duties of office.

We are all wondering who he will name as his vice-president. I'm rooting for Julia Roberts. Julia Roberts or maybe Will Smith. I'll be happy either way.

In any case, I am certain Mr Hanks will get the economy, the housing crisis and that nasty business in the Middle East straightened out in no time. I, for one, am looking forward to four years of peace, prosperity, and delightful Pixar productions, the kind with those hysterical fake out-takes at the end - you know the ones I mean. I am filled with hope for the future.

• Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia. He has won three O Henry awards for short stories.


Harry Shearer

November 5, 2008, was the best of times and the worst of times for Senator John McCain. Eking out a surprise electoral-college victory in the presidential election he was favoured to lose, McCain was taking a victory lap around his Sedona, Arizona, compound when, complaining of chest pains, he texted his wife Cindy. What turned out to be his final message was: "Sell Budweiser stock."

Within hours, vice-president-elect Sarah Palin was being sworn in as president-elect, a peculiar ceremony, since the new president doesn't take office until January 20. Still, the theatrics at Anchorage's IceDome were impressive. The cast of Disney's Polar Bears on Ice skated a specially choreographed number to a disco-ised version of Hall & Oates' Sarah Smile, after which president-elect Palin signed a premature proclamation according full rights to the unborn, including the right to vote. Early interwomb polls that evening gave Palin a huge lead in the 2012 election.

• Harry Shearer provides the voice for Mr Burns and other characters on the Simpsons. He is the author of the novel Not Enough Indians.


Paul Maliszewski

We awoke still tired. We had, my wife and I, stayed up too late, watching returns and taking in all the commentary, even though we vowed before turning on the television, no commentary tonight, we're just going to tune in periodically, then we'll do something else, read or maybe watch a movie. We were interested in the results, in the actual numbers, but during the months leading up to the election, we consumed our fill of comment and interpretation and what passes for analysis and then declared moratoriums on the sorry lot - The News Hour, Election Center, Ballot Bowl, the best political team on television, if they did say so themselves. We twisted the coverage shut like a tap. What need did we have for additional information? We were not, after all, undecided. Our pronouncements, however, lacked teeth, and will power. So there we were, on the sofa, facing the commentators, listening, weighing, smirking. Wolf Blitzer advised that the only way to watch was with a laptop at one's side. Someone else said something about narrative, about message, about running a highly disciplined campaign. That is so true, I said. Hadley looked over at me, narrowing her eyes and nodding. We were in profound agreement and we continued to watch.

Our baby got us up at six. Sometimes he sleeps an extra hour, it just depends, on what we're still not sure. As Hadley pumped Elliot some milk for the day and then readied for work, I played with him on the floor. Obama won, I told him, handily. Obama, I said again. It was a name I imagined he liked the sound of. I said the name once more, elongating the syllables this time, enunciating. He, too, had seen some of the coverage, looking up from his blanket as the candidates delivered snippets of speeches. I had explained it to him, who was who and what they were about. I laid it all out, not in baby talk but in complete sentences spoken sweetly and with a little silliness. I try to talk to Elliot in sentences, I guess, so he hears whole thoughts. This was his first election. It was a good year to be born. Tomorrow, I thought, he will be six months old.

• Paul Maliszewski's collection of essays, Fakers, will be published by The New Press in January.

• These stories are taken from Five Dials magazine, published monthly by Hamish Hamilton. Each issue can be downloaded for free at

hamishhamilton.co.uk/fivedials





http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/03/us-elections-barack-obama-mccain




(y) Third one was my favorite.......



:coffee::coffee:





Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

<:o)<:o)



TroopTube, the DoD-approved video sharing site for military personnel:

http://www.trooptube.tv/






A Living Wage Calculator from Penn State's Poverty in America Project:

http://www.livingwage.geog.psu.edu/


http://www.povertyinamerica.psu.edu/






Akinator, the Web Genius:

http://www.devinettor.com/aki_en/






Expressive robotic heads:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1085059/Pictured-The-robot-pull-faces-just-like-human-being.html






One-Minute Languages:

http://oneminutelanguages.com/






British Cartoon Archive:

http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/





Power Moby Dick:

http://www.powermobydick.com/





Teddy Bear Centaurs?

http://www.steiff.co.jp/2007w_ltd/037351_seet.html







The Association of Equipment Managers extensive collections of pictorial warning signs for every sort of industrial danger you can imagine:

http://www.aem.org/technical/PictorialDatabase/





Time magazine's picks for the 50 best inventions of the year:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1852747_1854493,00.html







23andMe's retail DNA test:

https://www.23andme.com/






(l)(l) Give me my Aeron Chair any day:

https://www.23andme.com/






Honda's walking assist device:

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20081107005135&newsLang=en






The Strong Museum of Play:

http://www.museumofplay.org/index.html


http://www.museumofplay.org/NTHoF/NTHoF.html


http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/11/07/stick.hall.fame.ap/index.html






:o USB digital endoscopes?

http://www.bookofjoe.com/2008/11/behindthemedspe.html







An experiment with Google Suggest:

http://upload.gaiatools.com/files/googlesuggest_1.png





PopSci's Best of What's New 2008:

http://www.popsci.com/bown/2008






For writers who need some external discipline to get the words flowing, Write or Die from Dr. Wicked:

http://lab.drwicked.com/writeordie.html

"Prod in productivity"...??





