Celebrating another long marriage

We went to another 25th-anniversary bash last night. That's two I've been to this weekend and celebrating 50 years of combined marriage time can take a lot out of a person. I'm recovering slowly today. I wouldn't have gone so wild on the dance floor last night if the band hadn't started playing an Elvis song. When the singer came down from the stage to pick someone to sing and dance with it, I yelled, "I'm from Mississippi!" and ran over. I know a lot of English people love Elvis, but I was the only Southern girl there last night, and I understood him best (I love bananas with peanut butter too).

Anyway, the evening was beautiful. Karen and Chris Blakeley renewed their marriage vows in their lovely village church. Here they are:



At the service, there was a reading from Captain Corelli's Mandolin that summed up the occasion:

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of eternal passion. That is just being 'in love' which any fool can do.

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both and art and a fortunate accident. Those that truly love, have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their brances, they find that they are one tree and not two.

Poor movie stars (and their $20 mil paychecks)

Interesting article from the New York Times:

LOS ANGELES — The spring and summer box office has murdered megawatt stars like Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, Eddie Murphy, John Travolta, Russell Crowe, Tom Hanks, Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell.

A-list movie stars have long been measured by their ability to fill theaters on opening weekend. But never have so many failed to deliver, resulting in some rare soul-searching by motion picture studios about why the old formula isn’t working — and a great deal of anxiety among stars (and agents) about the potential vaporization of their $20 million paychecks.

“The cratering of films with big stars is astounding,” said Peter Guber, the former chairman of Sony Pictures who is now a producer and industry elder statesman. “These supertalented people are failing to aggregate a large audience, and everybody is looking for answers.”

Mr. Guber added, “Even Johnny Depp” — starring in the drama “Public Enemies” --“didn’t exactly deliver a phenomenal result.”

Mr. Ferrell bombed in “Land of the Lost,” a $100 million comedy that sold only $49 million in tickets in North America. Ms. Roberts missed with “Duplicity,” a $60 million thriller that attracted $40.6 million. “Angels & Demons” (Mr. Hanks) was soft. The same for “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3” (Mr. Washington and Mr. Travolta).

“Imagine That,” starring Mr. Murphy, was such a disaster that Paramount Pictures had to take a write-down. Mr. Sandler? His “Funny People” limped out of the gate and then collapsed. Some of these may simply have not been very good, but an A-list star is supposed to overcome that.

Good Books don't have to be hard to read

My aunt in New Orleans sent me an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal (I know -- 'interesting article' and 'Wall Street Journal' seems like an oxymoron) but anyway -- the premise is that modern novelists in the 20th century stopped caring about storylines in books, and we stopped reading novels but now plots have reappeared in novels and we like that better and read more. Here's some of what the writer said:

"A good story is a dirty secret that we all share. It's what makes guilty pleasures so pleasurable, but it's also what makes them so guilty. A juicy tale reeks of crass commercialism and cheap thrills. We crave such entertainments, but we despise them. Plot makes perverts of us all.

It's not easy to put your finger on what exactly is so disgraceful about our attachment to storyline. Sure, it's something to do with high and low and genres and the canon and such. But what exactly? Part of the problem is that to find the reason you have to dig down a ways, down into the murky history of the novel. There was once a reason for turning away from plot, but that rationale has outlived its usefulness. If there's a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.

Where did this conspiracy come from in the first place—the plot against plot? I blame the Modernists. Who were, I grant you, the single greatest crop of writers the novel has ever seen. In the 1920s alone they gave us "The Age of Innocence," "Ulysses," "A Passage to India," "Mrs. Dalloway," "To the Lighthouse," "Lady Chatterley's Lover," "The Sun Also Rises," "A Farewell to Arms" and "The Sound and the Fury." Not to mention most of "In Search of Lost Time" and all of Kafka's novels. Pity the poor Pulitzer judge for 1926, who had to choose between "The Professor's House," "The Great Gatsby," "Arrowsmith" and "An American Tragedy." (It went to "Arrowsmith." Sinclair Lewis prissily declined the prize.) The 20th century had a full century's worth of masterpieces before it was half over.

But let's look back for a second at where the Modernists came from, and what exactly they did with the novel. They drew a tough hand, historically speaking. All the bad news of the modern era had just arrived more or less at the same time: mass media, advertising, psychoanalysis, mechanized warfare. The rise of electric light and internal combustion had turned their world into a noisy, reeking travesty of the gas-lit, horse-drawn world they grew up in. The orderly, complacent, optimistic Victorian novel had nothing to say to them. Worse than nothing: it felt like a lie. The novel was a mirror the Modernists needed to break, the better to reflect their broken world. So they did.

One of the things they broke was plot. To the Modernists, stories were a distortion of real life. In real life stories don't tie up neatly. Events don't line up in a tidy sequence and mean the same things to everybody they happen to. Ask a veteran of the Somme whether his tour of duty resembled the "Boy's Own" war stories he grew up on. The Modernists broke the clear straight lines of causality and perception and chronological sequence, to make them look more like life as it's actually lived. They took in "The Mill on the Floss" and spat out "The Sound and the Fury."

