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

[sweetlady]

Hi everyone!

I'm starting this thread to provide a forum for quotes, favorite URLs, favorite films, books, ANY thoughtful review of some movie, book, quote or other reference. Link to the actual reference is appreciated! Let's start a Butch-Femme favorite ARTS thread here!

If there are favorite photos/artwork in the gallery, please note it here in the threads.(f) (f)

Love, Peace and White Light,
(k) (k) Sweetlady(k) (k)

[sweetlady]

My quote for today:

"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face"
-Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962)

Have a lovely weekend friends,

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

[sweetlady]

M. Degas Teaches Art & Science At Durfee Intermediate School
Detroit, 1942

He made a line on the blackboard,
one bold stroke from right to left
diagonally downward and stood back
to ask, looking as always at no one
in particular, "What have I done?"
From the back of the room Freddie
shouted, "You've broken a piece
of chalk." M. Degas did not smile.
"What have I done?" he repeated.
The most intellectual students
looked down to study their desks
except for Gertrude Bimmler, who raised
her hand before she spoke. "M. Degas,
you have created the hypotenuse
of an isosceles triangle." Degas mused.
Everyone knew that Gertrude could not
be incorrect. "It is possible,"
Louis Warshowsky added precisely,
"that you have begun to represent
the roof of a barn." I remember
that it was exactly twenty minutes
past eleven, and I thought at worst
this would go on another forty
minutes. It was early April,
the snow had all but melted on
the playgrounds, the elms and maples
bordering the cracked walks shivered
in the new winds, and I believed
that before I knew it I'd be
swaggering to the candy store
for a Milky Way. M. Degas
pursed his lips, and the room
stilled until the long hand
of the clock moved to twenty one
as though in complicity with Gertrude,
who added confidently, "You've begun
to separate the dark from the dark."
I looked back for help, but now
the trees bucked and quaked, and I
knew this could go on forever.
***************************************
From WHAT WORK IS by Philip Levine © 1992.

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

[sweetlady]

Lorelei

The stones of kin and friend
Stretch off into a trembling, sweatlike haze.

They may not after all be stepping-stones
But you have followed them. Each strands you, then

Does not. Not yet. Not here.
Is it a crossing? Is there no way back?

Soft gleams lap the base of the one behind you
On which a black girl sings and combs her hair.

It's she who some day (when your stone is in place)
Will see that much further into the golden vagueness

Forever about to clear. Love with its chisel
Deepens the lines begun upon your face.

***************************************
From THE COLLECTED POEMS OF JAMES MERRILL by James Merrill © 2002.

Have a lovely Sunday,

Kindest Regards,
(f)(k) Sweetlady(k) (f)

[sweetlady]

April 22, 2004, New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/22/opinion/22FRIE.html

Excerpts from Friedman's column:
"The bottom line: we are actually in the middle of two struggles right now. One is against the Islamist terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, and the other is a competitiveness-and-innovation struggle against India, China, Japan and their neighbors. And while we are all fixated on the former, we are completely ignoring the latter. We have got to get our focus back in balance, not to mention our budget. We can't wage war on income taxes and terrorism and a war for innovation at the same time."

"And what is the Bush strategy? Let's go to Mars. Hello? Right now we should have a Manhattan Project to develop a hydrogen-based energy economy — it's within reach and would serve our economy, our environment and our foreign policy by diminishing our dependence on foreign oil. Instead, the Bush team says let's go to Mars. Where is Congress? Out to lunch — or, worse, obsessed with trying to keep Susie Smith's job at the local pillow factory that is moving to the Caribbean — without thinking about a national competitiveness strategy. And where is Wall Street? So many of the plutocrats there know that the Bush fiscal policy is a long-term disaster. They know it — but they won't say a word because they are too greedy or too gutless."

Whew! Friedman does it again quite succinctly. His columns are always provocative. He doesn't like Bush which is one reason why I read his columns.

Respectfully,
(f)(f)Sweetlady(f)(f)

[sweetlady]

A Great Love Story About Resistance: "November Moon" (1985)

I wish there were more movies like this one. Opening in Alsace-Lorraine before the Second World War, we follow the struggles of two women, one of whom is Jewish, and their families as they resist the German occupation. As their love ever deepens in the face of horrible oppression, we learn not only how deception can be honorable but the price of loyalty. This is not a very explicit movie nor is the print in pristine shape when they transferred the film to DVD, but it is a wonderful story very unlike many of today, particularly in the way that others not only accepted but defended their love. (l) (l)
Director: Alexandra von Grote.


(k) (k) Sweetlady(k)

[sweetlady]

Laughing, running, barefoot through the light-years
wish I may
wish I might
play hide and seek with you tonight.
However I wonder what you are.
Love-star-crossed lover, baby
You go you way and I go mine
Star-crossed lover
Time goes one way
While love remains and life goes on.
You be you
and I'll be me:
Star-crossed once in love, we
in our crystal stellar destiny
never were
and always will be.

Sweetlady, copyright, 12/2/1980

[sweetlady]

Building up my life around you babe
was never meant as right.
Because my life is mine alone
and I should keep my goals in sight.
Yet, if those plans are you or with
or by or in your life of preciouis time
how can I turn and find my mind
and stop this love-sick rhyme?

My time and energy I'd give, to one
I'd give me all, but how can I feel
that you'd feel then same
that you'd help me should I fall?

The reasons keep my minds secure
from being indepentently sure; you;d love me outside the sack.

Priorities are Astaire steps,
with you at me sky being shares and has as one
when my fears are gone.

Love,
Sweetlady(k) (k) (l) (l) (l)

[sweetlady]

"Mark Twain said, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightening and the lightening bug."

Anyone interested in other quotes? Maybe contribute a few? (f)

Love,
(k) (k) Sweetlady(k) (k)

[sweetlady]

Keeping the Forces of Decrepitude at Bay
By DAPHNE MERKIN Published: May 2, 2004
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/magazine/02BEAUTY.html

The Nose Knows
By S.S. FAIR Published: May 2, 2004
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/magazine/02NOSE.html

Unnatural Selection
By MARY TANNEN Published: May 2, 2004
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/magazine/02SKIN.html

Tonic Youth
By MARY TANNEN Published: May 2, 2004
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/magazine/02RECIPES.html

And now it's time for a nice bubble bath, facial and foot massage.
<sighs>

Peace,
(k) (k) Sweetlady(k) (k)

[sweetlady]

(~) (~) (~) (~) Gentle break during my writing today:
"Mrs. Brown" released in 1997. (BBC Films) Grieving widow Queen Victoria (played imperiously by Judi Dench,) withdraws into sadness for years, until plainspoken manservant John Brown (Billy Connolly) disrupts her mourning. Their friendship grows, resulting in personal and political ramifications for both. Funny, exquisitely shot and featuring sparkling performances, Mrs. Brown brilliantly portrays the world's most powerful woman behind an empire and the man who helped her live again. Outstanding and entertaining.

Ah, Judi should have received another Academiy Award, but this time for Best Actress, in addition to her Best Supporting role in "Shakespeare in Love".(l) (l)

She and Vanessa Redgrave are such favorites.

Peace,
(k) (k) Sweetlady(k) (k)

[sweetlady]

A darling on the film festival circuit, "Journey to Kafiristan" not only charts a physical journey from Switzerland to Afghanistan, it also explores the voyage of sexual self-discovery that writer Annemarie Schwartzenbach (Jeanette Hain) and researcher Ella Maillart (Nina Petri) embark on at a time when, as the saying goes, love like theirs dared not speak its name at that time.
Starring: Jeanette Hain, Nina Petri
Director: Donatello Dubini
Genre: Foreign Language & Int'l
Format: Widescreen
Language: German
Subtitles: English

Anyone seen it?

Peace,
(l) Sweetlady(k)

[sweetlady]

Laurent (Alain Chabat) thought he knew his wife, Loli (Victoria Abril), quite well. Chronically unfaithful, Laurent believes Loli is happy and will be hurt by news of his infidelities. But when a truck breaks down in front of their home and its owner, a female plumber (Josiane Balasko, who also directed this French film), asks to use the phone, Laurent discovers he and his wife have something in common: a sexual attraction to women.
Starring: Victoria Abril, Josiane Balasko
Director: Josiane Balasko
Genre: Foreign Language & Int'l
Format: Widescreen, More
Language: French
Subtitles: English

A spanish wife, a french unfaithful man and a lesbian (Josiane Balasko, who I just fell in love with!) who comes into their lives to wake both of them up form their lethargic predictable life.I enjoy all European films because of their perspective of life, infidelity means heartache not law suit. Their way of dealing with even the most unusual personal and social situations translate into "human relationships" not legal or political issues. thoroughly enjoyed this film. The story moves along swiftly. And the developing relationship between Loli and Marijo is both sweet and comical. This movie is packed with quick wit and touched with a smidgen of steaminess. Completely entertaining to watch.

Ah, the gift of teaching film appreciation!(~) (~) (and getting to choose the films for study)

<s>

Peace,
(k) Sweetlady(k)

[sweetlady]

Anais Nin (1903 - 1977)
US (French-born) author & diarist

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, volume 4, 1944-1947

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

Good things happen to those who hustle.

If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.


Peace,
(k) (k) Sweetlady(k) (k)

[sweetlady]

“The age of mind refers to the shift in focus from the production and availability of information and its associated technology, to concerns about how people utilize that information, the barriers and challenges they face in accessing and interacting with information, what they do with information, and how it enables them to get on with their lives.”

Peace,
(l) (l) Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Karla Jay Papers, 1961-1992:
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/rbk/faids/jay.html

Karla Jay's "Swimming with Sharks" short story (pp. 33-42) in the book, "Telling Moments: Autobiographical Lesbian Stories" is one of those cherished stories that I related to, but from the perspective of the French Baroness. Superby written!

Gloria Anzaldu'a 's "Swallowing Butterflies" was sweet. (pp. 3-11) in "Telling Moments".

Gloria E. Anzaldua, best known for her books Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. and This Bridge Called My Back, is one of the foremost feminist thinkers and activists of our time. As one of the first openly lesbian Chicana writers, Anzaldua has played a major role in redefining queer, female, and Chicano/a identities, and in developing inclusionary movements for social justice.

http://www.queertheory.com/histories/a/anzaldua_gloria.htm

http://www.nagasaki-gaigo.ac.jp/ishikawa/amlit/a/anzaldua21.htm

What great writers to read before I try to sleep "to jump that synapse from left to right brain" late at night!

Peace,
Sweetlady(l) (l) (k) (k)

[sweetlady]

and one of my most favorites! Been there in person nine times!

http://www2.nature.nps.gov/air/WebCams/parks/grcacam/grcacam.htm

Love,
Sweetlady(k) (k)

[sweetlady]

http://www.bushin30seconds.org/

This site put together a video featuring 56 of the very best ads submitted in the Bush in 30 Seconds contest, plus footage from Bush in 30 Seconds Live featuring Michael Moore, Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, Chuck D, Julia Stiles, Benny Boom, John Sayles, and the Bush in 30 Seconds team.

If you're ready to laugh your butt off, take a look!

"Anyone But Bush in 2004!"

Respectfully,
Sweetlady(k) (k)

[sweetlady]

July, 1937. Famous aviatrix disappears.

Amelia Earhart was an aviatrix who disappeared July 1937 in the Pacific Ocean while on a highly publicized world flight attempt. The FBI never investigated her disappearance. The records generally consist of correspondence from individuals speculating about her fate. In 1990, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery submitted a navigator's bookcase to the FBI Laboratory for examination. This item was suspected of having been part of Ms. Earhart's lost aircraft. Various technical analyses were conducted and nothing was found which would disqualify the artifact as having come from the Earhart aircraft.

http://foia.fbi.gov/earhart.htm

Maybe someday we'll all know what happened and if Amelia choose to "disappear" or whether she just wasn't quite ready skill-wise to take that last leg of an around the world flight. Deepest respect and honors for her regardless.

Have a delightful weekend,
(k) (k) Sweetlady(k) (k)

[sweetlady]

Amelia Earhart was the first woman, and only the second person (the other was Charles Lindberg), to make a nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. On May 20, 1932, she set off alone from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland. The weather was a problem from the start, and at one point in the flight, ice on the wings forced her into a 3,000-foot, unchecked descent. She finally managed to level off and, constantly fighting fatigue, she landed in a field near Culmore, Londonderry, Northern Ireland. She made the 2,026-mile flight in 14 hours, 54 minutes.

The aircraft she used was a bright red Lockheed Vega 5B, a sleek, new monoplane with a fully cantilevered wing and roomy cabin area. It was the first airplane built by Lockheed. The first one flew in 1927 and 131 were eventually manufactured.

Amelia sold her Vega to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in June 1933. The aircraft was displayed there until it was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution on September 8, 1966. It is displayed in the Museum's Pioneers of Flight gallery.

Great photo: http://www.aviation-central.com/famous/ab1c0.htm

(k) (k) Sweetlady(k) (k)

[sweetlady]

[Written by: Mack David, Al Hoffman and Jerry Livingston, used in Cinderella]

A dream is a wish your heart makes
When you're fast asleep
In dreams you lose your heartaches
Whatever you wish for, you keep

Have faith in your dreams and someday
Your rainbow will come smiling thru
No matter how your heart is grieving
If you keep on believing
the dream that you wish will come true

No matter how your heart is grieving
If you keep on believing
The dream that you wish will come true
So dream...

(l) (l) Sweetlady(k) (k)

[sweetlady]

What's Going On
Written by: Al Cleveland/Marvin Gaye/Renaldo Benson
Performed by: Marvin Gaye

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today - Ya

Father, father
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today

Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what's going on
What's going on
Ya, what's going on
Ah, what's going on

In the mean time
Right on, baby
Right on
Right on

Father, father, everybody thinks we're wrong
Oh, but who are they to judge us
Simply because our hair is long
Oh, you know we've got to find a way
To bring some understanding here today
Oh

Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me
So you can see
What's going on
Ya, what's going on
Tell me what's going on
I'll tell you what's going on - Uh
Right on baby
Right on baby


(k) (k) Sweetlady(k) (k)

[sweetlady]

Woman oh woman
Have you got cheating on your mind, on your mind
Something's wrong between us
That your laugher cannot hide
And you're afraid to let your eyes meet mine
And lately when I love you, I know you're not satisfied
Woman oh woman
Have you got cheating on your mind, on your mind
I've seen the way men look at you
When they think I don't see
And it hurts to have them think that you're that kind
But it's knowing that you're looking back
That's really killing me
Woman oh woman
Have you got cheating on your mind, on your mind
A woman wears a certain look
When she is on the move
And a man can always tell what's on her mind
I hate to have to say it
But that look's all over you
Woman oh woman
Have you got cheating on your mind
Oh woman oh woman
Have you got cheating on your mind.....

(k) (k) (k) SL

[sweetlady]

This girl walked in dreams
Playing in a world of her own
This girl was a child
Existing in a playground of stone
Then one night her world was changed
Her life and dreams were rearanged
And she would never be the same again

REFRAIN

This girl is a woman now
She's learned how to give
This girl is a woman now
She's found out what it's all about
And she's learning learning to live

This girl tasted love
As tender as the gentle dawn
She cried a single tear
A teardrop that was sweet and warm
Our hearts told us we were right
And on that sweet and velvet night
A child had died
A woman had been born


(k) (k) (k) Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Fleetwood Mac - Hypnotized Lyrics
Written by bob welch.


It’s the same kind of story
That seems to come down from long ago
Two friends having coffee together
When something flies by their window
It might be out on that lawn
Which is wide, at least half of a playing field
Because there’s no explaining what your imagination
Can make you see and feel

Seems like a dream
(they) got me hypnotized

Now it’s not a meaningless question
To ask if they’ve been and gone
I remember a talk about north
Carolina and a strange, strange pond
You see the sides were like glass
In the thick of a forest without a road
And if any man’s ever made that land
Then I think it would’ve showed

Seems like a dream
(they) got me hypnotized

They say there’s a place down in mexico
Where a man can fly over mountains and hills
And he don’t need an airplane or some kind of engine
And he never will
Now you know it’s a meaningless question
To ask if those stories are right
’cause what matters most if the feeling
You get when you’re hypnotized

Seems like a dream
(they) got me hypnotized

(k) (k) (k) Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Fleetwood Mac - Just Crazy Love Lyrics
Written by christine mcvie.


You’ve got a sweet, sweet way
You know you’ll always be the only one
And if you’ll let me say
You’ll never be a lonely one
Well you’ve just got something
Makes a girl start feeling crazy
And I’ll do anything if you’ll let me be your baby

Even when everybody tells me
I’m just being a fool
Something inside says I’ve got to have you
And I can’t play by the rules

Ooh baby baby tell me there’s a chance for me
’cos I’m crazy about you and I know this is love for me
Well you just got something
Makes a girl start feeling crazy
And I’ll do anything if you’ll let me be your baby

(k) (k) (k) (k) Sweetlady(k) (k) (k) (k)
P.S. any butch RELATE??

[sweetlady]

http://www.butch-femme.com/photos/showgallery.php/cat/500/ppuser/12944

Love
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

http://www.marlamallett.com/obi.htm What an incredible story.

Not that I have many, but I'm a collector of vintage Japanese kimonos. They are so femme and are beautiful for going out to dinner or dining at home.<not that I've done that lately>

One of my favorites: Japanese Irosode Meiji Period, circa 1910. Woman's formal kimono of figured rinzu silk decorated with delicate yuzen dyeing and small touches of silk embroidery. One embroidered crest. http://www.marlamallett.com/k-2615.htm

Japanese Shiromuku Late 1940s. http://www.marlamallett.com/k-2655.htm

Japanese Kimono Mid to late 1940s. http://www.marlamallett.com/k-3032.htm

Ah, the lovely feel of old silk with a black lace camisole.(a) (a)

Have a lovely Friday.

Sun Thoughts,
Sweetlady (k)

[sweetlady]

On May 21, 1927, Charles A. Lindbergh landed his "Spirit of St. Louis" near Paris, completing the first solo airplane flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/20040521.html

Sweetlady(k)

[sweetlady]

Seriously.

Check it out. Amazing, Changing Time Clock:
http://www.lares.dti.ne.jp/%7Eyugo/storage/monocrafts_ver3/03/index.html

Talk about making every single moment count.

Have a romantic, relaxing, safe Saturday night.

Peace,
Sweetlady(k) (k)

[sweetlady]

"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."

Sweetlady(k)

[sweetlady]

"The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert": This Oscar-winning, feel-good comedy won the hearts of moviegoers partly for its lavish costumes and devotion to ABBA, but mostly for the great performances of three drag artists who are on the road trip of a lifetime! Terence Stamp was wickedly funny and sexy. The one liners made me shake....I laughed that much!
This film won the 1995 Academy Award: Best Costume Design. And the costumes are truly gorgeous as was the Australian countryside. (as a femme, I wanted some of those costumes...)

Hugs across this digital tundra,
Sweetlady(k) (k)

[sweetlady]

but "She's Not There : A Life in Two Genders" by JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN definitely kept me interested and reading late into the evening.

The exuberant memoir of a man named James who became a woman named Jenny. "She’s Not There" is the story of a person changing genders, the story of a person bearing and finally revealing a complex secret; above all, it is a love story.As James evolves into Jennifer in scenes that are by turns tender, startling, and witty, a marvelously human perspective emerges on issues of love, sex, and the fascinating relationship between our physical and our intuitive selves. Through the clear eyes of a truly remarkable woman, She’s Not There provides a new window on the often confounding process of accepting ourselves.(l) (l)

By turns funny and deeply moving, Jennifer Finney Boylan explores the remarkable territory that lies between men and women, examines changing friendships, and rejoices in the redeeming power of family. She’s Not There is a portrait of a loving marriage—the love of James for his wife, Grace, and, against all odds, the enduring love of Grace for the woman who becomes her “sister,” Jenny.

To this extraordinary true story, Boylan brings the humorous, fresh voice that won her accolades as one of the best comic novelists of her generation. With her distinctive and winning perspective, She’s Not There explores the dramatic outward changes and unexpected results of life as a woman: Jenny fights the urge to eat salad, while James consumed plates of ribs; gone is the stability of “one damn mood, all the damn time.”

While Boylan’s own secret was unusual, to say the least, she captures the universal sense of feeling uncomfortable, out of sorts with the world, and misunderstood by her peers. Jenny is supported on her journey by her best friend, novelist Richard Russo, who goes from begging his friend to “Be a man” (in every sense of the word) to accepting her as an attractive, buoyant woman. “The most unexpected thing,” Russo writes in his Afterword to the book, “is in how Jenny’s story we recognize our shared humanity.”

Boylan, English professor and author of the critically acclaimed novels "The Constellations" (1994), "The Planets" (1991), and "Getting In" (1998), began life as a male named James Boylan. In this autobiography, she details her lifelong struggle with her burgeoning femaleness and the path she followed to become a female, both physically and mentally. For 40 years, the author lived as a man, seemingly happy and even marrying a woman and fathering two children.

(k) (k) Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

For those femmes like me who are attracted to butches, I have two words for you: Chloe Sevigny (circa 'If These Walls Could Talk 2''s second vignette... (k) (k)

Check the adorable Lori Petty as the sweet butch in 'Relax It's Just Sex' (and puzzle over the picture of her in the *dress!* on the video box!), the budding butch-femme love of 'The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love', or the h-h-h-hot Gina Gerson and Jennifer Tilly pairing in 'Bound'.

Need I say more? Yes? Get your fingers on 'Tipping the Velvet', Sarah Water's book whose main character lived in Victorian England and was quite the "masher" (that'd be a male impersonator... ohhh yeah). And it even has a happy ending. Check out the frothiness of Leslea Newman's oevre: 'The Femme Mystique' or 'The Little Butch Book', among others.

'The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader' is the perfect antidote to the single life-weekend blues. Lucid, descriptions of butch-femme lives from the 1950s to the present, and some really hot stories! If you're butch or femme, you may feel like you're coming home with this book. Joan Nestle is a queen among femmes and we all owe her much for putting this together.

Safe travels to those who are, and thoughts of a delightfully relaxing holiday weekend to all!

Love, Hugs and Light,
Sweetlady(k) (k) ({) (}) ({) (})

[sweetlady]

My absolute favorites include: Fresh seafood, grilled vegetables (from a local organic farmers' market), sushi, home-made chicken soup, Indian fry bread/tacos, blueberries, rasberries, blackberries. Frozen grapes are nice too.

It's so nice to take a breather from what's coming up in my two graduate courses. Once again it's draft final papers' time this coming and next week. I'm finished with this past week's assignments and feeling like doing something. Monday I'm having a cookout with beer-can chicken on the Weber grill. Not a beer drinker, but it's amazing how tender that chichen gets after sitting on top of a tall opened can of any kind of beer. Home-made potato and other salads, fresh white corn on the cob, watermelon and lots of other great foods - I can't imagine anyone going home hungry...lol. It's good to see neighbors after been indoors all winter - catch up on the latest news.

I hope that everyone here has a delightfully relaxing holiday weekend.({) (})

Hugs and Sun Thoughts,
Sweetlady(a) (a)

[sweetlady]

"Soldier, rest! Thy warfare o'er,
Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking,
Dream of battled fields no more.
Days of danger, nights of waking."

~Sir Walter Scott

The location of the first observance of Memorial Day is in dispute. Some claim the custom of honoring war dead began in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania. Others claim the custom was originated by some Southern women who placed flowers on the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers after the Civil War. According to one writer, the first Memorial Day service took place on May 30, 1866, on Belle Isle, a burial ground for Union soldiers in the St. James River, at Richmond, Virginia. The school superintendent and the mayor planned the program of hymns and speeches and had the burial ground decorated with flowers. In 1966, however, the U.S. government proclaimed that Waterloo, New York, was the birthplace of Memorial Day. On May 5, 1865, the people of Waterloo had honored soldiers who had died in the Civil War.

In 1868, General John A. Logan, commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic (an organization of Union veterans of the Civil War), named May 30th as a special day to honor the graves of Union soldiers. The selection of May 30th is attributed to a Virginian of French descent, Cassandra Oliver Moncure, who may have selected this date because it was "The Day of Ashes" in France-the day that Napoleon's remains were returned to France from St. Helena.

The custom of placing flowers on graves is an old one that exists in many countries. Today, almost everywhere around the globe, people have a special day to honor not only those who gave their lives in battle, but also family members and friends whom they wish to remember.

The Northern states and some Southern states celebrate Memorial Day on the last Monday in May. This date was made a federal holiday in 1971. Some Southern states have Memorial Day celebrations to honor Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War. Mississippi and Alabama celebrate Confederate Memorial Day on the last Monday in April. In Florida and Georgia, the date is April 26. May 10 is Memorial Day in North and South Carolina, and the holiday is June 3 in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Texas observes Confederate Heroes Day on January 19 (Robert E. Lee's birthday).

Eulogy for a Veteran
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the Gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the mornings hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush
of quiet birds in circled flight,
I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there, I did not die.

-Author Unknown

<in silent, respectful reflection>
Love,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Sharon Stone: http://www.cinema-stars.com/sharon/

Glenn Close and others: http://www.megspace.com/entertainment/ggordon/close/

There, now that's a bit of lightness to brighten a Saturday afternoon. That and iced(c) or Good Earth tea, or whatever a favorite beverage would be right about now.

(k) Sweetlady(k)

[sweetlady]

Been here back in 1994. Would love to be there right now:
http://www.americansouthwest.net/colorado/mesa_verde/national_park.html

I stayed here a few times in my many trips to AZ and the Four Corners area: http://www.americansouthwest.net/utah/mexican_hat/index.html
The San Juan River is exquisite. And Monument Valley is south "down the road a piece" along route 163. A northern view: http://www.americansouthwest.net/utah/monument_valley/mvalroad2_l.html

My favorite "set of Mittens": http://www.americansouthwest.net/utah/monument_valley/mvbutte_l.html
The 17-mile dirt road takes me back through time. Next time I visit there, I plan to make a previous reservation for a day trip on horseback with a Navajo guide. The last few times I stayed at Goulding's, across the road from the Park, and their restaurant's Indian Fry Bread is to die for.

My first stop on my many desert drives is usually in Zion. http://www.americansouthwest.net/utah/zion/zioncyn4_l.html Nice hiking, terrific B&B's, and rocks and trees.

Ah, what a virtual tour to rest the eyes (computer screen fatigue) and the soul.
http://www.americansouthwest.net/utah/dead_horse_point/deadhorse_l.html

TGIF to my friends and to those who take the time to read my postings. Have a delightful weekend.

(k)Sweetlady(k)

[sweetlady]

I could definitely live here for a year or two. The train to Amsterdam takes about two hours. I fell in love with this place! http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Grote%20Markt%20/%20Grand-Place

360 degree view that you zoon in/out and move the camera angle around: http://www.ilotsacre.be/images/virtualvisit/Grand_Place-Grote_Markt.htm

(o) (c) (c) Time for some leaded coffee and back to writing that paper...:|

Hugs,
Sweetlady(a)

[sweetlady]

http://www.streetswing.com/histmai2/d2gypsy1.htm

(k) (k) http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclopedia/g/gy/gypsy_rose_lee.html

"I have everything now I had 20 years ago-except now it's all lower." Gypsy Rose Lee (f) (w) :|

(k) Sweetlady (k)

[sweetlady]

"The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up."

"It's not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on."
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/marilynmon116142.html

(f) (f)
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Andes Mountain Range: http://www.blueplanetbiomes.org/andes.htm

The Andes run for 4500 miles along the west coast of South America, making them the longest mountain range in the world. Tucked within this sinuous continental backbone lie the ruins of ancient civilizations, the headwaters of the Amazon, and the highest peak outside of Asia, Argentina's 22,834 foot Aconcagua. http://www.mountain.org/andes.html

Andes photo taken from the Space Shuttle: http://www.solarviews.com/cap/earth/chile.htm

The Andes mountains form one of the longest continuous mountain ranges on Earth, extending from the shores of the Caribbean as far south as the Magellan Straits. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this range is how narrow it is over much of its length - the high part of the range is typically less than 150 kilometers (93 miles) broad. Illustrated is the section of the Andes near Coquimbo, Chile, where the highest peaks are 6,300 meters (20,670 feet). Low lighting and the oblique perspective emphasize the narrowness of the range, which forms a formidable natural obstacle, and explains how the improbably long and thin country of Chile acquired its identity.

Anyone ever visited Chile and/or Peru?

(S) (S) Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

It's amazes me that GW Jr. can compare himself to the Gipper. His arrogance is so inappropriate. In this morning's LA Times:

A Week of Comparisons Between Bush and Reagan
LA Times (online) June 12, 2004

Re "A Week That Could Bolster Bush," June 8: Oh, puhleeze! George W. Bush as the second coming of Ronald Reagan?

Excuse me, but I was around when Reagan was the governor of California, and I was around when he was president. Reagan may have been a conservative ideologue, but he knew that progress requires compromise, not condemnation of the opposition. He may have believed in cutting taxes, but he recognized a budget-busting mistake when he saw one and altered course accordingly.

Reagan may have been a military hawk, but when things went wrong, he assumed full responsibility. And he may have had deep religious beliefs, but he understood the proper relationship between religion and government, and refrained from imposing his personal religious views on public policy.

Simply put (and to borrow that legendary campaign debate phrase): Mr. Bush, I knew Mr. Reagan. You, sir, are no Ronald Reagan.

Marcy M. Rothenberg
Porter Ranch



My impression of the passing of "the Great Communicator" is simple. He lowered the intellectual bar for all future presidents and George W. Bush proceeded to limbo under it. A sad, but true, commentary on the Republican Party.

Mark S. Roth
Los Angeles



Any GOP insider who thinks this week of mourning Reagan might lift Bush's waning popularity and sagging poll numbers is delusional. Reagan gave the Republicans new hope and lifted their spirits after they had been pummeled by the Nixon scandals. Who in their right mind would confuse nostalgia for Reagan with good feelings about Bush, when he has committed atrocities and shamed his supporters in ways that even Richard Nixon could not have dreamed of?

Sheila Fenton
West Hollywood



I am a Democrat, so I am not eager to give Republicans any good ideas, but it seems to me the best way for Bush to make political capital out of Reagan's death is to reverse himself on stem cell research.

It would be a worthy memorial to Reagan, benefit current and future generations and give Bush the opportunity to admit a mistake, something he seems loath to do about other issues plaguing him.

Joan Evans
Altadena



Epitaph for Ronald Reagan: He was in all respects the greatest president of my lifetime: a good and honorable man who changed the world and the course of history. I am glad that death has released Reagan from the shadow of his last years, and that he has now, in one sense or another, entered into the company of immortals.

Richard Healey
Seal Beach

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/letters/la-le-bush12jun12,1,1351241.story?coll=la-news-comment-letters

(f) (f) Enjoy a lovely Saturday,
Now, back to final graduate paper writing again....

Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

COMMENTARY

In Solidarity

By LECH WALESA
June 11, 2004; Page A8 Wall Street Journal

GDANSK, Poland -- When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can't be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989.

Poles fought for their freedom for so many years that they hold in special esteem those who backed them in their struggle. Support was the test of friendship. President Reagan was such a friend. His policy of aiding democratic movements in Central and Eastern Europe in the dark days of the Cold War meant a lot to us. We knew he believed in a few simple principles such as human rights, democracy and civil society. He was someone who was convinced that the citizen is not for the state, but vice-versa, and that freedom is an innate right.

I often wondered why Ronald Reagan did this, taking the risks he did, in supporting us at Solidarity, as well as dissident movements in other countries behind the Iron Curtain, while pushing a defense buildup that pushed the Soviet economy over the brink. Let's remember that it was a time of recession in the U.S. and a time when the American public was more interested in their own domestic affairs. It took a leader with a vision to convince them that there are greater things worth fighting for. Did he seek any profit in such a policy? Though our freedom movements were in line with the foreign policy of the United States, I doubt it.


President Reagan, in a radio address from his ranch on Oct. 9, 1982, announces trade sanctions against Poland in retaliation for the outlawing of Solidarity.


I distinguish between two kinds of politicians. There are those who view politics as a tactical game, a game in which they do not reveal any individuality, in which they lose their own face. There are, however, leaders for whom politics is a means of defending and furthering values. For them, it is a moral pursuit. They do so because the values they cherish are endangered. They're convinced that there are values worth living for, and even values worth dying for. Otherwise they would consider their life and work pointless. Only such politicians are great politicians and Ronald Reagan was one of them.

The 1980s were a curious time -- a time of realization that a new age was upon us. Communism was coming to an end. It had used up its means and possibilities. The ground was set for change. But this change needed the cooperation, or unspoken understanding, of different political players. Now, from the perspective of our time, it is obvious that like the pieces of a global chain of events, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and even Mikhail Gorbachev helped bring about this new age in Europe. We at Solidarity like to claim more than a little credit, too, for bringing about the end of the Cold War.

In the Europe of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan presented a vision. For us in Central and Eastern Europe, that meant freedom from the Soviets. Mr. Reagan was no ostrich who hoped that problems might just go away. He thought that problems are there to be faced. This is exactly what he did.

Every time I met President Reagan, at his private estate in California or at the Lenin shipyard here in Gdansk, I was amazed by his modesty and even temper. He didn't fit the stereotype of the world leader that he was. Privately, we were like opposite sides of a magnet: He was always composed; I was a raging tower of emotions eager to act. We were so different yet we never had a problem with understanding one another. I respected his honesty and good humor. It gave me confidence in his policies and his resolve. He supported my struggle, but what unified us, unmistakably, were our similar values and shared goals.

* * *
I have often been asked in the United States to sign the poster that many Americans consider very significant. Prepared for the first almost-free parliamentary elections in Poland in 1989, the poster shows Gary Cooper as the lonely sheriff in the American Western, "High Noon." Under the headline "At High Noon" runs the red Solidarity banner and the date -- June 4, 1989 -- of the poll. It was a simple but effective gimmick that, at the time, was misunderstood by the Communists. They, in fact, tried to ridicule the freedom movement in Poland as an invention of the "Wild" West, especially the U.S.

But the poster had the opposite impact: Cowboys in Western clothes had become a powerful symbol for Poles. Cowboys fight for justice, fight against evil, and fight for freedom, both physical and spiritual. Solidarity trounced the Communists in that election, paving the way for a democratic government in Poland. It is always so touching when people bring this poster up to me to autograph it. They have cherished it for so many years and it has become the emblem of the battle that we all fought together.

As I say repeatedly, we owe so much to all those who supported us. Perhaps in the early years, we didn't express enough gratitude. We were so busy introducing all the necessary economic and political reforms in our reborn country. Yet President Ronald Reagan must have realized what remarkable changes he brought to Poland, and indeed the rest of the world. And I hope he felt gratified. He should have.

Mr. Walesa, winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, was president of Poland from 1990 to 1995.

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108691034152234672,00.html

(b) (b) Sweetlady ;) <part Polish, Swedish, English and Lithuanian......>

[sweetlady]

http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/corps/images/corp1977.jpg

http://www.terragalleria.com/images/mountain/icec3266.jpeg

http://www.cpaws.org/images/rockies-mayfield.jpg

Andes: http://staff.esuhsd.org/~balochie/studentprojects/peru/perures/andes.jpg

Tibet: http://community.webshots.com/s/image4/1/53/57/57715357qcfCXR_ph.jpg

Grand Tetons: http://www.winona.msus.edu/geology/imagearchive/mountains/tetons1archive.jpg

Sierra Nevada range from the air: http://www.wormley.com/images/200305/20030518-001-06-01.0.jpg

Denali: http://stevens.senate.gov/images/denali.jpg

Alps: http://www.planetfear.com/climbing/gallery/eyes-up/alps.jpg

Czech Republic mountains: http://www.boutiquebb.com/CzechRepublic/velke/Obr_6.jpg

Zion National Park: http://www.serve.com/wizjd/pics/zion06_m.jpg

Ah, nice rest for the eyes. Now back to my regularly scheduled programming - which at the moment is editing two final papers due this weekend. Then a two-week break......hmmm, wondering where to go for the break?

Peaceful thoughts,
Sweetlady (f)

[sweetlady]

http://www.ee.washington.edu/conselec/CE/kuhn/hdtv/95x5.htm

Academic explanations that the local consumer electonics' retailer sales people have no clue about. There are 18 different levels and profiles (resolutions) that are supported by the U.S. MPEG 2 video compression broadcast TV standard - which is why HDTV sets or receivers (true ones, that is) are still so expensive, and many still do not allow for display of all networks' HDTV broadcast transmissions.

<okay, enough girl-propeller-head speak> (o) It's Friday afternoon and I've been editing a 70+ page graduate course paper all day today. Guess I'm feeling punchy. ;) :| ;) That and a tall cafe mocha from Starbucks.<eeehaaa> (w) (f) That perked the brain cells right up....blew those mental cobwebs all to hell!

Hugs and kisses to my on-line and real-time f-2-f friends,
(k) (k) Sweetlady, the girl-propeller-head FEMME (k) (k)

[sweetlady]

http://www.hbo.com/deadwood/cast/

Thank goodness for digital cable VOD. (video on demand) since I'm currently taking writing breaks and watching a couple of shows every few days since the HBO series season ended last Sunday night. It's absolutely amazing how much I missed from each episode! Deadwood's exec producer and writer is David Milch (of N.Y.P.D. Blue fame) and once again he's got a "blow the doors off" winner. Come EMMY time, there will be some folks pushing out "The Soprano's" and other hit HBO series.

Hmmm, maybe I'll head for there in South Dakota during my two week break coming up. It's certainly cooler and less humid (my favorites) than here. I hope that it's also not like Tombstone, AZ was, which was kind of a tourist attraction rather than a true historical site. <okay, the Crystal Palace rocked as a museum in that it preserved the artifacts and feeling of the early 1880's>

Ah, where are my Victorian era ball gowns and hats? Better yet, where would I go wearing them? (6) ;)

Namaste,
Sweetlady (k)

[sweetlady]

Lapis is one of my favorites especially when set in gold by Hopi master jewelers:
http://www.tradeshop.com/gems/lapis.html

This site has every possible, imaginable gem stone that I have ever (or not) heard of: http://www.tradeshop.com/gems/rainbow.html

Amethyst: The Royal Purple. Great legend and another of my favorite stones.
http://www.gemstone.org/gem-by-gem/english/amethyst.html

With my love for all things southwest, I couldn't forget:
http://www.tradeshop.com/gems/turquois.html

Imperial topaz is another that I have a few of:
http://www.tradeshop.com/gems/topaz.html

Ah, rocks! (l) These and the ones picked up taking walks are also quite beautiful. there must be six or more as paperweights on my desk here.

(*) (*) (*) "Shoot for the moon, and even if you miss, you'll still be out there among the stars" (*) (*) (*)

Love, laughter and peace,
Sweetlady (k)

[sweetlady]

Subject: Abbott and Costello meet the 21st century


Who's on first...?

ABBOTT: Ultimate SuperDuper Computer Store. Can I help you?

COSTELLO: Thanks. I'm setting up a home office in the den, and I'm thinking
of buying a computer.

ABBOTT: Mac?

COSTELLO: No, the name is Lou.

ABBOTT: Your computer?

COSTELLO: I don't own a computer. I want to buy one.

ABBOTT: Mac?

COSTELLO: I told you, my name is Lou.

ABBOTT: What about Windows?

COSTELLO: Why? Does it get stuffy?

ABBOTT: Do you want a computer with Windows?

COSTELLO: I don't know. What do I see when I look out the windows?

ABBOTT: Wallpaper.

COSTELLO: Never mind the windows. I need a computer and software.

ABBOTT: Software that runs on Windows?

COSTELLO: No, on the computer! I need something I can use to write
proposals, track expenses. You know, run a business. What have you got?

ABBOTT: Office.

COSTELLO: Yeah, for my office. Can you recommend anything?

ABBOTT: I just did.

COSTELLO: You just did what?

ABBOTT: Recommended something.

COSTELLO: You recommended something?

ABBOTT: Yes.

COSTELLO: For my office?

ABBOTT: Yes.

COSTELLO: Okay, what did you recommend for my office?

ABBOTT: Office.

COSTELLO: Yes, for my office.

ABBOTT: Office for Windows.

COSTELLO: I already have an office and it already has windows! Let's say I'm
sitting at my computer, and I want to type a proposal. What do I need?

ABBOTT: Word.

COSTELLO: If I'm writing a proposal, I'm going to need lots of words. But
what program do I load?

ABBOTT: Word.

COSTELLO: What word?

ABBOTT: The Word in Office.

COSTELLO: The only word in office is office.

ABBOTT: The Word in Office for Windows.

COSTELLO: Which word in "office for windows?"

ABBOTT: The Word you get when you click the blue W.

COSTELLO: I'm going to click your big W if you don't give me a straight
answer. Let's forget about words for a minute. What do I need if I want to
watch a movie over the Internet?

ABBOTT: RealOne.

COSTELLO: Maybe a real movie, maybe a cartoon. What I watch is none of your
business. But what do I need to watch it?

ABBOTT: RealOne.

COSTELLO: If it's a long movie I'll also want to watch reels two, three and
four. Can I watch reel four?

ABBOTT: Of course.

COSTELLO: Great! With what?

ABBOTT: RealOne.

COSTELLO: Okay, so I'm sitting at my computer and I want to watch a movie.
What do I do?

ABBOTT: You click the blue 1.

COSTELLO: I click the blue one what?

ABBOTT: The blue 1.

COSTELLO: Is that different from the blue W?

ABBOTT: Of course it is. The blue 1 is RealOne. The blue W is Word.

COSTELLO: What word?

ABBOTT: The Word in Office for Windows.

COSTELLO: But there's three words in "office for windows!"

ABBOTT: No, just one. But it's the most popular Word in the world.

COSTELLO: It is?

ABBOTT: Yes, although to be fair there aren't many other Words left. It
pretty much wiped out all the other Words.

COSTELLO: And that word is the real one?

ABBOTT: No. RealOne has nothing to do with Word. RealOne isn't even part of
Office.

COSTELLO: Never mind; I don't want to get started with that again. But I
also need something for bank accounts, loans, and so on. What do you have to
help me track my money?

ABBOTT: Money.

COSTELLO: That's right. What do you have?

ABBOTT: Money.

COSTELLO: I need money to track my money?

ABBOTT: No, not really. It comes bundled with your computer.

COSTELLO: What comes bundled with my computer?

ABBOTT: Money.

COSTELLO: Money comes bundled with my computer?

ABBOTT: Exactly. No extra charge.

COSTELLO: I get a bundle of money with my computer at no extra charge? How
much money do I get?

ABBOTT: Just one copy.

COSTELLO: I get a copy of money. Isn't that illegal?>

ABBOTT: No. We have a license from Microsoft to make copies of Money.

COSTELLO: Microsoft can license you to make money?

ABBOTT: Why not? They own it.

COSTELLO: Well, it's great that I'm going to get free money, but I'll still
need to track it. Do you have anything for managing your money?

ABBOTT: Managing Your Money? That program disappeared years ago.

COSTELLO: Well, what do you sell in its place?

ABBOTT: Money.

COSTELLO: You sell money?

ABBOTT: Of course. But if you buy a computer from us, you get it for free.

COSTELLO: That's all very wonderful, but I'll be running a business. Do you
have any software for, you know, accounting?

ABBOTT: Simply Accounting.

COSTELLO: Probably, but it might get a little complicated.

ABBOTT: If you don't want Simply Accounting, you might try M.Y.O.B.

COSTELLO: M.Y.O.B.? What does that stand for?

ABBOTT: Mind Your Own Business.