A $6,232 Kindle book:

http://gizmodo.com/5080619/anti+dealzmodo-the-6200-kindle-book






Street With A View:

http://www.streetwithaview.com/index.html





From Mark Newman at the University of Michigan, some revealing cartographic versions of the election's red-blue distribution:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/






Remote cloaking technology:

http://arxivblog.com/?p=698






The One Velociraptor Per Child Project:

http://velociraptorz.org/






Zombie Baseball:

http://armorgames.com/play/2515/zombie-baseball






A visualization of wine flavors:

http://tashian.com/wine-flavors/






Exactitudes, a photographic examination of group identities:

http://www.exactitudes.com/index.php






From the New Yorker, "Rock, Paper, Scissors: How we used to vote:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/13/081013fa_fact_lepore?currentPage=all





(ap) Build your own fighter jet?

http://gizmodo.com/5074207/guy-builds-f+35-fighter-jet-on-his-own






Make Beliefs Comix, where you can roll your own:

http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/Comix/






City of Memory, a story map of New York:

http://www.cityofmemory.org/map/index.php







Stack Overflow, a collaboratively edited Q&A site for programmers, just out of private beta:

http://stackoverflow.com/


http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/09/15.html






Jedi mind-trick lessons:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/article2798657.ece






Dropbox, now in open beta:

http://www.getdropbox.com/






NetFlix Origami:

http://www.netflixorigami.com/






Play With Spider:

http://www.onemotion.com/flash/spider/






From CBS, all the episodes of "Twin Peaks" online:

http://www.cbs.com/classics/twin_peaks/






Networked toasters that burn news updates into the bread:

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/09/11/wacky_toaster/





(l) Wanderlusting?

http://awesome.goodmagazine.com/features/011/Wanderlust/






;) No, you can't smoke it:

http://www.yankodesign.com/2008/08/20/grass-balls-no-you-cannot-smoke-it/






Homemade LED luminaria:

http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/lantern






:D Turbulence visualized:

http://discovermagazine.com/photos/13-turbulence-how-to-visualize-the-invisible






Plan59.com, a museum of 1950's illustrations:

http://www.plan59.com/main.htm




(y)


Webslug, helping you measure the world-wide wait!

http://www.webslug.info/





Geeky handbag:

http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/d12bag






Sampling of job interview questions from Google and Microsoft:

http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/08/15/the-best-job-interview-questions-from-microsoft-google%e2%80%a6-and-ikea/






PC magazine's Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites:

http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/0,1206,l%253D230657%2526a%253D230658,00.asp





A remarkably detailed portrait of the London skyline drawn from memory by autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire after a single helicopter ride over the city:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-553755/See-amazing-picture-autistic-artist-drew-London-memory-single-helicopter-trip.html





;) Door chain?

http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/defendius/






Easy peanut butter:

http://www.skforlee.com/independent_work/easy_pb.html







Fun with a portrait shot: http://www.photofunia.com/





Name trends:

http://nametrends.net/






;) Here's a guide to apologizing when you're not sure what you did wrong:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=553






Remember pencils?

http://www.brandnamepencils.com/index.shtml




:)





Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


Sweetlady & WTB
:walkdog:

[sweetlady]

;)





Q U O T E D


"They hate everybody and we love everybody, and that's pretty much the difference. We even love Microsoft. This is our core strategy, love."


-- Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff says an open heart is the key to beating Microsoft and winning affection in the cloud computing market.


http://venturebeat.com/2008/11/03/salesforcecom-on-microsoft-they-hate-everybody/




:doh:


What is going on with the quote field being inserted into the location field? It's been that way since Wednesday.........






Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)







http://jpeterman.com/product~cat~110201~sku~WDR%201732.asp




Made me smile:

http://jpeterman.com/product~cat~110211~sku~WAC%203164.asp




Chuckle du Jour:

http://jpeterman.com/product~cat~110207~sku~WBZ%201931.asp




Nice but not in this lifetime:

http://jpeterman.com/product~cat~110208~sku~NLG%201926.asp




http://jpeterman.com/product~cat~130~sku~MOW%201001.asp



http://jpeterman.com/


http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/09/15/349146/index.htm




(l)




Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.



Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:s:s



Is there an older RN chasing you?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking




http://www.oag.state.tx.us/victims/stalking.shtml




http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Group/BussLAB/stalkinghelp.org/stalk4-legaldef.htm




:o:o



Take your power back......wherever you are....Report that lady and have her license taken away!!!



Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)(l)(l)




I really liked this one.......



November 16, 2008

Preoccupations


It May Be a Good Job, but Is It ‘Good Work’?

By DANIEL GOLEMAN


ONE hot summer day many years ago, I boarded a bus heading up Madison Avenue with a driver whom I still vividly remember. A middle-aged man with a charming manner, he entertained his passengers with a lively monologue on the places we were passing and their history, alerts of great sales, his reviews of movies at theaters we passed and highlights of museum exhibits.


The driver’s name, I later learned, was Govan Brown. He was a local legend; by the time Mr. Brown retired in 1988, he had received more than 1,400 letters of commendation (and not a single complaint), and his retirement party was attended by hundreds of loyal passengers on the M101 route. Mr. Brown’s remarkable outgoingness, it turned out, was part of a personal mission: as deacon of a Baptist church, he viewed his passengers, too, as a “flock” whose needs he tended.