Eliz again: I put this up on my Facebook page to see if people agreed with this or not, and my English Lit professor, Tom Dillingham, put up a wonderful riposte to this. I just love it when he gets furious! Here's what he said. Do you agree or not?

Sloppy thinking, groundless generalizations, fuzzy usage required to allow for the application of opinions (not analyses) that support themselves and nothing else. Difficult for whom? Difficult meaning what? Complex language? Intricate plot? Ambiguous characters?

Do we accept the preposterous notion that "plot" was broken or dismissed? This kind of self-serving manifesto happens periodically--Tom Wolfe produced one 30 years ago or so, so did John Gardner at some point, so has Francine Prose once or twice. The arguments function to support the novelists' own preferred practice. Piffle.

Celebrating a long marriage

We went to a 25th wedding anniversary party near Cambridge today for Kumar and Sue Sriskandan (below).

Mel and Kumar were at Cambridge University together, and we don't get to see them very often. Also at the party were other college pals. The last time I saw a lot of these people, we were so much younger, with little kids. Now the kids are almost all grown up, and we are all older, grayer and fatter ourselves.

Here we are at the party. First is Gail and Rob then me, Mel and Katie (just back from Paris - we picked her up at a train station outside London on the way).


But somehow that seemed to make the party more special. It's as if we don't take our time together for granted like we used to when we thought life would go on forever.

One of the guests at the party has brain cancer. He is so brave and still came out even though he has trouble saying what he is thinking (the words don't come out right). This person was always one of my favorites, so I was delighted to see him. He struggled to speak to me for bit a then he said, "I'm sorry, I can't converse..." then his voice broke and his eyes welled up and so did mine. I felt very close to him then and that moment was something I will always remember.

I know I am prone to over-analyzing everything but there was something freeing about seeing that we are all getting older, that troubles have befallen all of us, but yet we are still there to celebrate our friends' long marriage and laugh with each other.

A last photo of Kumar's parents. They were always fun to be around when we young. And they still remember me from when I was 20 and had thick brown hair all the way down to my waist.

Could you please water the plants while I'm gone?

My sister-in-law just sent me an email asking me to water her geraniums while she's away, and I was going to say 'sure' until I took a look at the photo.

Happy Saturday

I love Saturday mornings after the hard week at the office. I get to sleep late, drink coffee in bed and read the morning paper.

What are you all doing today? We have a 25th anniversary party to go to near Cambridge. One of Mel's college friends has made it to this mark -- an inspiration to us all.

The invitation said 'no presents' but of course we ignored that. We got them a fab present -- a magnum of Veuve Clicquot champagne. I snapped the magnum up against a regular bottle of champagne so you could see the size difference. And don't even ask what it cost!



Mel is going to shove it in his friend's face when he sees him like he did with the present he got them for their wedding 25 years ago, with the immortal words he used then:

I hope you enjoy this. It cost me enough.

Mel's friend Kumar has laughed over Mel saying this for years so he'll get the joke right away.

The legs are the last to go

Liz Smith (she's in her 80s and still writes a gossip column in NYC) says:

"My thighs have always pretty much taken care of themselves. A lot of things have disappeared as I have grown older and a lot of wrinkles and flab have suddenly appeared. But whatever I’ve lost, I still have great legs. As the late actress Kitty Carlisle Hart used to say as she showed her gams at age 90, "The legs are the last to go." Kitty had a good life motto. She looked at herself every morning in the mirror and said, 'Kitty, I forgive you!'"

New research on depression

Interesting information from Scientific American below. The article says that depression might be a way we've evolved to think more deeply about ourselves and to sharpen our thinking processes. I've struggled with depression most of my life, and it did anything but sharpen my thinking. Completely destroyed parts of my life, in fact.

Here's part of the article:

Depression seems to pose an evolutionary paradox. Research in the US and other countries estimates that between 30 to 50 percent of people have met current psychiatric diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder sometime in their lives. But the brain plays crucial roles in promoting survival and reproduction, so the pressures of evolution should have left our brains resistant to such high rates of malfunction. Mental disorders should generally be rare — why isn’t depression?

This paradox could be resolved if depression were a problem of growing old. The functioning of all body systems and organs, including the brain, tends to deteriorate with age. This is not a satisfactory explanation for depression, however, as people are most likely to experience their first bout in adolescence and young adulthood.

Or, perhaps, depression might be like obesity — a problem that arises because modern conditions are so different from those in which we evolved. Homo sapiens did not evolve with cookies and soda at the fingertips. Yet this is not a satisfactory explanation either. The symptoms of depression have been found in every culture which has been carefully examined, including small-scale societies, such as the Ache of Paraguay and the !Kung of southern Africa — societies where people are thought to live in environments similar to those that prevailed in our evolutionary past.

There is another possibility: that, in most instances, depression should not be thought of as a disorder at all. In an article recently published in Psychological Review, we argue that depression is in fact an adaptation, a state of mind which brings real costs, but also brings real benefits.

Friday boring stuff but it's my life

Had my last Pimms of the summer with a couple of friends last night. Drinking Pimms in the summer is a British tradition.

You mix Pimms (a sort of gin drink) with lemonade or 7Up and put fruit and cucumber in it. The bartender last night took forever chopping up cucumbers and fruit for it but it was worth it. I felt tipsy by the time I reached the end of the glass.