COSTELLO: I beg your pardon?

ABBOTT: No, that would be I.B.Y.P. I said M.Y.O.B.

COSTELLO: Look, I just need to do some accounting for my home business. You
know--accounting? You do it with money.

ABBOTT: Of course you can do accounting with Money. But you may need more.

COSTELLO: More money?

ABBOTT: More than Money. Money can't do everything.

COSTELLO: I don't need a sermon! Okay, let's forget about money for the
moment. I'm worried that my computer might...what's the word? Crash. And if
my computer crashes, what can I use to restore my data?

ABBOTT: GoBack.

COSTELLO: Okay. I'm worried about my computer smashing and I need something
to restore my data. What do you recommend?

ABBOTT: GoBack.

COSTELLO: How many times do I have to repeat myself?

ABBOTT: I've never asked you to repeat yourself. All I said was GoBack.

COSTELLO: How can I go back if I haven't even been anywhere? Okay, I'll go
back. What do I need to write a proposal?

ABBOTT: Word.

COSTELLO: But I'll need lots of words to write a proposal.

ABBOTT: No, you only need one Word-the Word in Office for Windows.

COSTELLO: But there's three words in...Oh, never mind.

ABBOTT: Hello? Hello? Customers! Why do they always hang up on me? Oh, well.
Ultimate SuperDuper Computer Store. Can I help you?

(f) (f) (f)
;) Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

With the next two weeks yawning in front of me and I have a nice stack of books of fiction and other genres, I also have quite the list on my Netflix account of films that seem to be worth watching. In order so far:

1. Aimee and Jaguar (came today in the mail)
2. Out of Season (arrives this week)
3. Claire of the Moon (arrives this week)
4. The Locket
5. Lianna
6. The Seventh Stream
7. Better Than Chocolate
8. Big Eden
9. All About My Mother
10. It's in the Water
11. Antonia's Line
12. Normal
13. Gia
14. Tipping the Velvet
15. The Wings of the Dove
16. Babette's Feast
17. Central Station
18. Wit

Well, the last three aren't in my originally described category as "queer", but they sounded good. The nice thing about netflix is being able to re-number the queue and reprioritize or delete films. (h) Very cool. I love that I can also rate films and get recommendations based on what I've watched and/or rated. There must be about 700 films that I've rated so far - but many were films seen either at art/indie theaters, while I was overseas or back when I had a Blockbuster account and drove to rent those old videotapes.

Wonder how many films I'll watch before it's back to work - writing, and other work. (S) (S)

({) (}) Hugs,
Sweetlady (f)

[sweetlady]

The following <snip> was in today's New York Times (online of course):

The Senate vote on global warming is only days away.

Now is the time to speak up. Tell your senators you support
the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act to undo
global warming. The best way to do that is to sign the
petition at undoit.org. The Senate vote could happen any
day, so make your voice heard NOW, click on the url below.

http://ads.nyt.com/th.ad/th-2004undoit2/defense/?_RM_REDIR_=http://iw.rtm.com/ed/undoit_petition_1.asp?sitecode=unyt
**************************
Maybe it's silly, but I just added my name to the signature list electronically. I thought that my B-F friends might see this and do the same. Since it was in the NYTimes, I know it's not one of those "urban legends" that continuously circulate through Internet emails.

And now off to brew some more coffee.......

Peace,
(k) Sweetlady (k)

[sweetlady]

Hatshepsut was an Eighteenth-Dynasty pharaoh......whose unprecedented act of apparent usurpation in donning the regalia of male pharaoh and stepping into the role of senior coregent.....(amazing that this happened 35 centuries ago :o

Fabulous academic article:

http://www.fathom.com/feature/190131/index.html

Can't help it, during my morning perusal of news web sites, I explore and often find things such as this unusual Pharaoh that I have a few books on and yet found this article to be one of the best on her/hym. (f)

Peace,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

http://live-fuji.jp/fuji/livee.htm

Mt. Fuji was once a national symbol of purity in Japan. Much more beautiful web site and photo (looks like when I flew by it a few times on business trips during the mid 1990's):http://www.mt-fuji.co.jp/index-e.html

The photo gallery of various times of day and weather make this sacred mountain seem like it's not the same mountain:http://www.mt-fuji.co.jp/Photo/Photo.html

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[Beaudyk]

http://www.geocities.com/maniac1916/Boudicca.html

Take a look.... the bear

[sweetlady]

Hello and thanks for posting the URL that inspired your B-F name. What an amazing story! Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni is revered as a symbol of British freedom, stories of her heroism have been told to English schoolchildren for the past two hundred years. http://myron.sjsu.edu/romeweb/ladycont/art5.htm

Boudicca takes a mother's revenge: http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa051298.htm

http://www.hhhh.org/maia/boudicca.html

What strength, courage, intellect and other admirable qualities! Thanks so much for your post. It was extraordinarily interesting. (*) (*) It provides some insight into your name here, and I wish I had such a respected source for my own rather superfluous nickname on B-F. ;) Very cool and creative name that you chose for yourself. I wonder if the mention of the bear in ancient Celtic times is in any way similar to the medicine animals of some Native American tribes. <musing to myself>

Hope that you're having a lovely and relaxing weekend. (f)

Peace,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Tower of London Virtual Tour: http://www.toweroflondontour.com/
Has anyone ever been? I have a three times and each time caused that feeling of deja vu......feeling ancient energy. There's even a wall dated back to 1050 from when the Romans were there. Founded nearly a millennium ago and expanded upon over the centuries since, the Tower of London has protected, housed, imprisoned and been for many the last sight they saw on Earth.
It has been the seat of British government and the living quarters of monarchs ... the site of renown political intrigue, and the repository of the Crown Jewels ... It has housed lions, bears, and (to this day) flightless ravens ... not to mention notorious traitors and framed members of court, lords and ministers, clergymen and knights.

http://www.twingroves.district96.k12.il.us/Renaissance/TowerofLondon/TowerLondon.html

"Hello, I am Anne Boleyn's ghost. During the Renaissance while I was still alive, the most distinguished and important people were the royalty, like me. If a king or queen wanted you to do something, you did it. There was no disputing the top."http://www.twingroves.district96.k12.il.us/Renaissance/TowerofLondon/AnneBoleyn.html

(l) (l) Sweetlady

[Collaredmerlot]

what about Billy Tipton who lived as a man for all of hys life? if hy could do that in the times during which hy lived, then let us give reverence to a queer inspiration to all today!

~merlot~

[sweetlady]

what about Billy Tipton who lived as a man for all of hys life? if hy could do that in the times during which hy lived, then let us give reverence to a queer inspiration to all today!~merlot~
({) merlot (}) wow! :| Where have I been?

"Tipton then is the biographer's ultimate challenge;, a person who lived life
beyond the reach of others, a performative character in work and in love." (*) (*)

http://www-music.duke.edu/jazz_archive/artists/tipton.billy/01/
What does matter is that she was able to make it successfully as a jazz musician. It is truly a shame that discrimination in the 1930s drove Dorothy to change her identity. Had she been able to play piano and sax as Dorothy, she could have had a tremendous influence, encouraging other female jazz musicians. As Dorothy, and not Billy, it is unlikely she would have feared fame, and the jazz community could have been blessed with her music much longer then 1958. Tragically though the world was not accepting of females with masculine qualities, especially not lesbians during this time period. According to Billy's wife of nearly twenty years, Kitty Oakes, jazz music was Billy Tipton's "magic carpet," an escape from reality and a vehicle to take her places. Unfortunately, this same "carpet" was responsible for putting Billy in the spot light that drove her from the music industry. Though one author says "Tipton couldn't really be considered a jazz musician," since she had only two mediocre albums, her life exemplifies the importance of jazz music and the sacrifices one person was willing to make in order to play (Firehammer, John. http://www.visionx.com/jazz/reviews/b1198_01.htm). Her life shows that many jazz musicians play for the love of music, not fame or fortunes since in actuality these are such rare achievements in the jazz industry.

What an incredible gift that you shared, Merlot, if I may call you that I hope. Thank you so much for sharing that in your posting. (f) Let's continue to share our views and feelings!

(l) Love and God/dess bless to all who read this (l)
Sweetlady
P.S. Let's have a "proper English tea", coffee, lunch or drinks girlfriend! PM, Email or call me! (f)

[sweetlady]

PM me and I'll give you my emails and chat IDs.

I hope that this post is taken with the humble spirit with which it is intended. (f) Sometimes my transexual friends have been shy in public forums and I can't blame them at all. Thank you for your wonderful posts! Let's stay in touch.

Love,
(k) (k) Sweetlady

[Electrocell]

WOW going to have to come back and read some more of this thread.

[Beaudyk]

MOJO HOODOO MAIL
This letter will protect you from any malicious wishes that may result from not forwarding a chain letter on the Internet. The following protections have automatically been applied to you because you have received this letter.

This letter hereby absolves you of any and all malicious consequences you may have been subject to by receiving a chain letter via the Internet.

In receiving this letter, you are bound not to send any chain mail to anyone you know. Chain mail is evil and pointless. Please consider the following examples:



Barry White received this mailing sometime in 1946, but, in spite of this warning, he forwarded a malicious chain letter to everyone in his address book. A week later, he was visited by a group of paranoid walrus worshipers who beat him senseless with uncooked lasagna noodles.

Gertrude Garth also received this letter and ignored it. After sending a chain letter to three of her friends, she was brutally beaten and mutilated by two Jehovah's Witnesses, angry that she answered her door in a party dress.

Don't let misfortune find you. This e-mail will protect you throughout your life and is unlimited in scope. Its protective powers will never expire nor become ineffective against any chain letter or clauses held therein.

Remember, you are bound to never, ever forward another chain letter or hoax as long as you live, so help you [enter the name of your supreme being here] !!!!!!!!!!!

[Beaudyk]

Urban Legends: http://urbanlegends.about.com/culture/urbanlegends/library/blhoax.htm
HoaxKill: http://www.hoaxkill.com/urbanlegends.html

[sweetlady]

"Out of Season" - This is the evocative romantic drama about two women who unexpectedly fall in love during a winter's stay in the resort town of Cape May, New Jersey.
Starring: Nancy Daly, Dennis Fecteau
Director: Jeanette L. Buck
Genre: Drama
Format: Full Screen, More
Language: English

Definitely worth the time. The book, "Afterlove" by Robert Rosenblum kept me up late last night and I finished it earlier this afternoon. After heading to Amazon.com to try to find any other the 20 books written under various pseudonyms the author writes under, I couldn't find any other books. :( "Afterlove" was an amazing story that kept me glued....and feeling grateful that I'm a speed reader on one hand, and sorry that the book had an end. Definitely worth the time to read. It gave me hope and confirmation that love trancends death. (f)

Have a peaceful Sunday evening. (l)

Love, laughter and lightness,
Sweetlady (k)

[sweetlady]

"Claire of the Moon" (1993) Notorious satirist Claire Jabrowski (Trisha Todd) meets Dr. Noel Benedict (Karen Trumbo), a dour sex therapist, at a women's retreat -- and despite their differences, the promiscuous Claire and the serious Noel find themselves passionately attracted to each other. Sparks fly as the two women clash at first, then reconcile and finally develop a romance that will change Claire's life forever. A sensual, provocative and deeply intimate film. (k) (k)
Starring: Trisha Todd, Karen Trumbo
Director: Nicole Conn

I really liked this film, for both it's sexiness as well as intellectual stimulation. I gave it 4 out of five stars.(*)

Sweet dreams tonight and lovely Tuesday (f),
Sweetlady

[Electrocell]

"Claire of the Moon" (1993) Notorious satirist Claire Jabrowski (Trisha Todd) meets Dr. Noel Benedict (Karen Trumbo), a dour sex therapist, at a women's retreat -- and despite their differences, the promiscuous Claire and the serious Noel find themselves passionately attracted to each other. Sparks fly as the two women clash at first, then reconcile and finally develop a romance that will change Claire's life forever. A sensual, provocative and deeply intimate film. (k) (k)
Starring: Trisha Todd, Karen Trumbo
Director: Nicole Conn

I really liked this film, for both it's sexiness as well as intellectual stimulation. I gave it 4 out of five stars.(*)

Sweet dreams tonight and lovely Tuesday (f),
Sweetlady

And Where might one find these movies ?

[sweetlady]

Thanks for asking. I joined Netflix earlier this year. Definitely worth joining in my opinion. You can sign up for a membership at www.netflix.com
The monthly membership is about $20 (they ask for a credit card) and includes as many films as you can watch - although you can have only three films at one time. They come in these envelopes that already have the return address and postage so that when you're finished either watching the movie (or like me, a few times I hated a movie and just put it back in it's self-mailer) and returned it. Their gay, queer, transexual, transvestite, etc. collection of films is the most extensive that I've ever seen! And, the more films that I watch, the less each movie actually costs.
(S) (S) I'm on a roll catching up on experiencing some great films that I usually don't have time for in-between grad school quarters, so have been watching a film each day the last week......either from Netflix or on cable pay-per-view. I watched "Calendar Girls" on cable for instance. I'm buying the movie sountrack for that and a few others. That's the other great thing about watching films - finding music I would have otherwise missed. (f)

Take good care and "see" you soon. ({) (}) Hugs to you!

Sincerely,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

July 1-3, 1863: Battle of Gettysburg. CNN (Monday, June 28, 2004)
"As the Civil War made a rare foray into the North, residents of the small southern Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg buzzed with excitement in summer 1863 and jockeyed for the best vista to watch the approaching Confederate and Union armies.This energized atmosphere was quickly dashed by the harsh reality of war. Described as the "work of the very devil himself" by one Union bugler, the Gettysburg battle on July 1-3 ended with 51,000 casualties -- an astonishing total given that about 165,000 troops on both sides participated."
The whole article is at: http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/06/25/gettysburg/

To say that this is a sad place is an understatement. (l) (l) <closes eyes for a moment>

Respectfully,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

By MARGARET WENTE Tuesday, June 29 Globe and Mail (Canada) "Did you have trouble figuring out who to vote for? Not me. I have always supported the tax-cutting, gay-marriage party that pledged to legalize marijuana and stop lying to us about health care. Unfortunately, this party, whose winning platform seems ridiculously self-evident to me, does not exist and probably never will. So I did the next best thing. I decided to vote strategically." The rest of her great column is at: http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040629/COWENT29/Columnists/Columnist?author=Margaret+Wente

I often wonder what it would be like to live in Canada, especially in western CA. <sigh>

Margaret is one of my favorite columnists at the Gobe and Mail. Peggy Noonan is another at the Wall Street Journal, Dan Gilmor at the San Jose Mercury News, Tom Friedman and several others at the NYTimes.

I'm having a massage with reflexology and Reiki this afternoon - the first one in well, I can't remember, it's been that long. Being single has many, many advantages however hair and nail appointments just aren't enough for the need to be touched and poor Doc the boxer can't hug his mama back. ;)

Sun thoughts,
Sweetlady

[Electrocell]

Thanks for asking. I joined Netflix earlier this year. Definitely worth joining in my opinion. You can sign up for a membership at www.netflix.com
The monthly membership is about $20 (they ask for a credit card) and includes as many films as you can watch - although you can have only three films at one time. They come in these envelopes that already have the return address and postage so that when you're finished either watching the movie (or like me, a few times I hated a movie and just put it back in it's self-mailer) and returned it. Their gay, queer, transexual, transvestite, etc. collection of films is the most extensive that I've ever seen! And, the more films that I watch, the less each movie actually costs.
(S) (S) I'm on a roll catching up on experiencing some great films that I usually don't have time for in-between grad school quarters, so have been watching a film each day the last week......either from Netflix or on cable pay-per-view. I watched "Calendar Girls" on cable for instance. I'm buying the movie sountrack for that and a few others. That's the other great thing about watching films - finding music I would have otherwise missed. (f)

Take good care and "see" you soon. ({) (}) Hugs to you!

Sincerely,
Sweetlady


Thanks Sweetlady hugs to you too ((((((((( SL)))))))))))))))))

[sweetlady]

June 23, 2004 MOVIE REVIEW | 'FAHRENHEIT 9/11' New York Times
Unruly Scorn Leaves Room for Restraint, but Not a Lot
By A. O. SCOTT

Respect for the president is a longstanding American tradition and one that is still very much alive, as the weeklong national obsequies for Ronald Reagan recently proved. But there is also an opposing tradition of holding up our presidents, especially while they are in office, to ridicule and scorn.

Which is to say that while Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" will be properly debated on the basis of its factual claims and cinematic techniques, it should first of all be appreciated as a high-spirited and unruly exercise in democratic self-expression. Mixing sober outrage with mischievous humor and blithely trampling the boundary between documentary and demagoguery, Mr. Moore takes wholesale aim at the Bush administration, whose tenure has been distinguished, in his view, by unparalleled and unmitigated arrogance, mendacity and incompetence.

That Mr. Moore does not like Mr. Bush will hardly come as news. "Fahrenheit 9/11," which opens in Manhattan today and in the rest of the country on Friday, is many things: a partisan rallying cry, an angry polemic, a muckraking inquisition into the use and abuse of power. But one thing it is not is a fair and nuanced picture of the president and his policies. What did you expect? Mr. Moore is often impolite, rarely subtle and occasionally unwise. He can be obnoxious, tendentious and maddeningly self-contradictory. He can drive even his most ardent admirers crazy. He is a credit to the republic.

While his new film, awarded the top prize at the Cannes International Film Festival this year, has been likened to an op-ed column, it might more accurately be said to resemble an editorial cartoon. Mr. Moore uses archival video images, rapid-fire editing and playful musical cues to create an exaggerated, satirical likeness of his targets. The president and his team have obliged him by looking sinister and ridiculous on camera.

Paul D. Wolfowitz shares his icky hair-care secrets (a black plastic comb and a great deal of saliva); John Ashcroft raptly croons a patriotic ballad of his own composition; Mr. Bush, when he is not blundering through the thickets of his native tongue, projects an air of shallow self-confidence.

Through it all, Mr. Moore provides sardonic commentary, to which the soundtrack adds nudges and winks. As the camera pans across copies of Mr. Bush's records from the Texas Air National Guard, and Mr. Moore reads that the future president was suspended for missing a medical examination, we hear a familiar electric guitar riff; it takes you a moment to remember that it comes from a song called "Cocaine."

Not that Mr. Moore is kidding around. Perhaps because of the scale and gravity of the subject of "Fahrenheit 9/11," perhaps because his own celebrity has made the man-in-the-street pose harder to sustain, Mr. Moore's trademark pranks and interventions are not as much in evidence as in earlier films. He does commandeer an ice cream truck to drive around Washington, reading the U.S.A. Patriot Act through a loudspeaker (after learning that few of the lawmakers who voted for it had actually read it), and he does stand outside the Capitol trying to persuade members of Congress to enlist their children in the armed forces. (The contortion that one legislator performs to avoid shaking Mr. Moore's hand is an amusing moment of found slapstick.)

Mostly, though, he sifts through the public record, constructing a chronicle of misrule that stretches from the Florida recount to the events of this spring. His case is synthetic rather than comprehensive, and it is not always internally consistent. He dwells on the connections between the Bush family and the Saudi Arabian elite (including the bin Laden family), and while he creates a strong impression of unseemly coziness, his larger point is not altogether clear.

After you leave the theater, some questions are likely to linger about Mr. Moore's views on the war in Afghanistan, about whether he thinks the homeland security program has been too intrusive or not intrusive enough, and about how he thinks the government should have responded to the murderous jihadists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11.

At the same time, though, it may be that the confusions trailing Mr. Moore's narrative are what make "Fahrenheit 9/11" an authentic and indispensable document of its time. The film can be seen as an effort to wrest clarity from shock, anger and dismay, and if parts of it seem rash, overstated or muddled, well, so has the national mood.

If "Fahrenheit 9/11" consisted solely of talking heads and unflattering glimpses of public figures, it would be, depending on your politics, either a rousing call to arms or an irresponsible provocation, but it might not persuade you to re-examine your assumptions. But the movie is much more than "Dude, Where's My Country," carried out by other means. It is worth seeing, debating and thinking about, regardless of your political allegiances.

Mr. Moore's populist instincts have never been sharper, and he is, as ever, at his best when he turns down the showmanship and listens to what people have to say. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is, along with everything else, an extraordinary collage of ordinary American voices: soldiers in the field, an Oregon state trooper patrolling the border, and, above all, citizens of Flint, Mich., Mr. Moore's hometown. The trauma that deindustrialization visited on that city was the subject of "Roger and Me," and that film remains fresh 15 years later, now that the volunteer army has replaced the automobile factory as the vehicle for upward mobility.

The most moving sections of "Fahrenheit 9/11" concern Lila Lipscomb, a cheerful state employee and former welfare recipient who wears a crucifix pendant and an American flag lapel pin. When we first meet her, she is proud of her family's military service — a daughter served in the Persian Gulf war and a son, Michael Pedersen, was a marine in Iraq — and grateful for the opportunities it has offered. Then Michael is killed in Karbala, and in sharing her grief with Mr. Moore, she also gives his film an eloquence that its most determined critics will find hard to dismiss. Mr. Bush is under no obligation to answer Mr. Moore's charges, but he will have to answer to Mrs. Lipscomb.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has graphic images of combat and its aftermath.

Written and directed by Michael Moore; director of photography, Mike Desjarlais; edited by Kurt Engfehr, Christopher Seward and T. Woody Richman; music by Jeff Gibbs; produced by Mr. Moore, Jim Czarnecki and Kathleen Glynn; released by Lions Gate Films, IFC Films and the Fellowship Adventure Group. Running time: 116 minutes. The film is rated R.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/movies/23FAHR.html

The Political 'Fahrenheit' Sets Record at Box Office
By SHARON WAXMAN Published: June 28, 2004 New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/28/movies/28BOX.html

({) (}) to my dear friends (f) (f) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

"Success is something to shadow-box with, not embrace." July 7, 1974, NYTimes.

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[Beaudyk]

http://www.michaelmoore.com/

[Beaudyk]

http://members.tripod.com/~moviemaniac1/index.html

Boy, a person can get lost in this thread for days!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanx for all the links!

[sweetlady]

WASHINGTON, July 2: -- Coast Guard headquarters was advised tonight that Amelia Earhart was believed to have alighted on the Pacific Ocean near Howland Island shortly after 5 P.M. Eastern daylight time today.

A message from the cutter Itasca, stationed in the vicinity of the island in the mid-Pacific, said:

"Earhart unreported at Howland at 7 P.M. [E.D.T.]. Believe down shortly after 5 P.M. Am searching probable area and will continue."

Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of naval operations, instructed the commandant of the naval station at Honolulu tonight to render whatever aid he may deem practicable in the search for Miss Earhart.

Plane Joins in Search

[A navy flying boat hopped off from Honolulu late last night for Howland Island, 1,900 miles distant, to join the cutter Itasca in hunting for Miss Earhart, The Associated Press reported. Two Los Angeles radio amateurs were said to have picked up weak signals on the frequency assigned to the Earhart radio.]

Coast Guard headquarters here received information that Miss Earhart probably overshot tiny Howland Island because she was blinded by the glare of an ascending sun. The message from the Coast Guard cutter Itasca said it it was believed Miss Earhart passed northwest of Howland Island about 3:20 P.M. [E.D.T.], or about 8 A.M., Howland Island time. The Itasca reported that heavy smoke was bellowing from its funnels at the time, to serve as a signal for the flyer. The cutter's skipper expressed belief the Earhart plane had descended into the sea within 100 miles of Howland.

Husband Asks Assistance

In a message to Washington, the flier's husband, George Palmer Putnam, who is awaiting her return to this country at the Oakland, Calif., airport said:

"Technicians familiar with Miss Earhart's plane believe, with its large tanks, it can float almost indefinitely. With retractable landing gear and smooth seas, safe landing (on the sea) should have been practicable.

"Request such assistance as is practicable from naval aircraft and surface craft stationed at Honolulu. Apparently plane's position not far from Howland.

"The plane's large wing and empty gasoline tanks should provide sufficient buoyancy if it came to rest on the sea without being damaged.

"There was a two-man rubber lifeboat aboard the plane, together with lifebelts, flares, a Very pistol and a large yellow signal kite which could be flown above the plane or the lifecraft."

Mr. Putnam said his wife had planned to take emergency food rations and plenty of water on the hazardous flight, the most dangerous on her trip around the world.

Earlier the Coast Guard had ordered the cutter Roger B. Taney to proceed from Honolulu to Howland Island to aid the cutter Itasca in the search for Miss Earhart. A message from Honolulu, however, said the Taney was undergoing repairs and could not participate.

Amateurs Pick Up Signals

Los Angeles, July 2 (AP) -- Two amateur radio operators claimed to have picked up signals tonight on frequencies officially assigned to the plane of Amelia Earhart.

Walter McMenamy said he picked up weak signals on 6210 kilocycles at 6 P.M. [10 P.M. Eastern daylight time] and heard the letters "L-a-t" which he took to mean latitude. The letters were followed by undecipherable figures.

The signals continued for some time. Mr. McMenamy expressed belief they came from a portable transmitter. he received other signals from a Coast Guard boat, presumably the cutter Itasca, requesting listeners to "stand by and listen on all frequencies."

At 8 P.M. [midnight Eastern daylight time], Carl Pierson, chief engineer of the Patterson Radio Corporation, picked up similarly weak signals on 3,105 kilocycles, Miss Earhart's daytime frequency. He said they were erratic and undecipherable.

Both Mr. McMenamy and Mr. Pierson said the signals came from a hand-cranked generator. Miss Earhart carried one in her plane.

Within 100 Miles of Goals

Honolulu July 2 (AP) -- Amelia Earhart, the world's best known aviatrix, and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were believed forced down at sea today in their $80,000 "flying laboratory" somewhere near tiny Howland Island on a daring attempt to span the South Pacific.

Apparently headwinds had exhausted their gasoline within 100 miles of the end of a projected 2,556-mile flight from Lae, New Guinea.

The alarming silence of the plane's radio spurred into search the Coast Guard cutter Itasca from Howland Island when Miss Earhart's estimated gasoline deadline of 8 P.M. [E.D.T.] passed without word.

A message from the globe-girdling plane, the time of which was translated at Washington by Coast Guard headquarters as 3:20 P.M. [E.D.T.] said she had only a half hour's gasoline and had not sighted land. A later incomplete message was reported at 4:43 P.M. [E.D.T.] Earlier at 2:46 P.M. [E.D.T.] the plane was approximately 100 miles from the island.

The cutter Itasca set out at 8:30 P.M. [E.D.T.] to hunt the missing plane. Coast guardsmen here expressed the belief that aviation's "first lady" and her companion had overshot the minute island and come down somewhere in the vast mid-Pacific region far removed from regular shipping lanes. The cutter prepared to search the little known area northwest of Howland Island.

Bound around the world on an equatorial trail of more than 27,000 miles, Miss Earhart had flown since May 21 from Oakland, Calif., in relatively leisurely stages.

Arriving at Lae, New Guinea, June 28 she awaited favorable weather for the attempt to negotiate the unflown miles to Howland Island, the dot of land that represents the United States' frontier in the South Pacific and is regarded as a potential stepping stone on an air line between the Pacific Coast and the Antipodes.

She left Lae at 10 A.M. local time July 2, which was 8 P.M. yesterday, Eastern daylight time, expecting to complete the flight in eighteen or twenty hours.

The navy tug Ontario stood by half-way between New Guinea and Howland Island, but was not heard from. The Itasca, waiting to receive Miss Earhart at the island received only the barest reports of her progress until the message came that her fuel was about gone.

The next nearest land to Howland is Jarvis Island, a similar mid-Pacific dot forty miles north. Aside form these virtual sandbars there is nothing but water for hundreds of miles.

Howland Island is many hours behind Eastern time, and daylight still existed there with a smooth sea and good visibility prevailing.

The Coast Guard reported receipt of the following message from the Itasca:

"Earhart contact at 3:30 P.M. [E.D.T.]; reported half hour fuel and no landfall. Position doubtful.

"Contact 2:46 P.M. [E.D.T.]; reported approximately 100 miles from Itasca, but no relative bearing. Sea is smooth, visibility perfect, ceiling unlimited. Understand she will float for limited time."

Coast Guard officers consulted the army commanders in Honolulu concerning the possibility of sending land or sea planes from Honolulu, but officials said this was unlikely.

Officers aboard the cutter reported they estimated 8 P.M. [E.D.T.] was the latest the plane could stay aloft an that if it had not arrived by then search would be started in the northwest quadrant from Howland Island "as the most probable area."

Headquarters officials said they could not understand the discrepancy between Miss Earhart's report that she had only a half hour's fuel and the Itasca estimate that she could remain in the air until 7 P.M. They added, however, that the Itasca officers might have taken into account a reserve fuel supply aboard the plane.

Information was sought concerning the sea, whether it was smooth enough to aid the fliers in keeping afloat until the Itasca could locate and rescue them or whether it was rough enough to endanger them immediately.

The Itasca radioed Washington the sea was smooth with visibility perfect.

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0702.html#article

Have a smooth start of the holiday weekend,(f) (f) (f)
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

(2002) An unusual love story told in three episodes, Tipping the Velvet charts the course of Nan, an ingénue who discovers a sexually charged world of male impersonators, actors and affluent women looking for female companionship in the usually controlled and corseted 1890s. Ultimately, however, Nan learns that she can only truly depend on herself. Stars Keeley Hawes, Rachel Stirling, John Bowe, Jodhi May, Anna Chancellor and Hugh Bonneville.
Starring: Rachael Stirling, Keeley Hawes
Director: Geoffrey Sax
Genre: Television

Don't watch it alone unless you want to take a cold shower afterwards.... :| ;) This BBC production was not only three superlative television shows in terms of continuing story, but the production (cinematography, editing, lighting, etc.) were quite extraordinary as well.

I won't give away the title except to say that the 1890's British accents and undercurrents of butch-femme dynamics were the best. ({) (})

Peace,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face" Eleanor Roosevelt (h)

[sweetlady]

http://lesbianlife.about.com/mbiopage.htm

What in the world has changed for posting here?

Respectfully,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

This John Sayles drama follows the title character's changing world when she becomes fed up with her marriage to her oppressive, cheating husband and begins a homosexual affair with Ruth, her night school professor. But Lianna's joy at finding a new life and love soon disintegrates as the people around her start to treat her differently. Forced to find a new apartment, job and friends, Lianna finds that with freedom also comes loneliness.
Starring: Linda Griffiths, Jane Hallaren
Director: John Sayles
Genre: Drama

Four stars! (*) (*) (*) (*) Not as good as "Tipping the Velvet", however was much more poignant and I related to it more.

(S) <getting sleepy> Two more courses started a few days ago. (S) Off to bed soon since I'm up early tomorrow.

(f) (f) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

http://www.mediaspec.com/castles/

http://www.castles-of-britain.com/

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=Poland+castles&btnG=Search

http://www.castlesontheweb.com/search/Castle_Tours/Poland/

http://www.parmaitaly.com/castellik.html

(S) Have a relaxing Friday night and sleep tight tonight. (S) (f) (f)

Peace,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

http://home.bawue.de/~wmwerner/essling/english/glas01.html

Metropolitan Museum of Art: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/glas/hd_glas.htm

http://www.palos118.org/south/curriculum/team6c/midages/stainedglass/

Rose Stained Glass Windows: http://www.elore.com/Gothic/Learning/rose_windows.htm

http://www.canterbury-cathedral.org/histglass.html

http://www.kent.k12.wa.us/staff/cspears/middle_ages/stained_glass.html

(o) (f) (w) (S)

Hugs,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Summer at warp speed: Hurry up and relax

MARGARET WENTE
July 3, 2004 Canada Globe and Mail

When I was a kid, summer was simple. I would ride my bike, play house with my girlfriends, break into the boys-only fort to annoy them and lie around on the couch all afternoon sucking popsicles. Time passed slowly. Every July, my grandparents would load us into the car and drive to Michigan, where we stayed at a cottage with no running water. We brushed our teeth at the outdoor pump and had baths in the lake. It was great.

Kids today aren't so lucky. Their lives are much more organized. They have art camp, soccer camp, computer camp. They have T-ball and tutoring. When mom and dad are both working, they need someplace to stash the kids when school's out. They also know there's no time to waste. Without organized enrichment, their kids will surely fall behind in the great race of life.

I feel sorry for the grownups too. The average striving middle-class professional can't afford to take too much time off in the summer. Your company will think you're a slacker if you do. Worse, your colleagues might not miss you, and then where would you be?

The relentless march of progress (cell phones, email, laptops, CrackBerrys) has made it slightly easier to fake it, and sneak away at noon on Friday. But those loathsome devices also mean you can work all the time.

Take me. I was in the country yesterday. It was a perfect morning, and nature beckoned me to go right out and start killing things. (I kill things. My husband plants them. It's a sensible division of labour. ) I should have answered Nature's call. Instead, I plugged in my computer and checked my e-mail. I read the friendly ones, deleted the ones that started "You are such a jerk," and sat down to write this piece. No need to be in the office. Now I can obsess anywhere.

In Europe, they think we're insane.

In Europe, they think nothing of taking at least a month off every summer. But we're a nation that crams in our relaxing time. (It's the Americans' fault.) Nothing is more dismal than the traffic jams on Sunday night of people heading back into the city, 48 hours after they got stuck in traffic heading out of it. In between, you can bet they didn't lie around. They were busy, busy, busy.

Take entertaining. When I was a kid, my family's idea of a summer dinner party was hot dogs and potato salad on paper plates. Life is not so simple now. Last weekend some friends asked us over and served up homemade spring pea soup straight from Gourmet magazine, followed by impeccably grilled free-range organic chicken, tomatoes with bufala mozzarella, four kinds of cheese you can't get at Valu-Mart, and fresh-picked strawberries from the gourmet produce store. They had linen napkins, which they take back down to the city to wash and iron.
They are busy urban professionals, just like us, so we have no excuse. We are now obliged to invite them back. Paper napkins and hot dogs will not do. I love them, but it makes me tired just thinking about it.

Once upon a time, country living was a simple matter. People lived in simple cabins with cobwebs in the corners, furnished with a lot of junk. If they wanted something to do at night, they went out and watched the stars. Now people's country places are nicer than their city places. They have gardens to maintain and decorator pillows to fluff up. They have giant televisions to watch at night, and satellite dishes that get all the channels. The trouble with the country used to be that there was nothing to do. Now the trouble is that there's too much to do.
Then there's the summer culture obligation, upon which entire industries are built.

If you're a Torontonian of a certain age and not a total lowbrow, you are obliged to schlep down to Stratford or Shaw and sit through a bunch of plays you're not too sure you want to see. If you don't do this, you feel vaguely like a philistine, and if you do, you feel vaguely guilty for wishing you were lying around in the country instead of shelling out $180 for Titus Andronicus.

Of course, you only think you'd be lying around. You'd probably be washing your windows, putting on your screens, and sweeping up the heaps of dead flies that fell out of the windows when you opened them. That's what I did on Thursday. Then I went out and killed some things. Then I ordered Stratford tickets. It was hard to get the ones I wanted, because summer's almost over. Just nine weeks till Labour Day. We've got to throw a couple of dinner parties. Better hurry up.

www.globeandmail.com

(*) Margaret is definitely one of my favorite columnists. Canadians like her have such a refreshingly liberal worldview. (okay, so Margaret is often slightly right leaning at times in her columns). (*)

I'm off soon with the Doc - it's doggie spa-day for him! It's his 6th canine birthday tomorrow! >wondering if there is someplace to get a dog-friendly birthday cake>

Carp Diem,
Sweetlady (k)

[sweetlady]

Breck Girl Takes On Dr. No

July 8, 2004
By MAUREEN DOWD

New York Times

WASHINGTON - I'm happy for John Kerry.

Long-faced guy, as some Bushies refer to him, finally found
somebody to stand at the podium and give him an adoring
look.

Heaven knows Teresa was never going to do it. Her attention
rarely seems to light on her husband when she's at a
microphone with him.

It's sort of mesmerizing, really. She's unlike any other
political wife I've ever seen - unscripted and ready to do
as she likes, in her intriguing, world-weary way, even as
her second husband introduced his running mate at her
adored first husband's 88-acre, $3.7 million "farm" in
suburban Pittsburgh. The white-columned colonial mansion
and swimming pool were out of sight and bales of hay
strategically placed to give a populist touch.

She doesn't gaze like Nancy or glare like Lee Hart or look
appraisingly at her husband like Elizabeth Edwards. She
doesn't always seem to notice he's there. When Mr. Kerry
moves in for a nuzzle or a kiss, she sometimes makes a
little face.

She's easily distracted, waving and mouthing "Hello" at the
audience and languidly arranging her hair and the
red-and-blue "John Kerry for President" scarves she
designed.

She siphons attention from a husband who has a hard enough
time getting it. Yesterday, she distracted the audience
when she seemed to be trying to get young Jack Edwards to
stop sucking his thumb. Sometimes she'll laugh and smile in
inappropriate places - she once chuckled while her husband
talked about curbing tax breaks for the rich.

Teresa has the air, as Chris Matthews noted, of an
old-fashioned European movie star. She projects a quality
like Marlene Dietrich or Jeanne Moreau, a sultry
touch-me-and-you-die look with an accent to match: a rare
political perfume of I don't give a hoot, I'm worth a
billion dollars and you're not and he's not and the Bushes
are not; of I have four mansions and he doesn't; of I'm so
confident I can admit to using Botox and I can wear Chanel
while my husband complains about manufacturing jobs' going
overseas.

Her detachment seems all the more appealing now that John
Kerry can't stop patting and grabbing his new pup, John
Edwards. Mr. Edwards awkwardly reciprocates, sliding his
arm around the big guy's torso.

(But nothing was as painful as watching Mr. Kerry
determinedly trying to cavort on the farm's lawn with the
adorable little Jack.)

Ordinarily, the John-John ticket might seem a bit
off-putting - a little too glib, a little too ingratiating,
a little too forced, a little too expedient, a little too
eager to please. But when the competition is two oilmen who
don't seem to want to please anybody but Halliburton and
the Saudis - ask Pat Leahy, Old Europe and the 9/11 panel -
overeagerness is a relief.

It's hilarious that the Republicans are trying to paint
their ticket as the more optimistic one.

Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush radiate negativity, even as Mr.
Edwards and his photogenic blond kids glow for the cameras.
Dick Cheney glowers for the camera, a Dr. No with a dark
vision that has resulted in a gigantic global mess. (When
he was stopped by applause at a campaign stop in Altoona,
Pa., on Sunday, he asked, "You guys want to hear this
speech or not?")

Unfortunately for this White House, it is Mr. Edwards's
great talent to talk about the class warfare of "two
Americas" in a sunny way. The Breck Girl is already getting
under the Boy King's thin skin.

President Bush should have easily knocked a question about
Mr. Edwards - nicknamed the Breck Girl by Bush officials -
out of the park. But he whiffed. Steve Holland of Reuters
noted that Senator Edwards was being described "as
charming, engaging, a nimble campaigner, a populist and
even sexy. How does he stack up against Dick Cheney?"

W. should have given a sly smile and drawled, "You mean you
don't find Vice sexy?" Instead, he looked irritated and
spit out his answer: "Dick Cheney can be president."
Indeed, he already is.

Except for the fact that the Secret Service has already
advised journalists to bring "escape hood respirators" to
the Democratic convention in Boston in case of a terrorist
attack, it looks as if happy campaign days are here
again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/08/opinion/08DOWD.html?ex=1090290586&ei=1&en=870bdf4a5cbce05e

The earlier posting with Margaret Wente from the Canadian Globe and Mail and this one by Maureen Dowd from the New York Times - these two along with Peggy Noonnan form the Wall Street Journal are pretty cool columnists. By the way?
www.globeandmail.com and www.nytimes.com are both free on-line. (f) (h) How cool is that?

Cool thoughts during the dog days of summer,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

If you can watch this and not laugh, then supposedly you are sane. LMAO

Try this (with the sound up) --

www.knplogic.co.uk/are_u_mad.html


Enjoy as I did,
Sweetlady (h)

[sweetlady]

July 10, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Closing of the American Book
By ANDREW SOLOMON

A survey released on Thursday reports that reading for pleasure is way down in America among every group — old and young, wealthy and poor, educated and uneducated, men and women, Hispanic, black and white. The survey, by the National Endowment for the Arts, also indicates that people who read for pleasure are many times more likely than those who don't to visit museums and attend musical performances, almost three times as likely to perform volunteer and charity work, and almost twice as likely to attend sporting events. Readers, in other words, are active, while nonreaders — more than half the population — have settled into apathy. There is a basic social divide between those for whom life is an accrual of fresh experience and knowledge, and those for whom maturity is a process of mental atrophy. The shift toward the latter category is frightening.

Reading is not an active expression like writing, but it is not a passive experience either. It requires effort, concentration, attention. In exchange, it offers the stimulus to and the fruit of thought and feeling. Kafka said, "A book must be an ice ax to break the seas frozen inside our soul." The metaphoric quality of writing — the fact that so much can be expressed through the rearrangement of 26 shapes on a piece of paper — is as exciting as the idea of a complete genetic code made up of four bases: man's work on a par with nature's. Discerning the patterns of those arrangements is the essence of civilization.

The electronic media, on the other hand, tend to be torpid. Despite the existence of good television, fine writing on the Internet, and video games that test logic, the electronic media by and large invite inert reception. One selects channels, but then the information comes out preprocessed. Most people use television as a means of turning their minds off, not on. Many readers watch television without peril; but for those for whom television replaces reading, the consequences are far-reaching.

My last book was about depression, and the question I am most frequently asked is why depression is on the rise. I talk about the loneliness that comes of spending the day with a TV or a computer or video screen. Conversely, literary reading is an entry into dialogue; a book can be a friend, talking not at you, but to you. That the rates of depression should be going up as the rates of reading are going down is no happenstance. Meanwhile, there is some persuasive evidence that escalating levels of Alzheimer's disease reflect a lack of active engagement of adult minds. While the disease appears to be determined in large part by heredity and environmental stimulants, it seems that those who continue learning may be less likely to develop Alzheimer's.

So the crisis in reading is a crisis in national health.

I will never forget seeing, as a high school student on my first trip to East Berlin, the plaza where Hitler and Goebbels had burned books from the university library. Those bonfires were predicated on the idea that texts could undermine armies. Soviet repression of literature followed the same principle.

The Nazis were right in believing that one of the most powerful weapons in a war of ideas is books. And for better or worse, the United States is now in such a war. Without books, we cannot succeed in our current struggle against absolutism and terrorism. The retreat from civic to virtual life is a retreat from engaged democracy, from the principles that we say we want to share with the rest of the world. You are what you read. If you read nothing, then your mind withers, and your ideals lose their vitality and sway.

So the crisis in reading is a crisis in national politics.

It is important to acknowledge that the falling-off of reading has to do not only with the incursion of anti-intellectualism, but also with a flawed intellectualism. The ascendancy of poststructuralism in the 1980's coincided with the beginning of the catastrophic downturn in reading; deconstructionism's suggestion that all text is equal in its meanings and the denigration of the canon led to the devaluation of literature. The role of literature is to illuminate, to strengthen, to explain why some aspect of life is moving or beautiful or terrible or sad or important or insignificant for people who might otherwise not understand so much or so well. Reading is experience, but it also enriches other experience.

Even more immediate than the crises in health and politics brought on by the decline of reading is the crisis in national education. We have one of the most literate societies in history. What is the point of having a population that can read, but doesn't? We need to teach people not only how, but also why to read. The struggle is not to make people read more, but to make them want to read more.

