Now Terry is the one who is out of commission. I think Mary got it the worst. It could be a combination of food poisoning and altitude sickness. She says, darkly, ¨Your turn will come too." So around noon we´re going to hire a couple of those little motorized three wheeledvehicles they have here and have them take us down to the lake.
But now I can spend the time working on getting some photos out to you. Maybe catch up to a few of your blogs, too.
This is a ring around the sun that we saw at an Inca ruin yesterday. First time any of us had seen one of these.
I will add colorful folklore stuff, scenery, restaurants, etc. later It is not possible to point a camera anywhere in the country without finding something worth taking a picture of.
Mormons have a long tradition of achieveing [sic] success by sharing secular versions of their tenets, said Matthew Bowen, author of The Mormon People, citing Stephen R. Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," which he called the Latter-Day Saint Theology repackaged as career advice."
I glanced over at a summary of Seven Habits on Wikipedia, and I thought it was terrible advice unless balanced by notions of community and caring, whether religious or not. For sure you can't strip religion out of such a Machiavellian plan of action without sounding soulless. And this could be exactly Romney's problem. By operating in the secular world as a person who is perceived as 100% success driven he gives the impression of soullessness. I, as a secular person, do respect and favor the notion of religion as a private matter. But the Mormons are not just private: they are secretive. They worship at the altar of success and, as a chosen people, expect god to favor them with riches.
Furthermore, if business and religion are the important things to Romney, where does that leave government? And that being the case, why does he want to be President?
Providing a contrast to this, I was with a group of Jehovah's Witnesses yesterday at a graduation party, and they touched me with their humility and earnestness. Most of them are not successful, struggling actually. Many of them were Spanish speaking. For them, material success is secondary to righteousness. And they are inclusive, welcoming people of all races and nationalities. To my way of thinking they are completely wrongheaded in their beliefs, but they avoid doing evil. They don't believe in government either, although they use government services like everyone else, and they don't vote. For which I am grateful.
in the NYT by Campbell Brown really chapped my hide, as Twisty would put it. (For those of you not in the know, nothing is classier than having a name that is two last names.)
She is pushing the meme that women care only about the state of the economy. Well, I'm a woman, and I care about a lot of issues that are not directly related to the economy. She slams that Obama campaign vid, The Life of Julia, which several young women on Melissa's Sunday show thought was highly relevant to their lives. They want to succeed, and they need government help reaching their goals. Not everyone has family to fall back on, let alone an affluent family, and family values based on making a virtue of necessity (a way of thinking that is constantly pushed on women ) don't move me much.
Her anecdotes about women making a go of it selling stuff on eBay and so on, getting by with the help of their families and "not wanting it any other way" made me think, "Campbell Brown is either a fool or a tool." I for one am glad I don't have to struggle. And I am sure Campbell Brown doesn't have to struggle much, either. All she has to do is write a dumb article and the NYT publishes it and pays her for her "work."
Below is Melissa talking to these youthful feminists about the Julia vid and other matters.
I was also annoyed to see a picture in the NYT Kindle version I get of Medea Benjamin of Code Pink holding a sign protesting the NATO summit in Chicago that did not identify her or her organization. (Can't find it anywhere on the 'net, either.) I also saw a scurrilous web site I won't link to with a lot of Photoshopped or possibly staged pix of Code Pink Women supposedly carrying signs saying, "Kill the Troops" and so on. Some people are stooping so low these days they probably have to live underground. I am hoping for a regeneration of the Peace Movement, but as Benjamin says, 9-11 really damaged it. The cause of peace is in trouble everywhere. It's on the streets now, though, in Chicago, and we have a long, hot summer ahead of us, probably the hottest ever.
Well, I have to go to the SS office today to inform them that I am alive for the time being, so I can continue to collect my Swiss social security.
Berube, Paterno Professor at Penn State, chimes in on scandal. He is someone I have long admired as a professor and as a person and is the current pres. of the Modern Language Association.