On the way to the pub, I noticed a woman wearing a dress a little bit similar to the one I bought in a boutique in Paris to wear to a big party tomorrow night. I wanted to jump out of the car and demand to know where she bought that dress and to ask her to refrain from wearing it until I had made a public debut with my dress (which was vastly superior in tailoring and style to hers anyway).

Today is a slow day at work because it's the start of a long weekend. It's another Bank Holiday Monday in England next week. I still don't know why they have these Bank Holidays but a friend of mine in Las Vegas used to complain that she'd call people in England about work and they'd always be having a 'Bank Holiday' or so it seemed to her. 'Why don't English people do any work?' she'd ask. (We get so much more vacation time than Americans that it can appear that we don't work much.)

Have a good weekend. I have two big parties to go to this weekend for 25th wedding anniversaries and birthdays so will report later.

Your obese brain is not very attractive

More bad news for obese people:
Brain Degeneration in Obese People

from Gawker.com:

YOUR OBESE BRAIN IS NOT VERY ATTRACTIVE: Ignore our remarks about bacon, stop eating raw cookie dough, and get on John Mackey’s nutrient-dense, organic dick-bag diet: obese people have “severe brain degeneration.” Obese people’s brains are not only withered and weird; they also look older, so if you are at all vain about your brain’s appearance you will definitely not want to become obese.

The magnetic pull of the refrigerator

Here's a woman who runs a Christian diet program. If you don't get the weight off, you are going STRAIGHT TO HELL.

She says:

We have been created with two empty, needing-to-be-fed holes in our body. One is the stomach, and the other is the heart.

(So, major fail on anatomy there.)

The stomach is a literal hole in our body which is to be fed with the proper amount of food. As for the heart, I am speaking figuratively of our deep-down feelings.

Trying to feed a hurting, needy heart with food or anything on this earth (alcohol, tobacco, antidepressants, sexual lusts, money, the praise of other people, etc) is a common error. The person who attempts to feed a longing heart with food will stay on the path to overweight.

Here’s how Weigh Down can “help”:

Weigh Down is showing people, on a daily basis, how our God can transform their hearts and minds so that they can rise above the magnetic pull of the refrigerator! Instead of emphasizing the caloric content of food, the Weigh Down Workshop encourages you to focus on your natural, internal hunger control.

Exam paper sends teacher into coma

"The French Resistance found the internet useful and Martin Luther led the 1960s civil rights movement in America, according to students whose gaffes have been submitted by academics for the Times Higher Education magazine’s annual exam howlers competition.

A politics student at Brunel remarked that the United States had the most advanced military in the world — possessing “highly developed and powerful marital equipment”.

Writing about the British electoral system, a first-year student at Royal Holloway, University of London, considered “first parcel post”. In another blunder that a lecturer sent in for this year’s list a biology student at Staffordshire University wrote a paper not about genomes but on the “science of gnomes”.

A student informed a cinema lecturer at the University of Leeds that a political group “used the internet to publicise their cause, just like the French Resistance did during the Second World War”. And the student who confused the German founder of the Reformation with Martin Luther King was American.

A final-year student’s commentary on a medieval French poem noted that “all of the sentences end in a coma”. Emma Cayley, a lecturer at the University of Exeter, said: “That’s pretty much how I felt marking it, too.”

from today's Times

Scrabble and crime

My husband beat me at Scrabble last night, even though I had long words like 'critter' and 'golden.'

We went to a pub when we discovered that we had no children at home that night and were free as birds. It was so strange to have no responsibilities for an evening.

But this morning, responsibility lies heavy on my shoulders. My daughter, still in Paris, had all of her cash stolen last night, and she wouldn't have had so much money if I hadn't given her too much because I was being over-protective. I guess I was thinking giving her a bunch of cash would protect her in an emergency -- and now the only emergency we've had is her getting all her money stolen.

Is my husband angry! He was yelling at me on the phone earlier about giving her so much money when I left.

Anyway, my friend in Paris, Jeanne Bernard, is going to go to the police station with her to report it then give her a place to stay for the rest of her trip. I called Jeanne just now and said that Katie said she feels 'lost and alone.'

'She's not alone,' Jeanne said. 'She's got her Southern family here to take care of her.'

That gave me such relief. Jeanne and I aren't related except we grew up just a few hundred miles away from each other -- but that makes us Southerners and therefore 'related.'

Americans leaving England

The Yanks are going home!

Aug. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Andrew Wesbecher moved to London from New York in 2006 to sell software to banks and hedge funds. This month he joined the exodus of American expatriates fleeing high taxes and the city’s shrinking financial industry.

“I’m the last guy to leave that I know,” said Wesbecher, 29, who worked for Tibco Software Inc. and lived in Notting Hill, the London neighborhood that’s home to billionaire Richard Branson and model Elle Macpherson. “We are all packing up.”

The number of U.S. citizens in Britain fell 3.8 percent to 126,000 in the 12 months through September, according to the Office for National Statistics. The trend probably continued this year, with the Confederation of British Industry estimating the U.K. financial industry will lose about 45,000 jobs in the first nine months of 2009, or 4.3 percent of the total.