I was recently reminded about my encounter with Mr. Brown by Howard Gardner, the psychologist at Harvard best known for his influential theory of multiple intelligence * that there are a range of abilities that can lead to success in life beyond math and verbal skills. Mr. Gardner cited the account of Mr. Brown (which begins my book “Emotional Intelligence”) as an example of what he calls “good work” * a calling that combines excellent performance, expresses one’s ethics and offers a pleasing sense of engagement. That is, the kind of job we’d all love to hold.


Lacking any of these three ingredients, a job or profession may be great in other ways, but it does not make the cut for good work. For instance, I know the head of a global environmental organization whose role expresses his values quite well, but he does not feel engaged or challenged. In search of just such engagement, a physician I met recently had given up his medical practice to head an auto racer’s pit crew, his real passion.


Mr. Gardner has been hard at work himself leading several research projects that seek to illuminate the structure of such good work, laboring in tandem with the psychologists William Damon of Stanford and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at the School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. (Their book “Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet” was published by Basic Books in 2001; a follow-up, edited by Mr. Gardner, “Responsibility at Work,” appeared in 2007, from Jossey-Bass.)


Their first wave of research entailed in-depth interviews with more than 1,200 American workers in nine occupations, including geneticists, journalists, actors and philanthropic grant-makers. Current plans involve parallel research efforts in Mexico and Italy, among other countries.


“We found that people working in very challenging professions or settings who were technically excellent might find their work difficult unless it was also important to their mission in life,” Mr. Gardner said.


An unexpected finding was that joy was a crucial ingredient of good work. Mr. Gardner said: “Take teachers in American inner cities. They may be good technically and feel deeply about their responsibility to their students. But if they don’t find joy in their work, they burn out; it’s just too hard. You have to build into hard jobs like that supports and rewards, so that what was initially meaningful and engaging will continue to be so.”


A study at M.I.T. of graduates who had midcareer breakdowns, Mr. Gardner said, found that although they had become professors or upper-level executives at engineering firms, often in their 40s, they found themselves asking, “Why am I doing this?”


“They’d been on a treadmill,” Mr. Gardner said, “where they had never been able to step back and ask, ‘Is this important to me, is it meaningful?’ ”


There are, Mr. Gardner said, three questions people can ask about their jobs to evaluate their good-work level: Does it fit your values? Does it evoke excellence; are you highly competent and effective at what you do? Does it bring you that subjective barometer of engagement, joy?


MR. GARDNER’S advice for anyone being forced to find a new job, setting out on a career or hankering for a midcareer change is: “Decide what you really like to do and what you would like to spend your life doing. That’s more important than deciding what particular job to hold, because the employment landscape is changing radically and quickly. Then ask, ‘Where could I carry that out?’ and be very flexible about the milieu and venue * but not about what you get a kick out of and can be good at.


“And then, third, if you have any choice over where to work, when you’re considering a job, go there and talk to people. Ask yourself, ‘Is this the kind of place where I can see myself in others?’ You might make five times more money at one place, but does it reflect who you are and who you want to be? Are my colleagues people I’d admire or people I’d prefer to avoid?”


In the early years of my career, I used to say that I’d like to retire by age 40. Mr. Gardner’s insights into good work lead me to realize that what I really meant by “retire” was to be engaged in meaningful efforts that I enjoyed and that drew on my best skills. At the time, much of my day job as a science writer (including for The New York Times) began to feel routine. At that point, I found more joyful labor largely outside my job, in side projects like helping to organize a benefit for the homeless. In those days, although I was good enough at my work, and often engaged, I eventually felt that it did not express the full range of my values. My work life was about 30 percent “good” by Mr. Gardner’s standard, and 70 percent not so good.


Over the years, now that I have become an author and lecturer, that ratio has been shifting: I now find that far more * but by no means all * of what I do approaches that magic mix of excellence, ethics and engagement. And that, I realize, reflects a shift in how I judge my career * in terms of a new metric for “success”: not status or fortune, but rather what proportion of my efforts qualify as good work.



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/jobs/16pre.html


(l)(l)(l)(l)(l)





Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(f)(f)



http://www.myspace.com/adelelondon



"Chasing Pavements" rocks........I heard it first on SNL within the past month or two......for some reason her voice and style reminds me of someone in the UK music world but can't quite place who....yet.


(f)(f)




Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)



http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2008/11/16/style/t/index.html#pageName=16osakaw



"Kuidaore" or "eating your way to the poor house" - I never heard of that before or of takoyaki (supposedly delicious octopus balls that are really fried, puffy dumplings....), where the author of this article says he "may be slipping into a coma" after eating six of them. Yikes!

I really got it when Osaka is "Chicago", if Tokyo is the New York of Japan.

Enjoy!



(f)(f)



Have a lovely rest of your week!




Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(f)




Very Cool URL du Jour:

http://www.videosurf.com/




VC URL du Jour #2:

http://www.fotonauts.com/

"Interesting, Wikipedia of photos".......





