Facebook mentality

It's amazing to me how creepily puerile our civic discourse has become. Today, former unconfirmedbythesenate ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, told a gathering of conservatives that maybe the Soviet Union would nuke an American city. Then he suggested "Chicago"--and all the conservatives cheered and laughed.

This follows closely on the California mayor's postcard showing watermelons growing on the White House lawn and the NY Post's vile chimpanzee cartoon.

I signed up with Facebook last summer just for fun. About a week later, I noticed that the communicative style of Facebookers included lots of teen-age style insults: "Crocs make you look like a dumb ass." So I inactivated my membership. I reactivated it this week when someone sent me a Facebook message, but I've discovered the twisted remarks are still plentiful. For example, I saw this message "99 things you should have heard of by now...unless you're a loser, or old, or something...."

Or "Take our IQ test"...and below that, "Two people in (my state) think you're dumb."

Is this how people talk to each other now? Is this why adults in responsible public positions are talking like demented adolescents? Katie Couric's "There's the white guy."

It sounds like pure Facebook mentality to me.

The Colors Game....

In my numerous years, I've spent considerable time on buses. The ones in Minneapolis provided LONG, BORING rides and even longer and more boring (also FREEZING) waits at the bus stop. To occupy my mind (I couldn't read because I'd fall asleep and miss my stop--annoying here, but a major tragedy there), I'd play the colors game. I'd look around for the first RED thing I could see, then YELLOW, then ORANGE, then GREEN, then BLUE, then PURPLE, etc. And by the time I found something orange or purple, I'd be at my destination.

I played it today as I walked to Whole Foods. Not a bad walk--maybe two miles--and as the day was lovely and warm, I took pictures of what I saw.

Unfortunately, I never got a photo of the blue sky, cuz every time I stopped for a red light and looked around, I never found just the perfect spot of blue before the light changed and I had to keep moving.

RED: a whole building!


ORANGE: I don't know what this is. If I ever see the gardener, I'll ask.


YELLOW: wonderful pansies, the tough little flower that blooms all winter here.


PURPLE: Johnny Jump-ups, newly planted between clumps of pansies.


GREEN: Somebody painted green bricks by the doorway of an electrical repair shop. I loved the jaunty hue.


BLUE: That's me cuz I didn't capture any.

Don't like the stimulus? Don't accept the $$

Bob Cesca hit the nail on the head in his HuffPost column, "Sean Hannity's Ridiculous War against Socialism."

Cesca says, among other things,

I'm calling upon Sean Hannity to use his prime time television program as a platform to rally Republican politicians, cable news hacks and citizens alike to refuse delivery of not just recovery bill spending, but all so-called "socialist" government programs. Send it all back. End American socialism now! But if the money somehow gets through Hannity's blockade and steams its way to socialist Republican governors like Charlie Crist and Arnold Schwarzenegger (embracing "economic girly man" status), and if those jobs are created anyway, Sean Hannity ought to heroically command his viewers in these states to not accept those jobs. They're socialist jobs, after all.

You tell 'em, Cesca! Gene Robinson of the WashPost said pretty much the same thing last night on Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. Robinson said he'd start believing the GOP as soon as he hears the first "No thanks" when a Senator who voted AGAINST the stimulus said he or she would tell the people in his or her state NOT TO ACCEPT THE MONEY.

When pigs fly.....

How can anyone believe the GOP? Even Pat Robertson finally said something sensible when he criticized Limbaugh's "I hope Obama fails" pronouncement. Robertson said, "That's a terrible thing to say." Yup. It is. And the GOP are terrible, horrible representatives of the people who elected them, many of whom now are suffering in the economic maelstrom. Not only that, they don't give a doggone about the country.

Sunday Comix

Here's a Valentine for all my readers

My friend Lida came over today to have lunch and work on her new book (#7, I think). Lida says she loves being 88 but can't wait till she can say she's 90. Why is she still creating after her long, fruitful career as a photographer, writer, and artist? It's her nature: she's curious, alert, engaged in life. The "statement" she loves is a sentence from a review in the Washington Post praising her work. She loves it the way she loves all praise and encouragement. It feeds her remarkable energy.

back to the future....