While there is much work do be done in the public schools, society at large also has a job. We need to make reading, which is in its essence a solitary endeavor, a social one as well, to encourage that great thrill of finding kinship in shared experiences of books. We must weave reading back into the very fabric of the culture, and make it a mainstay of community.

Reading is harder than watching television or playing video games. I think of the Epicurean mandate to exchange easier for more difficult pleasures, predicated on the understanding that those more difficult pleasures are more rewarding. I think of Walter Pater's declaration: "The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it to a life of sharp and eager observation. . . . The poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass." Surely that is something all Americans would want, if we only understood how readily we might achieve it, how well worth the effort it is.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/10/opinion/10SOLO.html

(*) (*) (*) (*) (*) (*) (*) for all of those passionate book lovers! (*) (*) (*)

Carpe Diem!
Sweetlady (k)

[sweetlady]

http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2004/05/02/travel/sophisticated/index.html

Nice thoughts and photos on dark Monday a.m. (thunderstorms) and Doc is exactly right next to me. (poor thing)

Have a lovely week,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Broadband over power lines makes it possible for plain old electric wires to do double duty in carrying high-speed digital data.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/business/yourmoney/11tech.html

Cool, another distribution venue for broadband, the more competition resulting in lower costs and access for more people. (I still believe that wireless including satellite is the wave of the future for broadband access on my ranch... (h) )

(k) (k) (k) .
Sweetlady, the "girl-propeller-head" ;)

[sweetlady]

THE NATION
Initiatives to Ban Gay Marriage Could Help Bush in Key States Strategists hope ballot measures in electoral battlegrounds will boost conservative turnout.
By Janet Hook
L A Times Staff Writer

July 12, 2004

WASHINGTON — If Phil Burress has his way, Ohio will be a battleground this fall for more than just the presidential candidates. It will be the scene of a moral struggle over the future of marriage, an institution on the front lines of a culture war that some conservatives want to wage in this election year.

Burress, a conservative activist in Cincinnati, is laboring to put before Ohio's voters a state constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages. If he succeeds, Ohio will become one of about a dozen states where this issue has been muscled onto the November ballot.

Conservatives are pushing hard for state action in part because the issue is falling flat in Congress. Although the Senate began discussion Friday of a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman, it almost certainly will not pass.

But same-sex marriage is roiling the politics of many states and could influence the outcome of the presidential election.

Republican strategists hope — and Democratic strategists fear — that the presence of anti-gay-marriage initiatives on the ballots of swing states such as Michigan and Oregon will boost turnout among conservative voters and improve President Bush's chances of winning crucial electoral college votes.

In the last month, activists in four states — Arkansas, Michigan, Montana and Oregon — have gathered enough petition signatures to force a vote in November on marriage amendments to their state constitutions. Five other states had already put the issue on their November ballots; two more will vote on amendments before then. Other states may yet take up the topic.

Those state petition drives are welcome successes for conservatives, who say they have found it surprisingly difficult to light a fire at the federal level for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

Conservatives seized the issue because they view same-sex marriage as an affront to the sanctity of a fundamental social institution — and as a political issue that could be as potent an organizing tool as the fight against abortion has been.

Although public opinion polls show that a majority of Americans oppose legal recognition of same-sex marriage, there is less support for amending the Constitution to ban it.

What is more, polls show that only a minority of voters consider the issue a top priority. Many people had not even considered the question until a Massachusetts court five months ago thrust it onto the national agenda by ruling that same-sex couples had a right to marry.

"People on the street in Los Angeles or Sacramento don't necessarily realize the significance of what's happening in the courts," said Matt Daniels, president of the Alliance for Marriage, a group leading the fight for a federal constitutional amendment. Same-sex marriage is so far removed from most people's lives, Daniels said, that "people are not thinking about this."

But same-sex marriage remains a potent political issue because the segment of the population that is concerned about it cares so intensely, GOP pollster Bill McInturff said.

"This is one of the three or four issues that will define this election cycle," he said.

The issue may rouse potential Bush supporters who need an extra shove out the door on election day. These include conservatives who have been disillusioned by parts of Bush's record, such as his big increase in federal spending, as well as the 4 million Christian conservatives who did not vote in the 2000 elections, to the frustration of Bush political strategist Karl Rove.

"In rural areas or exurbia, where there may be voters who have some disappointment with Bush, either on the budget deficit or other things, this is the kind of thing that will drive them to the polls — to his benefit," said Gary Bauer, a conservative leader.

Gay rights activists say the fact that Republicans are pushing the marriage amendment to a vote in Congress when there is no hope of it passing makes it clear that the issue is simply a political gesture to appease conservatives.

"You can see what their raw agenda is," said Cheryl Jacques, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group that supports same-sex marriage. "President Bush believes this will mobilize his extreme-right base."

Gay rights organizations are urging their members to get involved at the state and federal levels. "Bush and his political team are playing with fire," Jacques said. "They awoke a sleeping giant. The gay community is more activated and galvanized than ever before."

But some analysts and congressional staff say the more intense lobbying pressure seems to be coming from the right.

"We have received a lot of calls, and phone volume is heavy against gay marriage," said Scott Milburn, spokesman for Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio).

People promoting marriage amendments in Congress and the states deny they are doing so simply to help Bush, but few dispute that they expect it to redound to his political benefit.

Bush has called several times, as recently as Saturday, for a federal constitutional amendment to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. His Democratic rival, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, has said he opposes same-sex marriage but does not want to amend the Constitution to ban it.

In 1996, Kerry was one of only 14 senators to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits federal recognition of same-sex marriages. Despite the passage of that act, Bush has said a constitutional amendment is needed because the federal law does not "protect marriage within any state or city" and because it could be struck down by "activist courts."

"If courts create their own arbitrary definition of marriage as a mere legal contract, and cut marriage off from its cultural, religious and natural roots," Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address, "then the meaning of marriage is lost, and the institution is weakened."

But Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, said Sunday that the states, rather than the federal government, should have the last word.

"When it comes to conferring legal status on relationships, that is a matter left to the states," she said on CNN's "Late Edition," noting that "the constitutional amendment discussion will give us an opportunity to look for ways to discuss ways in which we can keep the authority of the states intact."

Her husband supports a constitutional amendment, though during the 2000 campaign he had said that "people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It's really no one else's business in terms of trying to regulate or prohibit behavior in that regard."

The Cheneys' younger daughter, Mary, is a lesbian who has been active in gay issues in Colorado. She now works for the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign.

Californians will not be voting on any marriage initiative this fall, but the state has seen in the past how ballot initiatives can affect candidates on the same ballot. In 1982, Democrat Tom Bradley narrowly lost his bid to become California governor largely because of heavy GOP turnout to vote against a gun control initiative.

Some analysts question whether this year's initiatives will have much effect on voter turnout, if only because turnout is already expected to be high due to intense interest in the presidential race.

In Oregon, a key presidential swing state and one where a marriage initiative will be on the ballot, turnout typically is as high as 80% in a presidential election year, said Tim Hibbitts, an independent pollster in Portland.

With the state's economy ranking among the worst in the country, Hibbitts said, marriage may not be the first thing on voters' minds. But if voting on same-sex marriage helps anyone, it will be Bush, he said.

In Michigan, pollster Ed Sarpolus said that the vote on a marriage amendment this fall may bring out more conservative Republicans, who would vote for Bush, in the closely contested state. But it may also bring out some Catholic Democrats who, though conservative on social issues, are not necessarily Bush supporters.

In Missouri, another swing state in the presidential contest, there was a partisan slugfest over the timing of a vote on a state marriage amendment.

When the Missouri Legislature decided to put the proposed amendment before the state's voters, Republicans wanted it to appear on the November ballot. Democrats, fearing a November vote might also tip the state to Bush, called for the question to appear during the August primary vote.

The issue went to the state's Supreme Court, which sided with the Democrats and set the vote for August.

A fight is still raging over whether the issue will be on the ballot in Ohio, a crucial battleground for Bush and Kerry. Same-sex marriage opponents have until Aug. 2 to gather 317,000 signatures to get a November vote on a constitutional amendment, but advocates have been fighting to keep the issue off the ballot.

Ohio is sympathetic territory for opponents of same-sex marriage. An April poll by the Columbus Dispatch found that 78% of those surveyed thought such relationships should not be granted legal recognition and 60% supported a constitutional amendment to ban them.

National conservative groups have bombarded their members in Ohio with e-mails to promote the amendment. The Human Rights Campaign is investing money and staff in a drive to defeat it. When Bush appeared in Cincinnati recently, the group ran a full-page ad in the local newspaper that read: "Jobs lost in Ohio since 2001: 255,000; Gay marriages in Ohio: 0. Focus on Americans' real priorities, Mr. President."

For activists on both sides of the issue, the challenge in Congress and across the country is to get the attention of themajority of the people who are still trying to figure out their stance on the issue or who do not feel particularly strongly about it.

"People are disturbed by the idea of same-sex marriage, but right now it's just an attitude and not something they are acting on," said John C. Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron who has written on religion and politics. "It's the job of activists to turn those attitudes into votes."

*The amendment:
Senate Joint Resolution 40, known as the Federal Marriage Amendment, states: "Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gaymarry12jul12.story

(*) <making a note to try once again online to register to vote> (*)

(f) (f) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

In Mystery, Alaska, life revolves around the legendary Saturday hockey game at the local pond. Unexpectedly, the hometown team (led by Russell Crowe) gets an exhibition match against the New York Rangers. When quirky small-towners, slick promoters and millionaire athletes come together, it's not pretty, but it's certainly funny. Directed by Jay Roach (Meet the Parents). (*) (*) (*) (*)
Starring: Russell Crowe, Hank Azaria Director: Jay Roach Genre: Comedy

Taking a break from reading 125 assigned pages for two written assignments in one of my classes (took nine hours today), I watched "Mystery, Alaska" tonight and laughed my a** off! I'm not much into sports but ice hockey was an interest when I was in high school and the Flyers were really good back then in the early 1970's. <thinking to myself....got to jump that synapse from left to right brain once in awhile...> ;)

(S) (o) Have a night filled with restful dreams and starlit wanderings.

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Sex Matters
Will too many boys make China and India aggressive militarily?

BY JAMES Q. WILSON, Wall Street Journal Op-Ed
Tuesday, July 13, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

Our country is preoccupied with terrorism. But looking ahead, terrorism may be only one of our problems.
China and India between them have 2.3 billion people. Although both nations have embraced some aspects of a market economy, one of them, China, is ruled by autocrats who manage a large military establishment. The People's Republic wants to control Hong Kong more than Hong Kong wants to be controlled and harbors aggressive tendencies toward Taiwan. Both India and Pakistan, though engaged in diplomatic talks, wish to control Kashmir, and each country has nuclear weapons to back up those desires.

In "Bare Branches," Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer, two political scientists, add a new and perhaps profound dimension to this problem. Both countries have many more men than women, the result of a longstanding preference for male children that has led to sex-selective abortions and, in many areas, the neglect and premature death of female children. A high "sex ratio," in the authors' view, spells trouble.

The sex ratio refers to the number of men and women in a society. Ordinarily more male than female children are born, so the average sex ratio across nations is about 105 (i.e., 105 men for every 100 women). China and India have much higher sex ratios; in China it is more than 118 for children under the age of five.
During the first half of the 20th century, the Chinese sex ratio fell, and the Communist leaders who took power around 1949 proclaimed the equality of men and women, releasing concubines from servitude. Even so, the sex ratio began to climb in the second half of the 20th century, especially during the 1980s. The change came despite (the authors would say, because of) a policy that urged parents to have only one child.

It is Ms. Hudson and Ms. den Boer's view that limiting children to one per family makes the desire for a male child even more urgent. They believe that, using the ultrasound technology available in China since the late 1970s, families have been aborting female fetuses and possibly killing newborn female infants by direct infanticide or deliberate neglect. Many Chinese scholars dispute this view, arguing that females are simply undercounted in government surveys because families take pride in having (and therefore announcing) a son.

To support their case, the authors note that infant mortality in China is higher for females than for males, a reversal of what is the norm in most countries. (Male infants are more vulnerable to disease and ordinarily die at higher rates than females.) The higher death rate of females can only be explained, the authors believe, by deliberate interventions based on a preference for boys.

Boys are preferred in China, as they are in most countries, for many reasons. A young boy can help more readily with farm labor; he is thought to be more likely to support aged parents; and he carries forward the family name. China has outlawed prenatal sex identification, but like most bans on popular ideas, it had not worked.
The result appears to be that China now has 41 million more men than women. These surplus men are concentrated in the youthful age range of 15 to 34. They are over-represented among poor, transient and unemployed men who will be drawn together into "bachelor subcultures." Citing other scholars, Ms. Hudson and Ms. den Boer speculate that the young-male surplus will translate into higher rates of crime and violence and possibly more political instability. If the government recruits surplus men into the armed forces to keep them under control, it may become more willing to engage in aggressive military actions.

These things may happen, and they may not. We have no reliable information from the modern world as to whether high sex ratios lead to military aggression or political instability. There are good grounds, however, for thinking that crime rates will grow if the ratio of young men to older men increases sharply; that has happened in the U.S.
The authors neglect one offsetting benefit of having more young men than young women. In the U.S., a high sex ratio is statistically associated with high rates of marriage and low rates of illegitimate births. This argument, first made by Marcia Guttenberg and Paul Secord and amplified in other studies--and in my book, "The Marriage Problem"--arises from the laws of supply and demand.

If there are a lot of men for young women, then the women will trade sex in exchange for what they value, which for most women is a stable relationship--that is, marriage and two-parent child care. But if men are scarce and women abundant, then women will lose their bargaining power and exchange sex for whatever is available: one-night stands, illegitimate children or even prostitution. In the U.S., African-Americans have a very low sex ratio, and the consequences of that fact are obvious.

Now, how this works out in practice depends on the culture in which men and women grow up. In the dominantly male Wild West, as reported by historian David Courtwright, there was a lot of violence. Ms. Hudson and Ms. den Boer repeat this finding. But they do not repeat Mr. Courtwright's other observation: namely, that in Wild West towns there was a strong tendency to respect decent women. When a married woman approach a group of men in a tough town with a high sex ratio, the men would call out "church time!" and lapse into respectful silence. By contrast, the Chinese community in the U.S. during the 19th and early 20th centuries, also with a high sex ratio, kept women in something akin to concubinage.

Ms. Hudson and Ms. den Boer acknowledge the work of Ms. Guttenberg and Mr. Secord but choose to ignore it, along with the work of other scholars who have continued research into sex ratio and marriage. "We thus disagree" with these analyses, the authors write, but do not explain why.

Nevertheless, "Bare Branches" is an impressive and comprehensive account of sex ratios, especially in China, and may well give us reason to worry more than we have about that country's future and--in a globalized world--our own.


(*) This sure got my attention in an otherwise very concervative and right-leaning newspaper. If it weren't for the financial and business news, the opinion columnists would not be on my Internet radar for the most part. I must admit that sometimes the WSJ's daily "Best of the Web" is pretty funny.....and Peggy Noonan is an incisive writer too. (*)

Enjoy your day - whatever little surprises in life come your way. (f)

(k) (k) .
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

http://travel2.nytimes.com/top/features/travel/destinations/europe/unitedkingdom/scotland/guide.html?th

Several articles on this extraordinary country. (f)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

McCain: Same-sex marriage ban is un-Republican. WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona broke forcefully with President Bush and the Senate GOP leadership Tuesday evening over the issue of same-sex marriage, taking to the Senate floor to call a constitutional amendment to prohibit the practice unnecessary -- and un-Republican,

Who knew?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/14/mccain.marriage/

And now onto other, more pleasant topics. (l)

;)
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

HP and Dell going green: The two biggest companies fighting to sell personal computers are now fighting to take them away for recycling. In dueling news releases on Tuesday, Dell and Hewlett-Packard -- the world's two largest manufacturers of personal computers -- announced new programs to recycle electronics for free. HP said it will accept old electronics equipment, from PCs to TVs, that are dropped off at Office Depot outlets across the country from July 18 to Sept. 6, free of charge.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/

***********************************
July 13, 2004 San Jose Mercury News-Silicon Valley
Gay Marriage: A Deeply Political Morality
• posted by Dan Gillmor 10:23 PM

Washington Post: Kill This Amendment. Precisely because of the weight conservatives have put on this issue, today's vote, despite its preordained outcome, has become deeply important. It requires senators to take a public stand on a question of deep principle: Are they willing to warp the entire American constitutional structure to prevent people who love one another from marrying? The amendment is going to lose, but it's dismaying that so many senators -- calling this a moral issue -- are willing to change the Constitution to turn some Americans into second-class citizens. Where's the morality in that?
http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/
*************************
July 12, 2004 San Jose Mercury News-Silicon Valley
PR, Blogs and the Evolving Media World
• posted by Dan Gillmor 12:15 PM
http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/010588.shtml#010588
http://www.globalprblogweek.com/archives/jay_rosen_pr_needs_t.php#more
******************************
How do we adjust when cameras are everywhere?
Posted on Sun, Jun. 20, 2004
By Dan Gillmor Mercury News Technology Columnist

Sprint has announced that it will start selling camera-less Treo 600 smart phones from PalmOne, the Milpitas maker of the popular handheld devices. Why? To satisfy customers fearful of corporate espionage inside their businesses.

I suppose it's always better to sell what the customer wants. But I have bad news for Sprint's worried customers: This won't help much, because the pace of technology means cameras will soon disappear from view, embedded in clothing and eyeglasses, not just phones.

Sprint's move highlights one more set of issues we have to confront in a world of digital information. Whether we're talking about photos or videos or documents or just about anything else that can be converted into zeroes and ones, we're entering a changed world.

Tiny, even microscopic, cameras, deployed ubiquitously, should worry us in any number of ways. Individuals will lose even more of their privacy. Companies will find it difficult to maintain traditional notions of trade secrets. And governments will confront a world in which, to some extent, people will spy on the official snoops, not just the other way around.

Technology has already led to some of these changes in what for the most part are relatively small ways compared with what's coming.

How can we respond appropriately? We should emphatically note that people and institutions have a need, and a fundamental right, to maintain some degree of privacy and security. But at least in the case of businesses and governments, we should encourage more openness instead of the mania for secrecy that seems to be growing.

For individuals, the issue is fairly simple, I think. We need to strictly enforce laws that prohibit uninvited snooping, whether by governments, businesses or nosy neighbors. A zone of privacy is essential, or we'll lose a fundamental part of what it means to live in a free society.

Video cameras

This should -- but probably won't -- extend to walking down a street. But the ever-growing presence of video cameras in public places, combined with the tendency to put those images in searchable databases, is creating a situation where any rational person may soon have to assume he or she is under surveillance when outside the home.

The government insists that it has the absolute right to know everything about us, but that we have no right to know much of anything any official declares off-limits. Some information is properly shielded, but in an age where officials use terrorism as an excuse to shut off public access even to benign information, the trend is to reveal less and less. This is a perversion of a fundamental tenet of democracy: an informed citizenry.

Yet some police agencies have put cameras in police patrol cars, recording what happens when suspects are stopped. All interrogations by the authorities should be videotaped. This won't just prevent violations of rights. It will also help convict the guilty, who can't claim abuse if it hasn't happened.

Citizens can and should use this new technology to help police the police. Rodney King was an early example of how it could work. So, thanks to the honorable whistle-blowing of a soldier who couldn't stomach what he had seen, were the disgusting pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Once a picture exists, there's a reasonable chance that it'll spread widely, if the subject is important enough and the picture sufficiently revealing. For some politically motivated criminals, this is a public-relations bonanza, as the vile video of the Nicholas Berg beheading demonstrated.

Businesses have trade secrets. They have private internal conversations. Digital-imaging technology inevitably lifts the corporate veil, too.

Where we need to force more transparency on government and do more to protect personal privacy, businesses should look at the technological trends and realize that the time has come for more voluntary transparency. Some things have to be kept secret, at least for a while, but I believe companies will find advantages in hanging out more, not less, of the corporate laundry.

The marketplace now includes a variety of constituents who need to know more about what a company is doing: employees, customers, suppliers, communities. If a company is doing its best for those constituencies, maybe that's a competitive advantage worth having.

What's the alternative, anyway? When cameras disappear into shirt buttons, will companies force visitors to undergo detailed searches or ask them to strip and put on different clothes? Now there's a way to welcome your customers.

The implications of cameras everywhere -- especially cameras connected to networks -- go far beyond this. Imagine how events of the past would have looked had tomorrow's technology been available at the time.

Sept. 11 memories

From various sources, we've seen and heard the heartbreaking communications from people who were inside the doomed planes and World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001. Yet our memories of that awful day stem largely from television: videos of airplanes slamming into the World Trade Center, the fireballs that erupted, the crumbling to earth of the structures.

What would we remember if the people in those aircraft and buildings had been carrying camera phones that day? What if they'd been sending images and audio from the epicenter of the terrorists' airborne arsenal, and from inside the towers that disintegrated under their feet? I don't mean to be ghoulish, but I do suggest that our memories would be considerably different had images and sounds of that kind ricocheted around the globe.

We have a lot to contemplate in our digital future. We can't stop the technology. So we'd better figure out how to adjust.

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/dan_gillmor/8969256.htm

(o) Got to run. Have a nice Wednesday everyone.
;) (k) .
Sweetlady

[Beaudyk]

I have recently been reminded that few people outside the Western States have any idea about Las Vegas as it really is. Here is a great link someone sent me:

http://www.ci.las-vegas.nv.us/history/default.htm

[Beaudyk]

http://www.greatbasinweb.com/

[sweetlady]

July 16, 2004 NYTimes
Learning the Things a Footsore Horse and a Dirty Saddle Can Teach You
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

I cleaned my saddle on a hot afternoon in Wyoming recently. It's a Western saddle, made for me nearly a decade ago by a saddle maker in Billings, Mont. At the time, I was spending part of every summer in the West, trying to learn as much as I could about horses and horsemanship. The days spent on horseback were always a strange tangle of joy and nervous anticipation. The horses were mostly strangers to me, and I was supposed to be imparting something to them, not merely taking what they had to offer. I rode, I learned a lot about horses, and the saddle darkened with use.

In Wyoming I took off the cinches and stirrups. I removed the breast collar and laid it in the sun. I brushed away the dust and oiled the latigos, then worked over the fine tooling on the skirts and fenders with a soft rag. I removed a plywood splinter wedged between the oak frame of the stirrup and its leather lining — the result of a collision in a Colorado round pen. I even spent a couple of hours polishing the nickel-silver bindings on the stirrups, trying to restore the mirrored shine they had when they were new. They began to gleam, but they'd been nicked and dinged too often to look new again.

I'd spent part of that week in the saddle again, for the first time in several years. I was riding with old friends, including a trainer named Buck Brannaman, and once again I was riding an unfamiliar horse, feeling in the way he moved how all the riders before me had responded to him. The horse's name was Eddie. He'd spent part of his life trying to decide just what his numerous riders were trying to teach him. But since he rarely had the same rider twice, Eddie decided to stick with what he already knew. That's why he felt a little stubborn, a little sluggish, but not unwilling. I spent three days getting him soft in the mouth again, easy to bend, light in my hands. In return, he reminded me how much I had once learned from horses. Eddie made me want to clean my saddle and come home and ride my own good horse, a quarter horse named Remedy, who has had plenty of time off lately.

You'd think that a man with his own horse and saddle would ride every day. But you'd be wrong. I took a job — this one — that has made it hard to haul the horses to the West for the summer. And somehow the East has seemed too full of excuses and inhibitions. Too much work to do. Not enough skywide spaces or antelope. Even the pleasure of watching the horses grazing became an excuse not to interrupt them. And in the end, I lost track of the time. My saddle sat in the horse trailer. The stirrups tarnished in the damp Eastern climate. Mold began to turn up on the cinches. And Remedy, who was 19 when I bought him, slowly turned 26.

So I discovered when I got home from Wyoming last week. I put my newly clean saddle in the horse trailer and brought the horses to the barnyard. Remedy usually leads the way, head high, a straight-up walk toward the feed and the hay. But this time he came last — stiff and visibly thinner than he'd been two weeks earlier. At his age, a horse that loses mobility begins to lose flesh as well, and he'd begun to lose both while I was gone. The vet thinks it's a matter of sore feet — a chronic condition with some aging horses — so we'll do everything we can to ease his pain and build his muscles again. That will mean lots of riding on my part.

Horses live a long time, long enough for owners to believe they'll always be there. I don't know whether horses are conscious of time. But I know that in his pain, Remedy seems, as my wife put it, to be deep within himself. That's not his way. In full health he is pure awareness, boldly alert. He can make you feel like an adjunct of his presence, as if he were somehow vouching for you with the pasture gods. Now it's my turn to vouch for him, to get him healthy and to learn, before it's too late, all the things he knows once more.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/16/opinion/16FRI3.html?ex=1091072007&ei=1&en=530a3b33a34312f0

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[Beaudyk]

Got ink?

http://members.tripod.com/~jennycox/print.html

[Beaudyk]

I had a boa constrictor winding itself around my neck, and it felt really good. It slid slowly around my shoulders and behind my back, and then glided onto the next woman. It was Womongathering, the annual gathering of pagan womyn in northern Pennsylvania. After an intense welcoming ritual, I felt connected on so many levels * by emotion, by song, by the press of hands, by the delicate power of the snakes.

I am a woman of many places and many tribes. Sometimes the connections are shallow and fleeting. When I stop at a rest stop on the highway, I am part of the tribe of travelers. I look at a slighty greasy guy in Bermuda shorts at a New York rest stop, and know we have something in common: that highway hypnosis, the swallowing of the miles, the contrast between rolling and stopping. (I feel a variant of this kinship when I look up at a flock of birds.)

Sometimes the connections are strong and enduring. I stop to talk to the beautiful harpist DeLuna at Womongathering, and find that our lives have the same punctuation marks: we’ve given birth, found our crafts, loved women, grown older, all in echoing cycles. Everywhere, I find myself in other women - sometimes my past, sometimes my present, sometimes my hoped-for future.

Coming out of the dining hall which is the social center of Womongathering, I run into Rainbow. She is tall as an oak, and I always feel that she has an equally strong skeleton. She is older than me, a vision of what possibilities lie in aging.

The women at this gathering are distilled into their essential selves. Names are often carefully chosen, and so are given to each other like offerings. Women wake up in the morning, roll out of the small beds formerly occupied by summer campers, and put on feathers and velvet. (I, in my ubiquitous T-shirt, am lost in admiration.) Then they go off to present and to take workshops on belly-dancing, breast-casting, and turning their fears into powerful action.

As we intersect with each other, we are each other’s milestones. As we reclaim our breasts, our bellies, our aging, we offer our experiences to each other. Recognition is the spark that runs between us.

I find it easy to muse on the gathering, because the sun is in Cancer, and Saturn is close by. Cancer is the sign of the tribe, the family and the domestic hearth, and it is about enclosing, nurturing, and supporting. In the human body, Cancer rules the breast and the belly.

July, when the sun is in Cancer, could be called the month of the Woman, and this particular July could be the month of the Old Woman. Saturn, the planet of age and experience, is close to the sun at both the full and new moons. The sun brings consciousness to Saturn, and puts the Old Woman at center stage.

Saturn gets a bad rap in astrology, because it is also the planet of pain and fear. Any painful experience is crystallized in Saturn, and becomes a fear of whatever caused that pain. And yet is it better to be oblivious to the results of past experiences? Aren’t we seeing the fruits of that kind of oblivion in the current US government? (Hello? Vietnam? The fall of the Roman empire? Any bells ringing?) Fear is not something to be denied, ignored, or done away with, but a teaching tool.

Saturn is the planet of the reality check. When you put something out, and it comes right back to you, that’s Saturn. Pagan womyn teach that it comes back to you many times over, and so it’s always best to send positive energy out into the world. (We also see this in the policies of the Bush administration, which creates new terrorists exponentially, every time it takes action against the old.)

Saturn in Cancer is the Old Woman, the Crone, who takes her long knobby stick and raps you on the kneecap. Yes, it smarts. But yes, it also makes you smarter. The usual response is a sheepish one. (“Ah yes, that boulder has been sitting in my path for years, and I’ve stubbed my toe on it hundreds of times before. Why has it taken me so long to see it?”) Sometimes the response is a defensive one. (“How dare you tell me the truth?”)

But the best response is gratitude, because it’s only in facing your fears (and the boundaries of physical existence) that you become free. Each of us dances through time, showing a new face and body with every season. We are all infinite beings in a finite form, and this is the essence of creativity. Each one of us creates our bodies, our personalities, our lives, as an individual flash of beauty in this endless cycle. Women follow women, in the long passage of the tribe through history.

This is the time to remember that. This is the time to go to your grandmother, whether she lives or just lives inside of you, and ask her to tell you all the stories she remembers. Make yourself comfortable. It will be a long night. But the longer you keep your eyes open, the wiser you will become.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jenny's web site can be found at: http://www.sheville.org/jennyyates.html.
Email Jenny at: jenny_yates@yahoo.com.

(y) :D

[sweetlady]

Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?
( Bryan Adams )

To really love a woman,
To understand her,
You've got to know her deep inside ...
Hear every thought,
See every dream,
And give her wings when she wants to fly.
Then when you find yourself lying helpless in her arms ...
You know you really love a woman

When you love a woman,
You tell her that she's really wanted.
When you love a woman,
You tell her that she's the one.
She needs somebody, to tell her that it's gonna last forever.
So tell me have you ever really ... really, really ever loved a woman?

To really love a woman,
Let her hold you,
Till you know how she needs to be touched.
You've got to breathe her, really taste her,
Till you can feel her in your blood.
And when you see your unborn children in her eyes ...
You know you really love a woman.

When you love a woman,
You tell her that she's really wanted.
When you love a woman,
You tell her that she's the one.
She needs somebody, to tell her that it's gonna last forever.
So tell me have you ever really ... really, really ever loved a woman?

You've got to give her some faith,
Hold her tight, a little tenderness.
You've got to treat her right.
She will be there for you taking good care of you ...
You really gotta love your woman.

And when you find yourself lying helpless in her arms,
You know you really love a woman.

When you love a woman,
You tell her that she's really wanted.
When you love a woman,
You tell her that she's the one.
She needs somebody, to tell her that it's gonna last forever.
So tell me have you ever really ... really, really ever loved a woman?
So tell me have you ever really ... really, really ever loved a woman?

So tell me have you ever really ... really, really ever loved a woman?

(k) (k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Love me with music and dance and poetry. (and being a cow boi whom loves horse and big dogs...) Please love me for being me - an intelligent femme whom knows how to please her butch or FTM. Kisses tonight for you. (k) (k)

(k) kising you where it counts, (w) (f)
Sweetlady (f) (f) (a)

[sweetlady]

Love you all.....and sending your sweet, FEMME energy always.

Shamanic help, whether hands-on, or intellectual. I am here!

(k) (k) (k) (k) Kisss me please where I request? Can I ask " WHAT I WANT?"

Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Isn't music and poetry just the best??

Love,
Sweetlady (k) (k) (k) (k)

[sweetlady]

Is hye out here?

Can I ask this as I sing and dance?

Everybody loves a winner but does anybody love me?

LOVE,
SWEETLADY

[sweetlady]

I wanna wake up in the city that doesn't sleep.....

lOVE,
DIGITALBLONDE

[sweetlady]

I am going to bed soon..........

Please contact me soon.

Love,
Karen@whightvideobabe@earthlink.com


???????????????????

[sweetlady]

Don't you worry about me.

I love , no mater what you do?

Dom you LOVE ME??

Sweetlady (k) (k) (k) (k)

[FR]

----just wanted to say -i 've enjoyed looking through your thread--some i have read and some i will have to come back to-unfortunately my brain gets overwhelmed at times. but its nice to see someone else who enjoys movies like me as well as other pursuits.

[sweetlady]

:@ This is probably the first time I have used that red icon. Sorry that my two neices got into the thread that I started here. I've showed them how to create their own web logs or blogs, but they enjoy "playing" and were in here yesterday afternoon while their Aunt Sweetlady was reading in the living room. :|

Now back to our irreverently unscheduled programming ;) And changing my password to B-F again... ;)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady (for real)

[sweetlady]

http://www.nps.gov/redw/

Redwood National and State Parks are home to some of the world's tallest trees: old-growth coast redwoods. They can live to be 2000 years old and grow to over 300 feet tall. Spruce, hemlock, Douglas-fir, berry bushes, and sword ferns create a multiple canopied understory that towers over all visitors. The parks' mosaic of habitats include prairie/oak woodlands, mighty rivers and streams, and 37 miles of pristine Pacific coastline. Cultural landscapes reflect American Indian history. The more recent logging history has led to much restoration of these parks.

Used to live in the S.F. area including one year in a log cabin in the redwoods south of the city. It was heaven for sure. (well not the commute over the mountains each way to get to Silicon Valley). Talk about seeing stars and all kinds of animals. Had a boxer back then too. He was a brindle named Rudy. He and the ranch horse named Sarge were great company way out in the woods. I first learned about solitude there nack in the late 1980's.

http://www.redwoodsinyosemite.com/

(o) Made the deadline for writing postings in my two courses, so with the neices now gone home, yours truly has absolute peace and quiet except for the rain on the roof.

Have a peaceful Sunday,
(k) (k) Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Charles Loloma, Hopi Jeweler:
Charles Loloma was one of the first Native American jewelers to use gold instead of silver and diamonds and other precious gems in addition to turquoise, coral, and shell. His innovative designs, so sculptural in quality, were internationally acclaimed. And his clients included celebrities, monarchs, and presidents. This program examines the work of Charles Loloma—and how the visionary behind the enchanting jewelry managed to break the barriers that separated Indian traditionalism and mainstream modern art. For him, the art world and the Hopi world were one.

http://www.tannerchaney.com/tbaker-bin/tc/commerce.cgi?page=artists/loloma.htm

Loloma was born on January 7, 1921. His father was a Hopi Indian, Rex of the Sand and Tobacco Clan. His mother, Rachel Loloma was from the Badger Clan. His father was an accomplished waver and moccasin maker and his mother was an excellent basket maker. The Loloma family lived in a traditional Hopi village. Over the years Charles Loloma developed a sense of design, dedication and meticulousness that was considered to be the Hopi way; in which art is not different from daily life. Loloma attended day school as a child. His teachers recognized his talents and he was encouraged to draw and paint. Charles finished high school in 1941. By that time he was an accomplished artist in his community and received many commissions.

As many others, Loloma was drafted into the army in 1941. He became a camouflage expert and was stationed in Missouri. From there he spent his time in the Aleutians as an engineer. In 1942 he married Otellie Pasivaya. Loloma returned to her village, Second Mesa, after he was discharged in 1945. With help of the GI Bill, Charles attended the School of American Craftsman at Alfred University. There he studied design, mechanical drawing, ceramic chemistry and marketing.

Loloma applied for a Whitney Foundation Fellowship. With the grant he studied the clays used by Hopi Indians. Through his experiments he proved that shale clays would turn into a glaze if fired at high temperatures. During his stay at Alfred, Loloma also discovered he wanted to pursue an occupation as an artist. He and his wife set up a shop in the Kiva Craft Center in Scottsdale, Arizona. After several years of working with clay and weaving, Loloma decided to try jewelry making. He continued to make and sell his jewelry in his shop. He was a self-taught silversmith. Loloma did find some help in a book called The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths. Loloma's early work was mainly cast objects designed in a traditional Hopi fashion. Loloma also taught part-time at Arizona State College and in Sedona during summers. He was able to formulate ideas on design and gather information on selling and marketing through these various experiences. Loloma and his wife were the first Native American's to successfully run a pottery shop. Because of this they received attention that inevitably helped their business.

In 1962 the Institute of American Arts was founded. Loloma was appointed head of plastic arts and sales departments. Loloma traveled to Paris in 1963. While in Paris, his jewelry was modeled in fashion shows and exhibited in private shows. After his visit, he returned to the Institute in Santa Fe where he remained until 1965. He then went back to his village in Hoteville. Soon after his return, he divorced his wife and remarried. He built a studio in his home and continued to make jewelry.

Loloma believes his most important contribution to the field was what he called "inner gems". These were hidden stones in his jewelry, once the jewelry was put on; you could no longer see the gems on the inner side of the jewelry. These gems were to indicate inner beauty of the wearer. Usually these gems were more valuable than the gems on the outside of the jewelry.

Loloma received many awards and prizes and is represented in numerous collections nationwide. In 1991, Loloma passed away and his studio no longer produces jewelry.

http://www.pricedewey.com/jewelry/?object_id=58

Charles Loloma (1921-1991, Hopi). Loloma is the masculine form of the Hopi word for “beauty,” and it can also be translated as “many beautiful colors.” He was from Hotevilla and grew up on the remote Third Mesa from which he drew much of his inspiration.

http://www.calacademy.org/exhibits/elkus/

(k) (k) .
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

By ROSANDA SUETOPKA THAYER Special to the Arizona Daily Sun
07/04/2004

The Museum of Northern Arizona kicked off its annual Native summer art presentation series this weekend with a blockbuster show of Hopi artwork that included traditional Tihu (kachina) pieces, mixed metal jewelry, painting, pottery, fiber art and mixed media, including bronze sculpture.

http://www.azdailysun.com/non_sec/nav_includes/story.cfm?storyID=90121

(f) Nice place, Flaggstaff is. (f) Their Northern Arizona University is quite large and provides not only entertainment but a lively town atmosphere. Macy's is the best "mom and pop" style coffee house that I've ever experienced......much more homey atmosphere at much lower cost than a Starbucks :| (I've been to Flagstaff 30 or so times) (h)

Carpe diem,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

----just wanted to say -i 've enjoyed looking through your thread--some i have read and some i will have to come back to-unfortunately my brain gets overwhelmed at times. but its nice to see someone else who enjoys movies like me as well as other pursuits.

({) (}) Thanks very much for taking the time to read through a few posts and provide some feedback. Aren't good films just one of the best past times for relaxing? It was great to read your kind words.

Have a delightful Sunday!

(f) (f) ,
Sweetlady

[sensualwillow]

"Trying to find yourself is a very hard thing to accomplish. Without trying, you will never be yourself because the question will remain What if?"

"Experimentation and Educating yourself on gender is the key to success and knowing who you are!"

The above are recent quotes i made in the forums here. Hope you like them. :)

My page: http://geocities.com/shineymaiden can educate others on gender and transition.



willow

[sweetlady]

Schwarzenegger Calls Budget Opponents 'Girlie Men'
By JOHN M. BRODER New York Times Published: July 19, 2004
LOS ANGELES, July 18 - With his frustration mounting this weekend over his inability to muscle a budget through the Legislature, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called his Democratic opponents "girlie men" and vowed to work to unseat them in November. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/19/national/19arnold.html

How rude Arnold. And to many people living in your own state too as elsewhere.
Maria? Can you put a Democratic muzzle on your hubby? C-mon girl, you're a Kennedy for pity's sake.....

Ok, am now off my soapbox.

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

on today's Globe and Mail:
Democrats denounce Schwarzenegger barb
Associated Press

Los Angeles — Democrats aren't amused by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's use of the mocking term “girlie men” to describe some lawmakers, although a spokesman for the governor said no apology would be forthcoming.

Mr. Schwarzenegger dished out the insult at a rally Saturday as he claimed Democrats were delaying the budget by catering to special interests. Democrats protested that the remark was sexist and homophobic.

Democrats said Mr. Schwarzenegger's remarks were insulting to women and gays and distracted from budget negotiations. State Sen. Sheila Kuehl said the governor had resorted to “blatant homophobia.”

“It uses an image that is associated with gay men in an insulting way, and it was supposed to be an insult. That's very troubling that he would use such a homophobic way of trying to put down legislative leadership,” said Ms. Kuehl, one of five members of the Legislature's five-member Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Caucus.

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040719.wschwarz0719/BNStory/International/

And this guy is supposed to be looked up to among young people? Not.

:( ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

'I'll be back. I will be back'

Although the arrogant diva has been brought low, the comeback of Martha Stewart is already under way

By MARGARET WENTE
Saturday, July 17, 2004 - Page A15 Globe and Mail

'I'm very, very sorry it has come to this," said Martha Stewart yesterday at the foot of the courthouse steps. She was passionate, emotional, but not contrite. "I'll be back. I will be back. Whatever I have to do in the next few months, I hope the months go by quickly. I'm used to all kinds of hard work, as you know, and I'm not afraid."

America's most famous felon has stayed mum for months. But now, facing five months of prison time for lying about a stock sale, she has decided to become her own defence lawyer. Her judge and jury are the public. Punish me if you must, she implored us, but please stop punishing my beloved company. "Perhaps all of you out there can continue to show your support by subscribing to our magazine, by buying our products. . . . And I don't want to use this as a sales pitch for my company, but we love that company, we've worked so hard on that company."

Convicted on four counts of conspiracy and lying to investigators, the 62-year-old Ms. Stewart drew the lightest sentence the judge could hand out under the circumstances. Naturally, everyone is disagreeing about it. Some people think she got off easily, and some think she has suffered enough already. "What she did was wrong," said one woman, echoing many others. "But she only hurt herself."

Her lawyers said they will appeal her conviction, and she will remain free pending that appeal -- which will almost surely fail. And so, a few months from now, Martha will trade in her Ralph Lauren suits and Hermes Birkin handbags for the khaki uniform and black steel-toed boots of the Danbury women's prison in Connecticut.

Danbury, a federal minimum-security facility, is no country club. It's a dreary, regimented place with very little privacy, where the inmates (many of whom are in for drug offences) sleep in dorms with bunk beds, shower communally, and work for 7½ hours a day at 12 cents an hour. "She is going to feel diminished," said a woman who has been there. After that, Martha will spend five months under house arrest wearing an electronic bracelet, then another two years of supervised probation.

Ms. Stewart was found guilty of lying to federal prosecutors about a 2001 stock trade that may or may not have been illegal. But her real crime was arrogance, stupidity, and rotten timing. Massive corporate scandals had broken out all over, and prosecutors were out for blood. If only she'd confessed and repented, she might have got off with a fine or a suspended sentence.

Her decision to tough it out has cost her dearly. Advertisers have fled her magazine. Her TV show is on hiatus. Her company is shrinking. In fact, her relatively light sentence was the best corporate news she's had in a long time; it sent the stock price bounding up. (The stock she dumped has rebounded, too. If only she had bought and held.)

But unlike other corporate felons, or even those who, like Conrad Black, are merely under a dark cloud, her social status is uncompromised. She still goes to all the A-list parties. The A-list agrees with her that she is more sinned against than sinning.

Yesterday, Martha premiered her newest line of defence on the sidewalk in Manhattan, surrounded by million-dollar lawyers and supporters. "What was a small personal matter became over the last two years an almost fatal circus event of unprecedented proportions," she said. Dressed in a plain back pantsuit, she looked worn. She looked dignified. She looked as if she'd put on weight. A piece of hair flopped across her face, the way it always does. She said she was sorry for the 200 people who have lost their jobs at her company. "I have been choked and almost suffocated to death during that time, all the while more concerned about the well-being of others than for myself, more hurt for them and for their losses than for my own."

Successful entrepreneurs are not prone to dark nights of the soul. That's one reason they're successful. But even Martha has succumbed to those nights lately. According to her daughter, Alexis, she was wholly unprepared for last March's guilty verdict. The verdict, she says, "shattered" her mother's world and left her "feeling like her life is wasted."