Americans are heading home as Britain plans a 50 percent tax rate for those who earn more than 150,000 pounds ($248,000) a year and employers cut benefits for workers living abroad, reducing the allure of London. That comes a year after the U.K. said foreigners who have lived in the country for more than seven years must pay 30,000 pounds annually or give up the special status that shields overseas income from British taxes.

Paris

Sometimes I meet people at parties who say, "What's the point of Facebook?" And I feel sorry for them. I have re-connected with so many people from my past, and my life is much richer because of it.

And it's not like they are just virtual friends -- I go to visit them. On Sunday I went to visit a woman I went to college with but I really didn't even know -- Jeanne Bernard.

We both were Southerners -- she's from Louisiana, I'm from Mississippi -- somehow we both went to Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri (Misery, we both called it), and then moved overseas. We even had a daughter within a month of each other. I didn't know she was over in Paris living a parallel life to mine until Facebook intervened.

My daughter and I went over to see Jeanne, and we had a blast. Here are a few highlights:

Montmartre -- Jeanne's neighborhood
Montmartre is in the north of Paris in the 18th arrondissement, a part of the Right Bank. Montmartre is primarily known for the white-domed Basilica of the Sacré Cœur on its summit and as a nightclub district.


2 am - tipsy and headed to Notre Dame
We stopped by a wine shop on the way to Jeanne's apartment and proceeded to test the wine in the afternoon. Later we went to dinner. Katie insisted on Kir Royales to start -- that and a bottle of wine with dinner put me in great spirits.


Finally got to Notre Dame (below) -- isn't it beautiful at night?




A little shopping -- inside Galeries Lafayette department store
We did a little shopping one afternoon. Jeanne took me to a little boutique near her house, and I got the most sophisticated black number for a big party I'm going to this weekend. Trouble is, it's a teeny bit tight so I'm going to watch my eating for the next few days (watch myself eat crisps, chocolate?? Hope I can be strong.)


A highlight was tea at Laduree's. We had violet tea and macaroons and while we were snuggled up inside the tea shop, a big thunderstorm rolled through Paris. It was a wonderful experience.


The beautiful macaroons I discovered when having tea at Laduree's:

Macaroon recipe here


I got on the train and two and a half hours later, I was back in London. The channel tunnel trains makes going to France so easy.

Now I have to go back to my real life of working at an office all day. Oh well....I'll always have my memories.

Orthorexia nervosa

Yay! A new thing to worry about. This doesn't affect me though 'cause I still eat plenty of junk food....

An obsession with eating healthily could in fact be bad for your health, scientists warn.

Those who deny themselves entire food groups or worry too much about the 'purity' of their meals are risking their mental and physical wellbeing.

Experts have reported a rise in such extreme behaviour, known as orthorexia nervosa. Sufferers or orthorexia nervosa tend to be over 30, middle-class and well-educated.

While anorexia patients restrict the quantity of the food they eat, sufferers of orthorexia, named after the Greek for 'right or true', fixate on quality.

The 'rules' vary from person to person, but the drive to eat only the healthiest foods can lead to sugar, salt, caffeine, alcohol, wheat, gluten, yeast, soya, corn and dairy foods being eliminated from the diet.

While such habits may seem quirky, they can have a serious effect on health.

Cutting out entire food groups can leave sufferers malnourished, while rigid rules can make eating out impossible, putting a huge strain on friendships and relationships.

More things Brits get wrong

The Times in London was reporting that President Obama has to be doing things all the time. Resting doesn't come easy to him. The paper quoted a friend of his: "Knowing Barack Obama, the antsiness for about three or four days will have him...out on the golf course."

The Brits don't know what 'antsy' means so the Times editors dutifully translated by inserting [nervousness] next to 'antsiness.'

That made me laugh over my morning coffee. Why do Brits take these tasks on for themselves without asking an American? I could have told them it means 'restless energy' not 'nervousness.'

Death by PowerPoint

PowerPoint presentations that go on and on and on...don't you just hate them?

We have to sit through so many of these -- and now you can animate them and have layers of callouts flying through the slide to dazzle spectators. It's just too much.


I've read that it's called the "Send-me-a-slide school of management" when everyone feels compelled to put all information on slides and call meetings so you can view them. I know this is raising your profile for a good job review but to the poor employees who have to sit through these turgid presentations, there is another way to refer to it: Death by PowerPoint.

Here's an interesting article about the drawbacks of PowerPoint:

The Problem with PowerPoint

And check out this hysterical video about PowerPoint too:

Some men will sleep with anybody

It's no secret that men are more likely than women to jump into the sack. But a new study adds some twists to the rules of such casual sex.

The research suggests men are far less choosy about the attractiveness of a potential one-night stand. For women to be tempted into considering casual sex, the guy better be a hottie.

These results, based not on real-life encounters but rather on interviews, match with past research showing that men lower their standards when it comes to one-night stands. And it turns out, from the new study, women raise their standards.

Such choosiness for short-term sex could be explained by the so-called good genes hypothesis, in which women, for instance, prefer guys who show some feature indicating strong genes that can be passed down to offspring, say the researchers.

The Rightwing Corner

I have a lot of good friends who disagree with my opinions. I like that we are able to differ but still be pals. One of the most passionate conservatives I know is a guy I went to college with, Garnett Sailor.