Just read an awful, embarrassing review of German writer Robert Walser's work in Harper's, by one Rivka Galkin. I must say she is very young and pretty and has written and published a novel. I question whether she has any background in German literature, because she used as comparative examples Melville and Dickinson and R. Crumb. She mentioned Kafka and Sontag, to nail it down culturally from the lit crit standpoint, and added some stuff about art brut. She provided background-- his life, his times-- matters easily available to anyone. Of course she could not understand this book. She does not understand German culture or Swiss culture. Walser assumes that knowledge on the part of his readers, and his work is not at all enigmatic, not to me, anyway.
The book under review she discussed is a newly published translation, which from the examples she quoted is not very good at all. How I miss John Leonard, who knew his European culture backwards and forwards.
In fact, I deeply deeply miss John Leonard, and he and Lapham were the reason I subscribed to Harper's. I just cancelled my subscription.
This evening was big tamale night at a friend of ours' place. It is her major Christmas custom. We made hundreds of tamales while talking about everything and nothing. I had a margarita and a half and had to go for a walk to regain my sobriety so I could finish the evening without disgracing myself. At about 8 p.m. someone in a nearby neighborhood set off a series of professional fireworks. None of us could figure out why, who, or exactly where. Perhaps tomorrow's paper will bring enlightenment.
As I discovered from listening to what people said tonight, the Tiger Woods scandal has rocked a lot of them, and I did not know why until I discussed the situation with a man who is a pretty dedicated golfer. The way he and several other men (one of whom owns a golf supply shop) talked and joked about Tiger Woods and his bimbos clearly showed me that they were terribly upset about the way he had behaved and what this does to the image of golf, which is supposed to be a very respectable sport. Golf is more than a mere game: it justifies the ways of man to man; it's emblematic of success, and look what Tiger Woods has done to it.
But what the man I talked to said was that the whole professional golf world is riddled from top to bottom with crime and vice. When you think about the social cost of golf, the use of prime land and water resources to provide a setting for this pastime, the deals made out on the links by people like Madoff, and now a general pall cast by the unsavory sexual behavior of the golden boy of the sport: well it is not a happy situation for golf lovers.
So here is my take on Vancouver: As in most places there is an elite that runs things. You are not likely to read about these quiet folks in the newspapers. Examples would be big property owners, especially the ones who bought property and settled before WW II, people whose family names are on public buildings, members of various boards, and so on. There are nouveau riches who have settled there to avoid the high property taxes in Oregon: they have built egregious McMansions everywhere. They do all their shopping in Oregon, where there is no sales tax. There are the usual eccentrics and poor folks. We do have some friends who have lived there a long time, have nice homes, and are adapting to changes there with good grace. It's a pleasant place to live, easy and convenient. Public transportation is pretty good. The downtown is mostly dead, but I seem to remember a nice brew pub there. High tech start-ups have moved in, and "campuses" abound. I don't know how well these outfits are doing; the failure rate is pretty high.
I worked there teaching ESL for a number of years at Clark Community College. This was in the early 90's. The "satellite campus" was a converted Safeway in a shopping mall, an ugly and bad smelling place, very depressing. The students were mostly Mexican workers (in fast food places or for the Lion's Inn), Russian Pentecostals, and Vietnamese. My classes with these students who had varying needs never worked very well, I thought, and left me with a sense of failure.
A few years ago I went out to visit the place. It seemed that virtually all the students were Russian, but that was just my quick impression. Next door, the unemployment office was very busy. I intuited that the people needing services were displaced Southern Californians who had moved up there in search of a better life. This is probably correct, but I have no stats or anything to back up my assertion.
I love the Internet! I was wondering if megachurches had invaded, and sure enough, there are two megachurches in Vancouver, the only ones in the Portland metro area. Obviously, they have been attracting new residents to Vancouver.