51 Japanese Characters:

http://www.51japanesecharacters.com/





Bacon and egg scarf:

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?ref=sr_list_2&listing_id=16474729






The official Monty Python channel on YouTube:


http://uk.youtube.com/user/MontyPython







http://www.thatsmyface.com





http://www.wardefence.com/




:coffee::coffee:




Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(f)



December 3, 2008

Books of The Times


The Days of Their Lives: Lesbians Star in Funny Pages

By DWIGHT GARNER



THE ESSENTIAL DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR

By Alison Bechdel


Two years ago Alison Bechdel seemed to come out of nowhere with a graphic memoir, “Fun Home,” that knocked a lot of people, myself included, right over. You didn’t have to go quite as far as Time magazine, which called “Fun Home” the single best book of 2006, to recognize Ms. Bechdel’s achievement. Her memoir, about coming of age as a lesbian in her secret-filled family’s rural Pennsylvania funeral home, was moody, astringent, microscopically observed. “Fun Home” belongs on that same small, high shelf of comic books where “Maus” dwells.

Plenty of readers, however, needed no introduction to Ms. Bechdel. For more than 20 years she has been the creator of “Dykes to Watch Out For,” a weekly comic strip, printed mostly in college-town alternative newspapers, about the fractious lives and loves of an articulate group of lesbians in a city that resembles Minneapolis. The strip is sexy, sometimes in an R-rated way * imagine “Doonesbury” with regular references to sex toys * and it’s political, in a feisty, lefty, Greenpeace meets PETA meets MoveOn.org kind of way. Ms. Bechdel’s lesbians wanted to impeach the first George Bush.

Taken together, these comic strips don’t have the tightly coiled impact of “Fun Home,” but in some ways they offer greater consolations * they’re looser, more funny, and they offer the chance to watch a group of very appealing women grow and change (and struggle to have better sex) over the course of more than two decades. Ms. Bechdel calls her strips “half op-ed column and half endlessly serialized Victorian novel,” and that’s not far off. I suspect that, over the years, “Dykes to Watch Out For” has been as important to new generations of lesbians as landmark novels like Rita Mae Brown’s “Rubyfruit Jungle” (1973) and Lisa Alther’s “Kinflicks” (1976) were to an earlier one.

As Ms. Bechdel observes in her introduction to this new anthology, “The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For,” it was not especially easy to be openly lesbian back in 1983, when she published her first cartoon. “We had no ‘L Word,’ ” she writes. “We had no lesbian daytime TV hosts. We had no openly lesbian daughters of the creepy vice president. We had ‘Personal Best,’ and we liked it.”

If you are, with this volume, coming to Ms. Bechdel’s comic strips for the first time, you’ll notice a few things pretty quickly. For one, sex happens. There are a lot of naked cartoon women here * gloriously naked cartoon women: fat, thin, young, old, black, white. They are real women, many with ample armpit hair and zits on their shoulders. These lesbians aren’t Bambi, Betty or Veronica.

For another, you’ll pick up on how literate this strip is. It’s not just the dropped-in references to writers like Camille Paglia, Andrew Sullivan, Katha Pollitt, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault. In the stacks of a library, one character confesses: “I’ve always fantasized about library congress. Let’s do it in the HQ 70s.” What’s more, many of the characters work in a feminist bookstore called Madwimmin Books, always under threat from two chain stores Ms. Bechdel refers to as “Bounders Books and Muzak” and “Bunns and Noodle.” You’ll also come to realize that lesbians have been, over the last 25 years, on the cutting edge of just about every cultural trend in this country. They were among the first foodies, even if most went the vegetarian route. (Ms. Bechdel’s very first strip mentions a “seaweed-avocado pâté.”) And on the environment? Eighteen years ago Ms. Bechdel was writing about compost heaps and the threat posed by nonbiodegradable plastic trash bags. Ms. Bechdel adores her characters and gently satirizes them at the same time. They sometimes read books with absurd titles like “The Wheat-Free Guide to Creative Visualization in Co-Dependent Past-Life Relationships.” They go to workshops called “Parthenogenesis With Gemstones.” They develop crushes on women with names like Amethyst. Criticism, Ms. Bechdel understands, is a form of love.

The most important thing to know about “The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For,” however, is how deeply amusing it is. It crackles with one-liners. Log Cabin Republicans, one character intones, dream about “skinny-dipping at the Bohemian Grove with George Will.” During sex play, one woman says: “I’ll be the Lexus lesbian with a flat tire, and you be the surly biker who stops to help.” When a boy with two mommies leaves the house for a soccer game, one says to him, “No kicking.” His reply: “Not even the ball?”

After seeing “Brokeback Mountain,” one character delivers this sardonic monologue: “Who wouldn’t prefer a ruined life with a few pristine moments to a regular, banal, disappointing life? Imagine the cinematography if Ennis and Jack had been able to live together. Sweeping vistas of their couples therapist’s office.”

And here’s Ms. Bechdel’s characters’ running patter after seeing “Thelma and Louise”:

“What was the real message? The only way for women to be free in this culture is to be dead?”

“Yeah. Why couldn’t they have escaped into Mexico?”

“Where they would consummate their love for one another, open a guerrilla training camp for women and start fomenting armed resistance against rapists.” These characters fret about the insignificance of their “little counterculture lives,” especially when terrible things are happening in the world, and Republicans are in the White House. But Ms. Bechdel makes their lives resonate in ways that do not seem insignificant at all. Real things happen here: births, deaths, adoptions, affairs, breakups, commitment ceremonies, civil unions.

Ms. Bechdel began her strips all those years ago, she writes here, partly to provide “an antidote” to the culture’s image of gay women as “warped, sick, humorless and undesirable.” Boy, has she succeeded. Her crazy lesbians seem saner than the rest of us, and beyond beautiful.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/books/03garner.html


(y)(y)




Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


Sweetlady & WTB

[sweetlady]

:)



http://www.genuardis.com/ifl/grocery/Holiday#iframetop



(f)





Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.



Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)


http://wwwdelivery.superstock.com/WI/223/1660/PreviewComp/SuperStock_1660R-18722.jpg




http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2419/2119245857_5efaa6eed6.jpg




(l)

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmd_blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/santa-fe-christmas.jpg




http://www.guidebookamerica.com/news/2007/santa_fe_might_change_your_life/goluminarias.jpg




(l)(l)

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2175/2096336614_daefc5d771.jpg



Peace:

http://www.losalamospeaceproject.us/peace-wreath.jpg




(f)



Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

(l)



How to survive the lean times:

Essay - December 01, 2008 by Jane Goetze


In 1976, circumstances beyond my control forced me into temporary homelessness. For six months, I alternated between relying on the couches of friends and camping out in my car.

With the proper gear, it's surprising how well you can fend for yourself. Of course, it helps to live in a region of the country with a tourist economy; in fact, if it weren't for the wealthy tourists who head for Aspen, Colo., Park City, Utah, and Sun Valley, Idaho, we might all be homeless.

If you're worried about losing your home now -- not to mention your job -- we in the West have more alternatives than the hemmed-in folks in the Midwest and on the East Coast. In the Rocky Mountains, not only is there an abundance of resort parking lots to choose from -- plus restaurants with hot water in the bathroom -- but when things get really bad, we can always head for the backcountry and a nice stand of trees. We don't even have to walk there, although if you can no longer afford health care insurance, walking might not be a bad idea.

Today, thanks to the free-market spirit of the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service, there are hundreds of miles of new roads we can cruise in search of a temporary homestead. True, the roads are potholed, dusty and built primarily for the gas, oil and mining industries. But as taxpayers, we paid for these roads so we're partial owners.

If you cruise these bumper-rattling roads at night, you can avoid the thumper trucks and oil rigs and pitch your tent in a sheltered spot in the trees, overlooking a creek that might even run clear. If anyone threatens to call the feds to throw you off their heavily subsidized claim, you can say, "The federal government wiped out my nest egg. So where is my bailout?” You can point out that thousands of others may soon be joining you in the wake of the stock market and home-mortgage fiasco. Before long, tent cities may crop up all over the interior West in a touching tribute to the Hoovervilles established by unemployed World War I vets during the Great Depression.

With millions of acres of public land on the development block, the intermountain West can absorb many more dispossessed people than Central Park or Seattle. You just have to be quick about it: Grab your claim before the rest of the multinationals do.

Some of us were responsible with our money and lived within our means. Unlike our government, we didn't go deeply into debt to build an overseas empire. Some of us didn't even buy SUVs. And now, through no fault of our own, the trickle-down theorists who have been duping us for the past 40 years have managed to enrich themselves and their cronies at our expense. But the ones who orchestrated this mess probably won't lose their livelihoods – they have parachutes to soften a landing.

Whatever happens, we Westerners are well equipped for hard times. Lots of us own camping gear and we're in pretty good physical shape because we love to hike, hunt, bike and ride horses in the outdoors. Even the threat of federal agents showing up in the middle of night with searchlights and shotguns doesn't intimidate us -- or at least that's what some of us tell ourselves.

Here's the plan: When winter sets in, and the temperatures become too much for a minus-20-degree-rated down bag to bear, we can head for the parking lot of the nearest four-star hotel. There, security is less likely to spot the sleeping bag and backpacking stove in the back of the car.

If you're a single woman like me, I recommend a hotel with a well-lit parking lot. The lights may interfere with sound sleep, but they will provide a greater sense of security. In the morning, you can trot down the halls and dine on some of the leftovers from room service deliveries. Don't be greedy. Wait until the guests have finished their breakfasts and left their carts outside their doors for the underpaid maids from Mexico and Honduras to pick up. You will be rewarded for your patience. The food is usually delicious, if no longer warm, and if you avoid the sausage, you can keep your cholesterol in check.

Jane Goetze is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). She is currently housed near Logan, Utah.



http://www.hcn.org/wotr/how-to-survive-the-lean-times?utm_source=wcn1&utm_medium=email


(y)




Happy Holidays.

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:o:o


;);)


Heavy Bedding

A bed made up to look like a flattened cardboard box — no, it’s not some un-P.C. attempt at satire. Inspired by a trip to New York City, the Dutch designers Peggy van Neer and Erik van Loo created this printed cotton duvet cover (about $78 for a double) and matching pillow cases ($11 each) and named the set Le Clochard, after the French word for ‘‘bum.’’ The duo will donate up to 40 percent of the sales to organizations that help get youngsters off the streets and back in school. Says van Loo, ‘‘It would be a bit strange to reference homelessness on a duvet if you weren’t doing something good with the money.’’ Up next: linens that mimic pavement. For more information and to order, go to:

www.le-clochard.com


http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2008/12/07/style/t/index.html#pageName=07cardboard




:s Yikes! Talk about feeling grateful for all kinds of things this holiday season. I'll stick with my soft flannel sheets thank you very much.


:coffee::coffee:





Feliz Navidad!