The message that he sent today me was so full of fire that I thought I'd better give him some blog space. If any of you other conservative readers would like to contribute a post to my new intermittent feature, The Rightwing Corner, please send something in. (But you will have blowback from dissenters.)

This is a response to a response I got from a Stephens College (in Columbia, Missouri) alum who said she would not trust our military because of an article she read regarding rape in the military. It was an interesting article but, in my humble opinion, not enough to distrust our military. Here was my response:

They should be tried, convicted, and shot. So should civilians who rape. The problem of course is that rape is always about power; it's never about sex. Both sides wield it in these cases. So, if convicted, hang 'em. But false reports should also be severely punished because of the murder to reputation caused thereby. Not gonna hang 'em, but there should be mandatory jail time.

As for trusting the military, I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Bad marines? Sure there are. The corps. in general? The most noble, heroic, honorable, self-sacrificing military group ever to have assembled in the history of mankind. I would trust them with my daughter. I would not trust Bill Clinton, Teddy Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Senator Inoue, John Edwards, or Obama.

Going to Paris

I'm going to Paris today with my daughter. I'm just taking her over, staying a day or so, then back to work while she continues her stay there.

Paris is so easy from London since they built the channel tunnel. Two and half hours on the train, and there you are.

It's sort of poignant for me because when my mother was my age she was in a wheelchair from Multiple Sclerosis. We couldn't have any mother/daughter adventures so it's all the more precious to me that I can have them with my daughter.

I always worried that I would get MS too and end up disabled. So far so good. That's why I exercise so regularly -- to keep disability at bay.

Anyway, I will drink some champagne for you while in Paris and toast you dear blog readers for making my life such fun. You've taught me so much.

What we do for beauty

A factoid on my calendar tells me that the first manufactured 'falsies' appeared in the 1840s.


In the Victorian Era, girls were considered grown-up when they were 15 years old. However, many girls had not developed large enough breasts to fit into adult clothes, therefore bosom pads were used.

When small, rounded breasts were in fashion, the problem was reversed. Adult women solved the problem with tight corsets and breast binding.

Now we have breast enhancements, reductions and implants. We come a long way...but is it a good or bad thing?

Uncovering the truth

I was reading a detective novel today by James Lee Burke. His detective lives in New Iberia, Louisiana. The writer seems to have a little trouble with female characters though -- the ones in his book are two-dimensional figures who always want sex. I think life does not imitate art in this case. Anyway, I'm deep into this mystery when I get a mysterious e-mail of my own.

My father was a pathologist in Natchez, Mississippi, during the Civil Rights movement in the '60s. He was routinely called out to do autopsies after gruesome racially motivated killings. He used to talk about the cases to us kids, show us the murder slides, play the tapes of the trials where the white guys always got off, and so on.

Now the FBI is re-opening the cases. This is from the Natchez Democrat:

NATCHEZ — An FBI agent was in town Wednesday to do a little stone turning.

The agent, from the Hattiesburg office, is one of several federal agents working the recently re-opened Civil Rights case involving the 1967 death of Wharlest Jackson Sr.

And though FBI policy prevents agents from talking about their work, a press release from the agency said the goal in Jackson’s case and 42 others is to leave no stone unturned.

“We will explore every lead and every tip provided to us in our effort to bring closure to these cases,” said Frederick T. Brink, special agent in charge of the FBI in Mississippi.

“The FBI, together with our federal, state and local partners, will work diligently in these cases to uncover the truth, should it be hidden, and to bring to justice anyone who so heinously violates the rights of our citizens.”

Jackson, a black man, died when his truck exploded from a planted bomb. He had recently received a job promotion at Armstrong Tire. The new job was widely considered a “white man’s job.”

No arrests were ever made.

An investigator e-mailed me to see if I could give him any information about the unsolved murder of Clifton Walker. He wrote:

"Walker was driving home from the 3-11 shift at International Paper on Friday night, February 28, 1964, and was ambushed when he turned onto Poor House Road, which he always took as a shortcut off of 61 to Old 61. There was probably a mob of white men firing at the car to bring it to a halt and then several stood around the car and fired in at close range and blew his face apart."

If only I could reach back into time and bring back some of that information for the families of the victims who still have no details about what really happened. My father kept everything about his cases but now he's dead and all of his stuff -- well, who knows what happened to it?

It's frustrating to me to think that at one point in my life I had access to all the information the family would need, but now it's gone, and I can't help them.

We'll never have another bright idea in England

I don't know who this woman is (below), but she is used as an example in an article to illustrate that people have trouble thinking properly on days when the sun isn't shining.

Do you realize the implications of this study for those of us who live in England? How many sunny days have we had this summer? 10?

Uh wait, I can't think of the implications because it's a dull day outside and my mind isn't up to the task.

Read on....

On bright summer days, Dawn Staudt-Vanek feels energetic and mentally sharp. But when the clouds come out, she loses her zip and her brain turns sluggish.

“I’m not depressed, exactly,” says the 51-year-old nurse from San Jose, Calif. “But I have no energy and I can’t focus. It’s hard to get up in the morning and my brain seems to have slowed down. It’s hard to even get myself to the gym.”