"She was very fragile," said one close friend, who saw her recently, and spoke to The New York Times. "She really felt she didn't understand the whole thing, and there weren't any repercussions for other people like there were with Enron, where everybody lost their pensions. . . . She's really so shaky. She hasn't been able to sleep through the night. I don't think anybody who knows her thought it would come to this."

But Martha, as she promises, will be back. You can be sure of that. In fact, her comeback is already well under way. She has been humbled, and people like that, because it makes her seem more human. Now that the haughty, arrogant diva has been brought low, people can once again admire the proud and plucky pioneer who overcomes all adversity, even a stint in Danbury. The rise and fall and rise of Martha Stewart -- self-made woman, tastemaker to a generation, target of a justice system that's resolved to treat everybody equally even if they're rich and famous -- is among the most emblematic American stories of the age.

Just don't expect her to apologize and say she's sorry. Martha doesn't do sorry.

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040717/COWENT17/Columnists/Columnist?author=Margaret+Wente

(f) (f) once again to Margaret Wente, columnist extraordinaire!

Have a smooth start of your week.

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

July 17, 2004
Interactive Tele-Journalism
• posted by Dan Gillmor 11:55 AM San Jose Mercury News

Shawn Van Every, a researcher at New York University, is here at the Strong
Angel II demonstration with some cool technology and an equally cool idea. He's combined some gear into a platform for what he calls Interactive Tele-Journalism, the notion being that the audience should have a more direct participation -- in real time -- with the journalist.

At Strong Angel he's doing some of this journalism with a video rig that includes a video screen connected to an Internet chat where the audience can make suggestions, including questions to ask and where he might point his video camera. (Here's his page with the video streams and chat software.) It sounds distracting to me, but I like the idea a lot in the context of picking the audience's collective brain in the middle of capturing news.

Imagine this applied to, say, a press conference. Someone in the audience might know -- surely would know -- a lot more than the reporter about a specific topic and offer a follow-up question the journalists hadn't thought of in the first place. This has interesting potential.

http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/010567.shtml#010567

(*) Dan's techie weblog has lots of interesting comments from readers. His columns often spark challenging and enjoyable debates that sometimes show that people *do* critically reflect on what they read. :|

(o) off to push that boulder up the hill this week on graduate course assignments. Today is reading day. <gathering tall stack of books and heads for the couch where Doc is already in my seat......guess I'll take the loveseat this morning ;) Just made a fresh pot of half-caff/half decaf coffee - ah, that's the ticket!

May your heart sing today (8) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

"I Capture the Castle": Cassandra Mortmain (Romola Garai), a 17-year-old aspiring writer, lives with her sister, brother, acclaimed author father and his nudist wife (Tara Fitzgerald) in a crumbling English castle. When the castle's rightful heirs (two American brothers) arrive to take ownership of their birthright, Cassandra's parents see it as a chance to improve the family's fortunes -- by marrying off Cassandra and her sister to the two wealthy young men.
Starring: Romola Garai, Rose Byrne Director: Tim Fywell Genre: Romance
(*) (*) (*)

The English countryside is as always, gorgeous. (*)

(o) Back to work. (o)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[Beaudyk]

THE DAY I WENT TO HEAVEN



On the day I went to heaven

There was maximum confusion

Thoughts of trumpet blowing angels

Turned out a feint illusion

Just some old guy in a Stetson hat

Drinking bottled beer

He curled his lip and sneered

"You can't come in here!"

I enquired as to "Who's in charge"

Before giving him a punch

And as held his broken jaw

He said "St Peter's on his lunch"

I asked for Angel Gabriel

As any one would do

But was told today was Friday

And he finishes at two

St Paul was on his holidays

St John alas was out

St Thomas won't be coming in

Of that there was no doubt

St Mark was writing gospels

St Mathew down the pub

And Jesus calling bingo

In heavens social club

So all there was to help me

Was him in his Stetson cap

I apologized for hitting him

A most unfortunate mishap

He then said, "Dubya Bush is around"

"I could give him a bell"

"Sod that" says I, and turned around

Caught the first train down to hell

[hym]

THE DAY I WENT TO HEAVEN
Tell your pal I Love It. Thanks for sharing!

[sweetlady]

Tell your pal I Love It. Thanks for sharing!

Ditto! Thanks so much for sharing that story. (*) (*) (*) (*) (*)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Catherine the Great: http://members.tripod.com/~Nevermore/CGREAT.HTM
One of the most interesting, industrious and powerful personages to grace the pages of history during the eighteenth century is Catherine II, Empress of all the Russias. Historians have not always been kind to her memory, and all too often one reads accounts of her private life, ignoring her many achievements. The stories of her love affairs have been vulgarized and can be traced to a handful of French writers in the years immediately after Catherine's death, when Republican France was fighting for its life against a coalition that included Russia.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/18catherine.html

http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/catherine.html

http://www2.sptimes.com/Treasures/TC.2.3.13.html

(l) (l) (l) (l)
Who LOVES smart, powerful Femmes?
(l) (l) (l) (l)

Have a lovely and relaxing Friday evening.

Love,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Sacajawea (Boat Launcher) or Sacagawea (Bird Woman) - Shoshoni
http://www.powersource.com/gallery/womansp/shoshoni.html

http://www.rootsweb.com/~nwa/sacajawea.html

http://www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/inside/saca.html

http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/s_z/sacagawea.htm

http://www.lemhishoshone.com/sacajawea.html

HO! (S)

Sun Thoughts,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

The New York Times starting tomorrow is including a chapter everyday this week from the book "Like Water for Chocolate". I saw the film a few times and was it ever sexy! And for those chocolate lovers out there, or those who think preparing food can be sexy, this film is "it". (k)

www.nytimes.com

I get the weekend editions on Saturday and Sunday in my driveway, so I'm hoping to get each chapter on-line when I take some work breaks from writing.

Enjoy this sweet love story set in Mexico. Yummy.

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Forget a la carte cable idea; the future is in Internet TV
posted Friday, July 23, 2004 By Mike Langberg

San Jose Mercury News

Everyone resents the high cost of cable TV, which has gone up three to five times faster than the inflation rate in the last five years. And we're all forced to buy big packages of 50 or 100 channels to get the five or ten we really want to watch.
So why not force the cable companies to sell channels individually?

You could, for example, just buy CNN and American Movie Classics if you're an effete liberal, or just Fox News and the Outdoor Life Network if you're a conservative hunting-and-fishing type. Parents could get Nickelodeon and Disney Channel for their children without also having to take racy channels such as FX and Spike TV.

Since this is an election year, politicians are making ``a la carte'' cable a hot topic in Washington.

It sounds like a good idea, but it's not. It's highly unlikely a la carte cable would save consumers money and it could have ugly unintended consequences, including messy government regulation and the death of many worthy cable networks with small audiences.

The debate picked up momentum in May when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., sent a letter to Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Powell asking him ``to explore all available options within your authority to promote a la carte cable and satellite offerings as soon as possible where such offerings would benefit consumers.''

The FCC is holding a daylong symposium in Washington on Thursday, following a hearing in the House of Representatives on July 14.
It now appears unlikely Congress will take action this year, although the FCC will respond to McCain's request with a report due in November.

Meanwhile, the issue is bringing together some unusual allies.Conservatives offended by adult-oriented cable shows are joining with liberals upset by the tight grip mega-media companies have on the creation and distribution of cable programming.

Big cable operators, who own many of the channels they offer, are very much against a la carte, while small independent cable operators like the idea.

Independent channels, now widely available on cable, worry they wouldn't attract enough viewers to survive in an a la carte world. Independent channels on the outside view a la carte as a way to break through.To their credit, cable operators have invested heavily of late to build new digital systems that offer far more channels, along with high-speed Internet access.

Comcast in the San Jose area now provides about 225 channels, not including music channels or pay-per-view movie and sports channels, to digital subscribers. But the cost is steep; the least expensive digital package is $54.45 a month for 100 channels.
Let's say Comcast instead offered all the local broadcast stations for $10 a month and let you pick your own line-up of cable channels for $1.50 each. You could get the locals and 20 channels of your choice for $40 a month -- one-fourth less than Comcast's best offer for digital cable today.

But what if Comcast set a la carte prices at $5 per channel? You'd only save money if you ordered nine channels or fewer.
Or Comcast and other cable operators might thumb their noses at any future a la carte regulations by charging $20 per channel. Congress and the FCC could respond by attempting to set prices for individual channels, a guaranteed regulatory sinkhole. Is ESPN worth more than MTV? What about C-SPAN compared with The Weather Channel?

There's also a big technical hurdle. About half of the 70 million cable households in the United States have a converter box that could be programmed to accommodate a la carte. But the other half connect the cable directly to their TV sets, and these viewers couldn't move to a la carte without the installation of extra hardware -- an expense that would be immediately passed along to consumers.
The Government Accountability Office, the non-partisan research staff of Congress, looked at the issue in a March report and concluded subscribers' monthly cable bills ``would not necessarily decline under an a la carte system.''

Anyone searching for relief from high cable rates in Washington is stuck on the wrong coast. Silicon Valley will ultimately provide a much better solution: broadcast-quality television delivered through the Internet, completely independent of the bloated cable industry.

Akimbo, a start-up company in San Mateo, says it's no more than six weeks away from launching a digital video recorder (DVR) that gets TV shows through a high-speed Internet connection rather than a cable, satellite dish or roof antenna. San Jose-based TiVo, which pioneered the DVR category, plans to add Internet delivery next year.

Cable companies will have to scramble like they've never scrambled before to meet the challenge of Internet TV. Their pain will be our gain.

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/9224062.htm

(*) (*) It just might get those high costs of digital television and especially cable modem bills down. I'm checking out Akimbo to see if what they and others are offering is real. Tivo has been around for several years and used to compete with a few firms that went belly up. Hmmm, I can't invest in high tech firms since I'm a consultant, but there's no reason to post some "what's on my radar screen" here as I do for friends. Some of them were very skeptical in the early 1990's when I suggested that cable modem mfrs. would be a good investment. Two of them made about $100K each on Broadcom stock. I'm also watching blue laser DVD technologies among other things.

Yes, I'm such a grrl-propeller-head, daaling....... ;) (f) (f)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

and I think to myself.......what a wonderful world.

"Meet Joe Black" and other movies................fireworks................... and music!

Thank you MTF's, FTM's and others who are sweet, intelligent, loving and strong! (*) (*) (*)

Thank you taking the time tonight. Please contact me.

Love,
Sweetlady (k)

[sweetlady]

By JESSE GREEN Published: July 25, 2004 New York Times Arts Section
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/movies/25GREE.html

YOU may not have known it, but May 27, 2004, was Meryl Streep Day. Or so proclaimed Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, kicking off a luncheon at the Marriott Marquis in Midtown that day. It was one tribute in an afternoon full of them, all intended to honor Ms. Streep's receipt of a Career Achievement Award from New Dramatists — a slightly odd prize, considering that New Dramatists is an organization devoted to nurturing young playwrights, and Ms. Streep has appeared in a play only once in the last 22 years. Still, she's a big draw; her recent pile-up of honors includes a Stanislavsky Prize, an American Film Institute Life Achievement Award and the usual raft of Golden Globe, Oscar and Emmy nominations. Standing in a spotlight inches from Ms. Fields, who was ticking off some of these achievements, Ms. Streep tried on every expression in her playbook — horror, incredulity, madcap goofiness — in what appeared to be an attempt to distract the 800 guests (and herself) from the incongruous tone of civic import. Finally she just raised her arms in a gesture of exultation, or crucifixion, and got a laugh at least.

"You would think they could have suspended alternate-side-of-the-street parking on my behalf," Ms. Streep joked later, "but no!" In fact, late for a fitting with Isaac Mizrahi after the event — Mr. Mizrahi had designed the gown she would wear to the American Film Institute tribute just two weeks later — she hailed a cab outside the Marriott only to be cut off by a woman claiming she'd been there first. "But it's Meryl Streep Day!" Ms. Streep complained. The woman relented, shared the ride and paid the fare.

Many stars say they despise the limelight, then promptly glow in it. But Ms. Streep is not built that way. She gives as few interviews as possible. Before the luncheon, reporters seemed to be cramming years' worth of questions into one lightning round: "Who's your favorite young actress?" "Do you have anything left on your wish list?" "What's it like working with Denzel?" — this last because Jonathan Demme's remake of "The Manchurian Candidate," starring Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber and (in a smaller role) Ms. Streep herself, was soon to be released. Ms. Streep found it difficult to handle even these softballs, the kind most red-carpet veterans would bat away with ease. She tried at first to answer everything seriously, gracefully, but gradually gave up and shook her head. When asked what it felt like to be honored by New Dramatists, Ms. Streep answered, rather too honestly, "If I don't get another award in my life, I'll go to my grave happy."

In recent years, however, Ms. Streep has begun to accept one prerogative of her position: having the press — and thus the public — listen to what she wants to say. Despite her distaste for celebrity-centric media, despite the possibility of seeming like another Hollywood liberal dilettante, Ms. Streep has re-emerged as a highly political animal, relentlessly exploiting the recent calendarful of Meryl Streep Days as an opportunity to bash the Bush administration. At the Golden Globes in January, accepting an award for her work in "Angels in America" on HBO, she attacked Mr. Bush's position on gay marriage; backstage afterward, when asked what the biggest problem facing America was, she said, "It has three initials." Toning it down for the New Dramatists luncheon in May, she merely took a swipe at Mr. Bush's famous word-mangling. But at the Radio City Music Hall fund-raiser for John Kerry earlier this month she really pulled out the rhetorical stops. "During Shock and Awe I wondered which of the megaton bombs Jesus, our president's personal savior, would have personally dropped on the sleeping families of Baghdad," she said. "I wondered, 'Does Jesus understand collateral damage?' "

And for an actress so long mesmerized by the sufferings of the individual soul, her role in "The Manchurian Candidate," which opens nationwide on Friday, suggests the further emergence of a new set of concerns. As a conservative politician whose ambition for her son knows no bounds — not even those of paranoid science fiction — she looks like Senator Clinton but behaves like Madame Mao. Her character doesn't suffer at all (except at the end); she barrels through meetings, smacks down the opposition, cracks her ice, gets done what must be done. In the process, Ms. Streep unhesitatingly steals the movie. It's hard to remember that the story is about an evil multinational corporation implanting a mind-control chip in a vice-presidential candidate, not about that candidate's mother.

"But you see in my mind I am the main figure in the movie!" she said, meaning her character. "And so many questions are interesting about a woman like that, a woman in power and how she's regarded. I'm fascinated by people like Liddy Dole and Margaret Thatcher and Madeleine Albright. I just looked at all those people, the ones who make things happen. Karen Hughes and Peggy Noonan. Their certainty. Unshakable. Ann Coulter! People like that work all their lives to achieve these positions where they can move world events — and then they can't control them. That's my character. They get into a place where they control nothing. Because they never learn that the tangent is the thing that really controls events."

Although she studied tapes in order to nail their mannerisms and attitudes, Ms. Streep already knew these women. She was, until recently, an "insane" news hound. Her day would begin with Imus and C-Span, proceed through "Morning Edition" and Leonard Lopate, end with a compulsive clicking around the TV dials and a spin around the Web in the evening, with a little work (not to mention family life — she has been married to the sculptor Don Gummer since 1978 and has four children) squeezed somewhere in between. "But even while I was working and reading and doing other things, I had that noise in my ear," she said. "I have my antennae out, what can I say? I'm hyperalert to all signals. When we picked our house in Connecticut — this was after I played Karen Silkwood — it was because it was 90 miles from any nuclear facility. We actually drew the circles on a map. When I moved out of New York it was because of Ramzi Yousef saying `I'm going to come back to the World Trade Center.' And I think I'm the only human being who believed him.

"You see, I'm enormously suggestible. That's my job as an actor. But even besides that, my boundaries are not so clear, the outline is not so strong. I sort of bleed out into whomever I'm talking to. My children always make fun of me on the phone; they can tell, even if I've just been talking to Information, they go, `It was a Haitian operator, right?' So there's that. But I'm also smart and I read. I pay attention. And when I saw the videotape of those guys riding through the Holland Tunnel" — here she adopts a disconcertingly realistic Arab accent — " `We have big thing for you, America,' we felt, you know, time to go. And so we lived very happily in the country for a while, and then everybody was graduating from various schools and I did a play in the park" — it was "The Seagull" in Central Park in 2001, opposite Kevin Kline — "and had a wonderful time and thought, `Well, maybe I'll do plays and live in the city.' So we moved back in. Sept. 9. Because I wasn't worried anymore."

Ms. Streep did not dwell on the obvious. She merely said, "You see, I'm not paranoid. I'm right, you know," and laughed.

Taking things seriously is virtually Ms. Streep's trademark, partly in response to the presumed frivolity of acting, which in college she thought of as silly — mere "playing." (To avoid that stigma, she almost chose a career in costume design.) "I'm from New Jersey," she explained. "It seemed highfalutin for an actor to say `I'm an artist.' " She got over that resistance; but taking her seriousness into the political realm has been an uncomfortable undertaking. It's hard to insist on privacy when you make policy pronouncements, and one of the ways she has tried to deal with tension she feels between her roles as a celebrity and an involved citizen is to keep the connection between the two a one-way street. She wants to influence the public, but at the same time keep the public at bay.

Voicing her more recent political stances, however, has meant breaching the privacy she had created for herself and her family, exposing the protected ground of her relatively placid domesticity to the ruckus of the outer world. She has done so, in small ways, before: on discrete crusades against domestic violence or Hudson River pollution or nuclear power, or against the apple pesticide Alar (a fight which was based, she later learned, on shaky science). Through it all she remained, as she once told a reporter, "more like Julia Roberts than Erin Brockovich." But now, as her children become adults (only the youngest, just 13, still lives at home) there is less within the domestic bubble to protect and, she obviously feels, much more outside it to fight.

"What pushed me over the edge?" she asked. "Name a topic. Everything pushed me over the edge! The quiet dismantling of environmental regulations. The phoniness of No Child Left Behind. Everybody should be getting up and making a big fat noise. Yes, of course, I always question why anyone would listen to an actor. But it's not your profession so much that defines you as your personhood. I listen to all kinds of people whose qualifications to opine on anything are that they have a radio show or a degree in art history. Our most famous president of late was an actor. You don't jettison your citizenship just because you're famous."

Still, deploying her stardom in this way is tricky for someone who finds the whole notion of stardom lunatic and distasteful. She knows perfectly well how some people will take it — sure enough, Internet chat rooms had a field day with the Radio City comments — and also knows what this sort of thing can do to a career. (Her first movie co-star was Jane Fonda.) She's aware of the awful clichés evoked by an actress taking on a cause. But Ms. Streep is no starlet showing up at a benefit for a picturesque disease. For one thing, the gravitas of all the heavy roles she's played still hangs on her persona like a mantle of moral authority. For another, she does her homework, turning her familiar old skills — the meticulous research, unwavering concentration and deep listening — to a larger idea of her job in life. Whether these considerations will be enough to protect her from the resentment of fans who prefer her to stick to the script, or from a lifelong tendency to overdo things, remains to be seen.

In any case, she's not giving up her day job. "I still love acting," she said. "I love it. Love it. Love it, love it, love it." She deployed each repetition of the phrase on a different fluty pitch. "It still feels like the wind in my hair."

We were sitting in a hotel suite a month after the Marriott luncheon, Ms. Streep with her back to the bright windows so that she was almost in silhouette. Her features were multi-tasking — brows lifting, cheeks flushing, eyes instantly clouding and clearing. In the midst of one thought she was already glancing as if down a hallway toward another, slamming unproductive conversational doors and opening others a crack; her hands kept trying to help somehow, but seemed to operate on their own recognizance. At one point they proceeded to top off her coffee cup, unfortunately from the teapot. She cackled raucously. "See, that's why the glasses are so necessary at this point," she said, picking up the pair she'd left at her side but not putting them on. "Ah, vanity," she sighed.

At 55, her vision may be less acute, her features softer, but Ms. Streep's image has barely budged since she was beatified on the evidence of her first film, "Julia," in 1977, when she was 28 and fresh out of Yale Drama School. Canonized by 1982 (at which point she'd already made "The Deer Hunter," "Manhattan," "Kramer vs. Kramer," "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and "Sophie's Choice"), Ms. Streep has in the subsequent 22 years made 25 major films, while Ms. Fonda, Jessica Lange, Marsha Mason, Debra Winger, Sissy Spacek, Sally Field and the rest of her cohort have drifted to the margins of the industry.

Partly she survived on her chameleon skills. "However you first appear in the public mind," she said, "that's the image you have to undermine right away. Certainly when I was younger my looks were very important to my success. What made me emerge, I'm sure, was all that hair and, you know, the perfect skin and all those things. Who I really was, was much more Byzantine and many, many, many faceted."

The Byzantine has certainly emerged over the years. At the New Dramatists luncheon, she did one of her ingratiating dithery-ditzy routines, abjuring glamour completely. While the program featured the famous Hirschfeld caricature of Ms. Streep circa 1980, looking sleek and witchy, with a pointy chin and long, Nina-filled hair, the real Ms. Streep — in a black frock coat and pants, with a polka-dot blouse tied sailor-style at the waist, her hair cut in a simple Hillaryesque bob — looked like a distracted magazine editor. She had on little oval purple-tinted glasses and carried a red Totes umbrella, which during the photos, in her only concession to glamour, she handed to Tony Kushner, who looked happy to oblige.

So she doesn't do regal, she doesn't do glitzy, she doesn't do sexy, but even the "Streepgoddess" (as Mr. Kushner calls her) is subject to the familiar and merciless rules of Hollywood: the cellulite ceiling through which no middle-aged woman can pass without a plastic surgeon. Though she has not surrendered herself to them — she's never had her wayward nose fixed, she's trim but not skinny and the lines around her eyes are perfectly visible — she is limited, like all other actresses, by the parts available and the material being filmed. William Styron, despite her entreaties, did not write her another "Sophie's Choice." Perhaps because she seemed to have tackled every serious dramatic challenge (and every obscure accent) in the first decade of her fame, no one knew quite what to do with her in the next, which was framed by the mortifying "She-Devil" in 1989 and the treacly "Music of the Heart" 10 years later. She never gave less than an intelligent performance, and often popped out of mediocre films with unexpected gifts (such as her belty rendition of "I'm Checkin' Out" in "Postcards From the Edge"), but for a while it seemed as if she was twisting rather brilliantly in the wind. This may be simply because she made some bad choices, or because she had priced herself out of the best parts, which for women in their 40's were mostly to be found not in the kind of top-dollar Hollywood movies she favored but in the grungier precincts of independent film. But then, at the beginning of her third decade on screen, the same strategy, or lack of it, that had produced some real duds (and, with "The Bridges of Madison County," a guilty-pleasure hit) suddenly paid off with "Adaptation," "The Hours" and "Angels in America" — three riveting performances in three different styles in a period of 12 months.

It's not that she had abandoned the huge seriousness of her early movies — though she is much more likely, these days, to be seen in supporting and comic roles. It's that she now seemed to be on a quest to light up ever smaller and odder corners of humanity. It should barely come as a surprise that in her next film ("Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events," due out this winter) she plays a gothic crone, or that the upcoming projects she's committed herself to (a fact-based Chinese drama, a Sandra Bullock comedy and an English remake of a French film about an abused prostitute) are so varied; for several years she has been choosing roles — spinsters, monsters, third bananas, frumps, even a rabbi in Mr. Kushner's "Angels in America" — as if daring moviegoers not to categorize or fetishize her. Or even, as in the case of the rabbi, to recognize her.

So our Greatest Leading Lady has remade herself as a character actress — and a character. By doing so, she's found a way to go on making films until she physically can't; she also promises a return to the stage, and the rich roles it offers a middle-aged woman, once her 13-year-old is out of the house, in another few years. (Filming rarely took her away from her family for more than a few weeks at a time, she said, but a play would have rendered her an absentee mother for months.) One thing she won't be doing, she said, is inundating herself with C-Span and Imus; no more news hounding and midnight wonkery. "I've cut myself off because eventually it strafes your sense of well being and ability to make jokes," she said. "Which are important. And maybe it had something to do with weaning myself from 'Manchurian,' too."

Still, the movie, with its implicit critique of the Bush administration, is likely to kick up a storm, and then there's the matter of the election itself. With her exquisite antennae and maternal fervor — she has played mothers convincingly from the very beginning of her career — it's hard to believe that Ms. Streep will really manage to resist the lure of politics, which after all stems from the same sort of expressive need that fuels her acting. A woman who moves closer to ground zero after Sept. 11 — she recently put her Greenwich Village townhouse on the market and bought a loft in TriBeCa — is not exactly running away from the world. "We will not be displaced," she explained, with theatrical emphasis.

Not that she's running toward the world, either. As she sees it, she's just responding to the circumstances she finds herself in. "I don't have any special role to play," she said, instinctively reverting to acting terms. "All I have is this big throbbing conscience."

(*) (*) (*) I believe Meryl is so gifted and she speaks out on issues that she cares about. (f) (f)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Spinning Our Safety
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 25, 2004 NYTimes

Maybe it's because I've been instructed to pack a respirator escape hood along with party dresses for the Boston convention. Maybe it's because our newspaper has assigned a terrorism reporter to cover a political convention. Maybe it's because George Bush is relaxing at his ranch down there (again) while Osama is planning a big attack up here (again). Maybe it's because there are just as many American soldiers dying in Iraq post-transfer, more Muslims more mad at us over fake W.M.D. intelligence and depravity at Abu Ghraib, and more terrorists in more diffuse networks hating us more.

Maybe it's because the F.B.I. is still learning how to Google and the C.I.A. has an acting head who spends most of his time acting defensive over his agency's failure to get anything right. Maybe it's because so many of those federal twits who missed the 10 chances to stop the 9/11 hijackers, who blew off our Paul Reveres - Richard Clarke, Coleen Rowley and the Phoenix memo author - still run things. Call me crazy, Mr. President, but I don't feel any safer.

The nation's mesmerizing new best seller, the 9/11 commission report, lays bare how naked we still are against an attack, and how vulnerable we are because of the time and money the fuzzy-headed Bush belligerents wasted going after the wrong target.

Even scarier, the commissioners expect Congress, which they denounced as "dysfunctional" on intelligence oversight, to get busy fixing things just as lawmakers are flying home for vacation.

The report offers vivid details on our worst fears. Instead of focusing on immediately hitting back at Osama, Bush officials indulged their idiotic idée fixe on Saddam and ignored the memo from their counter-terrorism experts dismissing any connection between the religious fanatic bin Laden and the secular Hussein.

"On the afternoon of 9/11, according to contemporaneous notes, Secretary Rumsfeld instructed General Myers to obtain quickly as much information as possible," the report says. " The notes indicate that he also told Myers that he was not simply interested in striking empty training sites. The secretary said his instinct was to hit Saddam Hussein at the same time - not only bin Laden."

At the first Camp David meeting after 9/11, the report states, "Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz made the case for striking Iraq during 'this round' of the war on terrorism."

Six days after the World Trade Center towers were pulverized, when we should have been striking Osama with everything we had, the Bush team was absorbed with old grudges and stale assumptions.

"At the September 17 N.S.C. meeting, there was some further discussion of 'phase two' of the war on terrorism," the report says. "President Bush ordered the Defense Department to be ready to deal with Iraq if Baghdad acted against U.S. interests, with plans to include possibly occupying Iraqi oil fields."

President Bush was unsure of himself, relying too much on a vice president whose deep, calm voice belied a deeply cracked world view.

He explained to the commissioners that he had stayed in his seat making little fish faces at second graders for seven minutes after learning about the second plane hitting the towers because, as the report says, "The president felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening."

What better way to track the terror in the Northeast skies than by reading "My Pet Goat" in Sarasota?

The commissioners warn that the price for the Bush bullies' attention deficit disorder could be high: "If, for example, Iraq becomes a failed state, it will go to the top of the list of places that are breeding grounds for attacks against Americans at home. Similarly, if we are paying insufficient attention to Afghanistan, the rule of the Taliban or warlords and narcotraffickers may re-emerge and its countryside could once again offer refuge to Al Qaeda, or its successor."

And, if that's not ominous enough, consider this: "The problem is that Al Qaeda represents an ideological movement, not a finite group of people. It initiates and inspires, even if it no longer directs."

"Yet killing or capturing" Osama, the report says, "while extremely important, would not end terror. His message of inspiration to a new generation of terrorists would continue."

If the Bush crowd hadn't been besotted with the idea of smoking Saddam, they could have stomped Osama in Tora Bora. Now it's too late. Al Qaeda has become a state of mind.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/opinion/25dowd.html

(*) (*) I wish that I could write as incisively as Maureen Dowd does! (*) (*)

Have a wonderful Sunday,

(k) (k) Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

<opening box from amazon.com.....taking out the CD's one by one...> (h)

With all of the great films that I've experienced from netflix so far this year, there were some films that I've either recently watched or it's been years - so I decided to get some CD's to listen to as I write.

The first CD is the first track on the soundtrack to Calendar Girls (that movie rocked!)

"Find Your Love"
(Beth Nielsen Chapman/Patrick Doyle)
On the movie soundtrack "Calendar Girls"

I'll catch your smile on someone's face
Your whisper in the wind's embrace
Through diamond stars and songs and dreams
I find your love in everything

The sun, the sky, the rolling sea
All conspire to comfort me
From sorrow's edge life's beauty seems
To find your love in everything

I've come to trust the hope it brings
To find your love in everything
Even as I fall apart,
Even through my shattered heart

I'll catch your smile on someone's face
.....amazing grace

(*) (*) Although I'm single and not getting over a relationship....and it's been five....<scratching head>.....or is it six years since I had a partner? Hmmm, yes, I'd say it's been awhile but these lyrics and the way they were sung touched me this afternoon and I wanted to share them with my friends here. (f)

Okay, here's the list of what was in the box today:
1. "The L Word: Music from the Showtime Original Series"

2. "Better than Chocolate" Movie Soundtrack

3. "Lesbian Favorites: Women Like Us"

4. When Harry met Sally" Soundtrack

5. "Serendipity" Movie Sountrack

6. "Don Juan DeMarco" Movie Soundtrack

7. "Meet Joe Black" Movie Soundtrack

8. "Frida" Movie Soundtrack

9. "Great Movie Love Themes" , Varese Sarabande, produced by Robert Townson.

(*) (*) Have a lovely weekend and I hope that you get hugged by somebody as you make your way doing those weekend things. ({) (})

Love,
Sweetlady (k)

[sweetlady]

Helen Hardin 1943–1984 A tribute to Tsa-sah-wee-eh, "Little Standing Spruce" http://www.collectorsguide.com/fa/fa048.shtml
(f) (f) (f)

A transcendent journey through the motherline: A voyage with Helen Hardin, southwest artist. By Kate T. Donohue, Ph.D., REAT
Expressive Arts Therapy core faculty

"The artist appeals to that part of our being...which is a gift and not an acquisition and therefore is more permanently enduring" (Joseph Conrad in Hyde, 1979, p. XI).

The artist gives us a gift of her personal images, which can be a bridge to our own personal experience and a portal to archetypal symbols. Ten years ago, I had an extraordinary experience of discovering the artistic work of the Southwest artist Helen Hardin. At that moment, little did I know that her work and her life story would open me to my own experience in a fuller, and deeper way, but would also help many other women with whom I have worked discover their own richly layered and complex Motherline stories.

My first glimpse of Helen Hardin's creative process was through her image Visions of Heavenly Flight (see Figure1) which I had discovered serendipitously at the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I could not stop looking at this piece and would come back to it several times in that afternoon. What was my attraction? I had always loved the Hopi and Pueblo myth of the eagle as the sacred guardian of the sky, the one who has direct access to the sun Kachina, universal harmony, and the creator. Through the feathers of the eagle the desires of the humans reach the ears of the Infinite (Parsons, 1939 & 1994; Spinden, 1976; Tyler, 1964). But this eagle was not a traditional Native American eagle. Helen's eagle was more modern, abstract, stark and dramatic. Yet, it still conveyed the myth of the eagle as the sacred guardian of the sky. With this piece I started to understand the paradox that each of Helen's images held. One was simultaneously invited into a familiar modern world with the abstract design and then into an unfamiliar ancient world of the Tewa mythos. Her paradox was also one of precisely conveying modern chaos and an ancient spiritual order with passionate color and composition. With her paradox, precision and passion, Helen made the ancient Pueblo myth modern (Donohue, 1995).

(*) (*) (*) This superb article is way, way too long to post here. I encourage anyone interested in Hopi, Navajo and really, any Native American artist, especially womyn - to read the rest of the article. (*) (*) (it's worth taking the time, in my opinion...) The URL follows here to the rest:

http://www.ciis.edu/faculty/articles/donohue_hardin_2001.html
(*) (*)
For those who might have an interest in a 30 minute video which can be rented at netflix, and I'm sure other firms who rent videos:
http://www.films.com/Films_Home/Item.cfm/1/31999

Artwork:
http://www.aicap.org/aicap/visit/hh_harmony.html

http://www.aicap.org/aicap/visit/hh_guardian.html

http://www.aicap.org/aicap/visit/hh_plumes.html (nice!!)

http://www.artssouthwest.com/paintings/HelenHardinBuffalo.html

http://www.artnet.com/artwork/423921281/_Helen_Tsa_Sah_Wee_Eh_Hardin_Petroglyph.html

http://www.nativepeoples.com/np_features/np_articles/1997_spring_article/hope_article_intro.html

(a) Thanks for bearing with me...as I searched for a web site that had the seriograph (or lithograph) that I have that was created by Helen Hardin when she was alive. It's just amazing and energized me! It's of three Hopi kachinas with these breathtaking "halos" around each.....and then you notice how not only are the halos different, the three kachinas are all different as well. It is a treasured artwork that reminds me that ALL OF US ARE DIFFERENT, and deserve unconditional love. ({) (}) <sending loving hugs with this posting>

Thanks for taking the time if you read down this far into my posting.

Love, peace and healing energy,
Sweetlady (k)

[sweetlady]

http://www.sedonaindianjewelry.com/Jewelry/HBegay.htm

Harvey Begay is a highly respected Navajo silversmith specializing in modern southwest jewelry. Long considered among the top Southwestern silversmiths, Mr. Begay enjoys using ancient tufa cast techniques and designs, but presents them in a very modern and balanced way. Like his famous father, Kenneth Begay, Harvey Begay is both an innovator and a mentor, always willing to share his knowledge.Harvey Begay jewelry is collected world wide.

(*) (*) Harvey made the chalice for the Pope that was given to him during his visit to New Mexico in the mid-1980's. I have a gold bracelet......like a femme cuff that I bought in 1983. (*) (*)

http://www.penfieldgallery.com/sandpaint/HBegay.html

http://www.elkridgeart.com/guide/featured.imagepage.ihtml?f=13.405&c=13

http://www.swaia.org/artistwebd.php?id=15

http://www.artresources.com/guide/featured.image.index.ihtml?step=2&startnum=1&maxvalue=9&c=13&an=Harvey%20Begay%20%28Navajo%29&o=1&increment=9

http://www.sidecanyon.com/debbiesilversmith.htm

http://www.nativepots.com/jewelry.html (Many examples!!!!)

http://www.sedonaindianjewelry.com/Jewelry/Rings/rings.htm (gorgeous!!!)

(*) (*) (*) I guess I will keep my pieces and wear them with knowledge that they are "one of a kind" pieces. My bracelet is solid gold that is fluid.....and very femme. Thank you for reading my passionate posts! (f) (f)

Sleep well,
(k) (k) Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Don Juan de Marco
Have you ever really loved a woman?

1996

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


To really love a woman
To understand her - you gotta know her deep inside
Hear every thought - see every dream
N' give her wings - when she wants to fly
Then when you find yourself lyin' helpless in her arms
Ya know ya really love a woman

When you love a woman you tell her
that she's really wanted
When you love a woman you tell her that she's the one
Cuz she needs somebody to tell her
that it's gonna last forever
So tell me have you ever really
- really really ever loved a woman?

To really love a woman
Let her hold you -
til ya know how she needs to be touched
You've gotta breathe her - really taste her
Til you can feel her in your blood
N' when you can see your unborn children in her eyes
Ya know ya really love a woman

When you love a woman
you tell her that she's really wanted
When you love a woman you tell her that she's the one
Cuz she needs somebody to tell her
that you'll always be together
So tell me have you ever really -
really really ever loved a woman?

You got to give her some faith - hold her tight
A little tenderness - gotta treat her right
She will be there for you, takin' good care of you
Ya really gotta love your woman...

(*) (*) (*) please tell that I'm with you..... (k) (k) (k) (k)

With tenderness,
Sweetlady (k) (k) (k) (k)

[sweetlady]

American Indians Expand College Hopes- By SAM DILLON-New York Times
Published: August 1, 2004

NORTHFIELD, Minn. - Sometimes white people can seem really ignorant, says Alistaire MacRae, a 17-year-old Navajo high school student, noting the time he and his family vacationed at Yellowstone National Park and were soon surrounded by tourists snapping pictures of them, as though they were a herd of elk.

Still, Mr. MacRae wants a college education and knows that some good universities are predominantly white, far from his homelands in the Arizona desert, and hard to get into. So his parents paid $50 for Alistaire to join 50 other American Indian students this summer, meeting with representatives of Harvard, Stanford and 19 other schools for a crash course on how to apply to elite colleges.

"This has really opened up my mind," said Kyle Hegdal, an Eskimo who is a high school senior from Fairbanks, Alaska, midway through the course on the Carleton College campus here. Mr. Hegdal said he had not previously contemplated applying to any Ivy League school. "But now I'm thinking East Coast, maybe M.I.T. or Cornell," he said.

American Indians and Alaska Natives, who make up about 1 percent of the nation's population, are underrepresented at many highly selective colleges, contributing well below 1 percent of undergraduates.

Even those who enroll often drop out. On average, fewer than one in five Indians who enroll in college earn a bachelor's degree, said Norbert Hill, executive director of the American Indian Graduate Center of Albuquerque.

The gathering here on Carleton College's leafy campus was part of a cottage industry that has developed - short courses, counseling efforts and consultancies - aimed at helping Indian students navigate the obstacle course that is college application. For their part, elite colleges, most of them far from any reservation, need ways to get acquainted with those students and to understand their difficulties, which include the cultural issues Indian students face at largely white universities.

"It's like navigating with a foot in two canoes," said Mr. Hill, who left an Oneida reservation to attend the University of Wisconsin in 1964. Among the reasons Indian college students drop out at higher rates than other ethnic groups, experts said, is the poor quality of their reservation and rural schools and the culture shock that many experience as they move from reservation to university life.

"You rarely would get a white student walking up to an African-American student and saying, 'Wow, I've never met a black person before.' But that's not uncommon for Natives," said Danielle Terrance, an Akwesasne Mohawk who is a student development specialist at Cornell University's American Indian Program. "You're always having to explain who you are."

During the five-day course here, known as College Horizons, students polished college entrance essays, heard an assistant director in Yale's admissions office describe the touches that can make a dull application sparkle, worked with an associate dean from Princeton on a financial aid application and heard Tallerita Tunney, a Navajo woman who took the course five years ago, describe life at Macalester College in St. Paul, where she graduated in May.

"It's cold in Minnesota, but you learn how to dress warmly and I love it," Ms. Tunney said.

The American Indian students, all high school juniors or seniors, included Gary Richards, an Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge, S.D., who wears a rhinestone earring and a braid reaching his waist and aspires to attend law school, and Ashton Thompson, a senior from Philadelphia, Miss., who wrote a college entrance essay about studying her Choctaw language, which is in decline.

Twenty-five students packed into a classroom to hear Carmen Lopez, a Navajo woman from Black Mesa, Ariz., who directs the Harvard University Native American Program.

"What's your interest in Harvard?" Ms. Lopez asked. One student wondered if Harvard had a dental school. Mr. Hegdal wanted to know about business courses.

"Doesn't Harvard have the most books of anywhere?" asked John Badami III, an Osage from Cazenovia, N.Y., who attends a private school in Connecticut.

"Yes, 15 million volumes!" Ms. Lopez said.

In an interview, she said that Harvard College currently has about 55 Native Americans out of a total enrollment of 6,500, and she would like to help increase that. But her goal was to help students find a college that is a good fit.

"Sometimes I just say, 'You should go check out Cal State,' " she said.

Whitney Laughlin, who founded College Horizons in 1998, sat across from Brittney Babb, a Lower Brule Sioux who is a junior from Vermillion, S.D., reading Ms. Babb's file, and asking questions. Did Brittney want a campus with lots of other American Indians? Was she liberal or conservative? What about a women's college? East Coast, West Coast or heartland?

Ms. Babb had already expressed interest in Dartmouth, Georgetown and Harvard, and Dr. Laughlin urged her also to consider Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Carleton, Macalester and Washington University in St. Louis.

"Here's what you have going for you," Dr. Laughlin said. "You're low income, you're Native American, you have an outstanding grade-point average and you have a solid record in athletics. You're doing a great job, Brittney."

Poverty had shaped the aspirations of students like Gabrielle Moore, a Chickasaw-Cherokee from Tulsa, Okla., who said she hoped to break into advertising.

"What about creative writing?" Dr. Laughlin asked.

"I'd love to, but I don't want to be living in a Dumpster behind McDonald's," Ms. Moore replied. "I've lived without money and don't want to do it again."

In contrast, Casey Vaughn, a senior from the Mississippi band of the Choctaw, said that revenues from her tribe's two casinos would pay her expenses at the college of her choosing. Such tribe-financed scholarships are not available to most students, however, because only about 30 of the 500 tribes in the United States run lucrative gaming operations.

Payments to youths by some tribes with casinos help dissuade them from attending college, some American Indian leaders who participated in the course here said.

But Willie Hordacker, a lawyer for the Shakopee Sioux, which operates the Mystic Lake Casino south of Minneapolis, rejected that view. He said in an interview that the tribe's 190 adult members receive a per capita payment, but said he could not confirm or contradict reports that the payments are $70,000 a month. The tribe, he said, has at least 10 current members enrolled in college or vocational schools. "So the per capita payments have clearly not been a disincentive to those students," Mr. Hordacker said.

For Mr. MacRae, a big bear of a fellow with longish black hair, the course did not change his college aspirations. Before arriving at Carleton, he wanted to attend the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.M., a preference maintained even after attending presentations by representatives from Macalester, Dartmouth, Yale, Cornell and Harvard.

"All those schools sounded challenging and I respect them for that," he said. But a visit to the institute in Santa Fe left him impressed by the sheer number of Indian artists there and eager to study writing there.

His father, Sterling MacRae, a successful sculptor, said in a telephone interview that he would support his son, regardless of his choice.

"Our songs and prayers are with him to try his wings," Mr. MacRae said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/national/01indian.html?pagewanted=2

(*) (*) <wondering why it takes so long......the first nine colonial universities established in the U.S. eventually started expansion into education for Native Americans and many folks asked for and received endowments for such a purpose. The monies collected in England and elsewhere in Europe rarely made it into education for Native Americans, unfortunately. This NYTimes article seemed a bit like three centuries late.....in my view.(o)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

"A dangerous summer"

As Bush slips in the polls no one can be sure what the increasingly panicked neo-conservatives will do, writes Hassan Nafaa:

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/701/op63.htm

Most political analysts believed that President Bush's image as the champion of the war against terrorism would be the image that would remain foremost in the minds of the American voters, still haunted by the spectre of 11 September, when they vote in November. There are recent indications, however, that the image of the valiant warrior has begun to crack, gradually exposing another image -- that of the conman. There are also indications that "terrorism" may no longer be as crucial an electoral factor. According to recent opinion polls, although a majority of the American people still feel that Bush is the best candidate on the fight against terrorism, not only is that majority rapidly dwindling, Bush's rival is coming out way ahead on many other issues. In addition, it appears that many are beginning to question the integrity of the current administration. Because these doubts and suspicions are integrally related with events in Iraq, developments there are likely to be the prime determinant of the outcome of the US presidential elections in November.