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(f)



Edward H. Johnson, an associate of inventor Thomas Edison, had the first Christmas tree bulbs made in 1882, when he was vice president of the Edison Electric Light Company. New York's newspapers dismissed his 80 hand-wired red, white and blue electric incandescent light bulbs the size of walnuts as a publicity stunt. A perceptive Detroit newspaper reporter picked up the story, though, and Johnson is now regarded as the Father of Electric Christmas Tree Lights. By 1900, businesses started stringing up Christmas lights behind their windows. Ordinary people couldn't afford to replace their candles with Christmas bulbs until about 1930. Now, of course, candles are more expensive than electric lights.

Our Switchables design depicts the big, old-fashioned C9-1/4 bulbs that Baby Boomers will remember adorning the outsides of our houses in our childhoods.


http://www.curiocityonline.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=547


(l)



:coffee::coffee:



Peace.

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)




http://www.skymaps.com/



http://www.astroviewer.com/



(l)(l)(l)



:coffee::coffee:




Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)



View our planet through the beautiful images taken by the Landsat-7 satellite - and most recently, the Terra Satellite's Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER). This gallery of images uses the visceral avenue of art to convey the thrilling perspective of the Earth that satellites provide to the viewer.

http://earthasart.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.htm




(f)




:coffee::coffee:



Have a delightful Saturday!


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[DAYWALKER]

:o:o


;);)


Heavy Bedding

A bed made up to look like a flattened cardboard box — no, it’s not some un-P.C. attempt at satire. Inspired by a trip to New York City, the Dutch designers Peggy van Neer and Erik van Loo created this printed cotton duvet cover (about $78 for a double) and matching pillow cases ($11 each) and named the set Le Clochard, after the French word for ‘‘bum.’’ The duo will donate up to 40 percent of the sales to organizations that help get youngsters off the streets and back in school. Says van Loo, ‘‘It would be a bit strange to reference homelessness on a duvet if you weren’t doing something good with the money.’’ Up next: linens that mimic pavement. For more information and to order, go to:

www.le-clochard.com (http://www.le-clochard.com)


http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2008/12/07/style/t/index.html#pageName=07cardboard




:s Yikes! Talk about feeling grateful for all kinds of things this holiday season. I'll stick with my soft flannel sheets thank you very much.


:coffee::coffee:





Feliz Navidad!

SL & WTB :walkdog:

Interesting.
:hmm2:
However, it does teeter on satire whether they aimed for that or not.
(c)
I like the fact they are donating a chunk to a good cause.
B-F

:[

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)(l)



Being a veterinarian, I had been called to examine a ten-year-old
Irish Wolfhound named Belker. The dog's owners, Ron, his wife
Lisa, and their little boy Shane, were all very attached to Belker,
and they were hoping for a miracle.


I examined Belker and found he was dying of cancer. I told the
family we couldn't do anything for Belker, and offered to perform
the euthanasia procedure for the old dog in their home.


As we made arrangements, Ron and Lisa told me they thought it would
be good for six-year-old Shane to observe the procedure. They felt
as though Shane might learn something from the experience.


The next day, I felt the familiar catch in my throat as Belker 's
family surrounded him. Shane seemed so calm, petting the old dog
for the last time, that I wondered if he understood what was going
on. Within a few minutes, Belker slipped peacefully away.


The little boy seemed to accept Belker's transition without any
difficulty or confusion. We sat together for a while after Belker's
Death, wondering aloud about the sad fact that animal lives are
shorter than human lives. Shane, who had been listening quietly,
piped up, 'I know why.'


Startled, we all turned to him. What came out of his mouth next
stunned me. I'd never heard a more comforting explanation.


He said, 'People are born so that they can learn how to live a good
Life -- like loving everybody all the time and being nice, right?'
The Six-year-old continued, 'Well, dogs already know how to do
that, so they don't have to stay as long.'


Live simply.


Love generously.


Care deeply.


Speak kindly.


Remember, if a dog was the teacher you would learn things like:


When loved ones come home, always run to greet them.


Allow the experience of fresh air and the wind in your face to be
pure Ecstasy.


Take naps.


Stretch before rising.


Run, romp, and play daily.


Thrive on attention and let people touch you.


Avoid biting when a simple growl will do.


On warm days, stop to lie on your back on the grass.


On hot days, drink lots of water and lie under a shady tree.


When you're happy, dance around and wag your entire body.


Delight in the simple joy of a long walk.


Be loyal.


Never pretend to be something you're not.


If what you want lies buried, dig until you find it.


When someone is having a bad day, be silent, sit close by, and
nuzzle them gently.



(l)(l)(l)(l)



:coffee::coffee:




Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:D



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsHtNZzpzcI



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dunham



:D




:coffee::coffee:



"Unless we make Christmas an occasion to share our blessings, all the snow in Alaska won't make it "white". "
- Bing Crosby


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)(l)



Webcams and AMAZING YouTube Videos: Christmas Lights:



:D:D AMAZING Perth Christmas Lights 2008:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeEFNhKIrKU

(Turn speakers on too)





Other very cool videos:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W7xj5f-eCs&feature=related



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE_sIIfTzXs&feature=related




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMqoXedPEfQ&feature=related





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szLmAPW39uE&feature=related





(y)(y) Control the lights at this home with webcams:

Includes a circuit layout!!

http://www.komar.org/cgi-bin/christmas_webcam




http://www.ryanschristmaslights.com/webcam.php





GOLD MINE (of links)!!!:

http://www.webcamplaza.net/cams/christmas.html





Enjoy! (f)(f)





"It's Christmas Day!" said Scrooge to himself. "I haven't missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can."
- A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

(l):walkdog:(l):walkdog:(l)



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUtPKbMwnRo




(l):walkdog:(l):walkdog:(l)




:coffee::coffee:




Greasoned Seasonings!! ;)

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:D



http://politicalirony.com/2008/11/30/robin-williams-on-obamas-election




:D




Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.