Scientists have long known that the shortened days of winter can wreak havoc on mood. A new study shows that some people are more mentally nimble on sunny days, but have duller brains on cloudy days, regardless of the season. The findings add to mounting evidence that the weather affects how well we think and respond.

Terror alert levels raised to get Bush elected

In a new book, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge reveals new details on politicization under President Bush, reports US News & World Report's Paul Bedard. Among other things, Ridge admits that he was pressured to raise the terror alert to help Bush win re-election in 2004.

Eliz: That's an interesting revelation. What's amusing is the vehement denial from the former chief of staff, Andy Card.

He said: "The clear instructions were to make sure politics never influenced anything."

A witty blogger followed this remark with a discovery of his own, to demonstrate how reliable these quotes can be:

"In today's regulatory environment, it's virtually impossible to violate rules."
(Bernard Madoff)

A 'Magnesia Smile' invites Romance

I think this is where I went wrong as a teen. If only I'd used Magnesia toothpaste, think how many boyfriends I could have had. An ad from 1948:

A 'Magnesia Smile' invites Romance. All eyes on the girl with the magnesia smile! Such sparkling white teeth. Such healthy pink gums. Such sweet breath. Only Phillips' Dental Magnesia can give you that magnesia smile because only this toothpaste contains 'Milk of Magnesia' which many dentists advise for neutralizing harmful mouth acids.

A fine re-election campaign slogan

Someone brought up John Ensign in the comments section. I saw this funny paragraph on the Wonkette website so thought I'd share:



Here is what we know about John Ensign: he was schtupping his buddy’s wife for six months or so until they got caught, at which point Ensign begged his old parents to give his buddy $96,000 in hush money (that worked out in the end!), which they did, spread across eight $12,000 checks to various family members so the sum wouldn’t have to be declared as taxable income. He shouldn’t be forced to resign. It’s better this way, to see him roaming around the desert, giving interviews, meekly trying to hedge his failures, shaming himself, and coming across like a dingbat fraud, which he is: “Ensign told The Associated Press that he didn’t lie under oath like Clinton did and that he hasn’t ‘done anything legally wrong.’” Indeed, this would make a fine re-election campaign slogan.

Good quote

It’s not the strongest of the species that will survive, or the most intelligent. It’s the one most adaptable to change.

Charles Darwin

Great news for me as I am neither strong nor as intelligent as I'd like to be me. Must work on being adaptable....

My world tonight

What's going on with you? Tonight I'm on the computer checking out Facebook while I wait for clothes to dry. My husband is out playing bridge with one of my friends from the book club. I've learned bridge before but never got any good at it. It's one of my goals when I get older and have more time -- to get better at bridge.

Weight struggles
I write about my problems with eating in the blog, and one of my childhood friends wrote me the nicest note. Please get serious about eating right, she said (because she knows I have high cholesterol) otherwise you won't be around for me to fight with in the nursing home. (We have always had this joke that we'll probably end up in the same nursing home one day.)

Have you ever noticed sworn enemies can end up in the same home? My grandmother couldn't stand the principal of the school she taught at -- we heard about her gripes all the time for years and years -- then they ended up in the same home, not remembering that they hated each other. A lesson for us all not to let things bug us too much as we won't remember them anyway in the end.

Religious struggles
We argue about religion in this blog. I am not good at debating so I'll tell you one of the reasons I don't believe -- we never get things right as a civilization. If you read history books and see the things we used to believe -- how on Earth could we have gotten the idea of god correct? Out of every false belief we have held through the centuries -- somehow we get it right about religion -- this is what god wants, he needs to be worshipped or he will send you to hell, etc. It just doesn't make sense.

Even the Victorians got most things wrong -- and that wasn't that long ago.

Taking God out of textbooks has led to crime increase?

I was reading about a scientist who goes around the South giving talks to convince people that creationism is true.

The Mississippi Atheist blog described it this way:

"Dr. Harrub gives this talk around 40 times per year and can give the talk at your next event for $1200. At this seminar, no minds were changed. In fact, everyone in the room (including myself) was more firmly grounded in their original positions. That's how you know that the seminar is a complete failure. The information is misrepresented, the Christians accept it uncritically, and the atheists do their best to correct the misinformation in the question and answer period.

You are probably wondering what atheists are guilty of doing. Dr. Harrub flashed a quote on the screen. "Let me control the textbooks, and I will control the state. Adolph Hitler." After we took god out of our textbooks, our country has become more immoral. We can show this by looking at the dramatic increase in crime and teen pregnancy rates and by completely ignoring ever changing socio-economic factors."

I thought this was a good rebuttal made by one of the attendees: We, as Americans, enslaved one race of people and nearly exterminated another while our children were learning about god in the public schools during the 19th century, so this thesis is bunk.

The Family of philanderers

The Family, also known as "The Fellowship", is a secretive fundamentalist Washington DC ministry which runs the National Prayer Breakfast and Bible study groups attended by numerous US Senators and Congress members, wields global influence, and celebrates the leadership lessons of Hitler, Lenin, and Mao.

Over the course of the summer of 2009, Washington's Family-run "C Street House" has become notorious as a string of sex scandals have engulfed national GOP political figures who live at or have lived at, or attended Bible study classes at, the secretive former convent turned church-cum cheap-rent high end boarding house: Senator John Ensign, former Congressman Charles "Chip" Pickering, and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.