Until recently analysts attributed Bush's declining popularity ratings to the material and moral costs of the war in Iraq. The numbers of soldiers returning home in coffins are increasing by the day and the funding needed to cover the costs of the war seems to have no ceiling. But, as crucial as these issues are, it now appears that they are being overshadowed by the growing sense among the American public that it was deliberately duped into going to war. The US is, theoretically at least, powerful and wealthy enough to mount a military offensive against a country the size of Iraq and win, as long as the American people remain convinced that war is the only way to protect their national security and strategic interests. Now that the administration's justifications for going to war have proved unfounded, the American public has grown suspicious of the real motives behind the administration's decision to embroil their country in such an ill-reputed adventure.

It took a year from Bush declaring that the war to rid the world of the Iraqi threat was over for the American public to learn that Iraq had not possessed the alleged WMD to begin with, that the Saddam regime had no connection whatsoever to Al-Qaeda or the events of 11 September and that, therefore, the war and its enormous death toll were unwarranted. As there had already existed strong opposition to the war in the US before it was launched, to which testify the massive anti-war demonstrations at that time, the American public eagerly awaited the outcome of the congressional investigations into the intelligence gathering process on Iraqi WMD and into the possibility that the White House had advance knowledge of the 11 September strikes. In spite of the suspicions many people had already entertained, the findings of the investigative committees still came as a shock. Although Bush tried to salvage the reputation of his administration with such claims as "the world is a better place without Saddam," he failed to counter the downward spiral in the credibility of his administration. Increasingly Americans came to the conclusion that if the administration could lie and cheat once, it would do so again and again.

Perhaps Tony Gott, director of New York University's Rimark Institute, best portrayed the prevailing mood in the US. In an article in the Arabic edition of Newsweek (27 July), he said the confidence of America's allies in the most powerful democracy in the world had reached an unprecedented low and that no one (outside the US and Israel) has any trust left in the US and its president. He also estimated that at least a third of the American people have come to believe that Bush not only misled them in order to go to war, but deliberately lied. In addition, he said, many Americans had begun to fear the existence of a plan to delay the forthcoming presidential elections in the event of the likelihood that Bush would lose. Although he stressed that such an unprecedented and unconstitutional move would be "unimaginable", he found it disturbing that so many people believed it possible, which, moreover, was another important indicator of the public's eroding trust in Bush. But what can we expect from an administration that a large segment of the US public believes is willing to commit such an unconstitutional precedent?

I, too, think it unlikely that this administration would resort to postponing elections, at least under normal circumstances. However, I do not rule out other possibilities or scenarios, including another military adventure. In "American options in Iraq", which appeared in Al-Hayat several months ago, I suggested that the Bush administration may attempt to escape its predicament at home by fabricating a crisis abroad, with Iran, Syria or both. The ideological delusions of the neo-conservative clique in the White House are such that they may be tempted to push the confrontation with Iran to the brink, casting Tehran as the "serpent's head" that must be severed in order to win the war against terrorism. When pushed to the critical point, they believe, the American people will always rally around the flag and their president, and even more so if the quarry is as big as Iran. Such was my distrust of the Bush administration at the time that I added, "Some might think that recourse to such an option is a form of madness possible only in an authoritarian government ruled by a pathological maniac...but not in a country with institutionalised checks on power and provisions for public accountability. I for one do not share this opinion."

Apparently I am not alone. The mistrust and apprehension of what the Bush administration might get up to is now abundantly palpable inside the US, as is reflected in the writings of numerous commentators and scholars. And not without reason. The scenario I described above is not just a theoretical likelihood, but a concrete option on that administration's agenda. In a recent statement Secretary of State Colin Powell said, "A preventive attack against Iran is a possibility." It is still too early to tell whether the US will undertake this assault by itself or give Israel the green light to do it for it. Or, perhaps Israel will take the initiative to escalate the situation in the Palestinian territories or in Lebanon in order to lure Syria and Iran into a trap of its own devising, one that will goad the Americans into action on its behalf. But, however it plays out, the purpose of the scenario is to destroy the alliance opposed to the US and Israeli project of regional hegemony. This alliance consists of the Palestinian resistance, the Lebanese Hizbullah, Syria and Iran. If this analysis is correct, the world is in for a dangerously hot summer.

Nevertheless, even if another war scenario has entered the realm of the possible, putting it into effect will not be as easy as some strategists in the White House or Tel Aviv imagine. The resistance alliance, regardless of the differences in the ideological orientations and interests of its components, still has some important leverage cards. It could, for example, transform Iraq and northern Israel into a hell for occupation forces and settlers. Also, it is unlikely that the US administration would want to embark on another military operation in the delicate run-up to election day, unless it could secure consensus among the American public that such an operation was a legitimate deterrent against a certain and imminent terrorist attack against the US. Given its dismal credibility ratings this administration would have a very hard time generating such a consensus, if only because no one would believe the information it furnished, even if that information were well-founded. On the other hand, perhaps this would not deter the Bush administration, whose recklessness and aversion to rational thought processes is becoming clearer by the day.

Can we hope that the American people will act to restrain the belligerency of this administration, at least until they have their say as to whether it stays or leaves in November? Can we hope that the American people has the sense to oust this administration in the national polls? I have no illusions about the policies of an administration headed by Kerry. But at least that administration would be more rational and pragmatic, and not taunt the world with "Armageddon" diatribes and doomsday scenarios.

The writer is professor of political science at Cairo University.

(*) (*) <sigh> And to think that I have scheduled, re-scheduled and cancelled probably a dozen trips to Egypt over the past 25 years. Maybe someday I'll actually get to Queen Hatepshut's palace and other ancient places without being blown up. :| :| (*) (*)

Carpe diem!
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

"Why politics must connect" Powerful pressure groups have emerged from the internet and mobile phone revolution. But who will take responsibility?
Will Hutton - Sunday August 1, 2004 - The Observer (London)

At the way with Words Literary Festival in Dartington this year the biggest crowd-pullers were politicians who could speak their minds. Robin Cook, Roy Hattersley and Tony Benn filled the beautiful Great Hall with audiences on a scale politicians fondly remember - and even humbler pundits like myself were astonished at how many people turned up for our sessions. And yet turnout at elections continues to fall.
The consensus is that in an era of managerial politics political debate is dull; any sulphurous and compelling exchanges over great issues that will change our lives are kept firmly out of sight. It isn't worth voting because your vote doesn't count and even if it did nothing much is going to change. The public realm is being progressively privatised by a mixture of disinterest, boredom and belief that it doesn't matter.

Why, then, the scale of the audiences for politics and current affairs events at Dartington and every other literary festival? It seems politics is migrating from the formal world of Westminster and the local authority chamber.

What people are hungry for is a sense of the possibility of engagement; of understanding; of sharing a group expe rience about politics without being subject to the overt manipulation of politicians wanting your vote - and for this the literary festival format works well.

Hattersley, Benn and Cook are interesting because they analyse and explain precisely as they see and write it, largely indifferent to how their views might play in the tabloids and in the focus groups.

Nor is this where the new engagement ends. The number of bottom-up campaigns into which people are throwing themselves with enthusiasm on left and right alike are growing by the year.

On the right there has been the Countryside Alliance protesting against the fox hunting ban, fuel protesters against petrol price hikes and the anarchic conservatives of the Animal Liberation Front; on the left there is the Stop the War Coalition and Reclaim the Party.

All are networks that depend on the new information and communication technologies (ICT) to create the multiple linkages and co-ordination necessary for large scale mobilisation of people; without the mobile and internet they would be impossible.

Such networks can be very local and account for the growing number of sleeping policemen and other traffic-calming measures along with often infuriating labyrinthine one-way systems. Groups form via, and remain in contact through, the internet and mobile, and bring formidable pressure on local councillors, and the harried councillors give way under their force.

Many of the schemes succeed only in diverting the traffic elsewhere, massively inconveniencing other local residents to benefit the few on the once busy road. They are, nevertheless, a tribute to a newly emerging, local and partially formed public realm.

Last week iSociety, the thinktank within the Work Foundation (of which I'm chief executive), devoted to exploring the new economic and social geography thrown up by ICT, produced a report ('Proxicommunication') mapping how we are now using the internet, and the critical role these new links are playing in generating a different politics and associated public realm.

Most of us shop and recreate within eight miles of our home; with a third of emails now used for social interaction, the internet is less about abolishing distance but more about entrenching the depth and complexity of local social relationships.

We use the net and our mobiles to stay in constant touch with our immediate friends, neighbours and colleagues; we know what each other is thinking better than ever.

Author William Davies identifies a number of local internet-based networks - mainly in housing estates such as Bentley in Manchester or, the largest scale of all, 10 linked housing estates in Liverpool. Tenants are using the net or broadband TV to interact with each other, find areas of common agreement; and then campaign for change in the way their estate is managed.

The BBC's iCan is based on the same principle; the BBC facilitating local interaction and knowledge about political issues for those citizens who agree to take part.

All of this is in its infancy, but the direction is clear; ICT is facilitating forms of interaction which both deepen local social relationships and offer a platform from which to co-ordinate any political action they may want to take. It is not so much that politics is dead; it's that the structures in which politics is taking place are mutating.

Davies argues that in the past the established political parties, indeed the state itself, could compete to run society only because they controlled the information necessary to do so.

That era is passing; political parties are not the agency of the citizen, but rather try to coerce the citizen into supporting what the party leadership has already been decided - an inversion of the democratic process and of which the Iraq war recently has been the quintessential expression.

But worse, ICT is creating a new capacity to monitor and control us; satellite technology in our cars, ID cards in our wallets with bio-metric information about, and centralised IT-based government departments holding every detail of our financial and personal affairs represents, as our leader argued last week, a new Big Brother.

Yet while the state tries to entrench the monopoly of information upon which control and its legitimacy is based, citizens are forming ad hoc net-based groups to assert local interventions and capacity for action.

Increasingly, citizens can acquire both the information and, via the net, the capacity to co-ordinate public intervention, which is beginning to subvert and challenge the state as it redoubles its own surveillance capacities.

The difficulty, as Davies acknowledges, is that while improved interactivity via the net may create more public space, that is very different to accountability - another key attribute of any definition of the idea of 'publicness'.

Animal rights protesters, traffic calming lobbyists and petrol protesters may be reclaiming lost public space; but to whom do they account for their actions?

Today's political parties may be too easily captured by their leaderships, and in Labour's case possess cabinets so supine that they did not even ask for the key briefing papers in the build-up to the Iraq war, as the Butler report so devastatingly reveals - but they are still ultimately accountable in general elections for their actions.

The trouble is that accountability weakens as faith in conventional politics diminishes. To reverse that, political parties are going to have to open themselves up to the same forces currently animating the local; proxicommunication.

This is all some way off, I would guess - and requires a culture change that would shake New Labour to its roots. But it is none the less imperative to start the process.

(*) (*) the next to the last paragraph applies in spades here in the U.S. Accountability? Within the Bush administration? <wicked grin> NOT! (*) (*)

(f) (f) ,
Sweetlady

[Beaudyk]

Sexuality, Drugs and the Ideal of Sport By DAVID TULLER

THE Olympic Games take place in Athens this month, even as an
investigation into the use of steroids has led to suspicions that some
of the biggest names in track and field, as well as other sports, are
using banned drugs.
That makes this an awkward time for the International Olympic Committee
to decide, as it did in May, that transsexuals may compete openly in the
Games. None are expected to participate this time, but the decision
raises difficult questions about the nature of sports achievement.
Does allowing a small number of athletes to take large doses of hormones
threaten to undermine the international effort to rid sports of
performance-enhancing drugs?
As a columnist for The Irish Times wrote, because the decision
"officially brings into the international sporting community athletes
who have undergone a radical and life-altering course of hormone
treatment, it is bound to provide a further smoke screen for the
malevolent practitioners of science who engineer the substances that
seduce athletes."
To proponents of transsexuals' inclusion, the issue is fairness. Dr. Joe
Leigh Simpson, a member of the I.O.C. committee that made the decision
and a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said it
was not fair to leave them without a place to compete.
But others disagree. "Men have an inherent advantage in sports that rely
on strength, speed and power," said Libba Galloway, senior vice
president and chief legal officer for the Ladies Professional Golf
Association, which requires that members and players at its events be
born as women. "The concern is that these people would still have a
greater muscle mass and other physiological advantages over someone who
was born a woman."
Transsexual athletes and many doctors who treat them dismiss that
argument.
They say that the prolonged use of estrogen by those transitioning from
male to female neutralizes any physiological advantages.
"Estrogen is not a performance-enhancing drug," said Michelle Dumaresq,
a transsexual Canadian mountain-bike racing champion, who is 34. "It's a
performance decreaser. I still have a very large bone structure, but I
no longer have all the muscle mass I did to help me move it."
In any case, experts say that objections to transsexual inclusion arise
less from physiological questions than from vague assumptions of what is
natural and what is artificial when it comes to the human body.
"It's no accident that the way people think about the transgender issue
in sports overlaps a lot with the doping issue," said Dr. Stephan Walk,
a professor of sports sociology at California State University at
Fullerton. "They think there's something out there called the natural
state of human beings, against which we juxtapose these supposedly
artificial manipulations."
"But so much of what athletes do is an intentional attempt to manipulate
the body's natural processes," he added. "Is the whole idea of
increasing muscle mass by overusing the muscle natural or artificial? Is
there anything natural about a specialized sports diet? The distinction
between natural and artificial got blurred a long time ago."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/weekinreview/01tull.html?ei=1&en=a0b690f9ace16065&ex=1092373524

The Homepage for KellysList can be found at:

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[Beaudyk]

The Yakima Herald-Republic
Yakima WA
Thursday, July 29, 2004

EDITORIAL

House's Try to Limit Courts Is Wrong

Now that their
election-year grandstanding over gay marriages is out of the way,
perhaps House Republicans can spend part of their current six-week break
from congressional action brushing up on our form of government.

The U.S. Constitution is
big on separation of powers, breaking the federal government into three
distinct branches: judicial, legislative and executive. Basically that
provides for the president to be the chief executive officer of the
country, for Congress to pass laws, and for the courts, including the
Supreme Court, to rule on the constitutionality of those laws.

It creates a system of
checks and balances among the three branches of government and it's a
system that has worked well now for some 215 years.

Last week the
Republican-controlled House clearly violated that separation doctrine by
approving, primarily on a party-line vote, legislation to prevent
federal courts from ordering states to recognize same-sex unions
sanctioned elsewhere. The suspect action came a week after the Senate
blocked a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

That action also took on
partisan overtones in the Senate. While Republicans have the majority in
that 100-member chamber, they could not muster the 60 votes necessary to
advance the amendment. Only 48 senators voted for the procedural move.
Fifty senators, including six Republicans, voted to block the amendment.
Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards, Democratic candidates for president
and vice president, did not vote.

That set the stage for a
little bit of election-year posturing in the House.

First, let's set the
record straight: The issue here isn't gay marriages or any type of
congressional action to stop them. The issue is one branch of
government, in this case the legislative, trying to strip the power of
another branch, the judicial. That is not acceptable in our form of
government, regardless of what the issue is.

To try to pass a law
that says something is not subject to judicial review is asinine, and
most likely unconstitutional on the face of it.

The nonpartisan
Congressional Research Service said it could find no precedent for
Congress passing a law to limit federal courts from ruling on the
constitutionality of another law, although some congressional Democrats
said opponents of civil rights legislation tried similar tactics. Both
types of efforts would be equally appalling.

A jurisdictional issue
of that magnitude should most certainly come in the form of an amendment
to the U.S. Constitution, not through any law passed in the heat of an
election year. Such an amendment requires not only congressional
approval but also ratification by three-fourths of the states.

It's a safe bet this
silly law isn't going to go anywhere, especially given the mood of the
Senate, and such a violation of constitutional intent most definitely
should not get serious consideration. Its main claim to fame will be
campaign-trail fodder for candidates of both parties.

Let members of Congress
debate all issues on their merits and not by blurring the clear intent
of the constitutional mandate for separation of powers and checks and
balances.
The U.S. Constitution is
much bigger than any partisan, election-year agenda.
© The Yakima Herald-Republic

[Beaudyk]

The Washington Blade [lgbt]

'Historic' convention for gay Democrats
By LOU CHIBBARO JR.
Jul. 30, 2004

BOSTON - Gays participated in the Democratic National Convention in
greater numbers and in higher-level positions than ever before, pledging
to pull out all the stops to help elect John Kerry president.

A record contingent of at least 252 gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgendered Democrats ? serving as delegates, alternate delegates and
convention standing committee members ? downplayed Kerry?s opposition to
gay marriage and gladly embraced the Kerry campaign?s call to stay on
"message."

For the first time ever, an openly gay person, U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin
(D-Wis.), delivered a speech before a Democratic convention during a
prime-time television hour.

Baldwin was also selected as a convention vice-chair, another first for
an openly gay person.

Baldwin, who was assigned to discuss the party?s plans for expanding
health care for Americans, did not mention that she is a lesbian or
discuss specific gay issues, although she said health care coverage
should include "domestic partners."

Gay Democratic activists nevertheless called Baldwin?s appearance
"historic," saying the party designated her as a prime time speaker
knowing that her status as a lesbian would be viewed as a symbolic
advance for gay rights causes.

Gay U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who addressed the convention at
6:15 p.m. on July 29, the final night of the convention, spoke openly
about gay issues and gay marriage. He described himself and the National
Stonewall Democrats, of which he is the founder, as the "gay, lesbian,
transgendered and bisexual wing of the Democratic Party."

Frank appeared to join the Rev. Al Sharpton in becoming the only two
speakers to take liberties from the Kerry campaign?s call for toning
down controversial subjects.

Frank was the only speaker to come out strongly for gay marriage and one
of only a few that mentioned transgendered persons.

"[W]hen two people are in love and they are willing to be morally and
legally committed to each other and financially responsible for each
other, that if they are prepared to get married, it?s a good thing for
the stability of society," Frank said.

Similar to most of the 4,322 delegates and 611 alternates attending the
convention, nearly all members of the gay contingent said they
understood the term "message" to mean doing everything possible to oust
George W. Bush from the White House in the November election, even if it
means downplaying controversial issues they deem important.


Staying on message

Among those leading the clarion call for this strategy was gay civil
rights attorney Mary Bresslow, the lead attorney in the Massachusetts
Supreme Judicial Court case that led to the legalization of same-sex
marriage in that state.

"John Kerry has, by far, the best record on our issues than any
presidential candidate in American history," she said Wednesday at a
meeting of the gay convention contingent.

Bresslow and veteran gay Democratic activist Jeff Trammell serve as
co-chair of the Kerry campaign?s gay outreach committee.

"We all know what we?re here for," said David Meadows, president of
D.C.?s Gertrude Stein Democratic Club. "We may not be pleased with Mr.
Kerry?s position on gay marriage, but we know he?s far, far better than
Bush on all the issues that matter to us and that matter to Democrats."

Kerry has said he supports civil unions over gay marriage and has
pledged to push for legislation that would provide the same rights and
benefits to same-sex couples in civil unions and domestic partnerships
as those enjoyed by heterosexual married couples.

Kerry and his vice presidential running mate, Senator John Edwards
(D-N.C.), have said they strongly oppose a constitutional amendment to
ban same-sex marriage, saying they favor allowing states to decide the
issue of gay marriage as well as civil unions.

His gay supporters note that Kerry has embraced virtually every other
gay civil rights initiative, including a federal gay civil rights bill
banning employment discrimination against gays and legislation giving
the federal government authority to prosecute anti-gay hate crimes.
Kerry has said he opposes the "Don?t Ask, Don?t Tell" policy on gays in
the military and would push for allowing gays to serve openly.

With the approval of the Kerry campaign, the Democratic Convention?s
Platform Committee earlier this year included these and other gay rights
proposals in the party?s platform.

Gay civil rights attorney Roberta Achtenberg, who served as an assistant
secretary of housing during the Clinton administration, read the "gay"
planks in the platform in a brief speech before the convention on
Monday.

Achtenberg?s speech, which took place about 6:30 p.m., when few outlets
other than C-Span and public television stations covered the convention,
was one of the few speeches during the first three days of the
convention that touched on gay issues.

Among other things, Achtenberg pointed out that the platform calls for
"full inclusion" of gay and lesbian families in the life of the nation
and expresses support for "equal responsibilities, benefits and
protections" for those families.


Six gay speakers

Achtenberg and Baldwin were two of six open gays scheduled to speak at
the convention. Andrew Tobias, the gay treasurer of the Democratic
National Committee, and Jim Stork, the former mayor of Wilton Manors,
Fla., near Fort Lauderdale, and a candidate for the U.S. House of
Representatives, spoke on Monday night and Tuesday night respectively.
Cheryl Jacques, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation?s
largest gay civil rights group, spoke Wednesday night.

Tobias devoted most of his brief speech, at about 5 p.m., to the party?s
fund-raising activities. He mentioned his domestic partner and the fact
that the two don?t enjoy the legal protections of married couples, but
he did not specifically mention gays. Stork made no mention of gays or
gay issues, limiting his brief speech to his quest to defeat a
Republican incumbent, with the hope of helping return the House to
Democratic control.

Jacques devoted all of her speech to gay rights issues, saying the
nation?s gay and lesbian citizens are seeking the same American dream as
all other citizens.

Jacques, a former Massachusetts state senator, received loud cheers from
gay delegates sprinkled through only a partially filled convention hall.
During Jacques? speech, the gay delegates waved Kerry-Edwards placards,
which were designed to appear as rainbow flags.

"I'm Cheryl Jacques, and on behalf of my partner Jennifer, and our
beautiful twin boys Timmy and Tommy, I'd like to say how proud I am to
be back in my home state of Massachusetts ? where I had the privilege of
serving in the state Senate for more than a decade," Jacques told the
convention.

"Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans share the dream ? the
dream of a better, stronger and more united America," she said. "We
protect our country. We die for our country. That's why we seek the
right to serve openly and honestly in our armed forces ? to defend our
freedoms and the rights of all American families."

Added Jacques, "We see a health care crisis that can be alleviated
through more personal responsibility. That in part is why we're working
for marriage equality ? so we can do what families do best ? care for
each other in sickness and in health."

Her reference to "marriage equality" was Jacques? only reference to gay
marriage, a term that she never mentioned.

Yet Jacques? speech, which also addressed anti-gay hate crimes and
AIDS-related issues, was by far the most extensive discussion of gay
civil rights among any of the convention speakers as of Wednesday.

Gay U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was scheduled to speak at the
convention on Thursday night. Frank told gay delegates he planned to
directly and forcefully mention gay issues as a speaker identified as a
representative of the National Stonewall Democrats, a gay Democratic
group, as well as a member of Congress.

Frank spoke as an official representative of the National Stonewall
Democrats, a gay Democratic group, as well as a member of Congress.

NSD officials hailed Frank?s scheduled appearance as another
breakthrough ? a first of its kind convention speech by a representative
of a gay Democratic Party organization.

Similar to Democratic conventions beginning in 1992, when Bill Clinton
won the nomination, heterosexual convention speakers, including a few
prominent names, such as Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), mentioned
gays or the subject of anti-gay discrimination in their speeches.


Gays in red states

Gay delegates said they were especially pleased this year that the
convention?s keynote speaker, Illinois state Senator Barack Obama, a
candidate for the U.S. Senate, mentioned gays. Obama?s speech was among
the most widely watched convention speeches other than those given by
Kerry and Edwards.

In his speech Wednesday night, Edwards did not mention gay rights. He
did talk about civil rights, but only in the context of race.

In a reference to how the nation is divided by red and blue states, the
color-coding that designates which states go to a GOP or Democratic
presidential candidate, Obama said, "We coach Little League in the blue
[Democratic] states and have gay friends in the red [Republican] states.
? We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and
stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."

As of Wednesday, far fewer speakers made reference to gay issues than in
the 1992, 1996, and 2000 conventions.

However, like conventions during those years, this year?s convention saw
a parade of big name elected officials make visits to the gay delegates?
caucus meetings. Among those who spoke at the gay caucus meetings were
Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of John Kerry; Senator Barbara Boxer
(D-Calif.); nearly a dozen members of the House of Representatives,
including Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and D.C. Congressional Delegate
Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.); and Governors Bill Richardson of New
Mexico, James McGreevey of New Jersey, and John Baldacci of Maine.

Veteran gay Democratic activist Tom Chorlton, who helped found the first
national gay Democratic organization in the early 1980s, said the trend
toward curtailing the discussion of gay issues in convention speeches
and other restrictions linked to Kerry?s call for staying "on message"
are partially signs of the success of gay Democrats during the past 20
years.

"In part, we?re the victims of our own success," Chorlton said. "When we
started, so many years ago, we were renegades. And so we did everything
we could legally do to push the envelope as far as we can push it. The
problem becomes once you win a seat at the table, which is what I?ve
always maintained it?s about, then, of course, you have to reach an
understanding with the powers that be that, to have that voice and seat
at the table, you have to play along as well."

Added Chorlton, "Some of your independence is curtailed. That?s a shame
from an individual point of view. But on a case by case basis, it might
be a price that?s well worth paying."


© The Washington Blade

http://www.washblade.com/2004/7-30/news/national/history.cfm

[Beaudyk]

Subject: Missouri moves on same-sex marriage

The Associated Press
Saturday, July 31, 2004

KELLY WIESE
Associated Press

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - There's nothing unusual about national political
groups focusing efforts on the bellwether state of Missouri. But the
attention this year is not only on the presidential race, but also a
ballot proposal to enshrine a ban on gay marriage in the state
constitution.

Tuesday's election will mark the first vote in the nation on the subject
since Massachusetts' highest court legalized gay marriages last year. At
least nine other states, and perhaps as many as 12, will vote on a
similar amendment this fall.

The proposed amendment has prompted national gay-rights groups to send
more than $100,000 to the Missouri organization fighting the ban, and
they expect to spend millions of dollars around the country before the
general election.

Supporters have raised just a few thousand dollars but think public
sentiment in this Midwestern state is on their side.

National groups expect Missouri's vote to be a test of which campaign
strategies work, and which don't, as the battle spreads to ballot boxes
around the United States.

"We have definitely prioritized fighting back on these ballot measures
that are happening across the country," said Seth Kilbourn, national
field director for the Washington D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign, a
gay rights organization that has sent about $112,000 to the Missouri
opposition.

"Missouri is the first one. It's really important that the gay and
lesbian community and our allies wage as strong a campaign as we can to
send a strong message to the other campaigns that are going on out
there," he said.

The group backing the amendment, the Coalition to Protect Marriage in
Missouri, also sees the vote here as an important gauge.

"What happens here in Missouri could have a tremendous impact on the
rest of the nation's other elections," said the group's spokeswoman,
Vicky Hartzler, a former Republican state lawmaker. "I'm hopeful we will
be able to send a very strong, clear message from Missouri that here in
the heartland, we value traditional marriage."

Overall, Kilbourn said, the Human Rights Campaign plans to spend up to
$1 million nationwide in monetary donations and assistance fighting the
ballot measures, as part of a $5 million effort that also includes
getting members of the gay and lesbian community to the polls.

The Washington D.C.-based National Gay and Lesbian Task Force chipped in
$10,500 in direct aid in Missouri and said it also provided campaign
training and helped raise thousands more, for a total impact of about
$40,000.

Kilbourn said he knows it's an uphill fight in Missouri, but he said the
state at least will help the movement figure out what strategies work as
it gears up for elections elsewhere.

Two groups supporting the amendment together have raised just $7,600.
But several national groups are monitoring the issue around the country
and taking action on their own. For example, Focus on the Family, a
Colorado-based Christian organization, mailed letters to 33,000 members
in Missouri urging support of the amendment, and plans similar efforts
in other states.

"What the early states do is they ensure that this is going to be an
issue in this election cycle," said Tony Perkins, president of the
Washington D.C.-based Family Research Council. "It kind of stokes the
interest in this issue as it moves across the country."

Louisiana residents are to vote on a marriage amendment Sept. 18. Then
Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon and
Utah are to vote on the issue Nov. 2.
There also are initiatives pending in Michigan, North Dakota and Ohio.

Legislatures in Massachusetts, Tennessee and Wisconsin have begun the
process of proposing a constitutional amendment to voters but must pass
the measure a second time to place it on the ballot.

Four states already have constitutional amendments banning gay marriage
or authorizing the legislature to do so - Alaska, Hawaii, Nebraska and
Nevada.

Backers are clamoring for constitutional protections, saying the federal
law and those of many states, including Missouri, defining marriage as
between a man and a woman are more susceptible to being tossed by a
court. They fear "activist judges" will find such laws violate state or
federal constitutions' equal-protection or due-process clauses.

In mid-July, a lesbian couple from Florida who married in Massachusetts
sued the federal government to have their union legally recognized in
the rest of the country.

Already, many of the benefits that come with marriage - such as making
medical decisions or receiving retirement benefits from a partner - can
be handled through legal contracts. Some private companies also offer
health insurance benefits to same-sex partners.

But gay marriage advocates say that still doesn't cover everything, and
that only legal marriage can provide rights in such things as
inheritance taxes and child-custody disputes.


© The Associated Press

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__________________________________________________ ______________________
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Message: 8
Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2004 23:31:33 -0400
From: Web_Weaver@webtv.net
Subject: Opponents of gay marriage ban running television ad

The Associated Press
Thursday, July 29, 2004

Opponents of gay marriage ban running television ad

Associated Press

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - Opponents of a proposed constitutional amendment
to ban gay marriage have begun airing TV ads around the state suggesting
the ballot measure would write discrimination into the Missouri
Constitution.

The ads, which began Wednesday, are expected to run through Tuesday's
election, said Doug Gray, campaign manager for the Constitution Defense
League.

Missouri law already defines marriage as between a man and a woman and
specifically does not recognize same-sex marriages, even if they are
performed in a state where they are legal.

Still, supporters of the amendment say it's needed to keep a court from
potentially tossing the law. They point to the Massachusetts court
ruling last year that gay couples have the right to marry.

The 30-second spot features Damon Hayward, a U.S. Navy veteran from
Raytown, speaking about the amendment, saying it's unnecessary because
of the state law, and that while people can disagree on the issue, such
restrictions don't belong in the constitution.

"Amendment 2 isn't about gay marriage. That's already banned in
Missouri. It's about putting unequal treatment in Missouri's
constitution, permanently," Hayward said in the ad.

The ad is running in St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield and Columbia
markets, Gray said.


ON THE NET
Anti-Amendment: http://www.constitutiondefenseleague.org
Pro-Amendment: http://www.cpmm.net


© 2004 AP Wire and wire service sources
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/politics/9273168.htm

[Beaudyk]

Washington Post News Service

Vatican document attacks feminism / Trend undermines teachings on
family, sexuality, paper says

- Daniel Williams, Alan Cooperman, Washington Post
Sunday, August 1, 2004

Rome -- The Vatican issued a letter Saturday attacking the "distortions"
and "lethal effects" of feminism, which it defined as an effort to erase
differences between men and women -- a goal, the statement said, that
undermines the "natural two-parent structure" of the family and makes
"homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent."

The sharp critique was contained in a document issued by Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger, a chief adviser to Pope John Paul II and head of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the department in charge of
laying out Roman Catholic orthodoxy.

The 37-page document also outlined the Vatican's own formula for
relations between men and women, calling for "active collaboration
between the sexes" and rejecting subjugation of women.

The statement was the latest Vatican salvo against trends it regards as
undermining its teachings on sexuality and the family. Vatican officials
have assailed abortion and contraception, politicians who support the
availability of abortion and the legalization of same-sex unions.

The pope approved the document issued Saturday, which is titled "Letter
to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and
Women in the Church and the World."

Catholic feminists in the United States said the letter presented a
caricature of feminism as trying to deny any difference between the
sexes, rather than as seeking equal rights and respect for both genders.

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, a feminist theologian at Harvard Divinity
School, said the document restated positions the Vatican has taken many
times and the only surprise was its timing. She said church leaders may
be feeling some urgency to combat same-sex marriage, as well as renewed
pressure to consider ordaining women in response to the worldwide
scandal over sexual abuse by priests.

"It has some positive things in it, but the political function of the
document is the same as the ones before," Fiorenza said.

"It's trying to make a theological case, which they're really not able
to make, against the full equality of women in the church."

Archbishop Angelo Amato, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith, said Saturday on Vatican Radio that the goal of the letter
was to critique two current strands in feminism: one that emphasizes "a
radical rivalry between the sexes" and the other that seeks to "cancel
the differences between the sexes."

It argued that "the obscuring of the difference ... of the sexes has
enormous consequences," including inspiring ideologies that "call into
question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and
father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent,
in a new model of polymorphous sexuality."

While assaulting what it said were the bases of feminist ideology, the
letter tried to tackle the practical difficulties and inequities that
feminists also decry. It attempted to strike a balance between a
Catholic ideal of women raising children at home and the reality that
many work outside the home.

Women ought not be stigmatized for desiring the life of a homemaker, the
letter argued. "Indeed, a just valuing of the work of women within the
family is required," it said.

Women who choose to work in the labor force should be awarded a proper
schedule and "not have to choose between relinquishing their family life
or enduring continual stress," it said.


©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/08/01/MNGN8810HG1.DTL

Program would give kids a voice in election

Samantha Critchell Associated Press
Published August 2, 2004

NEW YORK -- Adults wonder why children aren't more interested in
politics.

After all, they are the voters of tomorrow, they are the ones who'll
carry the torch of democracy into the future.

Here's an easy answer: Kids have no say today, and in a world of instant
gratification (and instant messaging), tomorrow is, like, a long time
from now.

"Voting statistics for younger voters are pathetic," said Ken Hakuta, a
toy creator and former host of a PBS science series.

"I don't even know if my three kids of voting age -- they're in their
early 20s -- will vote."

Hakuta, who might be familiar to children as "Dr. Fad," wants to reverse
the apathy.
He launched a program called Adopt-a-Vote, which aims to give children a
voice in this presidential election year.

Other initiatives, such as Rock the Vote, have targeted those closer to
voting age, while Hakuta sees his program as sparking conversation among
the middle school set.

"Everyone underestimates the maturity of kids. When I did inventions, I
always thought only of the invention itself, but the kids would ask for
marketing materials," he says with a laugh.

He says that California briefly flirted with -- then backed away from --
the idea of giving younger children a partial vote in November's
election. "It's an intriguing idea," he says.

The next best thing, according to Hakuta, is having children and parents
enter into an agreement pledging that the parents will vote according to
their children's preference as long as the children have done their
homework.

Such a pledge is available at Hakuta's Web site, kidsvote2004.com. The
Web site also features a poll that asks children about their positions
on gun control, violence in the media, smoking and parents, and short
biographies of President Bush, John Kerry and Ralph Nader.

"I hope to promote discussion. I want parents to ask kids the tough
questions: What do they think of Iraq in terms of economics, security
and sacrifice?"

"Parents are averse to discussing hard issues with their kids, but
parents -- who are reluctant even to talk about sex -- will find out
that their kids really want to talk about gay marriage, Iraq, steroids
in major league baseball, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission)
and Howard Stern, and Janet Jackson."

Meanwhile, candidates don't want to talk to youngsters because they'll
demand straight talk, which candidates don't usually offer, Hakuta says.

"Young people don't want to have to read between the lines."

Adopt-a-Vote could be a supplement to school social studies programs in
the fall, Hakuta suggests.

Parents and teachers, so used to talking at children, might be surprised
to find that today's youths have strong opinions and don't fall into
cookie-cutter thinking, Hakuta says. Some children are very
conservative, others are liberal and still others take the middle road.

Hakuta makes the case that youngsters are more true to their convictions
than grown-ups. They're also more likely to care about the future and
issues affecting the future, including the environment and Social
Security.

"Kids have unadulterated views. This will make them good voters and good
analysts of current situations. Parents are too involved. Parents might
not like what Bush is doing in Iraq, but like that they're saving on
their capital gains tax, or they'll vote according to their union," he
said.

"Parents, unfortunately, often vote their self-interests," Hakuta said.

"Nobody is right or wrong here, but it's a matter of letting kids
decide," he said.

Sure, adults and children can have meaningful discussions without taking
the pledge but Hakuta says the ability to vote gives children an
incentive to do the thoughtful research that should go into such a big
decision.

Maybe kids can have a daily assignment such as reading the newspaper
(even if they do it online) or to research all candidates' position on a
particular issue.
Hakuta also encourages using Adopt-a-Vote for local elections because
that's where children will see more immediate results.

"Many young people don't vote because they feel unwelcome and
irrelevant, and that's the system's fault. ... As much as MTV tries to
get them to vote, politicians don't include young voters because young
voters don't donate money."

As for Hakuta's interest in all this, he says he lives in Washington,
D.C., and is surrounded by politics, but he's always been more
interested in the youth movement. He worked on the inauguration of
former President George H.W. Bush and on the Dean campaign earlier this
year.


© The Associated Press

[Beaudyk]

News.com
Australia
Sunday, August 1, 2004

Gay photos rock elite school

By Chris Tinkler
August 1, 2004

AN elite Melbourne school has been rocked by a scandal over risqué
pictures in a gay magazine.

Photographs of semi-clad young men were shot on the grounds of Melbourne
High School.

The lurid 12-page spread, published in July's issue of DNA magazine, has
outraged Victoria's oldest state secondary school and drawn widespread
condemnation.

The school, which selects its all-male students on academic merit,
counts transport tycoon Lindsay Fox, Opposition shadow treasurer Simon
Crean and comedian Max Gillies among its old boys.

It is regarded as one of the finest in Australia.

But it fears the picture spread will make it a national laughing stock.

The spread includes male models dressed in school-style uniforms and
sports gear and striking sexually suggestive poses.

Three images shot on the sports ground - with Melbourne High clearly
identifiable in the background - show a male pulling down another's
shorts to reveal his bare buttocks.

Another shows a model leaning over a desk as a second prepares to spank
him with a ruler.

Acting principal Sue Bell said yesterday the school had given permission
for a fashion shoot in the school, but it had no idea it would be crude.

"Melbourne High School hired out its facilities in good faith for a
fashion shoot," Ms Bell said.

"The school trusted the magazine involved would respect the standards of
the community and at no time gave approval for the sort of photographs
which were taken and published.

"We regret this trust was not fulfilled and we will be more vigilant in
the future."

She stressed no students from the school were involved in the shoot, and
it was conducted outside school hours.

Australian Family Association spokesman Bill Muehlenberg said he hoped
the homosexual community would distance itself from the publication.

"This is irresponsible and again highlights a concern we have long held
about young people being exposed to homosexuality."

But Andrew Creagh, editor of DNA, Australia's widest circulating gay
magazine selling 18,000 copies a month, said they had done nothing wrong
and described the images as harmless "fun".

"I've been told the school is concerned about the nudity, but I think
it's a storm in a tea cup," Mr Creagh said.

"School boys pull each other's pants down. They do. It's funny."

Education Minister Lynne Kosky said she did not think the pictures
breached any rules.


© News.com

[Beaudyk]

© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
Actress Sharon Stone says a puritanical streak running through America created by President Bush prevented her from kissing Halle Berry in the newly released film "Catwoman."

Stone, 46, wanted to enjoy a lesbian moment with her co-star, but the current conservative climate in the country just wouldn't allow it, she concluded, according to Ireland Online.

"Halle's so beautiful and I wanted to kiss her. I said, 'How can you have us in the movie and not have us kiss? That's such a waste,'" said Stone.

"That's what you get for having George Bush as president."

The movie has been universally panned. Miami Herald reviewer Connie Ogle said: "Catwoman doesn't belong on the big screen. It belongs in the litter box or to be scraped off the bottom of our shoes as we head quickly for another theater."

Stone was among the Hollywood luminaries in attendance at the Los Angeles premiere of Michael Moore's anti-Bush film "Fahrenheit 9/11."

[Beaudyk]

I put them on a webpage for him:

http://www.geocities.com/maniac1916/Peter.html

[sweetlady]

Chords for Change By BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
Published: August 5, 2004 New York Times

Our nation's artists and musicians have a particular place in its social and political life. Over the years I've tried to think long and hard about what it means to be American: about the distinctive identity and position we have in the world, and how that position is best carried. I've tried to write songs that speak to our pride and criticize our failures.

These questions are at the heart of this election: who we are, what we stand for, why we fight. Personally, for the last 25 years I have always stayed one step away from partisan politics. Instead, I have been partisan about a set of ideals: economic justice, civil rights, a humane foreign policy, freedom and a decent life for all of our citizens. This year, however, for many of us the stakes have risen too high to sit this election out.

Through my work, I've always tried to ask hard questions. Why is it that the wealthiest nation in the world finds it so hard to keep its promise and faith with its weakest citizens? Why do we continue to find it so difficult to see beyond the veil of race? How do we conduct ourselves during difficult times without killing the things we hold dear? Why does the fulfillment of our promise as a people always seem to be just within grasp yet forever out of reach?

I don't think John Kerry and John Edwards have all the answers. I do believe they are sincerely interested in asking the right questions and working their way toward honest solutions. They understand that we need an administration that places a priority on fairness, curiosity, openness, humility, concern for all America's citizens, courage and faith.

People have different notions of these values, and they live them out in different ways. I've tried to sing about some of them in my songs. But I have my own ideas about what they mean, too. That is why I plan to join with many fellow artists, including the Dave Matthews Band, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., the Dixie Chicks, Jurassic 5, James Taylor and Jackson Browne, in touring the country this October. We will be performing under the umbrella of a new group called Vote for Change. Our goal is to change the direction of the government and change the current administration come November.

Like many others, in the aftermath of 9/11, I felt the country's unity. I don't remember anything quite like it. I supported the decision to enter Afghanistan and I hoped that the seriousness of the times would bring forth strength, humility and wisdom in our leaders. Instead, we dived headlong into an unnecessary war in Iraq, offering up the lives of our young men and women under circumstances that are now discredited. We ran record deficits, while simultaneously cutting and squeezing services like afterschool programs. We granted tax cuts to the richest 1 percent (corporate bigwigs, well-to-do guitar players), increasing the division of wealth that threatens to destroy our social contract with one another and render mute the promise of "one nation indivisible."

It is through the truthful exercising of the best of human qualities - respect for others, honesty about ourselves, faith in our ideals - that we come to life in God's eyes. It is how our soul, as a nation and as individuals, is revealed. Our American government has strayed too far from American values. It is time to move forward. The country we carry in our hearts is waiting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/05/opinion/05bruce.html

(*) (*) Remember to register to vote.....<makes note to myself> This short Op-ed communicated much with few words. (*)

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[Beaudyk]

Viacom To Launch Gay Network

NEW YORK, July 23, 2004

Logo, the new television network aimed at gays and lesbians, is working
with Cher, Alan Cumming and Margaret Cho on new shows and plans two
wedding programs.

A Viacom network that plans a Feb. 17, 2005 launch, Logo detailed its
programming strategy for the first time on Friday.

Brian Graden, MTV/VH1 Entertainment president who's also working on
Logo, said the outpouring of support has been thrilling.

Cher and her daughter, Chastity Bono, are working on "Family Outing," a
series telling the stories of celebrities who came out as gay and
lesbians.