The negative reaction of the left to the new Sara Silverman show on Comedy Central is exposing some not so pleasant sides of liberal thought. Silverman's harmless fooling around causes great offense, for some reason. Why do people react so negatively to her obvious point that women swear, fart, shit, and do mean things to others? That they can be snarky? Goofily unobservant? Selfish? High? Drunk? Hilarious? Heartless? Aren't women human, just like men? Oh no, we have to be saints. Nice, well bred women say, "You kids, just settle down and be good." "Don't make fun of man love, because they love each other just the way you and I do." "Drugs are bad, don't take them." "Drive safely." " Don't make rude noises in public." "Always look and behave as pleasantly as you can." "Don't say fuck." "Be modest and self deprecating." "Be kindly in all your interactions with others." " Be good to children and the elderly and the handicapped." When I was young I was just like Sara Silverman, but parenthood has added pounds and beaten me down in other ways. I have been forced to repress my natural meanness quite a bit. The comical aspects of my mother in law's reaction to the death of her cat are pure Silverman territory, but I have to restrain myself and not laugh in her face at her oblivious boobery. I mean it really is funny when a woman spends hours crying in front of a photo of her dead cat. Especially when she had it euthanized because she did not want to deal with it. She also thinks vibrators are used to massage tired muscles. I could have helped her quite a lot in life, clued her in some, but of course she's one of those people who never listen. Prozac has helped her quite a bit. I spent yesterday at a committee meeting. Some members are women way up there in years. After a lifetime of service, they have become quite cynical and tell great jokes; most of them are about the funny and ludicrous aspects of sex and politics. They laugh a lot. One of them lost her husband of 50 years a couple of weeks ago. This man was 80 and had stage four cancer, but that didn't mean he was going to give up and die. She relates the story of their horror trip to Germany, where he was turned down for an experimental treatment. Getting off the long flight back from Frankfurt to San Francisco, he fell flat on his face in the walkway from the plane to the concourse. He had stopped breathing. All the personnel stood around doing nothing while she found someone to haul him up and get him out of there and to the hospital. After two weeks of hospitalization he died. So now his daughter wants his ashes spread around a remote pali on Oahu, a place that he loved. She feels that this is beside the point and an unnecessary expense, but oh well, she's going along with it. You could tell that a lot of this woman's feeling was that she was glad to be rid of the old nuisance. But that is not nice, is it? Among us, all of whom have put up with years of this sort of thing, her response was understandable. Not that we don't care. We do. We wouldn't be caring for others if we didn't. But we're not saints, and we get tired of it all. Family members can be demanding and unreasonable and just a pain in the ass. We at least have the right to feel the way we feel about that and to laugh about it. How Silverman reminds me of the nasty and selfish girl I was. I miss her.
Here's a sad state of affairs. This is how the Republicans treat their base:
In Medford recently, a bookish crowd gathered in support of libraries.
Jackson County plans to shut all 15 of its libraries on April 7.
Footnote: The benchmark species to be protected in the Northwest was the spotted owl. Pickups in rural Oregon had bumper stickers saying, "Save a logger; cook a spotted owl," or something to that effect. These were real aggressive people who blamed those city slickers in Portland and, of course, environmentalists, for their not so hot way of life. Wonder what they think now.
"Does President Bush have it in for
the press corps? Touring a Caterpillar factory in Peoria, Ill., the
Commander in Chief got behind the wheel of a giant tractor and played
chicken with a few wayward reporters. Wearing a pair of stylish safety
glasses--at least more stylish than most safety glasses--Bush got a
mini-tour of the factory before delivering remarks on the economy. "I
would suggest moving back," Bush said as he climbed into the cab of
a massive D-10 tractor."I'm about to crank this sucker up." As the engine roared to life,
White House staffers tried to steer the press corps to safety, but when
the tractor lurched forward, they too were forced to scramble for
safety."Get out of the way!" a news photographer yelled. "I think he
might run us over!" said another. White House aides tried to herd the
reporters the right way without getting run over themselves. Even the
Secret Service got involved, as one agent began yelling at reporters to
get clear of the tractor. Watching the chaos below, Bush looked out the
tractor's window and laughed, steering the massive machine into the
spot where most of the press corps had been positioned. The episode
lasted about a minute, and Bush was still laughing when he pulled to a
stop. He gave reporters a thumbs-up. "If you've never driven a D-10,
it's the coolest experience," Bush said afterward. Yeah, almost as much
fun as seeing your life flash before your eyes.