Sweetlady and WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(f)



December 22, 2008

Op-Ed Contributor, NYTimes


Hard Times, a Helping Hand

By TED GUP

Canton, Ohio


IN the weeks just before Christmas of 1933 * 75 years ago * a mysterious offer appeared in The Repository, the daily newspaper here. It was addressed to all who were suffering in that other winter of discontent known as the Great Depression. The bleakest of holiday seasons was upon them, and the offer promised modest relief to those willing to write in and speak of their struggles. In return, the donor, a “Mr. B. Virdot,” pledged to provide a check to the neediest to tide them over the holidays.


Not surprisingly, hundreds of letters for Mr. B. Virdot poured into general delivery in Canton * even though there was no person of that name in the city of 105,000. A week later, checks, most for as little as $5, started to arrive at homes around Canton. They were signed by “B. Virdot.”


The gift made The Repository’s front page on Dec. 18, 1933. The headline read: “Man Who Felt Depression’s Sting to Help 75 Unfortunate Families: Anonymous Giver, Known Only as ‘B. Virdot,’ Posts $750 to Spread Christmas Cheer.” The story said the faceless donor was “a Canton man who was toppled from a large fortune to practically nothing” but who had returned to prosperity and now wanted to give a Christmas present to “75 deserving fellow townsmen.” The gifts were to go to men and women who might otherwise “hesitate to knock at charity’s door for aid.”


Whether the paper spoke to Mr. B. Virdot directly or through an intermediary or whether it received something in writing from him is not known.


Down through the decades, the identity of the benefactor remained a mystery. Three prosperous generations later, the whole affair was consigned to a footnote in Canton’s history. But to me, the story had always served as an example of how selfless Americans reach out to one another in hard times. I can’t even remember the first time I heard about Mr. B. Virdot, but I knew the tale well.


Then, this past summer, my mother handed me a battered old black suitcase that had been gathering dust in her attic. I flipped open the twin latches and found a mass of letters, all dated December 1933. There were also 150 canceled checks signed by “B. Virdot,” and a tiny black bank book with $760 in deposits.


My mother, Virginia, had always known the secret: the donor was her father, Samuel J. Stone. The fictitious moniker was a blend of his daughters’ names * Barbara, Virginia and Dorothy. But Mother had never told me, and when she handed me the suitcase she had no idea what was in it * “some old papers,” she said. The suitcase had passed into her possession shortly after the death of my grandmother Minna in 2005.


I took the suitcase with me to our log cabin in the woods of Maine, and there, one night, began to read letter after letter. They had come from all over Canton, from out-of-work upholsterers, painters, bricklayers, day laborers, insurance salesmen and, yes, former executives * some of whom, I later learned, my grandfather had known personally.


One, written Dec. 19, 1933, begins, “I hate to write this letter ... it seems too much like begging. Anyway, here goes. I will be honest, my husband doesn’t know I’m writing this letter... . He is working but not making enough to hardly feed his family. We are going to do everything in our power to hold on to our house.” Three years behind in taxes and out of credit at the grocery store, the writer closed with, “Even if you don’t think we’re worthy of help, I hope you receive a great blessing for your kindness.”


Another letter came from a 38-year-old steel worker, out of a job and stricken with tuberculosis, who wrote of his inability to pay the hospital bills for his son, whose skull had been fractured after he was struck by a car.


One man wrote: “For one like me who for a lifetime has earned a fine living, charity by force of distressed circumstances is an abomination and a headache. However, your offer carries with it a spirit so far removed from those who offer help for their own glorification, you remove so much of the sting and pain of forced charity that I venture to tell you my story.”


A mother of four wrote, “My husband hasn’t had steady work in four years ... . The people who are lucky enough to have no worry where the next meal is coming from don’t realize how it is to be like we are and a lot of others... . I only wish I could do what you are doing.”

Another letter was from the wife of an out-of-work bricklayer. “Mr. Virdot, we are in desperate circumstances,” she wrote. They had taken in her husband’s mother and father and a 10-year-old boy. Now the landlord had given them three days to pay up. “It is awful,” she wrote. “No one knows, only those who go through it. It does seem so much like begging. ”


Children, too, wrote in. The youngest was 12-year-old Mary Uebing. “There are six in our family,” she wrote, “and my father is dead ... my baby sister is sick. Last Christmas our dinner was slim and this Christmas it will be slimmer... . Any way you could help us would be appreciated in this fatherless and worrisome home.”


The wife of an out-of-work insurance salesman added a postscript to her letter, one not intended for her husband’s eyes: She had just pawned her engagement ring for $5.

Also in the suitcase were thank-you letters from people who had received Mr. Virdot’s checks. A father wrote: “It was put to good use paying for two pairs of shoes for my girls and other little necessities. I hope some day I have the pleasure of knowing to whom we are indebted for this very generous gift.”


That was from George W. Monnot, who had once owned a successful Ford dealership but whose reluctance to lay off his salesmen hastened his own financial collapse, his granddaughter told me.