Cumming has signed on for a musical cabaret series and Cho is expected
to star in her own series, for which few details were available.

Kathy Griffin will be cruise director for "Fantastic Voyage," a
real-life "Love Boat" played out on an ocean liner in the Caribbean.

The two wedding-themed series play off a newsmaking topic. "My Fabulous
Gay Wedding," with actor Scott Thompson as host, follows
about-to-be-married gay couples as they plan their wedding. "Do I?"
brings gay and lesbian couples contemplating marriage before a
relationship expert.

Graden will also bring a familiar MTV Networks idea to Logo with "The
Big Gay 100," a countdown show of the greatest people, places and things
in gay culture.

Logo has also acquired more than 150 documentaries and movies popular
with gay audiences, including "Mommie Dearest," "Philadelphia" and
"Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story."

Logo, MTV, VHI and CBSNews.com are owned by Viacom.


©MMIV, The Associated Press

[sweetlady]

"Escape-a-Date" August 5, 2004


At the far fringes of technology and culture - just around
the corner, in other words - lies the cellphone. New
studies suggest that cellphones are altering social
behavior in ways that seem counterintuitive. One
anthropologist argues that they foster "hybrid"
interactions in which cellphones stay on when friends are
together. It becomes a way of orienting oneself, an added
social focus.

Cingular Wireless now offers a new wrinkle on this strange
social effect called "Escape-A-Date." If you're going out
on a date, you can arrange to have your cellphone ring at a
specified time. The call guides you through a script that
makes it sound, to the gullible party across the table, as
if you've got to rush off. Think of it as a wake-up call
with benefits. If the date's going well, just don't answer.

Dating has always been a game of sorts, but the gaming has
gotten more serious. Witness "The Player," a new reality
show about competitive heartbreaking on UPN. Those
contestants could really use the Escape-A-Date service,
which Cingular calls an added "functionality," except that
their dates probably already suspect that they're being
gamed - a new euphemism for being lied to.

In a sense, Escape-A-Date is an automated version of the
"alibi clubs" that have sprung up recently online, in which
members enlist one another to create an alibi. It's easy to
imagine a whole new series of automated cellphone services.
"Deceive-A-Spouse," for instance, or "Disappoint-A-Child."
You could argue that the real purpose of Escape-A-Date is
to prevent hurt feelings so you don't have to explain to
your date what a loser he or she is. Or you could argue
that it is simply another step forward in the
institutionalization of lying, for those who lack the
mental wherewithal to lie for themselves.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/05/opinion/05thu3.html?ex=1092712917&ei=1&en=30ddceae9cd863a5

(*) (*) Seems as this is the tip of an iceberg of an "Emperor's New Clothes" type scenario. Definitely a scathing take on how old-fashioned manners, courting, wooing and just plain "ole being nice because people matter" have become the exception rather than the norm. (*) (*)

Carpe diem!
(k) (k)
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Learning Japanese, Once About Resumes, Is Now About Cool


Business Majors of '80s Yield To Kids Smitten by Anime; Up at
4 a.m. for Cartoons


By GINNY PARKER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
August 5, 2004; Page A1



ATHENS, Ga. -- When Yuki Sasaki began working in the Japanese-
language program at the University of Georgia in 1995, most
students were international business majors interested in studying
things like polite Japanese expressions and the ins and outs of
Japanese business-card exchange.


Nine years later, Ms. Sasaki says her students are a different
sort. They ask for help in translating Japanese pop-song lyrics and
talk excitedly about the Japanese cartoon character Card Captor
Sakura. And they blurt out colloquial Japanese expressions, like
baka! (stupid), that they have learned from comics.


"It's amazing how you can see the changes happening right before
your eyes," Ms. Sasaki says. Japanese pop culture, she says, "is
their passion."


The changing nature of the Japanese-language student reflects a big
shift in Americans' perception of Japan. Back in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, Japan's economy was booming, Japanese management terms
like kaizen (continuous improvement) were all the rage, and the
country seemed poised to dominate international commerce. Studying
Japanese was considered a smart choice for ambitious, business-
minded college students.


But then, Japan fell into a deep slump from which it has yet to
fully emerge. The country, while still the world's second-largest
economy, has lost its reputation as a land of corporate
opportunity. Instead, over the past few years, Japan has gained
cult status in a completely different area -- cool pop culture,
through comics, street fashion and animated movies called anime,
the highly stylized cartoons featuring idealized, doe-eyed
characters.


Now, the typical Japanese-language student is a Japan-culture
fanatic like 19-year-old Rachel Maurer, a UGA undergrad with maroon
hair and skull earrings who also goes by the Japanese name Reiko.
Ms. Maurer, who grew up in Daytona, Fla., studies the language to
further explore the Japanese rock bands she's crazy about: Pierrot,
Dir en grey and DuelJewel, for which she runs an English-language
fan Web site. Ms. Maurer likes the Japanese "visual" bands, which
feature male musicians with wild, colorful hairdos, heavy makeup
and a mysterious, feminine air. She chose UGA for its Japanese
program, although she isn't sure how she will use the language in
the future.


"I just came here knowing that this is what I want to learn," she
says.


These days, the serious business types aren't focusing on Japanese;
they're taking Chinese instead. These are people like Patrick
Henry, 21, a UGA undergrad from Norcross, Ga., who eventually hopes
to get an MBA and work for "a corporate conglomerate." Mr. Henry,
who has just completed a year of Mandarin Chinese classes, leaves
for Taiwan at the end of August for a year of intensive language
study. While he's hedging his bets by taking German and Japanese,
too, he feels that China is the next big thing. "That's where the
money's going to be," he says.


Gaining Popularity


According to the Modern Language Association, an organization of
scholars promoting the study of languages and literature, both
Japanese and Chinese are gaining popularity among U.S. students. In
the fall of 2002, the number of students studying Japanese in U.S.
institutions of higher education rose to 52,238, a jump of 21% over
1998, when the previous survey was conducted. There were 34,153
students studying Chinese, an increase of 20%.


At UGA, about half the 100 Japanese-language students surveyed cite
Japanese pop culture -- including animation, comics, pop songs and
video games -- as their top reason for studying the language,
according to Natsuki Fukunaga, who teaches Japanese at the school.
Impressed by her students' interest in Japanese pop culture, she
wrote her master's thesis detailing the phenomenon. "I was excited
to see these kids really picking up this authentic Japanese
culture," she says.


Many of Ms. Fukunaga's students are members of UGAnime, a club for
fans of anime. The club's 40 to 50 members meet twice a week to
watch anime. Members firmly eschew dubbing -- preferring subtitles
-- and the club has strict rules against talking or heckling during
the showings. But members who think they have sufficient language
ability may sing along to the opening and ending theme songs.


During the spring Mega Days of Anime festival, during which members
watch anime every night for a week, club officers temporarily
lifted the no-heckling rule. That gave 23-year-old Nathan LaForce,
a fourth-year Japanese student at UGA from Evans, Ga., an
opportunity to show off. Mr. LaForce, whose hobby is "fansubbing,"
an amateur service providing English subtitles for anime, groaned
loudly about the poor quality of the subtitles.


Hooked at an Early Age


Like many college students today, Mr. LaForce got hooked on Japan
in middle school, when he regularly got up at 4 a.m. to watch
Japanese animation on the Sci Fi channel. Mr. LaForce says he likes
anime because it includes the Eastern philosophical elements that
aren't seen in typical American cartoons -- like demons interacting
with humans.


In the West, "everything you see is the same old story. This is a
completely different perspective, an Eastern perspective," says Mr.
LaForce, who is majoring in Japanese, physics and astronomy. While
he may eventually look for a job in Japan, for now, studying
Japanese "is just for fun," he says.


Mr. LaForce is far more carefree about studying Japanese than
students were a decade ago. "Japanese was the hot language to take
if you wanted to do something with your life," says Trip Bakun, 32,
who studied Japanese for five years starting in 1990 when he was
majoring in international business at UGA. "It looked like the
Japanese style of management and way of doing business was going to
become the new standard."


Still, despite the long economic slump, Japan-related opportunities
haven't completely dried up for the former business majors. Mr.
Bakun himself landed a job four years ago in the California office
of chemical company Tokyo Ohka Kogyo Co. A former classmate works
for a Toyota Motor Corp. plant in Princeton, Ind.


Today, Japanese-language teachers are scrambling to accommodate the
new type of student. One sign of change: The Japan Foundation, a
Japanese government-affiliated organization promoting cultural
exchange, has recently been asked to conduct a seminar introducing
language teachers to the latest anime and Japanese comics.


Ms. Sasaki, one of the UGA Japanese teachers, works hard to adapt
to the changing interests of her students. After a recent trip to
Japan, she came back armed with pop and folk music CDs to play in
class. At home, she plays video games regularly, and she tries to
use the occasional comic book in her lessons. Still, she says,
there's a limit to how well she can keep up.


"No matter how hard I try, I can't beat my students," she says.
"They know about all these things because they love them."

(*) (*) With broadband Internet, especially cable modems - desktop teleconferencing provides easier access to language courses especially for Japanese where it's easier to learn when you can "see" how words are pronounced as you're listening. Another great digital video app! (*) (*)

(o) Back to writing reflections during my two courses break week. That and just finished a four page proposal for a final paper to be approved by the instructor.

(f) (f) .
Sweetlady

[Beaudyk]

http://library.auraria.edu/libq/

[sweetlady]

Barbara Walters did a story on gender roles in Kabul several years before
the Afghan conflict.


She noted that women customarily walked about 5 paces behind their
husbands. She returned to Kabul recently and observed that women still
walk behind their husbands, but now seem to walk even further back and are
now happy with the old custom.


Ms. Walters approached one of the Afghani women and asked. "But why do you
now seem happy with the old custom that you used to try and change? "


"Land mines," said the woman.

(*) (*) (*)

(h) (h) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

The pressure may be getting to Mr. Bush. He came up with a
gem of a Freudian slip yesterday. At a signing ceremony for
a $417 billion military spending bill, the president said:
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we.
They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country
and our people, and neither do we."

from: "Failure of Leadership", August 6, 2004 - By BOB HERBERT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/opinion/06herbert.html?ex=1092888234&ei=1&en=18a0b25a6277e665

(*) Between stupid slips like this and the Labor Dept.'s bleak job numbers, I hope that voters will get out and get this idiot out of the White House! 22 million SINGLE WOMYN did not vote in 2000!! :o :|

Have a lovely weekend.

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

"Another Mother Tongue"
(*) Just started this book last night...........interesting read.

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Statues of Ramses the Great at Abu: Simbelhttp://www.wildernesstravel.com/gallery/egypt_gallery/ray10.html

Up close and personal with the Sphinx: http://www.wildernesstravel.com/gallery/egypt_gallery/abbott3.html

Queen Hatshepsut's Temple: http://www.wildernesstravel.com/gallery/egypt_gallery/russell16.html

Pylons at Edfu: http://www.wildernesstravel.com/gallery/egypt_gallery/russell14.html

Figures in high relief at Esna: http://www.wildernesstravel.com/gallery/egypt_gallery/russell12.html

Luxor Temple: http://www.wildernesstravel.com/gallery/egypt_gallery/ray8.html

Obelisk at Luxor Temple: http://www.wildernesstravel.com/gallery/egypt_gallery/ray9.html

(*) (*) <stretching a little.......sipping coffee to blow those mental cobwebs away this morning> Good morning! Sunny, cool Sunday a.m. here, although the unseasonably cool weather won't last.....<yearning for Fall>....where's a leaf icon when I need one? ;)

(f) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Gokyo Ri where we are rewarded with views of Everest (29,035'), Lhotse (27,890'), Makalu (27,805'), and Cho Oyu (26,750'), four of the eight highest mountains on earth. http://www.wildernesstravel.com/gallery/office/gokyori.html

(the highest mountains on earth, including the South Face of Mt Everest)

http://www.vic.com/nepal/images/chomolongmo.html

360 degree panoramic view: http://www.celebratebig.com/nepalandthailand/p199910hi8p.htm

http://www.celebratebig.com/nepalandthailand/p199910hi9.htm

This trek is also known as the Khumbu Trek. The Khumbu area is interesting and justifiably famous, not only for its accessibility to the world’s highest mountain but also for its unique Sherpa villages and monasteries. Khumbu is one of the most popular trekking destinations in the world. The course is varied. You encounter Lamas and see gompas, chortens, mani walls, and prayer flags flapping in the wind. The impressive glacier and river-sculpted land of Khumbu supports a series of vegetation zones governed by the altitude. http://www.frontier.net/~mth/gokyo_ri.htm

(*) (*) Off to make a fresh pot of "bean" and watch "Sunday Morning" and read parts of the NYTimes "driveway edition". Have a relaxing day! (f) (f)

(k) ,
Sweetlady


(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[Beaudyk]

30 July 2004: Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic Behavior

President George W. Bush is taking powerful anti-depressant drugs to control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue has learned.

The prescription drugs, administered by Col. Richard J. Tubb, the White House physician, can impair the President’s mental faculties and decrease both his physical capabilities and his ability to respond to a crisis, administration aides admit privately.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” says one aide. “We can’t have him flying off the handle at the slightest provocation but we also need a President who is alert mentally.”
Angry Bush walked away from reporter's questions.

Tubb prescribed the anti-depressants after a clearly-upset Bush stormed off stage on July 8, refusing to answer reporters' questions about his relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J. Lay.

“Keep those motherfuckers away from me,” he screamed at an aide backstage. “If you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”

Bush’s mental stability has become the topic of Washington whispers in recent months. Capitol Hill Blue first reported on June 4 about increasing concern among White House aides over the President’s wide mood swings and obscene outbursts.

Although GOP loyalists dismissed the reports an anti-Bush propaganda, the reports were later confirmed by prominent George Washington University psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank in his book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. Dr. Frank diagnosed the President as a “paranoid meglomaniac” and “untreated alcoholic” whose “lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions and pumping his hand gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad” showcase Bush’s instabilities.

“I was really very unsettled by him and I started watching everything he did and reading what he wrote and watching him on videotape. I felt he was disturbed,” Dr. Frank said. “He fits the profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has been arrested but not treated.”

Dr. Frank’s conclusions have been praised by other prominent psychiatrists, including Dr. James Grotstein, Professor at UCLA Medical Center, and Dr. Irvin Yalom, MD, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University Medical School.

The doctors also worry about the wisdom of giving powerful anti-depressant drugs to a person with a history of chemical dependency. Bush is an admitted alcoholic, although he never sought treatment in a formal program, and stories about his cocaine use as a younger man haunted his campaigns for Texas governor and his first campaign for President.

“President Bush is an untreated alcoholic with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies,” Dr. Frank adds.

The White House did not return phone calls seeking comment on this article.

Although the exact drugs Bush takes to control his depression and behavior are not known, White House sources say they are “powerful medications” designed to bring his erratic actions under control. While Col. Tubb regularly releases a synopsis of the President’s annual physical, details of the President’s health and any drugs or treatment he may receive are not public record and are guarded zealously by the secretive cadre of aides that surround the President.

Veteran White House watchers say the ability to control information about Bush’s health, either physical or mental, is similar to Ronald Reagan’s second term when aides managed to conceal the President’s increasing memory lapses that signaled the onslaught of Alzheimer’s Disease.

It also brings back memories of Richard Nixon’s final days when the soon-to-resign President wondered the halls and talked to portraits of former Presidents. The stories didn’t emerge until after Nixon left office.

One long-time GOP political consultant who – for obvious reasons – asked not to be identified said he is advising his Republican Congressional candidates to keep their distance from Bush.

“We have to face the very real possibility that the President of the United States is loony tunes,” he says sadly. “That’s not good for my candidates, it’s not good for the party and it’s certainly not good for the country.”







"If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time." - Marian Wright Edelman

[sweetlady]

"Beyond the Stepford Queers: Welcome to the age of do-it-yourself identity", June 22nd, 2004 10:00 AM, Village Voice:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0425/fintro.php

Stepford Queers march in lockstep with the media's image of homosexuals. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's just one of many ways to be queer today.

For some time, the old binary of gay and straight has been breaking down. Now the predictable parade of homo personae—drag queen, leather man, lipstick lesbian, etc.—is giving way to a vast procession of personalized identities. Your body, your gender, and your orientation can now be constructed to express your truest sense of self. And no matter how uncanny that vision may seem, the Internet makes it possible to find others with the same idea, ready to connect and create a community.

Even if you don't consider yourself a gender radical, this spirit of freedom has probably influenced your persona. Chances are that you are who you are in a much more authentic way because of it. This issue is an attempt to prove that point by showcasing some prophetic neo-queer configurations.

Elizabeth Cline explores the brave new world of transmales, a term for female-bodied folks who identify with masculinity in various ways. Christopher Stahl writes about the rough sport of rugby as a proving ground for his own gay identity. Richard Goldstein describes his funky queer marriage in order to dispel the myth that matrimony inevitably leads to conformity. And Wayne Hoffman examines the history of that great matrix for gay identity, Christopher Street.

It's the Voice's 25th Queer Issue. We hope you'll check out Charles McNulty and Matthew Phillp's selection of awesome pieces from our archives. And we invite you to enjoy this special section, whether you're a furry, a poly (for polyamorous), a proud eunuch, a beautiful boi, a bear-baiting cub, or none of the above. Whatever your gender—if you even have one: Be here, be queer, and never get used to it.

(*) (*) This above article kicks off an issue that includes the following articles and features: The 25th Annual Queer Issue:

1. "I Ruck, Therefore I Am: Rugby and the gay male body" by Christopher Stahl

2. "My Big Fat Funky Queer Marriage:Forget the rice. (We're on Atkins.) No his-and-his towels. (Nothing matches in our house.) Just give us Viagra—and wish us well" by Richard Goldstein

3. "Transmale Nation: Remaking manhood in the genderqueer generation" by Elizabeth Cline

4. "The Great Gay Way: A brief history of Christopher Street" by Wayne Hoffman

5. "It Was 25 Years Ago Today Selections From the Village Voice's Annual Queer Issue" compiled by Charles McNulty and Matthew Phillp

6. "Elements Of Style: Chasing Rainbows, Peace tees, platform shoes, and big pussies get ready for Pride day" by Lynn Yaeger

7. "Listings: There She Is, Miss L.E.S.: She'll Take the Town by Storm" by Keisha Franklin

8. Pride Events (h)

URLs to all of the above articles and features are at: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0425/tqi.php

(*) (*) Have a smooth week and stay cool wherever your travels take you. (f)

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[Beaudyk]

The San Francisco Chronicle
Column

Query for candidates: Is hope on the way for single women?

- Jane Ganahl
Sunday, August 8, 2004

The prom is over, and we were named queen.

At the close of the Democratic National Convention, single women
everywhere were left breathlessly adjusting their crowns, such was the
courtship for their vote during that week in Boston. There were rallies,
teas (the Boston She Party), parties, caucuses, even a late-night
concert called Every Woman Counts.

Hosted by Lifetime, a mediocre television cable station with a heart of
gold (it is involved in many charitable efforts), Every Woman Counts was
co- sponsored by Rock the Vote and featured performances by Carole King
-- who galvanized our budding feminist hearts in the early '70s -- and
sometime San Franciscan Vanessa Carlton.

Speaking at the event was Elizabeth Edwards, who, along with Teresa
Heinz Kerry, are two of the best reasons to watch this election
carefully.

She urged women to "be on the cases" of their nonvoting friends. "Every
woman counts," she said, "only if every woman votes."

It's a challenge worth taking up: registering women to vote and then
getting them to the polls. Especially for the Democrats. A National
Public Radio poll released this week by Stan Greenberg Associates
revealed that unmarried women favored John Kerry 60 percent to Bush's 31
percent and Ralph Nader's 6 percent (the rest are undecided or other).

But at the same time, single women have lousy voting records. According
to polls, if single women in Florida had voted in the same percentages
as their married pals, the election would have been a slam-dunk for
Gore. Nationally, 22 million single women across the country did not
bother to vote in the last election.

"Unmarried women can change this election," Democratic pollster Celinda
Lake has said. "But driving by in a van on election day won't help."

Driving by in a van? Carrie Bradshaw?
She may be whom many think of when the subject is single women, but
pollsters and pundits know that the "Sex and the City" stereotype is
only one segment of the vast population of unmarried women.

There are also widows of 70, divorced and dating women of 50 and 60,
never-marrieds of 30 and 40. There are lesbians, and there are single
mothers, and there are lesbian single mothers. The one thing they all
have in common: They lack the traditional setup so revered by the
Republicans.

And that brings us to why unmarried women aren't inspired to vote. From
what I gather, from both polls and my own life, it's because they don't
think politicians understand what their lives are like. And really, how
could they? Every major candidate for president has been a straight,
white, married man. What do they know about working a night shift to
take care of kids whose father left home?

What do they know about the occasional scariness of living alone,
especially as one gets older, and watching health insurance costs go
through the roof?

(At least the left wing is slightly more in tune than the right. Rush
Limbaugh, when chewing over this story on the air, admitted that he just
didn't get it when single women say they need a politician to walk in
their shoes. "As though they could," he laughed. "Which pair? You got
200 in there."

Right, tell that to the single working mom.
He also stated that "single women don't have kids." Brilliant.)

According to Lake's poll, what single women are most concerned about are
child care, health care (including reproductive choice), jobs and
education.

In the coming months, if both parties are smart, they'll veer away from
preaching to the soccer moms and NASCAR dads and start creating ads that
show how they plan to speak to the issues single women hold dear.

And strangely, despite the abundance of parties and rhetoric about
winning our votes at the Democratic convention, there was a paucity of
rhetoric where it most counted, in the major speeches. Female speakers
did make a few passing references:

-- Alexandra Kerry, in introducing her father, pleaded for a future that
would allow our children to "control their own bodies," a not-so-oblique
reference to reproductive choice.

-- Heinz Kerry expressed a double wish -- for the women of the country,
and for herself. "My only hope is that one day soon, women -- who have
all earned the right to their opinions -- instead of being labeled
opinionated will be called smart or well informed, just as men are."
(Stay tuned: The media dissection of this gutsy, wonderfully
unpredictable woman has only begun.)

The worst thing the Democrats could do is take this constituency for
granted, figuring that the odds that unmarried women will vote for Kerry
are tremendously in their favor. Single women have also proved
themselves independent thinkers, and if President Bush can come forward
with some concrete ways to make our lives better, some of us might just
switch sides.

As you single men know, there's nothing single women hate worse than
being taken for granted.

I understand that it's new territory, that everyone is unsure how to
approach us in the way that would best solicit our votes.

It must be a bit of a leap for mainstream politicians like Kerry and
Edwards, entering this untested message market.

What should they focus on? How do they solicit the millions of us out
there on our own without alienating those who think family values must
equal marriage?

Veep hopeful John Edwards showed a flash of promise during his
convention speech, with this passage: "When you return home some night,
you might pass a mother on her way to work the late shift. And you tell
her: Hope is on the way. "

They might just get it after all.


E-mail Jane Ganahl at jganahl@sfchronicle.com

[Beaudyk]

The Chattanoogan
Chattanooga TN
Sunday, August 8, 2004

Op-Ed

Concerning Gay Marriage

What is going on among our people in this country? Why is it such a
difficult thing for us to just get along? It is all over the news media,
every day, day in and day out, this issue of "Gay Marriage" and how it
is going to destroy the family values of our country.

Speaking as a "Gay Man" (who is not "Married"), I do not understand why
there is such a big deal being made over something as simple as two
"people" wanting to commit themselves to each other and it being legal
for them to do so. How does that "Hurt" the heterosexual community?

If a man and a woman decide to commit themselves to each other, they do
so with full recognition of the government, to share all properties,
posessions, and benefits,(such as insurance, tax claims, etc.). They
also have to go through another form of legal red tape to end that
commitment, known as divorce, which divides said properties and
posessions legally.

Gay couples do not have the right to be in a legal binding commitment.
They (for the most part) have to keep their feelings and commitments a
secret or struggle along to share their feelings with each other,
without the fear of persecution or prejudices from others. THAT IS
WRONG! It should not be this way.

If two "Gay" people "LOVE" and care enough for each other and want to be
in a committed binding relationship, they should have all the rights and
privileges of the Heterosexual counterparts, AND the same legal issues
to end it known as divorce. We have blown this issue way out of
proportion on both sides, the gays wanting it legalized, and the
heterosexuals wanting it stopped.

Gays are not lower class citizens or people than the heterosexuals...
they work hard, build a career, have homes, some even have children of
their own, (from a "marriage") that they love and care for.

They have feelings, emotions, and talents just as the hetersexuals do.
So why are they being denied their rights to be treated equally by the
government, and other people?

There is the issue or thought that God made the institution of marriage,
and that it was solely for a man and a woman.

That is the Christian viewpoint... I am a Christian also, though I do
not conform or restrict myself to the beliefs of the "church." I feel
and have learned that God, however we view him or worship him, is far
bigger than these issues... He cannot be confined to the pages of a book
or books. He cannot be limited in His Love, and it is foolish to believe
that these issues really bother Him to the point of disturbance. He is
so much more than that if we open ourselves to it.

His name has been used, and the Bible has been literally reworded, to
twist and turn the thoughts of man around so much that it has become an
effective tool of confusion and destruction in the lives of many... and
that is NOT what God would have us do.

So what shall we do now - keep fighting with each other and making the
problems bigger and bigger until many people literally die for the right
to love and be loved?

Or do we learn to Love each other and respect the fact that we are all
human, and we all have feelings, and the right to share those feelings
with the person we love in a committed relationship should be an equally
legal,binding and recognized by law, opportunity for everyone,
reguardless of their sexual preference.

When we reach this point in our society, we will be able to face much
more pressing issues that threaten all of us as a nation TOGETHER, hand
in hand, for the protection and safety of everyone, instead of being
divided with resentment, and weakened by our own lack of love and
understanding...

Evan Wallace
Chattanooga, Tn.
evanwallace@bellsouth.net


© The Chattanoogan

[sweetlady]

http://s-2000.com/hi-iq/

******************
Great Thinkers and Visionaries: http://www.ethologic.com/sasha/thinkers.html

Biographies of Women Mathematicians: http://www.scottlan.edu/lriddle/women/women.htm

FOR OLDER PEOPLE WITH HIGH IQ’S, MORE SENSITIVE TEST NORMS BETTER PREDICT WHO MIGHT DEVELOP ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE: http://www.apa.org/releases/alzheimers_iq.html

***********************
High IQ Linked to Longer Life: http://www.mercola.com/fcgi/pf/2001/apr/18/longevity.htm

*************************

High IQ Lesbian women: http://www.mercola.com/fcgi/pf/2001/apr/18/longevity.htm

http://www.laspirale.org/interviews/plenum/plenum02.htm

TRANSGENDERED:
http://www.reneereyes.com/Webdocs/mtpsych.html

http://www.natureiq.com/links/rights.html

http://talentdevelop.com/Page1.html

http://www.transgendercare.com/guidance/what_is_gender.htm

http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/bailey-transgender.html

http://www.tsroadmap.com/mental/gendertests.html

http://www.symposion.com/ijt/walinder/male01-10.htm

http://www.glamazon.net/c_links.html

(k) (k) and loving thoughts and prayers,
Sweetlady
P.S. PM me if you'd like to chat more interactively - that would be lovely! (k) (k)

[Beaudyk]

- Donald E. Messer
Wednesday, August 11, 2004


When a former U.S. president's son, Ron Reagan, contended at the Democratic National Convention in Boston last month that "the theology of a few is harming the health of the many," he could have been speaking about global AIDS rather than stem-cell research.

At the 15th International AIDS Congress in Bangkok, it was evident that theological taboos have contributed to the escalating HIV/AIDS crisis. At a time when more than 40 million worldwide are infected, nearly 50 percent of them women, the religious roots of this disease must be examined to determine how the theological thinking of some has caused widespread harm to many.

These theological taboos include not talking openly about sex, preventing people from understanding how to prevent the disease. Second, moralistic judgments toward infected persons and their families have added to society's stigmatization. Third, religious prejudice toward sex workers, injection-drug users, gay men and others has contributed to discrimination. Silence, stigma and discrimination keep people from getting tested and treated.

"The theology of a few" has unfortunately long influenced many religious responses to the world's worst health crisis. Patriarchal religious assumptions have made women especially vulnerable. Endless controversies over the efficacy of condoms have helped deny people the least expensive "weapon of mass protection" available. In many countries, married women and young girls are endangered because they lack education and control of their own sex lives.

Some religious communities have done pioneering work in the battle against HIV and AIDS, but often their sacrificial service has been obscured by the publicity given to the religious right's twisted theology claiming that "AIDS is the punishment of God." This has prompted people to embrace a theology of condemnation rather than compassion, indifference rather than involvement. Instead of offering a theology of hope and health, faith-based groups sometimes have become missionaries of death, not life.

Twenty plus years into the pandemic, faith-based groups belatedly emerged at this year's conference demonstrating their willingness to participate in positive partnership with others engaged in efforts at education, prevention, care and treatment. Never before had people of faith from the world's major religions met together to face the world escalation of the AIDS pandemic -- a confluence that Dr. Peter Piot, UNAIDS executive director, said sketched a vision of his hopes.

Piot declared, "I hope for a day when every church engages in an open dialogue on issues of sexuality and gender difference. I hope for a day when every synagogue will mobilize as advocates for a global response to find AIDS, when every temple will fully welcome people living with HIV, where every mosque is a place where young people will learn about the facts of HIV and

AIDS."
"When that will have happened," concluded Piot, "I am convinced that nothing will stop our success in our fight against AIDS."

Piot's audience, however, knew that this day has not yet dawned, primarily because a "theology of a few" continues to dominate the hierarchical leadership of many faith communities.

I have argued that the "theology of the few" dare not continue to dominate either religious responses or government policy. Faith-based groups - - Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, or Hindu -- share common core values of compassion, love and human dignity. Embedded in all the great religions is sacred text equivalent to the Torah's promise that "when you save the life of one person, you save the world."

Just as attitudinal and behavioral change are essential steps in AIDS prevention for individuals, it is imperative that faith-based groups change certain beliefs and behavior so they can provide a message of hope, services of loving care and a theology of life.

Donald E. Messer (dmesser@iliff.edu) is author of "Breaking The Conspiracy of Silence: Christian Churches and the Global AIDS Crisis" (Fortress, 2004) and a professor at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, where he directs the Center for the Church and Global AIDS.

[Beaudyk]

The New York Times
August 15, 2004

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR



By JONATHAN RAUCH

Washington — What happened to Governor McGreevey - that is, James E.
McGreevey, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, who announced his
resignation on Thursday because he was secretly gay and had "shamefully"
conducted an extramarital affair - was strange, to say the least.

Pundits wondered whether there would be broader ramifications for gay
civil rights, same-sex marriage or American politics. I doubt it. A rich
and seemingly unique concatenation of homosexuality, adultery,
suspicions of political featherbedding, and rumors of extortion and
sexual harassment made the McGreevey scandal look like an aberration.

What happened to Mr. McGreevey - the man, not the governor - was not
strange at all. It was familiar to almost every gay American of Mr.
McGreevey's generation.

Marriage, not homosexuality, lies at the heart of it.

Mr. McGreevey is 47. I am 44. We have in common being among the early
members of the post-Stonewall generation. We came of age in the 1970's,
when overt expressions of anti-gay animus were becoming unacceptable in
polite company.

The worst of official repression was past. Vice-squad raids and
scandalous arrests and federal witch hunts were not central fears in our
lives. There was still plenty of unofficial discrimination and ugly and
ignorant rhetoric, and we all feared the low-grade terrorism known as
gay-bashing.

But on the whole we were free, as no previous generation had been, to
get on with our lives.

There was one thing, however, we knew we could never aspire to do, at
least not as homosexuals. We could not marry.

By that I mean not just that gay couples could not marry.
Self-acknowledged gay people - coupled or single, adult or adolescent,
open or closeted - also could not hope to marry.

The very concept of same-sex marriage had yet to surface in public
debate. We grew up taking for granted that to be homosexual was to be
alienated and isolated, not just for now but for life, from the culture
of marriage and all the blessings it brings.

Social-science research has established beyond reasonable doubt that
marriage, on average, makes people healthier, happier and financially
better off. More than that, however, the prospect of marriage shapes our
lives from the first crush, the first date, the first kiss.

Even for people who do not eventually choose to marry, the prospect of
marriage provides a destination for love and the expectation of a stable
home in a welcoming community.

The gay-marriage debate is often conducted as if the whole issue were
providing spousal health insurance and Social Security survivors'
benefits for existing same-sex couples.

All of that matters, but more important, and often overlooked, is the
way in which alienation from marriage twists and damages gay souls.

In my own case, I did not understand and acknowledge my homosexuality
until well into adulthood, but I somehow understood even as a young boy
that I would probably never marry. (Children understand marriage long
before they understand sex or sexuality.)

I coped by struggling for years to suppress every sexual and romantic
urge.

I convinced myself that I could never love anybody, until the strain of
denial became too much to bear.

Others coped differently. Some threw themselves into rebellion against
marriage and the bourgeois norms it seemed to represent. Some, to their
credit, built firmly coupled gay lives without the social support and
investment that marriage brings. And some, determined to lead "normal"
lives (meaning, largely, married lives), married.

At what point Mr. McGreevey realized and acknowledged he was gay I don't
know. I do know that many gay husbands begin by denying and end by
deceiving. Perhaps that was so in his case.

Opponents of same-sex marriage sometimes insist that gays can marry.

Marriage, they say, isn't all about sex. It can be about an abstinent,
selfless love.

Well, as Benjamin Franklin said, where there is marriage without love
there will be love without marriage.

I'm always startled when some of the same people who say that gays are
too promiscuous and irresponsible to marry turn around and urge us into
marriages that practically beg to end in adultery and recklessness.

For most human beings, the urge to find and marry one's other half is
elemental. It is central to what most people regard as the good life.
Gay people's lives are damaged when that aspiration is quashed, of
course. Mr. McGreevey can probably attest to that. But so are the lives
of spouses, of children. Mr. McGreevey can probably attest to that, too.

The country is still making up its mind about same-sex marriage.
Massachusetts has it. Most states have pre-emptively banned it.

On Thursday, the California Supreme Court invalidated about 4,000
same-sex marriages performed by the city of San Francisco, but
gay-marriage advocates hope that this is a temporary setback.

Through litigation now working its way through the system, California's
highest court may yet overturn the state's gay-marriage ban.

The McGreevey debacle suggests why all Americans, gay and straight
alike, have a stake in universalizing marriage.

The greatest promise of same-sex marriage is not the tangible
improvement it may bring to today's committed gay couples, but its
potential to reinforce the message that marriage is the gold standard
for human relationships: that adults and children and gays and straights
and society and souls all flourish best when love, sex and marriage go
together.

Nothing will ever make the discovery of homosexual longings easy for a
young person. But homosexuality need not mean growing up, as Jim
McGreevey and I and many others did, torn between marriage and love.


Jonathan Rauch is the author of "Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays,
Good for Straights and Good for America."


Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[sweetlady]

"We the media" by Dan Gillmor

"The Internet has made it possible for ordinary citizens to gather, create and disseminate news, shaking up traditional notions of journalism. Mercury News Technology Columnist Dan Gillmor explores this idea and its ramifications in his new book, ``We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People.''

Here are edited excerpts from the book's introduction:

We freeze some moments in time. Every culture has its frozen moments, events so important and personal that they transcend the normal flow of news.

Americans of a certain age, for example, know precisely where they were and what they were doing when they learned that President Franklin D. Roosevelt died. Another generation has absolute clarity of John F. Kennedy's assassination. And no one who was older than a baby on September 11, 2001, will ever forget hearing about, or seeing, airplanes exploding into skyscrapers.

In 1945, people gathered around radios for the immediate news, and stayed with the radio to hear more about their fallen leader and about the man who took his place. Newspapers printed extra editions and filled their columns with detail for days and weeks afterward. Magazines stepped back from the breaking news and offered perspective.

Something similar happened in 1963, but with a newer medium. The immediate news of Kennedy's death came for most via television. As in the earlier time, newspapers and magazines pulled out all the stops to add detail and context.

September 11, 2001, followed a similarly grim pattern. We watched -- again and again -- the awful events. Consumers of news learned the what about the attacks, thanks to the television networks that showed the horror so graphically. Then we learned some of the how and why as print publications and thoughtful broadcasters worked to bring depth to events that defied mere words. Journalists did some of their finest work and made me proud to be one of them.

But something else, something profound, was happening this time around: news was being produced by regular people who had something to say and show, and not solely by the ``official'' news organizations that had traditionally decided how the first draft of history would look.

This time, the first draft of history was being written, in part, by the former audience. It was possible -- it was inevitable -- because of new publishing tools available on the Internet.

Another kind of reporting emerged during those appalling hours and days. Via emails, mailing lists, chat groups, personal web journals -- all nonstandard news sources -- we received valuable context that the major American media couldn't, or wouldn't, provide.

We were witnessing -- and in many cases were part of -- the future of news.

Six months later came another demonstration of tomorrow's journalism. The stakes were far lower this time, merely a moment of discomfort for a powerful executive.

At the PC Forum executive conference on March 26, 2002, Joe Nacchio got a taste of the future. In those days Nacchio was the chief executive of regional telephone giant Qwest, a near-monopoly in its multistate marketplace.

That morning in suburban Phoenix, he was complaining about difficulties in raising capital -- whining about the rigors of running a monopoly. I was in the audience, posting frequent conference updates to my weblog via a wireless link the conference had set up for attendees. So was another journalist weblogger, Doc Searls.

One of my posts noted Nacchio's whining. Seconds later, I received an email from Buzz Bruggeman, a lawyer in Florida, who was following my weblog and Searls's from his office in Orlando. He attached a hyperlink to a web page showing that Nacchio had cashed in more than $200 million in stock while his company's stock price was heading downhill. I noted this in the blog. Doc Searls did likewise.

Many people in the luxury hotel ballroom -- perhaps half of the executives, financiers, entrepreneurs, and journalists -- were also online that morning. And at least some of them were amusing themselves by following what Doc and I were writing. During the remainder of Nacchio's session, there was a perceptible chill toward the man. Esther Dyson, the investor and author who was running the conference, said later she was certain that our weblogs helped create that chill.

Consider the sequence of news flow: a feedback loop that started in an Arizona conference session, zipped to Orlando, came back to Arizona and ultimately went global. In a world of satellite communications and fiber optics, real-time journalism is routine; but now we journalists had added the expertise of the audience -- and Bruggeman had joined the process in a much more direct way.

Change is afoot

Journalism is being transformed, from a 20th century mass-media structure to something profoundly more grassroots and democratic.

In the 20th century, making the news was almost entirely the province of journalists; the people we covered, or ``newsmakers''; and the legions of public relations and marketing people who manipulated everyone else. The economics of publishing and broadcasting created large, arrogant institutions.

Big Media have treated the news as a lecture. We told you what the news was. You bought it, or you didn't.

Tomorrow's news reporting and production will be more of a conversation, or a seminar. The lines will blur between producers and consumers, changing the role of both in ways we're only beginning to grasp now. The communication network itself will be a medium for everyone's voice, not just the few who can afford to buy multimillion-dollar printing presses, launch satellites, or win the government's permission to squat on the public's airwaves.

This evolution will force the various communities of interest to adapt. Everyone, from journalists to the people we cover to our sources and the former audience, must change their ways.

• Journalists: We will learn we are part of something new, that our readers/listeners/viewers are becoming part of the process. I take it for granted, for example, that my readers know more than I do -- and this is a liberating, not threatening, fact of journalistic life. Every reporter on every beat should embrace this.

We will use the tools of grassroots journalism or be consigned to history. Our core values, including accuracy and fairness, will remain important, and we'll still be gatekeepers in some ways, but our ability to shape larger conversations -- and to provide context -- will be at least as important as our ability to gather facts and report them.

• Newsmakers: The rich and powerful are discovering new vulnerabilities, as Nacchio learned. Moreover, when anyone can be a journalist, many talented people will try -- and they'll find things the professionals miss. Politicians and business people are learning this every day.

But newsmakers also have new ways to get out their message, using the same technologies the grassroots adopts. Howard Dean's presidential campaign failed, but his methods will be studied and emulated because of the way his campaign used new tools to engage his supporters in a conversation. The people at the edges of the communications and social networks can be a newsmaker's harshest, most effective critics. But they can also be the most fervent and valuable allies, offering ideas to each other and to the newsmaker as well.

• The former audience: Once mere consumers of news, the audience is learning how to get a better, timelier report. It's also learning how to join the process of journalism, helping to create a massive conversation and, in some cases, doing a better job than the professionals.

For example, Glenn Reynolds, a.k.a. ``Instapundit,'' is not just one of the most popular webloggers; he has amassed considerable influence in the process. Some grassroots journalists will become professionals. In the end, we'll have more voices and more options.

A warning

I've been in professional journalism for almost 25 years. I'm grateful for the opportunities I've had, and the position I hold. I respect and admire my colleagues. And I know that Big Media often does a superb job. But I'm absolutely certain that the journalism industry's modern structure has fostered a dangerous conservatism -- from a business sense more than a political sense, though both are apparent -- that threatens our future.

Our worst enemy may be ourselves. Mega-corporate journalism, which dominates today, is squeezing quality to boost profits in the short term. I don't believe the First Amendment, which gives journalists valuable leeway to inquire and publish, was designed with corporate profits in mind.

Yet even as greed and consolidation take their toll, our historically high margins are under attack. Our advertising revenue streams are under attack from competitors like eBay, which aren't interested in doing journalism.

Who will do big investigative projects, backed by deep pockets and the ability to pay expensive lawyers when powerful interests try to punish those who exposed them, if the business model collapses? Who will serve, for better or worse, as a principal voice of a community or region? Flawed as we may be in the business of journalism, anarchy in news is not my idea of a solution.

Journalism wanted

People need, and want, trusted sources -- and those sources have been, for the most part, serious journalists. If the business model dissolves, we may be left with the equivalent of countless pamphleteers and people shouting from soapboxes.

We could also end up, perversely, with information lockdown. The forces of central control are not sitting quietly in the face of challenges to their authority.

Governments are very uneasy about the free flow of information. In this era, governments are restricting access even to benign public information. Legal clampdowns and technological measures to prevent copyright infringement, meanwhile, could bring a day when we need permission to publish, or when publishing from the edge feels too risky. The copyright holders have targeted some of the essential innovations of tomorrow's news, such as peer-to-peer file sharing.

In short, we cannot just assume that self-publishing from the edges of our networks -- the grassroots journalism we need so desperately -- will survive, much less thrive. We will need to defend it, with the same vigor we defend other liberties.

Instead of a news anarchy or lockdown, we need a balance that simultaneously preserves the best of today's system and encourages tomorrow's emergent, self-assembling journalism. It's not just necessary, and perhaps inevitable, but also eminently workable.

It won't be immediately workable for the people who already get so little attention from Big Media. They've been left behind in our Brave New Economy: everyday people, buffeted by change, and outside the conversation. To our discredit, we have not listened to them as well as we should.

The rise of the citizen journalist will help us listen. The ability of anyone to make the news will give new voice to people who've felt voiceless -- and whose words we need to hear. They are showing all of us -- citizen, journalist, newsmaker -- new ways of talking, of learning.

In the end, they may help spark a renaissance of the notion, now threatened, of a truly informed citizenry. Self-government demands no less, and we'll all benefit if we do it right.

Let's have this conversation, for everyone's sake.