Time Goes By has been ruminating out loud for a number of years on getting old, and yesterday, she tackled the LANGUAGE associated with, er, senescence. In her post, "Five years of blogging about age: Language," she promises that if someone like me gets mugged, the resulting newspaper article will say something like, “The mugger got away with 70-year-old Jane Doe’s handbag, but the elderly woman was unharmed.” When I read that, I laughed out loud. "Elderly?" The hell you say! (Actually, if someone like me gets mugged in DC, there probably won't be any newspaper article at all except maybe for a line item in the little neighborhood paper's "police report" column: "Georgia Ave NW, 4800 block: woman, 72, held up at gunpoint, 2 a.m.)

I've been doing a lot of walking this month, and it's changed the whole rhythm of my life. I almost feel transported back to the streets of Fargo, North Dakota, where I grew up. In the 1940s, when I was in grade school, nobody drove a car unless they had a demonstrated need (doctors, for example) and permission to do so. Just about everyone had a family auto in their garage, but the wheels were off, and the thing sat on blocks of concrete to hold it above the dirt floor. There were buses, but they ran maybe once an hour and went in only two directions--from downtown and back again. I not only never SAW a taxi, I'd never heard of one. So we walked everywhere--or rode our bikes, or skated, in the ice-covered streets. Our neighbor Rex even had a horse and cutter that he got around in, and he'd give us a ride if he was going the same way. I didn't like it. It was fast and scary, and the runners screeched on the pavement when they hit a bare patch in the ice.

I'm discovering that life changes shape dramatically when you go by "shank's mare," as my mother-in-law used to say. I don't have as much leisure time, but my days have begun to feel very leisurely. I have time for maybe two or three things instead of half a dozen, and yet at the end of the day, I'm spent and content. And I'm realizing that even at my advanced age, there's still that very independent 3-year-old lurking inside me. Elderly, my left foot! Who ever tells you this kind of stuff about, um, getting old?

Friday cleanup

How was our week? I took a look around the 'net, especially in Daily Kos:

Cenk Uygur's diary on the bankers' visit to Congress. Hey...the Congress Critters (as Kay calls 'em) removed the cap on the bankers' salaries after they hauled them in and gave them a good scolding?!

Barbara Morrill aka BarbinMD's diary "Where were the economists?" Here's proof of the kind of pap we're getting as media consumers.

Truthout.org, which I love, delivers to my inbox several times a day. Here's one interesting Truthout.org offering this past week: ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry's "The GOP's Jihad on Obama"

Now it's the weekend....time to clean this place, take another long walk, and get ready for a dinner guest. Living here in Petworth is reminding me of life in Fargo in the 1940s--that is, we walked just about everywhere, no matter the weather. The distance from my apartment here to the Giant Store just off 14th St on Monroe St NW or the new Yes! Organic Market a few blocks further down 14th at V St NW, feels about the same distance as the trip my mother and i took several times a week to Grondahl's grocery store.

Don't read, don't buy; don't turn it on , don't watch....

So the News Corp has lost over $6 billion this year....and the NYTimes has sustained deep losses in advertising revenue. Is it possible that at least some of this is due to readers and viewers becoming more discerning in their choices of what to read or watch? Are they getting fed up with the neocon ideology?

From here, it feels as if the media are going all out to recapture their losses by attacking President Obama and by linking any progress in Washington to the Republicans. The Washington Post today had an article about the stimulus' making it through the Senate. The photo showed TWO Republicans and ONE Democrat--as if the Repugs have not been dragging their feet in serious numbers--and the headline trumpeted "Bipartisan deal eases way for stimulus package in Senate." That may be true, but it gives more credit to the Repugs than they deserve.

The WaPo is actually ADDING to its mostly conservative columnists. They hired Bill Kristol after he was recently dumped by the NYT. The February 9 edition of New York magazine says in "Who's Right for the Times" on p. 11, "It's hard to imagine that Kristol's presence expanded the paper's readership by a single person." Imagination, however, may be leading the WaPo astray on this. They may think the average US citizen is not totally fed up with what the neocons have wrought over the past eight years. They may imagine they have not gone far enough to the right.

Happy Birthday, Dad - repost

[NOTE: I posted this two years ago, but I like it, so here it is again. I always get Dad's birthday mixed up with my h.s. boyfriend's, whose birthday was yesterday, Feb. 3.]


Tomorrow will be the 115th anniversary of the birth of my father, Francis Thomas Dwyer. He was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on February 5, 1894, and he died at Shoreham, Minnesota, on January 3, 1968, a night of bitter cold. (It was -41 degrees in Bismarck the following morning when I dropped off the girls with our neighbor Iris and took the train to Detroit Lakes for his funeral. Tom was not yet born.)