Read more here.

Fatty Foods Affect Memory and Exercise

More bad news about eating fatty foods. I know it's bad of me, but the meal below looks so delicious that I want to reach into the photo and take a bite.


Eating fatty food appears to take an almost immediate toll on both short-term memory and exercise performance, according to new research on rats and people.

It’s already known that long-term consumption of a high-fat diet is associated with weight gain, heart disease and declines in cognitive function. But the new research shows how indulging in fatty foods over the course of a few days can affect the brain and body long before the extra pounds show up.

“We expected to see changes, but maybe not so dramatic and not in such a short space of time,’’ said Andrew Murray, the study’s lead author and a lecturer in physiology at Cambridge University in Britain. “It was really striking how quickly these effects happened.’’

Sausage factory

My son has a friend spending the night. We always sit down to eat together when any of my kids have friends over, mostly so I can discreetly interrogate the visiting child. The info I obtain is helpful in gauging what my kids are up to because they won't tell me otherwise.

Tonight I learned which kids are on drugs, which kids are sleeping around, who is flunking out -- the usual stuff.

Have you tried the following technique with your kids? You fulsomely praise the action of the visitor who will invariably be ultra polite and take his dishes from the table and put them in the sink, wipe spills himself, thank you for the trouble you've gone to on his behalf, and hope the behavior rubs off on your own child. I try this every time with limited success.

I think the most memorable thing I learned tonight is the term 'sausage factory.' This means that some teen has thrown a party and only boys showed up. Think about it! (I figured it out pretty fast, and I am slow on the uptake).

Then the boys are upset because no girls have shown up for them to impress, and they either go home in a huff or drink whatever booze is left in the parents' house.

No potato chips today

My son is trying to get all of us to eat healthily. He grills us every night on what we ate that day. Last week, I had three days in a row where I succumbed to the siren call of the vending machine at work and got a Mars bar during my afternoon slump.

I eat fruit and yogurt for breakfast, and snack on rice cakes and more fruit until noon when I am absolutely starving. I always get the deli to make a chicken, lettuce and cheese sandwich on brown bread for lunch but it's never enough so I get a bag of potato chips/crisps to go with it. It's the highlight of my day, eating lunch. But Mikey has laid down the law and the chips have to go.

I don't know if I'll be able to forgo this treat. I hate being hungry.

What foods are your weakness? Which food, if my son ordered you not to eat it for the sake of your health, would you struggle to give up?

Other Stuff Going on Today

My daughter was going Inter-railing around Europe with a friend of hers, then he cancelled at the last minute. I told her I'd escort her to Paris on Sunday on the train, 'just to make sure she's OK going over there.' :)

There's a woman I went to college with on Facebook who is a Southerner like I am and settled in Paris so I'm going to meet her. In fact, she has a flat in Montmartre and has invited us to stay. We are very excited.

The sun is shining brightly today for what might be the last nice day of the summer so I'm going to take my gym towel outside to the field across from the office and lay down in the sun. I'm sure that will appear highly eccentric to my co-workers but you can't waste a minute when the sun shines in England -- it's so unusual.

PS
I just went outside and lay down on the grass outside the office and tried not to care if I looked like an idiot. Sunshine is too precious to waste. I took my shoes off and ran my toes through the freshly mown grass. It was blissful. There was a breeze blowing through the trees, the sounds of birds...I completely forgot about my job that was waiting for me inside the office building.

PPS
I caved and ate a bag of chips with my sandwich. I don't know whether to lie to my son when he asks me what I ate today or confess with an excuse to mitigate my crime ('it was so sunny and warm and I didn't want to deprive myself on such a gorgeous day'). Will think about it.

PPPS
Now I just went down to the deli for coffee and got a dark chocolate bar and ate it. I am doomed. I can never tell my son this. Thank goodness he never looks at my blog so he'll never know.

If Sarcasm Ruled the World

I found the coolest website -- If Sarcasm Ruled the World.

If there's one thing we could use more of, it's sarcasm. Sure it's a barrel of laughs when the guy behind you in line to tells you to "Take your time!" But wouldn't it be great if the ATM could give you crap as well?

We asked you to show us a world in which everything turned sarcastic.

Famous for nothing = Famesque

Sienna Miller is in a big-budget movie released this week.

Right about now you're thinking, "Who's Sienna Miller again? Remind me why I'm supposed to know her?"

It's okay! There's absolutely no reason you should know who she is -- not even if you're a religious follower of the celebrity press that tracks her so closely. She's an actress, but odds are you've never seen a single one of her movies or TV shows. Miller is a pioneer in a new kind of fame that is changing our celebrity culture, a fame that is increasingly disconnected from the star's success in the field for which he or she is ostensibly famous.

Sienna Miller is not famous. She is famesque.

The truly famesque possess the seeming gravitas that comes with a title and the suggestion of a job -- actor, singer, pro athlete. It's just that . . . you've never seen them act, or heard them sing, or watched them play.

Instead: You read about them. A lot. There was a time when the growth of our worldwide round-the-clock entertainment-news industry was gravely threatened by the fact that there weren't enough legitimate celebrities to power it -- until the famesque stepped in to fill that market niche. They single-handedly saved TMZ's business model. Because, hey, it's not every day Mel Gibson gets drunk and insults a cop.


from the New York Times

Who else can you think of who is Famesque?