WE THE MEDIA

Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People

O'Reilly Media, 2004

320 pp., $24.95

http://wethemedia.oreilly.com

(*) (*) (*) I went to amazon.com and bought it for $16.95 last week and just started it late last night. It rocks! And the concept of average folks blogging and emailing "news" and reactions to news among informal groups of people rather than the huge communications and entertainment (content) media conglomerates is prescient. What a rare gem from a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News whose writing is superb! (*) (*)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

A Digital World With Analog as Its Workhorse
August 9, 2004 By BARNABY J. FEDER NYTimes

DALLAS - Phonograph records are relics. Traditional cameras
sit in closets gathering dust. Clocks with hands? How
quaint.

Digital technology, as every marketer knows, is synonymous
with speed, precision and the future.

The challenge, though, for those designing digital products
is that no human experiences reality as a pattern of 1's
and 0's. The natural world is, in engineering terms, a
thoroughly analog realm of endlessly variable waves of
sound and light, temperature and pressure fluctuations, and
shifting magnetic fields.

So it turns out the digital revolution is driving strong
demand for advances in analog electronics, an arcane realm
in which tens of thousands of products translate reality
into 1's and 0's for computers and retranslate digital
results into forms humans can perceive.

In a digital camera, for example, analog chips translate
wavelengths and intensities of light into digital code and,
if the photographer wants to check the image, they
retranslate the code into a visual display. Analog or mixed
analog-digital chips also manage timing functions, signal
filtering and amplification and battery performance.

Few companies understood the interplay better than Texas
Instruments Inc., which in the late 1990's decided to
invest heavily in analog devices along with its
higher-profile digital products. Last year, it moved past
STMicroelectronics of France to become the global leader in
the $26.8 billion analog chip market, according to
Databeans, a market research firm in Reno, Nev.

"Most people think that the world has gone digital and
analog is old and not hip," said Gregg A. Lowe, the senior
vice president who oversees most of Texas Instruments'
analog business. "On average, there's probably 15 analog
chips needed for every digital processor you use."

In fact, analog semiconductors have become Texas
Instruments' biggest business, generating about 40 percent
of its $8.36 billion in semiconductor revenue in 2003.

"The only thing exciting about analog electronics is the
results," said Richard K. Templeton, who has been at the
company for 20 years and became its chief executive in May.

Of course, when executives at Texas Instruments show off
their products by popping open cellphones, digital cameras
and hand-held music and video players, the first thing they
point to is usually a digital signal processor. Such
digital processors, which manage images and sounds while
consuming 30 times less power than a standard desktop
microprocessor operating at the same speed, made up 35
percent of the company's semiconductor business last year.

But while digital signal processors and microprocessors
are the rock stars of information technology, executives at
Texas Instruments are making the number of analog devices
surrounding the signal processors a feature of their
show-and-tell sessions.

Texas Instruments' history with analog technology goes back
to 1930 when it was created to help oil companies explore
for oil fields using sound waves. It later developed an
expertise in radar, another analog technology, making
equipment for the military in World War II.

Analog semiconductors have been part of Texas Instruments'
business since the 1950's. But it was not until the company
began concentrating on electronics for communications in
the 1990's that the role of analog electronics became
central to its business strategy.

Over the course of that decade, Texas Instruments sold its
original oil services unit to Halliburton; its missiles and
defense electronics business to Raytheon; its computer
operations to Hewlett-Packard and Acer; and the memory-chip
business, which had at one time been its biggest unit, to
Micron Technology.

Then it began acquiring companies to expand its analog
semiconductor operations and to increase its ability to
build single silicon chips with both analog circuits and
digital signal processors. The acquisitions included a $7.6
billion takeover of Burr-Brown in 2000 that still stands as
the largest acquisition in the semiconductor business.

No company, not even a longtime semiconductor giant like
Texas Instruments, can expect to produce a home-run product
in analog electronics.

Success in digital processors and memory chips boils down
to recognizing accurately and rapidly whether a circuit is
on or off. That simplicity makes measuring performance and
cost relatively straightforward and has even allowed the
industry to predict fairly accurately how fast digital
technology will improve. But the more variable world of
analog data defies the emergence of a blockbuster analog
design that fits many products.

"The average analog product does $1 million to $2 million
in sales," said Gary Grandbois, principal analyst in the
Santa Clara, Calif., office of iSuppli, a market research
firm. "You need to have a huge number of products."

Thus, while Texas Instruments controls nearly half the
digital signal processor market with a small portfolio of
chips that it regularly prunes and updates with more
powerful designs, keeping up its 12.9 percent share of the
analog market requires maintaining its ability to produce
more than 15,000 different analog chips and expanding that
portfolio by about 500 chips each year.

While it has the overall market lead, the market is so
fragmented that Texas Instruments trails others in many
segments of it. In the important analog-to-digital data
converter market, for instance, Texas Instruments is a
distant second to Analog Devices.

There is not much total profit in many types of analog
chips because the volumes are so low, but the profit
margins per chip can dwarf those in other sectors of the
semiconductor business. As a result, specialists in the
most demanding analog components like Linear Technology and
Maxim Integrated Products routinely report profit margins
that other semiconductor companies envy.

"Anybody who knows anything about analog is sitting on a
money-making proposition," said Robert H. Swanson Jr.,
chairman and chief executive of Linear, which is based in
Milpitas, Calif. Even when the end of the
telecommunications and Internet bubbles sent Linear's
annual sales plummeting from $972 million to $507 million
in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2001, its operating
profit margins never fell below 38 percent.

Analog Devices, based in Norwood, Mass., has
"extraordinarily high gross margins" similar to Linear's
for its converter and analog amplifier segments, according
to a presentation by Jerald G. Fishman, Analog's chief
executive, to investors in New York in June.

It helps that analog chip makers can generally get all the
precision they need from manufacturing equipment viewed as
obsolete by the leading manufacturers of digital chips.

Texas Instruments makes digital processors in its newest
factories or outsources production to foundry companies
that regularly modernize their equipment. But, with modest
equipment changes, it produces analog chips internally on
older production lines that cannot make circuits small
enough for today's digital processors.

But the varied tasks for analog chips present huge design
challenges. While some analog chips are sold for pennies
apiece as commodities, others that are designed to produce
peak performance in specialized research or medical
equipment can cost hundreds of dollars. Buyers of analog
chips are often more concerned about availability and
reliable performance than price, said Kevin P. March, Texas
Instruments' chief financial officer.

Because digital technology is considered the leading edge
of electronics, new analog electronics engineers are hard
to find at universities. And because analog products are
less standardized, engineers who have worked with analog
designs and production processes at a particular company
cannot easily transfer their expertise.

"It takes six to nine months for a college graduate with
training in digital engineering to be contributing to our
products," Mr. Lowe said. "In analog, we have to go to a
few top universities, get Ph.D.'s and train them for four
years before they can help us."

Experts with feet in both realms are especially valuable.

One of the most successful strategies Texas Instruments and
others have applied to improving analog microchips has been
to integrate them with digital monitoring and control
circuits. Just as digital controls get higher efficiency
out of an automobile engine, tiny digital circuits on such
mixed signal chips can fine-tune the performance of the
analog portion of the chip or help it avoid damage.

"The line between pure digital and pure analog chips is
rapidly blurring, with both incorporating a little bit of
the other," said Kevin Hawkins, a business development
manager for the company.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/09/technology/09texas.html?ex=1093060986&ei=1&en=1bf7057de67d8b8d

(*) (*) and some folks thought that D-to-A and A-to-D conversions were a thing of the past....... ;)

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

http://www.hbo.com/deadwood/

In it's first season, Deadwood received 11 Emmy® nominations, including Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (Brad Dourif), Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series (Robin Weigert), Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series (Walter Hill), and Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series (David Milch).

http://www.hbo.com/deadwood/community/news.shtml

(*) HBO is running it again this summer, and it's about the mid-point through the season. Third time I'm watching the episodes since the first go-round I watched it again via "on-demand" through COMCAST. Amazing how much dialog can be missed during the first run through. I can't wait until the second season starts! (*)

Have a lovely Sunday and hopefully it's dry where you are. The air feels like liquid jello with the humidity :| I'm grateful though that Hurricane Charley ran out of gas before passing through overnight. (o) Time for another walk for the Doc'meister and a couple of feedback assignments in my courses and the rest of the day is wide open with opportunities to relax.

(f) (f) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

"Chutney Popcorn " (2000) When Reena (Nisha Ganatra) learns that married sister Sarita (Sakina Jaffrey) can't have a baby, she picks up a turkey baster to play surrogate mother. But Reena's girlfriend (Jill Hennessy) worries that three might be a crowd. As Reena's mother remains in the dark about her daughter's same-sex relationship, Sarita grapples with her failure to conceive. The movie marks actor-director Nisha Ganatra's feature-film debut.
Starring: Nisha Ganatra, Jill Hennessy
Director: Nisha Ganatra
Genre: Drama

(*) (*) (*) Liked it. It was a surprise to see Jill Hennessy from Law and Order act in a lesbian film. Believeable performance.

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

"Salmonberries" (1991) In this classic and haunting tale directed by Percy Adlon, two women meet and develop an unusual and unexpected relationship. K.D. Lang portrays Kotz, an androgynous young Eskimo. She is attracted to Roswitha (Rosel Zech), a German expatriate and the town librarian. Together, they find the freedom to face old demons and to express their hidden yearnings.
Starring: K.D. Lang, Rosel Zech
Director: Percy Adlon
Genre: Gay & Lesbian

(*) (*) (*) Liked it very much although sometimes the cinematography was a bit strange - however maybe the lighting was such because it was supposed to have taken place in Alaska. K.D. Lang's "Barefoot" was lovely, especially while simultaneously watching such a starkly evocative winter landscape in the background. (*) (*)

Nice, quiet afternoon....two good films, read a little for pleasure and now off to write a letter before curling up with another good book for a little while. (I'm one of those old fashioned types that still writes "snail mail" thank you's and sympathy notes.) Have a delightful start of your week.

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[Beaudyk]

The Party Unity Plank introduced Monday reads:

"We recognize and respect that Republicans of good faith may not agree
with all the planks in the party's platform. This is particularly the
case with regard to those planks dealing with abortion, family planning,
and gay and lesbian issues. The Republican Party welcomes all people
on all sides of these complex issues and encourages their active
participation as we work together on those issues upon which we agree."

The coalition said it will take the fight to the platform committee and,
if necessary, is not ruling out taking it to the convention floor.

"This coalition of mainstream Republican organizations stands here today
representing the future of the GOP," said Eli Allagoa, Managing Director
of Republican Youth Majority.

"This coalition is represented in the primetime speakers our party has
chosen for the New York convention and this coalition should be
represented in our party's platform," Allagoa said.

The RNC's announced lineup of primetime speakers for the convention
includes a number of moderates including former New York City Mayor Rudy
Giuliani, Arizona Senator John McCain, California Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger, and New York Governor George Pataki. Additionally, New
York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will
open the convention.

All of these speakers have long histories of supporting policies that
respect the GOP's diversity.

"It is not enough to have inclusive voices like Mayor Giuliani, Governor
Schwarzenegger and Senator McCain speaking in primetime, if the platform
only represents the voices of exclusion like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell
and Rick Santorum," said LCR's Guerriero.

In 2000, one million gays and lesbians voted for President Bush, and
millions of pro-choice men and women supported the President, said
Guerriero in a press statement.

"In a year when the nation is so evenly divided, the President and our
party must unite all Republicans. It is time for the Republican Party
to concentrate on the issues that bring us together: lower taxes,
strong national defense, personal responsibility and a commitment to
individual liberty. It is time for the GOP to tell the far right that
they are welcome in this party, but they are just one part of a diverse
Republican Party," said Guerriero.


©365Gay.com 2004

[sweetlady]

Wiring the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy...July 25, 2004 NYTimes
By MATT BAI

Andy Rappaport made his millions as a venture
capitalist,searching out what he calls ''ideas that change
the world.'' About six years ago, for instance, when most
everyone else in the high-tech industry thought wireless
communication was going to depend on new, exotic
semiconductors, Rappaport threw $2.5 million into a
start-up called Atheros Communications, whose founders were
focusing instead on building low-cost radios using common
chip technology. It was a smart move. When the company went
public last February, the initial investment by Rappaport
and his partners was worth more than $60 million.

Rappaport is also, increasingly, an avid investor in
liberal causes, and in this context he might be called a
political venture capitalist. Rappaport and his wife,
Deborah, whose philanthropic activities in recent years
include several million dollars in donations to art museums
and after-school music programs, have committed at least $5
million this year -- so far -- to support a bevy of
fledgling liberal groups, like Music for America and
Punkvoter.com, aimed at mobilizing younger voters.

I met Rappaport, who is 46, in early June in his firm's
offices on Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley's answer to Wall
Street. As we talked in a plush conference room flanked by
a sunlit terrace on one side and a pool table on the other,
events in the world outside seemed to be tilting strongly
in the Democrats' favor. Public support for President
Bush's handling of the war in Iraq was dropping
precipitously. The price of oil had shot up to $42 a
barrel. Only hours earlier, voters in South Dakota sent a
Democratic woman, Stephanie Herseth, to the U.S. House in a
special election -- a race widely viewed as a potential
harbinger for November.

But if all of this made John Kerry a good bet to become the
next president, it did nothing, in Rappaport's view, to
solve the Democrats' underlying problems. When I asked if
he was skeptical about the direction of the party, he
smiled, then said dryly, ''If you've been able to discern a
direction on which to be skeptical or optimistic, then
you're doing pretty well.''

In fact, Rappaport was surprisingly downcast about the
party's prospects, which, he said, would not be improved
simply by winning back the White House. Though he sat and
thought about it, he said he was unable to name a single
Democratic leader in the years since Bill Clinton left
Washington who he thought was articulating a compelling new
direction for the party. ''There is a growing realization
among people who take very seriously the importance of
progressive politics that the Democratic Party has kind of
failed to create a vision for the country that is strongly
resonant,'' he said. ''And our numbers'' -- meaning
Democrats as a whole -- ''are decreasing. Our political
power has been diminishing, and it's become common
knowledge that the conservative movement has established a
very strong, long-term foundation, whereas we've basically
allowed our foundation, if not to crumble, to at least fall
into a state of disrepair. So there are a lot of people
thinking, What can we do about this?''

Actually, Rappaport says he may be on to an answer. Last
summer, he got a call from Simon Rosenberg, president of
the New Democrat Network, a fund-raising and advocacy group
in Washington. Would Rappaport mind sitting down for a
confidential meeting with a veteran Democratic operative
named Rob Stein? Sure, Rappaport replied. What Stein showed
him when they met was a PowerPoint presentation that laid
out step by step, in a series of diagrams a ninth-grader
could understand, how conservatives, over a period of 30
years, had managed to build a ''message machine'' that
today spends more than $300 million annually to promote its
agenda.

Rappaport was blown away by the half-hour-long
presentation. ''Man,'' he said, ''that's all it took to buy
the country?''

Stein and Rosenberg weren't asking Rappaport for money --
at least not yet. They wanted Democrats to know what they
were up against, and they wanted them to stop thinking
about politics only as a succession of elections. If
Democrats were going to survive, Stein and Rosenberg
explained, men like Rappaport were going to have to start
making long-term investments in their political ideas, just
as they did in their business ventures. The era of the
all-powerful party was coming to an end, and political
innovation, like technological innovation, would come from
private-sector pioneers who were willing to take risks.

For Rappaport -- who, like other Democratic donors, had
grown increasingly doubtful that his donations to the party
were being well spent -- Stein's pitch came as something of
a revelation. This was a new way to look at progressive
politics (politicians who 10 years ago called themselves
liberals now prefer the less-demonized label
''progressive''), and it was an approach he understood as
well as anyone.

In March of this year, Rappaport convened a meeting of
wealthy Democrats at a Silicon Valley hotel so that they,
too, could see Stein's presentation. Similar gatherings
were already under way in Washington and New York, where
the meetings included two of the most generous billionaires
in the Democratic universe -- the financier George Soros
and Peter Lewis, an Ohio insurance tycoon -- as well as
Soros's son and Lewis's son. On the East Coast, the
participants had begun referring to themselves as the
Phoenix Group, as in rising from the ashes; Rappaport
called his gathering the Band of Progressives. More
recently, companion groups have come together in Boston and
Los Angeles.

What makes these meetings remarkable is that while everyone
attending them wants John Kerry to win in November, they
are focused well beyond the 2004 election. The plan is to
gather investors from each city -- perhaps in one big
meeting early next year -- and create a kind of
venture-capital pipeline that would funnel money into a new
political movement, working independently of the existing
Democratic establishment. The dollar figure for investment
being tossed around in private conversations is $100
million.

''You're talking about raising a lot of money,'' I said
doubtfully.

Rappaport tilted his head to one side. He looked as if he
felt sorry for me.

''A hundred million dollars,'' he said, ''is nothing.''

As Democrats converge on Boston this week to hold their
party convention and formally anoint Kerry as their
nominee, all the talk will be of resurgence, unity and a
new sense of purpose. Don't be fooled. It's true that a
kind of all-consuming, blue-state animosity toward George
W. Bush -- not just for the war and the tax cuts, but also
for what Democrats see as his venality and secrecy, his
contempt for all things coastal, the way he walks and the
way he laughs, the fact that he was ever sworn in as
president to begin with -- has, remarkably, brought a sense
of coherence to a party that had been groping for a
mission. Nearing the end of his first term, Bush has at
last delivered on his promise to be ''a uniter, not a
divider,'' except that the people he has united will be
crammed, standing room only, into Boston's FleetCenter for
the next four days, rhetorically -- if not literally --
burning him in effigy.

But whether the Democrats win or lose in November, what
will happen -- to put a twist on the old Engelbert
Humperdinck song -- after the hating? Four years from now,
in 2008, these same Democrats will come together again, in
Miami or Phoenix or Las Vegas, perhaps to renominate
President Kerry or perhaps to give the stage to Hillary
Rodham Clinton or John Edwards or to some now-obscure
governor. Either way, Bush will be receding into history,
and the party's left and center factions will again be
wrestling over free trade, social programs and tax cuts for
the middle class. The questions that will loom over the
Democratic Party will be the same ones that have resurfaced
regularly since the end of the Great Society: what, beyond
a series of disconnected policy proposals, is the party's
reason for being? What does it stand for in the era after
big government?

Andy Rappaport isn't the only one asking these questions.
The party's decline is a constant source of gallows humor
among Democrats in Washington. It is true that in terms of
voter identification, the country remains more or less
evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, and in
fact, the best data show that Democrats still enjoy a
slight advantage among the ever-shrinking pool of voters
who do identify themselves with one party or another. But
the historical arc of the parties tells a different story.
Since the 1950's, when nearly half of all voters called
themselves Democrats, nearly one in six Democrats has left
the party, according to a University of Michigan study,
while Republican membership has held close to steady.

Reflected in this trend -- although it is by no means the
entirety of the problem -- is that the Democratic Party has
seen an exodus of the white working-class men who were once
their most reliable voters. In the suburbs, according to
the Democratic pollster Mark Penn, the percentage of white
men supporting the party has plummeted 16 points just since
Bill Clinton left office.

When measured in terms of electoral success, the growing
imbalance between the parties is quantifiable. From the
election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 until the
Republican takeover of 1994, Democrats never lost control
of the House of Representatives for more than one election
before regaining it, and that only happened twice. They
have now failed to control the House in five straight
elections. Similarly, for 46 of those years, Democrats
ruled the Senate by a margin of at least 10 seats. In
contrast, they have spent most of the last decade in the
minority, and during that time they have never enjoyed a
majority of more than a single vote. More sobering for
Democrats, the realignment that began in the 1960's -- when
the battles over civil rights and Vietnam began to drive
white men and rural voters away from the party -- has
finally begun to erode the party at its very foundation:
the state and local level, where it was dominant for
decades. Thirty years ago, Democrats could claim outright
control of 37 state legislatures, compared with only 4 for
Republicans; Democrats now control just 17.

''The deterioration is steady, and it's spreading like a
cancer,'' says Patrick Caddell, the onetime strategist for
Jimmy Carter and Gary Hart, who has been compiling this
data from statistical abstracts. ''So much for thinking
that if we could just go back to the glorious 90's, the
party would be fine. The 90's were our worst decade since
the 1920's.''

Privately, and sometimes publicly, leading Democrats will
admit that the party's shrinking influence has its roots in
the most basic problem of ''message.'' Despite having ruled
Capitol Hill for a half-century, during which time they
successfully enacted a staggering array of innovative
programs, Democrats have been maddeningly slow to adapt
their message to the postindustrial age. ''The truth is
that a lot of the people who ran the Democratic Party in
the 70's and 80's ran it into the ground,'' Simon Rosenberg
said. ''The imperial Congress was in charge of America for
50 years, but we lost our way, and we've got to fight
back.''

In his 1992 campaign, Clinton vowed to drag the party into
the new economy, bringing it toward the center on social
and economic issues that mattered to an anxious middle
class. Parts of that agenda, like a middle-class tax credit
and welfare reform, met with success. But weakened by the
Republican takeover of Congress and then his impeachment,
Clinton's lasting legacy to the party seems to have
amounted to something far less than an ideological
modernization; somewhere along the line, Clintonism
devolved into a series of rhetorical gimmicks -- ''fighting
for working families,'' ''working hard and playing by the
rules'' -- aimed at appeasing conservatives and winning
over pet constituencies like ''soccer moms'' and ''office
park dads.'' Underneath all the now-tired mantras, there
remains a vacuum at the core of the party, an absence of
any transformative worldview for the century unfurling
before us.

Into this vacuum rushes money -- and already it is creating
an entirely new kind of independent force in American
politics. Led by Soros and Lewis, Democratic donors will,
by November, have contributed as much as $150 million to a
handful of outside groups -- America Coming Together, the
Media Fund, MoveOn.org -- that are going online, door to
door and on the airways in an effort to defeat Bush. These
groups aren't loyal to any one candidate, and they don't
plan to disband after the election; instead, they expect to
yield immense influence over the party's future, at the
very moment when the power of some traditional Democratic
interest groups, like the once mighty manufacturing unions,
is clearly on the wane. Meanwhile, Rappaport and the other
next-generation liberals are gathering on both coasts,
having found one another through a network of clandestine
connections that has the distinct feel of a burgeoning
left-wing conspiracy. They have come to view progressive
politics as a market in need of entrepreneurship, served
poorly by a giant monopoly -- the Democratic Party -- that
is still doing business in an old, Rust Belt kind of way.
To these younger backers, investing in politics is far
cheaper than playing in the marketplace, and the return is
more important than mere profit: ultimately, they say, it
is the power to take back the country's agenda from
conservative ideologues.

Spurred on by legal reforms that were in fact supposed to
reduce the torrent of private money into politics, the new
political venture capitalists see themselves as true
progressives, unbound by any arcane party structure. If
their investment ends up revitalizing the Democratic Party,
so be it. If they end up competing with the party to
control its agenda, or even pushing the party toward
obsolescence -- well, that's fine, too.

As the old union bosses and factional leaders who dominated
the Democratic Party in the 20th century file into the
FleetCenter this week, waving signs and hooting for their
heroes, be sure to take a long, last look. The Democratic
Party of the machine age, so long dominant in American
politics, could be holding its own Irish wake near Boston's
North End. The power is already shifting -- not just within
the party, but away from it altogether.

By the time this election year ends, George Soros will have
contributed more than $13 million to the independent
political groups known as 527's. (The term is shorthand for
the section of the tax code that makes them legal.) For
this reason, Republicans insist that the 74-year-old Soros,
who may become the largest single political contributor in
history, has resolved to buy the Democratic Party.

This is, on its face, a little silly. To put things in
perspective, $13 million is a fraction of what it takes to
run a serious modern presidential campaign, let alone
control a party. And Soros, who made his fortune as an
international investor, is worth an estimated $7 billion;
his foundation alone gives away some $450 million every
year. In other words, if George Soros really felt like
buying the party, you would know it. For Soros, spending
$13 million on a campaign is like you or me buying 100
boxes of Thin Mints from the Girl Scout next door.

The real significance of Soros's involvement in politics
has little to do with the dollar amount of his
contributions. What will stand out as important, when we
look back decades from now at the 2004 campaign, will be
the political model he created for everyone else. Until
this year, Democratic contributors operated on the
party-machine model: they were trained to write checks only
to the party and its candidates, who decided how to spend
the money. But by helping to establish a series of separate
organizations and by publicly announcing that he was on a
personal mission to unseat Bush, Soros signaled to other
wealthy liberals that the days of deferring to the party
were over. He became what the financial world would call
the angel investor for an entirely new kind of progressive
venture.

To understand why Soros matters, you have to slog, however
briefly, through the mind-bending swamp of the nation's
campaign finance laws. Democrats in the 90's became
obsessed with erasing the Republican advantage in
fund-raising, so much so that it was fair to wonder which
party wasn't representing the rich and privileged. Under
Clinton, who became the most powerful money magnet the Oval
Office had ever seen, the Democratic Party and its various
committees began sucking up mountainous contributions from
what are known in politics as access donors --
corporations, Wall Street firms and trade associations
whose leaders had an interest in certain legislation or who
coveted a ride on Air Force One. Unlike the ''hard money''
checks that an individual might write to a candidate, these
corporate contributions to the party were ''soft money,''
meaning they had no legal limits; it was as if both parties
were drawing cash from an endless equity line, with power
as its only collateral. During the 2000 presidential
election cycle, lawyers and law firms gave more than $33
million to the Democratic Party, while securities and
investment firms anted up more than $25 million, according
to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

For ideological donors like Soros, whose goal was to effect
changes in Democratic policy, these were not the best of
times. You could give millions of dollars in soft money to
the Democratic Party, if you were so inclined, but a lot of
ideological donors were not. (Soros gave $100,000 to the
party in the 2000 cycle.) Donors had no control over how
the money was spent -- badly, a lot of them suspected --
and because the party was getting so much money from large
industries, the influence that might have been gained
through such a contribution was instantly diluted. In other
words, a $5 million check might buy you an invitation to a
state dinner, but it wasn't going to make anyone at the
Democratic National Committee listen seriously to your idea
for a national health care plan.

A lot of ideological donors continued to give money to
independent interest groups like Emily's List, Naral
Pro-Choice America and the Sierra Club. These issue-based
groups, however, were notoriously balkanized and
territorial. Your dollars might be useful in organizing
pro-choice voters or in preserving Pacific woodlands, but
there was no way to contribute money that would have an
impact on the overarching framework of Democratic ideology.


Then came the campaign finance law passed in 2002, known
informally as McCain-Feingold (after its iconoclastic
Senate sponsors, John McCain, a Republican, and Russell
Feingold, a Democrat), which prohibited the parties from
accepting soft money. Overnight, the era of the access
donor essentially ended. Individual lawyers and executives
could still wield influence by bundling small personal
contributions from employees or colleagues, but their firms
could no longer write the giant checks that let them rent
out the party as if it were a billboard or a blimp.

For the ideological donors, however, the new era seemed
quite promising. McCain-Feingold left untouched and
unregulated a vehicle that had been little used on the
national level up to that point: the 527. And last fall and
winter, the surprising success of Howard Dean's campaign
convinced a lot of wealthy liberals that a new ideological
movement could be nurtured outside the constraints of the
Democratic Party. By controlling 527's, donors believed,
they could determine, to a greater extent than ever before,
the message and the strategy of a Democratic presidential
campaign. ''This is like post-Yugoslavia,'' Andy Stern,
president of the Service Employees International Union,
told me. ''We used to have a strongman called the party.
After McCain-Feingold, we dissolved the power of Tito.''

Having financed projects in the former Communist bloc,
Soros understood the opportunitites that political tumult
can create. He and the more reclusive Peter Lewis began by
contributing about $10 million each to America Coming
Together (ACT), the largest of the new 527's, which was
designed to do street-level organizing for the election;
the donations enabled ACT to expand its canvassing campaign
from five critical swing states to 17. ''I used 527's
because they were there to be used,'' Soros said bluntly
during a conversation in his Manhattan office.

Soros's and Lewis's donations made it possible for longtime
leaders of Democratic interest groups to do something they
had never done in the modern era: work together. Now the
insular factions have begun to form alliances. The founders
of ACT included Ellen Malcolm and Carl Pope, the heads of
Emily's List and the Sierra Club respectively, Andy Stern
from the service employees' union and Steve Rosenthal, the
former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Suddenly,
because they no longer had to compete with one another for
contributions -- and because they had such a galvanizing
villain in Bush -- the leaders of the party's most powerful
adjunct groups were able to look beyond the more limited
interests of their own membership.

Strangely, for someone who is supposedly staging a hostile
takeover of an entire party, Soros said he is only
nominally a Democrat, and he evidenced an obvious distaste
for the business of politics. ''I hate this kind of
political advertising,'' he said at one point, complaining
about the anti-Bush attack ads he had paid for. ''I always
hated it, but now that I've sort of been involved in it, I
hate it more.'' Soros said his only goal is to get rid of
Bush, whom he believes is endangering American democracy.
After that, he said, he didn't expect to continue meddling
in politics at all, and in fact, he seemed eager to be rid
of it.

And yet, even if they walk away after 2004, both Soros and
Lewis have begun to expand on what they started -- by
handing off their political portfolios to the next
generation. Both Jonathan Soros, a 33-year-old
Harvard-trained lawyer, and Jonathan Lewis, a 45-year-old
restaurateur, have become deeply involved in monitoring
their fathers' political investments day to day. They have
also traveled extensively throughout the country, asking
their contacts in different circles -- business types for
Soros, while Lewis hits up the Hollywood crowd -- for
million-dollar checks.

Both sons, and particularly the younger Soros, are also
looking to play a deeper role in the future of Democratic
politics. Last January, at the invitation of Alan Patricof,
a New York venture capitalist who has been one of the
Democratic Party's most reliable fund-raisers over the
years, both Jonathans attended a hastily planned meeting of
wealthy Democrats at Patricof's Park Avenue office. George
Soros and Peter Lewis were there, too, along with some 45
other Democratic donors. No one at the meeting quite knew
why Patricof had summoned them. Then he introduced them to
Rob Stein and his PowerPoint slides.

My first meeting with Rob Stein occurred over breakfast at
the Four Seasons hotel in Washington. Our conversation was
strictly off the record, a sort of get-to-know-you chat.
Our second meeting took place on a sun-bathed balcony
outside a Starbucks near his home in northwest Washington.
Stein, who is a young-looking 60, has a full head of gray
curls and an air of serenity about him. He is a native West
Virginian, although his accent, oddly, makes him sound like
a Yankees fan. He carried with him a metal loose-leaf
binder, which he laid on the table and kept always within
his reach. In a short while, Stein said, I would become
only the third person in Washington to possess my own copy
of his presentation.

By the time we met, in the middle of May, Stein estimated
that some 700 people had seen his PowerPoint show. He told
me his story and explained how he had ended up at the
center of a minimovement. He had been a Democratic
operative, rising to become chief of staff at the Commerce
Department under the late Ron Brown. Then he managed a
venture capital firm. After 2000, he, like a lot of
Democrats, watched with growing alarm as his party ceded
ground at every level of government. ''I literally woke up
the day after the 2002 elections, picked up the paper, had
breakfast and we were living in a one-party country,'' he
said. ''And there it was. That was my wake-up call.

''I said: 'O.K., there's now Republican dominance down the
line. It's not only that they control the House and the
Senate and the presidency. But it's growing. There's no end
in sight.' It wasn't only that they had reached a
milestone, but they were ascendant.''

Stein read a few reports that liberal research groups had
published on the rise of the conservative movement. Then he
began poring over tax forms from various conservative
nonprofits and aggregating the data about fund-raising and
expenditures. He spent hours online every night, between
about 9 p.m. and 1 in the morning, reading sites like
MediaTransparency.org, which is devoted to tracing the
roots of conservative groups and their effect on the media.
To call this an obsession somehow seems too mundane; Stein
spent much of the spring of 2003 consumed with connecting
the dots of what Hillary Clinton famously called the ''vast
right-wing conspiracy'' and then translating it into flow
charts and bullet points.

(*) .....I have the rest if you're interested.....PM me and I'd be delighted to email you! (*)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/magazine/25DEMOCRATS.html?ex=1092017255&ei=1&en=729e21bc595ca136

(*) (*) thank goodnesss those with the investment funding can "do" this! I f I had millions instead of worthless stock certificates for start-ups that floundered......I would! (*) (*) (*)

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Since the shooting death of her father, Johnny has spent most of her life in prison. There, she forms a new family and falls in love with her cellmate Lana. But her responsibilities to the outside world weigh heavily as she attempts to pull together her fractured natural family. With a release date near, she valiantly strives to keep her two worlds together.
Starring: Gloria May Eshkibok, Gail Maurice
Director: Jorge Manzano
Genre: Drama

(*) (*) (*) (*) Loved this Native American film that I watched late last night with Doc.....(This sweet film was shot in Canada)

(f) (f) (k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Posted on Tue, Aug. 17, 2004
RealPlayer takes on Apple By Jon Ann Steinmetz
Mercury News Assistant Business Editor

There's nothing subtle about RealNetworks' latest foray into Apple's turf, launched today with big ol' ads touting its online music store's compatibility with the iPod -- a technological development that Apple's just a teensy bit unhappy about.

A full-page ad in the New York Times and Rolling Stone touts 49-cent singles and half-price CD downloads from the RealPlayer Music Store. ``Half the price of Apple,'' the ad proclaims. ``Welcome to freedom of choice.''

The ad features an illustration of the Apple iPod, with the arm of an imaginary combination lock unhinged. It's a blunt visual reference to RealNetworks' new Harmony technology, which for the first time opens the iPod to songs bought from a store other than Apple's. Here's the full story.

Quick hit on Applied's earnings from Bloomberg News: Applied Materials, the world's biggest maker of semiconductor-production equipment, reported its largest quarterly profit in almost four years after chipmakers doubled purchases of its machines.

Net income of $440.6 million, or 26 cents a share, compared with a loss of $36.8 million, or 2 cents, a year earlier. Sales in the third quarter ended Aug. 1 rose to $2.24 billion, the company said in a statement distributed by Business Wire. The Santa Clara company was expected to earn 25 cents, the average of 29 analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

Did you think for one second that we were gonna get out of here without a Google update? Not a chance. Bidders could find out today -- any minute now, really -- whether they're getting in on the IPO party.

Trading? Yesterday we were hearing it might start Friday. Today we're hearing Wednesday, or maybe Thursday. So let's just say, with authority, that we don't know yet.

(*) (*) Couldn't sleep, and Doc needed a middle of the night walk so here I am... ;) (o)

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Posted on Mon, Aug. 16, 2004

Comic relief from the Google guys By Deborah Lohse and Dawn C. Chmielewski
Mercury News

The highlight of Google's week should have been the much-awaited opening of bidding for its auction-style initial public stock offering. Instead, it turned out to be the publication last week of an interview that Google's founders gave to Playboy magazine back in late April, a week before they filed the documents announcing their planned IPO.

The existence of that interview has raised questions about whether the chief Googlers violated ``quiet period'' rules requiring them to stay silent while their company is in registration to sell shares publicly.

Of course, the interview also has spurred plenty of jokes about investors and regulators finally reading Playboy for the articles. On the Motley Fool investor Web site, writer Rick Aristotle Munarriz reveals several headlines that he considered for his own article on the Playboy flap, including ``Google in the Buff,'' ``Private Parts in Public Places,'' ``Miss IPO'' and ``Google's Center Folds.''

Our favorite headline, though, comes from our colleague at SiliconValley.com: ``Google Guys to Playboy: They're Real and They're Fabulous . . . No, Our Options, You Idiots.''

Some folks can't take a joke: By now, you've joined the millions who have checked out JibJab.com's ``This Land'' political satire. That's the one where animations of President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry trade political jabs (``You're a liberal sissy,'' ``You're a right-wing nut job''), sung to the tune of Woody Guthrie's ``This Land is Your Land.''

Ludlow Music, the publisher that owns the rights to Guthrie's song, isn't laughing. It has sued to stop distribution of the Web-based animation.

While the parties argue over the sanctity of free speech and copyright in court, AtomFilms is attempting to capitalize on the nation's renewed interest in political humor. The JibJab satire is the centerpiece of a new section at www.atomfilms.com called ``Mock the Vote.''

Not many of the animations are likely to put Jay Leno out of work -- especially the one called ``Doodieman: Days of Duty,'' which relies mainly on scatological humor to get a laugh.

But you might find yourself smirking at the Janet Jackson-inspired animation dubbed ``Campaign Jukebox: John Kerry.'' Or you could get a chuckle out of animated versions of counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice facing off in a tense boardroom drama recalling the NBC hit ``The Apprentice.''

A dip in a virtual ocean: We're not sure whether the following technology demonstration, showcased at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Los Angeles last week, qualifies as a breakthrough in virtual reality or an oddity worthy of the Guinness Book of World Records.

The University of British Columbia described its innovation, in characteristically dense scientific prose, as a ``new locomotion interface for swimming and floating in a virtual reality ocean.''

What we're talking about here is a swimmer suspended in a hang-gliding harness from a wooden frame structure. He (and it's ALWAYS a male who volunteers for this kind of awkward scientific display) dangles from bungee cords, which are attached to sand bags to simulate buoyancy.

As he moves, froglike, through midair, eight magnetic sensors track his movements and a computer-generated animation of the swimmer swimming through a virtual ocean is projected on a screen.

What the swimmer sees through a virtual reality display worn over his head (where one might expect to see a swim mask) is a simulation of the ocean -- with waves reacting to the movement and refracted sunlight. He can even hear the sounds of water slashing and sea birds calling.

What everyone else sees is an awkward off-stage revival of Peter Pan, dangling before the crowd from visible wires. Sans applause.

(*) (*) Pleasant dreams and a lovely Wednesday all.

(f) (f) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

To Declare Your Love, Sign Here, Here, and Here
Let’s Get Government Out of the Marriage Business

http://www.50minutehour.net/

Jennifer Keenan of the Foundation for Economic Education does a good job of explicating just how creepy it is for the government to preside over marriages. However, she apparently plans to get legally married anyway. For me, I would feel like filling out a bunch of forms for Uncle Sam somehow cheapens the commitment one makes in marriage, especially since the government is so willing to look the other way when people want to reneg on that commitment. But more than that, people who recognize the statist implications of marriage should also recognize that the problem is somewhat self-perpetuating. If fewer people got married by the state, social institutions would adapt, as they have with civil unions and such, to deal with alternative declarations of commitment. Moreover, it would just matter less what the government wanted us to declare, because more other options would spring up to encompass people whose needs and wants were different. So long as we keep telling ourselves that although state marriage is bad, it's necessary and acceptable to do it because everyone else does, the problem will continue to grow. So while I won't condemn marriage as an institution, I will say that every person who signs on the government-approved dotted line is perpetuating the problem.

(*) (*) terrific web site in my opinion.

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Intersection of Boston's Queer and Transgender/Gender Queer Communities
Resources, Rants, Information for Everyone!

"Justice for Gwen: Are trans allies MIA?"
By Lauren Steely

Tucked away in an old auditorium, in a town known for its political apathy,
70 people managed to show up. It was the largest crowd I'd even seen at the
annual West Hollywood town hall meeting on transgender hate crimes.
Honestly, I was moved to see so many faces there. I doubt more than 20 would
have showed were it not for the Gwen Araujo (mis)trial, which even drew an
ABC newscrew to the auditorium. But tonight there was a palpable sense of of
single-mindedness, of outrage, that I haven't felt here in a long time.

The focus was entirely on the recent events surrounding the trial. Dr. Talia
Bettcher was on the panel and spoke, more eloquently than anyone, about the
implicit narrative of deception written into most media accounts of the
murder. She described how the language used in these reports enforces a
discourse in which Gwen was 'really' a man who tricked her assailants into
having sex with her, thus unloading some of the moral burden from the
murderers. And longtime LA trans activist Shirley Bushnell ended the meeting
with an account of Gwen's murder so chilling that people were moved to
tears, and rage. "Are you angry yet??" she repeated, over and over.

We were plenty angry when we began our march down Santa Monica Boulevard,
shouting "Trans justice now!", "La justicia para todos!", and "We are
stonewall!" to the blase circuit boys and L-word dykes milling outside the
clubs. Officers from the WeHo sheriff's station escorted us on motorcycles,
closing down lanes of traffic as we passed by.

It was heartening to see everyone from the trans women's community so united
for once. But far more telling was who was not there. Where was the FTM
Alliance? Where was the UCLA Queer Alliance, the USC GLBTA Board? Where on
earth was the entirety of the LGB community? Don't you all remember? Hello,
we started your fucking revolution! It is really sad, I thought...so many
people just don't seem to care. Especially the people who really ought to.

But what disturbs me most, I think, is the utter lack of involvement of
young people, especially college students -- groups that are usually at the
forefront of social justice movements. Most of my friends are college
students. Hell, most of my friends are queer college students, and yet the
vast majority of them are in absentia at these events -- events that address
the single most significant crisis facing our community right now. Nor do I
ever see people from college groups, trans or not, that supposedly work for
social justice, even after cross-posting the fuck out of their listservs.

And it all stems from the worst kind of classism. I think there is a real
belief that the murders of Gwen Araujo, of Freddie Martinez Jr, of Bella
Evangelista are "not our problem" because they disproportionately affect
young, working-class trans women of color -- many of them sex workers. Maybe
there is the sense that if you're not involved in sex work, it won't happen
to you. Perhaps it's easy to feel insulated from the violence, walking
around a progressive college campus. Perhaps we're all too distracted by our
Halberstam readings, or the coming gender insurgency, or whatever.

But the whole "trans panic" defense ought to scare the fuck out of every
queer person who values their life. It hinges on the notion that every trans
person is, essentially, a deceiver and an imposter. If some of the jurors
were persuaded by this argument, that is not a failing of the justice
system. The failing lies with a society that teaches men to be so horrified
by their own penis, so disgusted by any possibility of attraction to another
human with a penis, that they respond in the most cruel, inhumane way
imaginable.

How fucked up does our society have to be, that a penis can throw a man's
entire identity into murderous crisis? How chilling was it to hear that
seconds after Jose Merel learned of Gwen's biological sex, just minutes
before bludgeoning and strangling her to death, he broke down in tears,
repeating "I'm not gay... I don't like men." How devastating was it to read
Zach Calef's article in the Iowa State Daily, the one claiming that Gwen had
tricked her attackers into having sex with her by not revealing her birth
sex, an act which he calls "a form of rape" -- though he did conceed that
"Given the circumstances, murder is a bit much."

This is all symptomatic of a profound crisis of contemporary manhood, a
tragic flaw in the way men in our society are socialized. It will take a
very long time to change. Until then, we are going to have to make it
absolutely unacceptable to target our community through violence. This isn't
like the civil rights or even the gay rights movements. There aren't nearly
enough of us to effect sweeping social change or influence policymakers on
our own -- especially when so many of us are invisible and prefer to remain
that way. It will take a few radical leaders - like Shirley Bushnell and
Maria Roman - and a broad base of allies, which so far are asleep while
Paris is burning. The problem is, so are most of the Parisians.

Lauren Steely is a post-riot, neo-granola dyke and a fierce advocate for
trans women in queer and feminist communities. She is a founding organizer
of Trans/Giving, LA's only performance series for trans & genderqueer
artists, and an organizer with Camp Trans.

http://www.butchdykeboy.com/bdb/oneshot.htm

(S) (S) Calm, restful sleep and funny dreams tonight and a Thursday that brings smiles.