Here are some of the photos I have of Dad. There are more, but they're not organized, to put it mildly. These are the framed photos I have in the den.

First is the earliest photo I have (maybe anyone has) of Dad. He's maybe a year to 18 months. Notice his lovely blonde ringlets. Dad's hair was blondish until he was 13, when it turned black. It stayed curly, although he always combed it flat so that it wouldn't curl.

The bright-eyed girl is my Aunt Ellen, who was a year and a half older than Dad.



The next photo shows Dad with Ellen and little Edgar in the middle. Dad was the oldest boy in their family of seven children: Ellen, Francis, Edgar, Rose, Ann, and Mary. The seventh child, Theresa (Susan says "Mary"), died as an infant, and she followed Francis.



Here's a photo of Grandma and Grandpa and their lovely family of teenagers. It's the only photo I have of the whole group, and the only one I have of my grandmother. The two boys, Edgar and Francis, are in the back row. In the middle row are Ellen (soon to become Sister Mary Mark, I.H.M. (Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Monroe, Michigan), Mary, Ann, and Rose. Grandma was teaching school in Cherokee, Iowa, when Grandpa came back from Iowa Normal School in Cedar Falls with a teaching certificate. His father had wanted him to stay home and work the farm, but he did not want to be a farmer. He ran away from home at age 15 and worked his way through college in Cedar Falls and then Valparaiso College in Valparaiso, Indiana. (Grandma and Grandpa actually met at Valparaiso where they were both students.) Arriving back home, he taught school during the day, studied for the law at night, and presumably courted Grandma at the same time. Soon he applied for admission to the University of Michigan law school, was accepted, married Grandma, the lovely Alicia Hogan, and moved to Ann Arbor. Ellen was born the day Grandpa graduated from the U of M with his law degree.

The following picture is of the St. Thomas Parish baseball team of 1912. My dad is in the middle of the back row wearing his Shaker knit sweater, and my grandfather is on the end at the right. He was now a lawyer in private practice in Ann Arbor and coach of the team. Grandpa at various times also was the city attorney for Ann Arbor and the bishop's lawyer as well. Right after Grandpa's graduation from the U of M, he taught law there, also. The two guys on either side of my dad, Leo and Everett, were his pals growing up, and I remember him talking about their baseball exploits and canoeing trips on the river. Dad played shortstop or second base, I forget which, and shortly after this, he won a baseball scholarship to the University of Michigan.



His graduation photo is next, but I'm not sure which graduation this was taken for, high school or college. I thought I remembered Mom saying this was his U of M graduation photo, but Susan said it's his high school photo. He looks older than high school in this one, and certainly older than he does in the family photo.





The U.S. Army appropriated him after he graduated from the U. of M. with a degree in English, and they stationed him for the duration of WWI in Newport News, Virginia, as a typing clerk. Mom took this photo of him on the farm in Iowa when he was home on furlough. Mom met Dad while he was still in college. Grandpa used to send Dad back to Iowa during his summer vacations to help Grandpa's two old maid sisters, Nora and Ellen, who wound up running the farm after all the boys in the family defected or proved incapable of managing the place. Mom taught school with Aunt Nora, who was eager to introduce her handsome nephew to her bright, bubbly co-worker. Dad wrote home after the introduction, "I've met the liveliest girl in town."



Fast-forward to the 50s....Grandpa is dead, and Dad bought a lake cottage on Lake Sallie with his inheritance. Here he is out back of the cottage by our 1947 green DeSoto, which he bought when I was in 8th grade. It boasted the forerunner of automatic transmission. When you started out, you'd step on the gas until you got to maybe 15-18 mph, then you'd let up on the gas, the car would shift itself--Ka-KLUNK!--and you'd be at driving speed.

Dad always wore khakis from L.L. Bean on the weekends, plus a yellow terry cloth longsleeved t-shirt like he has on in the picture. He carried his Pall Malls in the pocket in front. On his feet, he wore old wingtips that were too scuffed to wear to work. And he usually wore a cap like this.

The smoke from his Pall Malls was deadly, and when we drove to the lake every Friday night after Dad got off work, Mom and I would beg him to open the window a little wider so we could breathe. He always did, but ever afterward, I could tell Pall Mall smoke from any other cigarette's. It was tarry and raw, and it stunk upwind.