Of course, the checks could not reverse the fortunes of an entire family, much less a community. A few months after one man, Roy Teis, wrote to B. Virdot, his family splintered apart. His eight children, including a 4-year-old daughter, were scattered among nearly as many foster homes, and there they remained for years to come.


So why had my grandfather done this? Because he had known what it was to be down and out. In 1902, when he was 15, he and his family had fled Romania, where they had been persecuted and stripped of the right to work because they were Jews. They settled into an immigrant ghetto in Pittsburgh. His father forced him to roll cigars with his six other siblings in the attic, hiding his shoes so he could not go to school.


My grandfather later worked on a barge and in a coal mine, swabbed out dirty soda bottles until the acid ate at his fingers and was even duped into being a strike breaker, an episode that left him bloodied by nightsticks. He had been robbed at night and swindled in daylight. Midlife, he had been driven to the brink of bankruptcy, almost losing his clothing store and his home.


By the time the Depression hit, he had worked his way out of poverty, owning a small chain of clothing stores and living in comfort. But his good fortune carried with it a weight when so many around him had so little.


His yuletide gift was not to be his only such gesture. In the same black suitcase were receipts hinting at other anonymous acts of kindness. The year before the United States entered World War II, for instance, he sent hundreds of wool overcoats to British soldiers. In the pocket of each was a handwritten note, unsigned, urging them not to give in to despair and expressing America’s support.


Like many in his generation, my grandfather believed in hard work, and disdained handouts. In 1981, at age 93, he died driving himself to the office, crashing while trying to beat a rising drawbridge. But he could never ignore the brutal reality of times when work was simply not to be had and self-reliance reached its limits. He sought no credit for acts of conscience. He saw them as the debt we owe one another and ourselves.


For many Americans, this Christmas will be grim. Here, in Ohio, food banks and shelters are trying to cope with the fallout from plant closings, layoffs, foreclosures and bankruptcies. The family across the street lost their home. From our breakfast table, we look out on their house, dark and vacant. Multibillion-dollar bailouts to banks and Wall Street have yet to bring relief to those humbled by need and overwhelmed by debt. Already, the B. Virdot in me * in each of us * can hear the words of our neighbors.


Ted Gup, a professor of journalism at Case Western Reserve University, is the author of “Nation of Secrets.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/opinion/22gup.html



(*)(*)





Happy New Year!

Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

;)



http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/12/20/fashion/20081220-street-feature/index.html




:D




(f)

Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)(l)(l)




"We read to learn, to strenthen our personality, to judge by ourselves, tohave pleasure, to discover new worlds,to escape from reality.There are so manyreasons why we read that life without reading would be like living in a world ofshadows where the reality is close to us but we are unable to understand it. Myteacher used to say "no reading, no living".
— Dario Gomez Escudero, Warsaw



"I read The New York Times for information. I read books because I want my soul to be touched. Some writers express things I feel but which I cannotexpress. I read for the beauty of the language. I do have an all time favorite E.L. Doctorow's "The Book of Daniel". I also love Philip Roth, John Updike, Colm Toibin. I'm always reading something.....It is not a hobby, but breathing!"— Nadia Kamolz, Germany



".....that doesn't completely explain my desire, my need to read.It's something about creating, maintaining, and exploring an internal world,plus feeding an insatiable curiousity about the world, plus getting knowledge tofill in the gaps. Life without reading would have been only half a life,terrible and unimaginable."— Charles, Slough, UK



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"Reading is like making love -- one of the few activities in this technology-drenched existence in which we can participate without some gadget involved. Even exercising these days is rarely done without an iPod attached to one's ears. Reading, on the other hand, is intimate. Whether one reads forpleasure, laughter, education, escape, exploration, exorcisement, knowledge,entertainment, philosophy . . . whatever the reason, he/she will alwaystranscend the very thing advertisers and telecommunication and computer companies are forever trying to lure us from: being human." — Joe McLarte, Los Angeles


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"Reading takes me away from the problems of the ordinary world, into aworld that where if problems exist, they have solutions and endings. All romantic stories have happy endings, all tragedies do not-murders are always solved. Nearly everyone gets their due and justice is served. I read non-fictionand fiction alike-history and biography are roads into another time and person's life, while fiction creates a world I can briefly inhabit. I learnand grow when I read."— Mary Hilton, Norway





l“I really think it’s the age at which you find that book that you reallyidentify with that determines the rest of your reading life, The younger you arewhen you do that, the more likely you’re going to be a serious reader. Itreally is about finding yourself in a book.”
- Sherman Alexie



I started reading when very, very young and have developed a deep passion forbooks since. I can't imagine a world without the freedom to read what I want.Veritatem dies aperit.Time discloses the truth.



(l)(l)






Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l) (f) (l) (f)



Hidden in a collection of historic buildings at the gates of Edinburgh castle, James Thomson’s seven theatrical and decadent suites are perfect for those looking to stay in the most indulgent and magical of settings * the perfect antidote to bland hotels. Lavishly decorated and antique-filled, these suites scream romance with a capital R!

http://www.thewitchery.com/home.html






http://www.roomforromance.com/





http://www.lafayettenyc.com/





"Tenthouse"??

http://www.rockwatersecretcoveresort.com/site/accommodations/tenthouse_suites.html

http://www.rockwatersecretcoveresort.com/media/images/headers/header08.jpg





http://www.sugologone.it/inglese/hotel.htm





http://www.theivyhotel.com/default.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1




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(f)


SL