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/

Video Killed the Radio Star
Right now on screen, we're watching a series of images, interspersed with words, Lessig-poetry-slam-style. "Change." We're set up like the UN, with one person walking around in the middle. Talking about how to get people who are younger to pick up the paper. Oliver is responding to this saying that the paper has only so much info, and as a media consumer, he wants the source, but wants to see more info than can fit in the paper, and he doesn't want to kill trees. Dan Gillmor responds that it's a damned good argument, and he hopes it will get solved. But there is a need for traditional reporting, for the deep investigation (funding, editing, distribution). Dan and I had dinner last night and spent a lot of time talking about how blogs need traditional journalism and journalism needs blogs, and the biz model is kind of a mess for newspapers, as well as those that rely on newspapers like the wire services.

Oliver/Kos says I haven't seen anything since Watergate that warrants going to a paper. He wants to go to a blogger on music or movies for that.

Esther Dyson is saying there are two arguments: online verses paper, and traditional verses non-traditional. Leave the dead-tree argument behind.

Interesting discussion, though I have to say that just having completed a study of 30 people, asking about their news and search habits, seeing the results, it's not that people don't want news, but they want it another way than traditional news is used to giving it. Of these people, 60% were under 35, 40% were 36-70. The average self-reported news consumption was 45 minutes a day, and while they occasionally look at papers when on BART or out, they reported that they do this consuming online. Every one said this. While people are notoriously bad at self-reporting, and the skew of the participants is that they are Craig's List readers who have broadband at home, so it is a unique subset, it is still an amazing statistic.

And what they are describing up front here is a reflection of these always-on used-to-be-consumers but now they are building their own feeds people. People who want to get it how, when, where they want it. Untethered. Unencumbered. From lots of different sources. People who use blogs to filter their links and attention to manage the tremendous amount of information coming at us from traditional and non-traditional sources.

http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/cat_media.html

(S) (S) I Hope that these sites are intersting to some folks as they are to me! I found a GOLD MINE of URL's that I'm checking out and saving (or not) those of value. (*)

(f) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

"Tsunami": The Campaign '04 information war is fast, deep, and fraught with lies. The press must rethink its coverage, or drown in a toxic tidal wave
BY BRYAN KEEFER http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/keefer-tsunami.asp

Published on Wednesday, August 18, 2004 by Ted Rall
NYC to GOP: Drop Dead http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0818-11.htm

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/index.htm

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news/search.jspq=Reuters+World+News+Highlights&w=ALL&f=336

http://news.bbc.co.uk/default.stm

http://www.iht.com/

http://www.washtimes.com/

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jhtml;sessionid=ROM1MAYGSP4TZQFIQMFSNAGAVCBQ0 JVC?view=HOME&grid=P13&menuId=-1&menuItemId=-1&_requestid=31361

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

http://www.smh.com.au/text/index.html

http://www.kcna.co.jp/index-e.htm

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/

(S) (S) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Welcome to the GNU Project web server, www.gnu.org. The GNU Project was launched in 1984 to develop a complete UNIX style operating system which is free software: the GNU system. (GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”; it is pronounced “guh-noo.”) Variants of the GNU operating system, which use the kernel Linux, are now widely used; though these systems are often referred to as “Linux,” they are more accurately called GNU/Linux systems.

This is also the web site of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). FSF is the principal organizational sponsor of the GNU Project. FSF receives very little funding from corporations or grant-making foundations. We rely on support from individuals like you who support FSF's mission to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of Free Software users. Last year, over 67% of our operating funds came from individual donors. That ongoing support is the primary way we can continue our work. Please consider making a donation today, becoming an Associate Member of FSF, ordering a copy of Free Software, Free Society, and/or encouraging your company to become a Corporate Patron of FSF.

The FSF supports the freedoms of speech, press, and association on the Internet, the right to use encryption software for private communication, and the right to write software unimpeded by private monopolies.

http://www.fsf.org/

(f) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

http://www.pets911.com/index.php

For the dogs: http://www.pets911.com/forthedogs/index.php

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

"Treading Water" (2001) Casey has turned away from her family to work as a longshorewoman and live with her social-worker girlfriend, Alex, with whom she's deeply in love. When Casey visits home at Christmas time, she finds that her family's ways have not changed -- in fact, they've become even more judgmental than ever. Drama and emotions fly as two very different lifestyles try hard to find common ground on the beautiful coast of New England.
Starring: Angie Redman, Nina Landey
Director: Lauren Himmel
Genre: Drama

(*) (*) (*) (*) Loved the film this afternoon but the family drama really cut to the bone reminding me of when I used to attempt placating my domineering mother with her control freak "triangling" with my siblings. Thank God/dess for therapy years ago or I couldn't have watched this and enjoy it. I'm grateful that I'm not "in" a family like that anymore. (f) The DVD has an extended love scene on the menu for couples to watch..... (a)

Have a lovely Saturday afternoon.......Doc's taking a doggie nap across the entire sofa and I'm thinking of feedback for other learners in my two courses.....have to post them before Sunday night. (S)

Carpe diem,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

"Watching You" (2003) Catch some of the best lesbian-themed short films from around the world in this fascinating collection. Includes 4PM, a British movie in which a one-night stand brings comic relief; the Israeli feature Watching You, in which the green-eyed monster -- jealousy -- rears its hideous head; Dear Emily, an American short in which an older woman reminisces over her first crush … and more. Starring: Diane Flacks, Ann-Marie MacDonald
Director: Katherine Brooks Genre: Gay & Lesbian

(*) (*) (*) I liked this series of short films - talk about variety! The DVD is 134 minutes, so my Thursday late evening was delightfully enjoyable. Quiet evening break from writing and liked the film too. (k) (k)

Sun Thoughts,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Seems as if my interests and collections are rather eclectic. There's nothing like a quilt that my great grandmother made, but of course it's sealed in plastic, which is why I have bought a few others over the years.

http://quilting.about.com/library/weekly/aa030997.htm

If you ask most quilters what types of quilt designs of the past inspire them 99% will list Amish Quilts high on their list. Whether a quilter works in a contemporary style or a highly traditional vein, Amish Quilts are universally respected as a high point of quilting skill and design. Making a quilt with "too much" in it is all too easy, but creating a quilt as simple and sophisticated as the Amish designs is difficult.

Photos of quilts: http://quilting.about.com/library/houston99/bl-amishcommun.htm

One I bought about ten years ago (on the left): http://secure.wideworld.net/catalog/quilt/

Scholarly article that covers anything anyone wants to know: http://magazines.ivillage.com/countryliving/collect/ar/articles/0,12922,284656_293945,00.html

Amish Quilts: Beauty in Simplicity: http://www.womenfolk.com/quilting_history/amish.htm (nice and short article)

Quilt Museum on Lancaster, PA: http://www.quiltandtextilemuseum.com/

(*) (*) When I didn't have a headboard for my California King bed, I bought a wooden quilt hangar and a Kingsized quilt for the wall and it looked beautiful!


(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Walden at 150: What Would Thoreau Think of the 24-Hour News Cycle?
August 22, 2004 By ADAM COHEN NYTimes

In his time at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau
periodically returned to Concord, Mass., and when he did,
the village seemed to him like a "great news room." After
days alone, he found himself surrounded by gossip on all
sides, from the idle talk of his neighbors to the frivolous
reports in the newspapers. Thoreau was not immune to the
appeal of gossip, which he saw as "really as refreshing in
its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs."
But he worried that society was being dulled by its
fascination with trivial events. "Hardly a man takes a
half-hour's nap after dinner," Thoreau lamented, "but when
he wakes he holds up his head and asks, 'What's the news?'"

"Walden" is, to use one of Thoreau's favorite images, a
bottomless pond. Readers can always dive into it again, and
find something new. Thoreau's lyrical account of his two
years, two months, and two days living in a simple shack by
a pond was published 150 years ago this month, yet it
speaks directly to the information age. Buried in its
accounts of planting bean fields and staring out at the
night sky is some remarkably prescient media criticism.
Thoreau could not have imagined television news shows
endlessly yammering about Scott Peterson and Michael
Jackson, or newsstands jammed with accounts of celebrity
breakups. But he had a dead-on sense of how they could
undermine the human spirit and lead the nation astray.

Thoreau was born in Concord on July 12, 1817. This
fortuitous combination of place and time put him at the
center of one of America's greatest intellectual moments.
He became friends with Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and
wrote for the pathbreaking transcendentalist journal The
Dial. Even before moving to his cabin, Thoreau was known as
a loner and a contrarian, but he was capable of warm human
interactions. He forged a lifelong, if complicated,
friendship with Emerson, who once declared that "Henry is -
with difficulty - sweet."

"Walden" is an unusual work, more a digression-filled
letter from a friend than a sustained philosophical
argument. Still, Thoreau had some important principles to
lay down. He wrote it for the mass of Americans who, he
believed, "lead lives of quiet desperation," sleeping
through life, and missing the most important things going
on around them. His intent, he declared in the epigraph,
was to crow like a rooster in the morning "to wake my
neighbors up."

Much of "Walden" is Thoreau's account of how he stripped
life down to its essentials. For a book about returning to
the garden, however, it is oddly preoccupied with Thoreau's
thoughts about communications. The third chapter,
"Reading," is his extended complaint that Americans are not
reading the best books. It includes a scathing attack on
the Hollywood of the day, cheap novels that offered up "the
nine thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how
they loved as none had ever loved before."

But it is Thoreau's views on news that have the most
contemporary feel. He believed that sensationalist
newspaper articles - the mid-19th century equivalent of
local television news - were a distraction. "If we read of
one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one
house burned we never need read of another," he writes. "If
you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for
a myriad instances and applications?"

Thoreau was by no means opposed to news consumption, but he
believed society should focus intently on the news that
mattered. A few days before John Brown was hanged for
leading his antislavery insurrection in Harpers Ferry, Va.,
Thoreau wrote in his journal that he had been "absorbed of
late in Captain Brown's fate" and that it surprised him to
see other people "going about their affairs indifferent."
He believed in the importance of information not merely to
improve the mind, but as a guide to action. He disavowed
organized reform movements. "If I knew for a certainty that
a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of
doing me good," he wrote in "Walden," "I should run for my
life." But he was, in fact, not only keeping up with the
great moral causes of his day; he was fighting for them.

He crusaded for John Brown and helped lead slaves to
freedom on the underground railroad. In "Civil
Disobedience," he tells the well-known story of being
thrown in jail for refusing, in protest of slavery and the
war against Mexico, to pay his poll tax.

Thoreau would be disturbed by today's endless flood of
celebrity bulletins and made-for-cable-TV courtroom
face-offs not because he thought gossip was inherently
wrong, but because of what it was distracting America from.
He missed the opportunity to deplore the fact that people
who can rattle off the details of the voting in "American
Idol" know little about the presidential campaign, and that
the Laci Peterson killing gets more attention than North
Korea's nuclear program. But he anticipated, long before
the 24-hour news cycle and cellphones, that in modern
America the problem might well be not too little access to
information, but too much. "We are in great haste to
construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas," he
writes in "Walden," "but Maine and Texas, it may be, have
nothing important to communicate."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/opinion/22sun3.html?ex=1094188101&ei=1&en=c4e121693d858eb2

(*) (*) This has to be one of my favorites in terms of perspective on the mass media and the overwhelming tsunami of digital information that comes my way daily. Walden, that's it........those URL's especially the web cams at remote, peaceful palces in nature are probably one type of Walden for us folks who use the Internet for work as well as for personal communication. (*) (*)

Have a lovely week. (f)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

In the Classroom, Web Blogs Are the New Bulletin Boards
August 19, 2004 By JEFFREY SELINGO NYTimes

LAST spring, when Marisa L. Dudiak's second-grade class in
Frederick County, Md., returned from a field trip to a
Native American farm, all the students wanted to do was
talk about what they saw. But instead of leading a
discussion about the trip, Mrs. Dudiak had the students
sign on to their classroom Web log.

There they wrote about learning to use a bow and arrow,
sitting inside a tepee and petting a buffalo. The short
entries were typical of second-grade writing, with
misspelled words and simple sentences. Still, for Mrs.
Dudiak, the exercise proved more fruitful than a group
discussion or a handwritten entry in a personal journal.

"It allowed them to interact with their peers more quickly
than a journal," she said, "and it evened the playing
field." Mrs. Dudiak said she found that those who were
quiet in class usually came alive online.

Classroom Web logs, or blogs, many of which got their start
in the last school year, are becoming increasingly popular
with teachers like Mrs. Dudiak as a forum for expression
for students as young as the second-grade level and in
almost any subject. In the blogs, students write about how
they attacked a tough math problem, post observations about
their science experiments or display their latest art
projects.

For teachers, blogs are attractive because they require
little effort to maintain, unlike more elaborate classroom
Web sites, which were once heralded as a boon for teaching.
Helped by templates found at sites like tblog.com and
movabletype.org, teachers can build a blog or start a new
topic in an existing blog by simply typing text into a box
and clicking a button.

Such ease of use is the primary reason that Peter Grunwald,
an education consultant, predicts that blogs will
eventually become a more successful teaching tool than Web
sites.

"School Web sites are labor-intensive and are left up to
administrators and teachers," said Mr. Grunwald, whose
consulting firm in Washington focuses on the technology
link between home and school. "With blogging intended to be
a vehicle for students, the labor is built in. The work
that is required to refresh and maintain an interesting
blog is being provided by students."

One way teachers say they use blogs is to continue spirited
discussions that were cut short or to prolong
question-and-answer periods with guest speakers.

"With blogs, class doesn't have to end when the bell
rings," said Will Richardson, supervisor of instructional
technology and communications at Hunterdon Central Regional
High School in Flemington, N.J., who maintained blogs for
two journalism classes he taught last year.

Teachers say that the interactivity of blogs allowed them
to give students feedback much more quickly than before.

"I used to have this stack of hard-copy journals on my desk
waiting to be read," said Catherine Poling, an assistant
principal at Kemptown Elementary School, also in Frederick
County, Md., who ran a blog last year when she taught third
grade at a nearby school. "Now I can react to what they say
immediately, and students can respond to each other."

In one blog entry, for instance, Ms. Poling asked her
students what qualities they looked for when rating books
for a statewide award. When several students responded that
a book has to be creative and grab their attention, she
posted a follow-up question asking them if they used the
same criteria for both fiction and nonfiction books.

While such a question could have just as easily been posed
during a classroom conversation, teachers who use blogs say
that students put a lot more thought and effort into their
blog writing, knowing that parents and others may read
their work on the Web.

"They want to make sure that it's good enough to be read by
more than just their teacher," said Christopher S. Wright,
a third grade teacher at Wyman Elementary School in Rolla,
Mo.

Sometimes, the long reach of the Web has turned bloggers
into modern-day pen pals, allowing students to collaborate
easily with their peers in other classes or even other
countries. Some social studies classes at Hunterdon Central
Regional High School in Flemington, for instance, are using
a blog to study the Holocaust with high school students in
Krakow, Poland.

One of the goals of classroom blogs, advocates say, is to
get students to write more often. Even so, according to the
time stamps on classroom blogs, they are most heavily used
during the school day. Few entries seem to come after
school hours, and some teachers who have tried to keep
their blogs going during the summer say they have been
disappointed by the results. "I'm not getting a huge
response," said Mrs. Dudiak, the second grade teacher in
Frederick County.

That has led some teachers who are critical of blogs to
question wonder the technology has actually done anything
to interest students in writing. Critics also worry that
the casual nature of writing on the Web may encourage bad
habits that are hard to break, like e-mail-style
abbreviations, bad grammar and poor spelling.

While some teachers who run blogs encourage students to
write out their entries on paper first and then post them
online as if they were publishing the work, others view
blog writing as more free-flowing.

"Blogging is a different form of writing," Mrs. Dudiak
said. "They should proofread, but we are more concerned
about the content, not grammar."

It is unclear exactly how many teachers maintain blogs. Mr.
Richardson estimates their numbers in the thousands. The
Educational Bloggers Network, a loosely organized
clearinghouse, lists only about 130 members at its Web
site, www.ebn .weblogger.com. Whatever the number, the
ranks of bloggers are likely to grow in the coming school
year.

In some cases, teachers may not have much of a choice. The
Little Miami School District near Cincinnati plans to
require teachers to maintain blogs for their classes once
they are trained on the technology, which should be
completed sometime in the 2005-6 school year.

Debbi Contner, an assistant principal at one of the
district's six schools, Hamilton-Maineville Elementary, who
used a blog when she taught fourth grade at the school last
year, said that teachers become receptive to blogs once
they see how easy it is to set one up.

"If it gets kids excited about learning," Mrs. Contner
said, "we might as well try it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/19/technology/circuits/19blog.html?ex=1093927193&ei=1&en=e98a2dcc712808ff

(*) (*) Then cool thing is not only are kids using blongs as a tool for learning, computer and Internet-saavy adults, especially older folks are also learning more about their interests, concerns and passions through the use (even if it's reading only) of web logs or blogs. Yet another virtual tool for interactive (however not real time or synchronous) communication or discourse. No, not that kind. ;)

(o) Off to get some reading done......only 150 pages for one course this week before spending hours doing online research and creating two writen assignments to post. Not feeling well last night and today - I have an inner ear infection that is causing vertigo. It's no big thing though - just have to keep my head level and not move too fast :o I guess it's been more hectic lately than I thought since feeling dizzy (truly) makes me take it more slowly to maintain equalibrium. It never ceases to amaze me how my body will tell me when I need to slow down - although admittedly it takes feeling like this first before I'll actually do something. :| (*) (*)

Thanks for letting me add some more personal sharing than my usual short opinion or commentary. Have a lovely last week of August. (f)

Hugs,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 Posted: 1230 GMT (2030 HKT)
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Comedian Ellen DeGeneres is getting a promotion -- to supreme being.

DeGeneres will star as God in a remake of the 1977 comedy "Oh, God!" The original starred George Burns as the creator and John Denver as a supermarket manager tapped as a new prophet.

"Ellen is a strong comedian and she has always done material about God and questions about God," said Jerry Weintraub, who produced the original movie and also will oversee the remake.

Weintraub said he'll hire a screenwriter and director with the aim to shoot the movie during a break in DeGeneres' schedule from her talk show next summer.

Though successful on the small screen, DeGeneres misfired in an earlier transition to film with the romantic-comedy flop "Mr. Wrong." She helped score a hit with her voice work on last year's animated tale "Finding Nemo."

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Movies/08/24/people.degeneres.ap/index.html

(*) This ought to be a scream, so to speak. ;)

Have a cool (temp-wise) Tuesday.

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

August 23, 2004 San Jose Mercury News
Michael Powell Reflects by Dan Gillmor

If Michael Powell is still chairman of the Federal Communications Commission this time next year, no matter who is elected president in November, it will come as a major surprise. Powell hasn't announced any plans, but in several recent public appearances he seemed more in a valedictory mood than anything else: reflective about his seven-year tenure at the commission, including the past four as chairman.

At the Progress and Freedom Foundation gathering today he talked at length about some of what he considered the less-known achievements, including what he called a major shift in the way the staff operates. And he warned, as he has again and again, that regulation in the Internet age should be done with the lightest possible touch, or else we risk a long delay in seeing the Net reach the potential it should.

Powell was among friends here. The PFF is a free-market oriented organization, and you could almost hear the members of this audience thinking Amen to themselves as he spoke.

His message does resonate in many ways, and it always has even when FCC policies tended to belie the words. Entrenched incumbents have gone to great lengths to keep their advantages.

Again today, he spoke of a broadband revolution that will be much more than just two data pipes -- DSL and cable -- and fiercely competitive. There's no doubt that the commission under his leadership has made some excellent strides in wireless, particularly in pushing more use of unlicensed spectrum.

But some FCC decisions have tended to reinforce the long lead the Baby Bells and cable companies already have, giving them the right to establish an entrenched position in true broadband, as opposed to the pathetic imitation we have today. And Powell is plainly in no mood to help competitors get any traction on those pipes. (He's also been craven in his kowtowing to Congress on the "indecency" issue, which he must find an enormous waste of time. If so, he should have said so.)

Upcoming rules governing voice over Internet Protocol will be one of the defining moments of the next generation of communications and the policy that will govern it, Powell said. VoIP is either a voice service, subject to myriad old-fashioned regulations, or its just another Internet data application, he observed. If it's just data, the implications are huge.

Powell, asked to say what he's point to in his running of the FCC as key achievements, was quick to list initiatives to change the nature of the organization itself. The staff now looks forward, not backward, on regulatory issues, he said, with special attention to how technology is changing the landscape. And there's regular internal training to keep up -- including an internal "university" the staff lawyers must attend.

I wonder what government would be like if top appointees were all as smart and thoughtful as Michael Powell.

http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/

(*) (*) and it will also be extremely difficult to wiretap voice-over-IP (Internet) as in telephone calls. <scratching head> Is THAT why Linksys and other home Internet router and other equipment have been so slow to offer V-IP products - they believe that there'll be federal legislation to damper growth? (*)

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

August 21, 2004
Olympic-Sized Arrogance (Dan Gillmor of www.siliconvalley.com)

AP: Olympians largely barred from blogging. Athletes may be the center of attention at the Olympic Games, but don't expect to hear directly from them online -- or see snapshots or video they've taken.

UPDATED
This is about greed, nothing more and nothing less. It is about the historically corrupt International Olympic Committee's desire to please the giant media organizations to which it has sold "rights" to tell and show the world what is happening.

The irony here is that the olympic officials are inadvertently telling us something about the future of journalism, though I'm certain they don't understand it themselves, in the context of their heavy-handed (and illegal?) action. Because the more that regular folks -- OK, that's a stretch for the athletes -- put their own work on the Web or send it to each other by other means, the more they are becoming some of tomorrow's journalists.

But the move is ridiculous. If an athlete phones a friend and reports what's happened, and the friend posts it online, is that somehow breaking the rules?

Go further. Look past today's technology. What's coming will utterly wreck the Big Media monopoly over Olympic images, and all Big Event images. When all spectators have a high-quality video camera in their phones, will the powers-that-be ban phones? Unlikely. But even if they could ban phones that are obvious, what will they do when we're carrying video cameras in the buttons on our shirts, and when our eyeglasses contain phones or other transmitting devices?

I hope athletes break this rule right and left. I also hope that they declare independence someday from the cynical and corrupt organizations that have run international sports for so long. The games are about the athletes, or should be.

(*) (*) hear , hear! I have been wondering why friends in Athens haven't sent me photos as promised, or why many of their emails to me have been completely empty of content - they're being stripped out as they pass through local Internet servers at Olympic Village in Athens! I wonder why ABC's World News Tonight or some other huge news outlet hasn't picked this story up - well, duh, NBC has absolutely exclusive coverage which blocks out other news distribution organizations. Oops. Maybe the Internet masses will get this story out to J.Q. Public.

(o) Time for getting into some other serious (as in school) readings this a.m.

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

And Now, Another Olympic Moment
By JOHN KENNEY

The scene is a conference room at NBC Olympic broadcasting headquarters in Athens. Three people sit at a table: a network producer, researcher and writer.

PRODUCER So who's next?

RESEARCHER (referring to a folder in front of him) Let's see, a Romanian swimmer.

PRODUCER O.K. What can we do with him?

WRITER Is his mother alive?

RESEARCHER Yes, she is. Why?

PRODUCER Too bad.

WRITER Any family history of illness?

RESEARCHER It says here that his aunt had shingles once.

WRITER This could be good.

PRODUCER This could be very good. Were they close?

RESEARCHER He only met her once. Apparently she was insane. Claimed she was a porpoise.

PRODUCER I like this. One meeting with her is all it took.

RESEARCHER What are you talking about?

WRITER A profound meeting. Life altering. Spurred him to greatness.

PRODUCER He has a picture of her.

RESEARCHER There's no mention of that here.

WRITER In his mind.

PRODUCER He sees her face when he runs.

RESEARCHER He's a swimmer.

WRITER Even better. She gave him his first bathing suit.

RESEARCHER Where are you coming up with this? He was 2 years old when he met her and he didn't start competing until he was 15. She was in an asylum!

PRODUCER The connection's there. Can't you see it?

WRITER I see it. His healthy mother still remembers the meeting. The child glowed.

PRODUCER But in the intervening years, bad things happened. Communist repression.

WRITER The boy loves his trunks. From his aunt. What boy doesn't love his swim trunks?

PRODUCER He swims for his aunt, the aunt who can't swim. Do you see? This is his mission. He loves her still.

WRITER Yes. Of course he does. Perhaps she's terminal.

PRODUCER I love it. Write it. I'll book a crew. Who's next?

RESEARCHER A Belgian cyclist.

(Pause)

PRODUCER Hmm. Belgium.

WRITER It's cold in Belgium.

RESEARCHER It is?

WRITER Often. So he rides at night.

RESEARCHER Why would he ride his bike at night? That would be insane. Do you know how fast they -

PRODUCER Shhh. Go on.

WRITER His bike is old. It's not a new bike. The bike was a gift from his mother, a charwoman.

PRODUCER Yes, she's a charwoman. I like the word charwoman. Poor. There is no money. But he loves the sport too much to stop. He rides at night. Waits for her to come home from cleaning.

WRITER He fashions a new bike from wood. He's poor, you see.

RESEARCHER What on earth are you - this guy's a professional. He's sponsored by Nike. He started his own software company. He's a billionaire!

(Pause)

WRITER I once read of a child who needed a kidney.

RESEARCHER What?

PRODUCER Be quiet.

WRITER The boy was ill. From Chicago, I believe.

PRODUCER Bosnia.

WRITER Better. There was a war. Winter. Frozen mud. Dysentery.

PRODUCER The boy -

WRITER Orphan -

PRODUCER Beautiful. The orphan lay near death. He needed a kidney -

RESEARCHER But what does this have to do with -

PRODUCER Someone must give him one.

WRITER Someone must sacrifice an organ for the orphan -

RESEARCHER Please tell me what this has to do -

PRODUCER The Norwegian skeet shooter -

RESEARCHER He's a Belgian cyclist!

PRODUCER Sure. He saw the story -

RESEARCHER What story?

WRITER It touched home.

PRODUCER He's never forgotten it.

WRITER Who could forget? He rides for the boy.

PRODUCER I love it. Write it. We've got a crew in Prague now. Who's next?

RESEARCHER A Nigerian fencer.

WRITER My God, this is a dream come true. Where is Nigeria?

PRODUCER Near Belgium.

RESEARCHER Africa, on the west coast.

WRITER Do you know what I think?

PRODUCER Tell me.

WRITER I think he's gay.

PRODUCER Fantastic. A gay Belgian gymnast.

RESEARCHER Nigerian fencer! And he's married with three children!

PRODUCER No matter. Lifelong dream, to fence in the Olympics.

WRITER Swords, foils, epées. Marvelous words. First time on a plane, probably.

RESEARCHER For the love of - he's a pilot! He went to Stanford!

PRODUCER Stanford. Of course. Don't you see? It's so obvious.

RESEARCHER What?

PRODUCER Tell him.

WRITER He could have stayed in the West. But he went back to his village after college in America to help the starving children.

PRODUCER He saved many of them. Operated on them in the night. He is a doctor. Practiced fencing with a broomstick.

RESEARCHER He's not a doctor! He works on Wall Street.

PRODUCER Of course he does. All the better.

RESEARCHER What are you talking about?

WRITER His one chance for redemption.

PRODUCER For the little boy he lost.

RESEARCHER What boy?

WRITER There was a boy. He lost him. On the operating table.

RESEARCHER He's not a doctor!

PRODUCER Perhaps he knows first aid -

WRITER He sure well better know first aid if he's going to be operating on poor little children in Chad -

RESEARCHER Nigeria!

WRITER You're missing the point. The boy died. Now he swims for the boy.

RESEARCHER He's a fencer!

PRODUCER Can we make him a swimmer? Ask him if he'd like to swim instead. Who's next?

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/opinion/25kenney.html
John Kenney, a former advertising copywriter, is writing a novel.

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

I can just hear the Chicago song about the 1968 Dem Convention as I read this Village Voice article. In Chicago in 1968, and in New York in 2004, these are lessons forgotten. Scary how many similarities there are and Nixon won then and this author believes that what happens in New York next week could help Bush get re-elected. Mass media and instantaneous global communications. :|

"Protesters risk playing into GOP hands. Get Mad. Act Out. Re-Elect George Bush."
by Rick Perlstein August 24th, 2004 Village Voice:

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0434/perlstein.php

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Tombston: movie year: 1993
movie genre: western
composer: Bruce Broughton
label: Intrada (MAF 7038D)

1. The Cowboys

2. A Family

3. Arrival in Tombstone

4. Josephine

5. Thespian Overture

6. Gotta Go to Work

7. Fortuitous Encounter

8. Street Standoff

9. The O.K. Corral

10. Aftermath

11. Cowboys' Funeral

12. Morgan's Death

13. Wyatt's Revenge

14. The Former Fabian

15. Brief Encounters

16. Finishing It

17. Doc and Wyatt

(*) (*) (*) (*) I WANT what Wyatt and Doc Holliday had in terms of friendship.
Is there a womyn who relates? Cool if that is so.

(o) (o) Back to graduate studies........Is there a butch who loves a high-IQ yet very, very sexy lady?????

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

August 26, 2004
A Digital Divide

Everyone covets a piece of Apple Computer's iPod. And for good reason. It essentially defines what consumers want in a digital music player: capacity, style, seamless integration with personal computers and, through them, access to an enormous musical database. The iPod itself has been wildly successful with consumers, and that translates into profits. The iTunes Music Store has been no less successful in its way, though it has been slower to make money. Apple's business strategy is to maintain control over both the music and its digital player.

Some companies want to outdo the iPod with players of their own; others aim to compete with the iTunes Music Store. And some, like RealNetworks, want to be able to sell music from their online store for use on the iPod. That has led to an escalating feud between Apple and RealNetworks.

The issue is how to protect the copyright of the products you buy - digital music in this case. Apple uses proprietary software, called FairPlay, to keep you from making illegal copies of the songs you download from the iTunes Music Store. Apple has steadfastly refused to license this software to RealNetworks. In late July, RealNetworks introduced a software called Harmony, which allows its music to be played on an iPod. In other words, RealNetworks mimics Apple's software without licensing it. Litigation will surely ensue.

If nothing else, this dispute demonstrates the increasing importance that digital rights play in our lives. Digitally encoding music, selling it and sending it over the Internet, not to mention carrying thousands of songs around on a music player the size of a box of cough drops - these things are easy to do. What's hard, and yet what makes it all possible, is creating the software bottleneck that protects the rights of copyright owners.

It would be better for consumers if Apple began licensing its digital rights management software, only because the iTunes Music Store will not be able to lock up access to all the copyrighted music in the world. But RealNetworks' contention that Apple is stifling freedom of choice is self-serving. You can play music from any CD on an iPod, once it has been digitally copied, and the device works on PC's and Macs. Some critics like to argue that Apple is making the same mistake that it made by not licensing its operating system back in the 1980's. At the moment, Apple seems to hold most of the cards.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/opinion/26thurs3.html?hp

(*) (*) Apple should license its software......they seem to be repeating what they did to themselves as Mac users back in the 1980s. Glad that I have a PC in addition to a G4 laptop. ;)

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Concerns Mount over Major Web Strike
Tue Aug 24, 5:24 PM ET
David Morgenstern - eWEEK

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1738&ncid=1212&e=10&u=/zd/20040824/tc_zd/133957

Safe, smooth travels whether virtual or in person.

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

2 hours, 52 minutes ago
By Susan Page, USA TODAY

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=676&ncid=676&e=1&u=/usatoday/20040826/ts_usatoday/marriedsinglestatusaffectshowwomenvote

(*) One vote at a time, we can get Bush out in November.

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

okay so here goes: When Harry met Sally:
okay so I have the DVDs:

Bummer. (k)

Love,
Sweetlady (f) (f) (f)

[sweetlady]

http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/kamenetz/

For important information during Sunday's enormous march, United for Peace and Justice is advising people to bring a portable radio tuned to WBAI, 99.5 FM, broadcasting live all day.

Activists can also sign up for cell phone text messages here (sign up for the comms_dispatch group). The NYC Comms Collective and its network of unidentified scouts say they will be advising activists where and when things are happening tomorrow and throughout the week.

(*) Oh, please let there be peaceful demonstrations (f) (f)

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

http://www.villagevoice.com/infocus/rnc.php

"Of pride and punches: The fight for gay rights: Rebel Yells"
by Danial Adkison August 24th, 2004 12:40 PM Village Voice
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0434/adkison.php

(f) (f) Have a lovely Sunday and start of your week.

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

A presidential potpourri of cuts, blunders, stonewalls, deceptions, and distractions
by Wayne Barrett, special reporting by Daniel Magliocco
August 24th, 2004 10:25 AM Village Voice

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0434/barrett.php

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Desperately seeking women voters, Bush sends in his own
by James Ridgeway August 26th, 2004 5:40 PM

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0434/mondo7.php

New York: Jittery over the women's vote, George W. Bush's campaign will dump all its heavy-duty female firepower into New York. In an event called the "W Stands for Women" event at the Waldorf-Astoria on Monday afternoon, the dais will be full to overflowing with his mom, Barbara Bush; his daughters, Barbara and Jenna; his sister, Doro; and Dick Cheney's wife, Lynne (with her straight daughter, Lyn).

Bush can focus on women because he probably thinks he has a lock on the other gender. Young white men in the South are said to love him because of the president’s swaggering "Fuck You" style. Not to mention the Washington press corps, which gets down every time it gets to see Bush shifting his balls around like an Alabama state trooper.

However, most women may not see things in quite the same light. Many of them view Bush as a disaster for themselves and their families. More women than men vote. They potentially are a force that can be easily energized to support lackluster politicians, even, when push comes to shove, the mind-numbing Kerry. If Kerry could pull his ear away from the drones at the Democratic Leadership Council long enough to attend to a few of their interests, women might very well turn out to be his secret weapon.

In the 2000 election, women represented 52 percent of the total electorate, but 22 million unmarried women didn’t bother to vote, according to the Kerry campaign, which claims that 73 percent of that group now want a change in leadership.

According to the August 25 USA Today, a survey of Gallup polls over the first half of 2004 show that, overall, registered women voters are evenly split between Bush and Kerry. Married women tend to support Bush, but unmarried women tend to support Kerry.

There are signs that Bush is ready to move to some sort of compromise with pro-choice Republican women. Earlier this week, the party's platform committee voted 74-18 for language stressing that the GOP is the party of the "open door," contending that its members "respect and accept" that Republicans "have deeply held and sometimes differing views."

"We are encouraged that pro-choice Republicans and social conservatives are finally at the same table," said Jennifer Stockman, national co-chair of the Republican Majority for Choice, a group that might well cause problems for Bush's re-election campaign. Stockman added, "We are obviously disappointed with the strong anti-choice language throughout the party platform. We have a long way to go to end the intra-party fighting, but this is a positive step in the right direction."

The Republican right's direction, however, has been well-known, particularly its anti-abortion stance. But that's just the tip of the iceberg: Bush's entire social policy is organized around sex roles, so that you qualify for things like welfare, tax breaks, unemployment insurance, and health care based on where you do it, how you do it, when you do it, and, of course, with whom you do it. To the Christian fundamentalists, fucking makes the world go 'round.

And there are other aspects of Bush’s social policies that hit women where they live. Last night, The Feminist Press, which published a collection of essays on administration policies called The W Effect: Bush's War on Women, edited by Laura Flanders (feministpress.org/newreleases), held a symposium on the subject. At the event, as in the book, one author after another rattled off the different ways women have suffered under the current administration. A few examples:

More older women than men spend their last years mired in poverty. While Bush breezily says that eliminating taxes on dividends will "help America’s seniors make ends meet," fewer than one-quarter of older Americans—and only one-fifth of older women—ever see a stock dividend. Only 6 percent of black and Hispanic women live in families that receive any stock dividend.

The large numbers of women who don’t have health insurance (huge numbers among blacks and Hispanics) put off getting care for diseases in their early stages and often seek treatment after it's too late. For the cost of Bush's $726 billion "growth" package, perhaps the nation could provide health insurance for all poor Americans.

Contrary to the notion that women have weathered recessions better than men, the truth is that women’s unemployment rates have grown faster than men's, and long-term unemployment among women has increased.

Perhaps the most insidious attacks on women have come from Bush's clever manipulation of government reports. For one thing, the government doesn't do the number of studies and reports, especially on health issues, that it once dead. Even worse is simply an absence of information—a sort of disinformation by omission.

The National Council for Research on Women’s recent report Missing tells in detail just how the government goes about the process of manipulation and of eliminating key information from public scrutiny. Among the most egregious examples occurred when the government sought to make an unconvincing and unsupportable connection between abortion and breast cancer. Only after furious complaints was the propaganda about a connection removed.

And there's Bush's ceaseless prodding and pushing against condoms. "Despite research, the government is now unwilling to state that condom use is important to protect women against HIV and sexually transmitted diseases," according to Missing. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) fact sheet that focused on the advantages of using condoms to prevent sexually transmitted diseases was revised in December 2002 to cast doubt on condom effectiveness, calling evidence on condom use and transmission of HIV and other STDs "inconclusive." The new version focuses exclusively on abstinence, warning that "condom use cannot guarantee absolute protection against any STD." A straightforward guide to the correct use of condoms disappeared, as did a "Programs that Work" section, which listed successful comprehensive sex-education programs and cited peer-reviewed studies that showed no increase or earlier occurrence of sexual activity among teens taught about condoms. Similar changes in information about condoms appeared on the web site of the USAID, which funds programs around the world.

(f) (f) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

By KATIE ZEZIMA Published: August 27, 2004 New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/27/education/27mit.html

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Aug. 26 - The Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Thursday named Susan Hockfield, provost of Yale University, as its 16th president. She succeeds Charles M. Vest, who announced his retirement in December after 14 years in the post.

Dr. Hockfield, a 53-year-old neuroscientist, is the first woman and the first person from the life sciences to achieve the presidency at M.I.T., a traditionally male-dominated university that built its reputation on engineering.

She said in an interview that she hoped to strengthen the spirit of collaboration among M.I.T.'s schools, especially as the boundaries between biological and engineering sciences continue to blur.

Dr. Hockfield said she also planned to continue the university's tradition of being a significant voice in national policy in science, technology and education, and of lobbying for additional money for scientific research. Students have been driven away from the physical sciences in the last decade, she said, because the government has "underinvested" in those disciplines compared with its spending on the biological sciences.

She also hopes to bolster math and science education in kindergarten through 12th grade, subjects in which she feels the United States lags behind other countries.

"The big challenge has to do with how the nation views science and technology, the investment in research," she said.

The appointment furthers a marked shift at the university since 1999, when it issued a report, undertaken by female faculty members, concluding that women there suffered from widespread if unintentional discrimination. In 2001, nine universities, including M.I.T., Harvard and Yale, pledged to work together toward gender parity.

Members of the presidential search committee and the M.I.T. Corporation, the university's board of trustees, said that in Dr. Hockfield, they had chosen the best candidate for the job with little regard to sex.

The significance of the selection was not lost on the campus, however.

"It could not have been imaginable to any of us that this could have happened," said Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology who undertook the sex discrimination report with 16 colleagues in 1994. "It's a milestone for sure. It's something you really have to take the day off and sit back and say, 'This is what social change looks like.' ''

Dr. Hockfield joined Yale's faculty in 1985 and was dean of its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 1998 to 2002. Before joining Yale, she worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Rochester and graduate degrees from Georgetown University School of Medicine.

She will assume her new post in early December, at an institution with a $5.1 billion endowment and 20,000 students and staff members.

(h) (h) How very cool.

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

This was in an email that my mom received during my visit with her and my dad earlier this week:

I dreamt that I went to Heaven and an angel was showing me around. We walked side-by-side inside a large workroom filled with angels.

My angel guide stopped in front of the first section and said, "This is the Receiving Section. Here, all petitions to God said in prayer are received."
I looked around in this area, and it was terribly busy with so many angels sorting out petitions written on voluminous paper sheets and scraps from people all over the world.
Then we moved on down a long corridor until we reached the second section.

The angel then said to me, "This is the Packaging and Delivery Section. Here, the graces and blessings the people asked for are processed and delivered to the living persons who asked for them."

I noticed again how busy it was there. There were many angels working hard at that station, since so many blessings had been requested and were being packaged for delivery to Earth.

Finally at the farthest end of the long corridor we stopped at the door of a very small station. To my great surprise, only one angel was seated there, idly doing nothing. "This is the Acknowledgment Section," my angel friend quietly admitted to me. He seemed embarrassed. "How is it that? There's no work going on here?" I asked.

"So sad," the angel sighed. "After people receive the blessings that they asked for, very few send back acknowledgments.

"How does one acknowledge God's blessings?" I asked.

"Simple," the angel answered. "Just say, "Thank you, Lord."

"What blessings should they acknowledge?" I asked.

"If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep ... you are richer than 75% of this world. "If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish, you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy.

"And if you get this on your own computer, you are part of the 1% in the world who has that opportunity."

Also ......

"If you woke up this morning with more health than illness ...... you are more blessed than the many who will not even survive this day.

"If you have never experienced the fear in battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation ... you are ahead of 700 million people in the world.

"If you can attend a church meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture or death ... you are envied by, and more blessed than, three billion people in the world.

"If your parents are still alive and still married .. you are very rare.

If you can hold your head up and smile, you are not the norm, you are unique to all those in doubt and despair."

Ok, what now? How can I start?

If you can read this message, you just received a double blessing in that someone was thinking of you as very special and you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world who cannot read at all.

Have a good day, COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS, and if you want, pass this along to remind everyone else how blessed we all are.

"For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

Posted on Thu, Sep. 02, 2004 Associated Press

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/9566264.htm

A California company that claims it owns the patents for streaming video over computer networks is lowering its royalty demands of the nation's colleges and universities.

Newport Beach, Calif.-based Acacia Media Technologies Corp. has asked dozens of colleges to pay up or face potential lawsuits over their use of streaming video in areas like distance learning and video lectures.

Some colleges, as well as education and technology groups, say Acacia's claims are invalid and worry that they could threaten college educational activities. In July, Acacia lost a key preliminary ruling in a similar dispute with adult entertainment Web sites, but the company insists its patent claims remain strong.

Acacia now says it has responded to college concerns with a more generous licensing proposal. The arrangement, detailed in a letter dated Thursday, would exempt colleges from paying royalties on streaming video that produces no income. Colleges with small distance-learning programs could be exempted, and the minimum royalty for larger colleges could be as low as $1,000 annually.

``We are looking to be reasonable business people,'' said Acacia executive vice president and general counsel Rob Berman. But, he said colleges, which reap hundreds of millions of dollars from licenses on patents they develop, still have an obligation to sign on or stop using streaming video.

``To me it is incomprehensible how they could expect others to respect their intellectual properties while ignoring others','' he said.

Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on Education, which is advising colleges on the matter, said: ``For reasons unbeknownst to us, Acacia has reviewed its position and has adopted a much-welcomed, more conciliatory position.'' However, he said ACE still advises colleges not to sign licensing deals pending an analysis of Acacia's claims.

(*) (*) still too expensive when considering all of the vendors and service firms who have their hand out for MPEG 4 licensing....... (*) (*)

(k) ,
Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

LOS ANGELES (AP) - The Walt Disney Co. has postponed an expansion of its video-on-demand service while it explores partnerships that could result in a deal to include the service in set-top boxes, computers or other devices.

Disney launched its MovieBeam service in three cities last September and had hoped to add three more cities by the end of this year with a national rollout as early as next year.

The service transmits movies using a technology called "datacasting