The big house behind Dad belonged to Jack and Babe Maloney, parents of my growing-up playmates at the lake, Michael and Marcia. It used to be the main house of a resort, and our cottage was one of the little rental places. It had a living room, a bedroom, and a porch on two sides...the kitchen on the side, and a big round table & chairs plus a big squeaky spring bed in front.

Here are Dad and Gene getting ready to put the dock in for the summer. Dad is pulling something out from under the front porch, where he stored the dock over the winter. Part of the dock is stacked to the right. The trees are not yet in leaf, but the snow is gone, so it must be the end of May. I took these little photos with my 8th grade graduation present camera. I wish I'd taken hundreds more.



Last photo: "Brothers of the Brush" - Fargo's Diamond Jubilee, 1950. Dad, like most other men in town, grew a beard for the Centennial celebration. He sent a copy of this photo to Aunt Mary Barnes, I think, and on the back, though the ink has almost completely faded, he wrote "Is this Pop Hogan or a duke's mixture? With love, Francis"



Love to you, Francis. You were my best pal as a kid. You took me everywhere with you: fishing, hunting, even bowling at night during the winter when the NW Bell team had league bowling--you'd park me at the bar with a glass of 7Up while you rolled up one great game after another. You were a natural athlete and a lover of the outdoors. Your temper scared me to death when I was little, but I learned that yelling back would shut you up good. I only did it once, actually, because I was so appalled to see you silenced like that. Thanks for giving me life and a share of your unique spirit....

Mark Morford on the new Boy Scout

I like to post humor...it's the best way to publish bad news, for one thing. Today's post features the SF Chronicle's Mark Morford on the joys of his youthful membership in the Boy Scouts and what he envisions today to introduce survival skills (like, archery) to feckless youth. The bad news? You think that banning gay scout leaders was a sign of moral integrity? Read what the Boy Scouts are doing to raise money now that their membership has fallen off....

Goodbye and Good Luck, Daschles!

In case you need any further background on WHY Tom Daschle withdrew as the HHS nominee, here's Glenn Greenwald's Sunday post from Salon.com.

I especially loved the quote from Rolling Stone's Matt Taibi:

In Washington there are whores and there are whores, and then there is Tom Daschle. Tom Daschle would suck off a corpse for a cheeseburger.

You don't know the half of it!

This morning, I decided to see whether Groundhog Day is another one of those holidays, like Halloween or Christmas, with roots--not in modern day phenomena like the Punxatawny, Pa., TV station's weather forecast but further back--in ancient times.

I'm very happy to report that I hit PAYDIRT. Yes, this day does have ancient roots, going at least as far back to 542 A.D. But please click the link and read this fascinating article.

Among the scientific and historical nuggets I mined from "Weather Doctor's Almanac for 1998, Celebrating Groundhog Day," I learned that the beginning of February marks the start of Solar Spring! Hooray!

In my youth (long before Bill Murray was born), we never celebrated the groundhog's first venture from his burrow (yup, HIS burrow...the Weather Doctor says female groundhogs don't come out of hibernation for quite a while yet).

We observed February 2 as Candlemas Day--the day whose most salient liturgical point was the long line of sneezing, snuffling, bundled-up children waiting to kneel two at a time at the communion rail to get our throats blessed after morning Mass. A couple of the nuns would stand at the ends of the front pews to make sure our throats were free and clear--the layers of scarves unwrapped, the topmost coat, sweater, and shirt buttons undone--so Father Walsh or Father Branconniere could stick the "X" arrangement of two candles against our necks and recite the blessing. The blessing invoked St. Blaise, patron saint of sore throats. The idea was that this actually worked, and I apologize for not researching any scientific proof.

If the blessing didn't take, however, (often) our mothers would paint our throats with MERCUROCHROME!! Mercurochrome was a sure-fire cure, but omg...that was MERCURY they were swabbing on our tonsils! Last I tried, I couldn't even BUY mercurochrome any more at the local pill, nostrum, greeting card, and whatnot emporium known as CVS. The PTB (Powers That Be) have decided dabbing mercury on our cuts is too dangerous.

It's a wonder we survived. Of course, all weather is local, which means so are all weather prognostications. Despite all the nonsense about "six weeks left of winter," etc., Groundhog Day in North Dakota was only halfway through the danger zone of the ND winter. We still had to get through February AND March, when the worst blizzards came, plus April and May, too. I have a photo of my old yellow Chrysler almost completely buried in the May Day blizzard of 1967, but of course, I can't find it now in the gazillion photos unearthed during moving....