Medical notes

My daughter is still doing her summer job of summarizing doctor's notes. She just sent me this cute one. A doctor wrote this about his patient:

"Pretty clearly until you'd had a chat with him it had not occurred to him that his foreskin pulled back. This must say something about the home circumstances and I think I've put a few ghosts to bed today by having a simple man to man chat about things."

Stalinist garden service

I emailed my garden service to say I was going to use someone else. A few hours later, the owner called me up and interrogated me. "No one does this to me!" he said. 15 minutes of haranguing later he said, "I'm just about to lose my temper." And there I thought I was just being a good capitalist by firing him for someone cheaper.

(cross-posted from my Facebook page)

After I wrote this, I got an email from the guy:

Dear Elizabeth

As discussed, I am upset to lose you as a customer, especially as I cannot see why you are leaving us.

Eliz again: This is worse than breaking up with a boyfriend! So much trauma and emotion....and over a postage-stamp sized garden?

Excellent comments from my Facebook page on this situation follow:

Paul M Hounslow
Idiot. :(
I'd add bullying to the reasons for firing him

Theresa Spencer Apps
Guess he doesn't understand, the customer is always right.

Eileen Tuuri
This reminds me of my husband quitting a job. His supervisor called him in and treated him to several minutes of over-the-top, "Oh, no you're not!" hollering. Let's just say it did not go over well.

When do you call a musician Maestro?

When we were at a Q&A with Vladimir Ashkenazy on Sunday, I noticed several questioners addressed him as Maestro.

"Maestro," one asked, "does reading about the Baroque period influence your playing of Bach in any way? For example, has it influenced your decision not to use the pedal while playing a fugue?"

Yes, they asked questions like these yesterday. It was that sort of forum. Anyway, it reminded me of when I was in school and used to watch the Young and the Restless soap opera and there was a master musician character who everyone referred to as 'Maestro.' My mother and I used to make fun of it and call each other Maestro sometimes.

Now that I'm in the Philharmonia Chorus in London, and we work with eminent conductors, they all get called Maestro too. One day I asked if the conductor had shown up yet, and the woman looked at me with wide eyes then said, "Are you referring to the Maestro?"

So when does a regular piano player get elevated to Maestro status? Are there certain things he/she must have attained or can you call a person Maestro on a whim? I don't understand. I would feel so pretentious calling someone Maestro. I'm just a simple Mississippi girl after all. That's also the same problem I have in rehearsal when everyone rolls their Rs in a grand manner while singing. I just can't do it. It would feel too weird.

The definition of a maestro:

A master usually in an art; especially an eminent composer, conductor, or teacher of music

Check out Ashkenazy below playing Chopin. Now that's a maestro!

Apparently, Chopin used to force his students to keep playing until their arms were so sore that they would start crying. That's how hard it is to play things like this.

A Natchez childhood

A friend of mine wrote a poem about childhood in Natchez, Mississippi, an old Southern town filled with antebellum homes and Southern tradition. Another friend just happened to post a picture of one of the characters in the poem, the Natchez Peanut Man, so I thought I'd put the two together.

Natchez Peanut Man, Sy, with a boy (circa 1977) on the porch at Under The Hill, Natchez, Mississippi

Goodbye Charlie
by Elodie Pritchartt

You know you've lived
too long
when you're still
alive after the trees
you planted have died
of old age.

The air is turning
and the leaves
the hurricane left
crumble underfoot
like distant memories.

The sidewalk
at Main and Commerce,
where Cee Tee, all
crossed eyes and paranoia,
combed his greasy hair.

The auditorium. Sy,
bent half in two
over a wheelbarrow
selling chewing gum and peanuts
His cowboy hat and skin,
black and lined
as a story.

Violins at night.

Nellie lost to the flames,
Dabney's beautiful eyes,
Leigh Ann's hands and
the bay gelding at the
county barn that
sixteenth summer.

Mud swirls in patterns
in the river, arrowheads
and pottery shift on
ancient sandbars,
disappear, appear again.

I thought I heard you
calling from the porch,
but it was just
the subtle thunder
of a passing storm.

Muslim bathing suits -- the Burquini

Thanks to the reader who sent this in. She comments:

Here’s a new one….Muslim women’s “bathing suits”. Looks like a cross between a track suit and the “bathing costumes” my great aunts wore to the beach in the 1890s-early 1900s.



The full article is here.

Talking to Vladimir Ashkenazy

Wonderful afternoon. We drove my son Mikey to Harrow School in London for his piano academy, promising to return when his lessons were over to see Vladimir Ashkenzy award their diplomas. On the way up, I obsessively read the Greg Iles thriller I'd started last night, even though reading in the car gives me a terrible headache.

Background on Harrow School: Harrow is famous for its many traditions and rich history, which includes a long line of famous alumni such as eight former Prime Ministers (most notably Winston Churchill and Jawaharlal Nehru), a host of former and current British Lords and members of Parliament, two Kings and several other members of various royal families.

Look at this fancy school (below). Whenever we go to events at these elite private schools, Katie and I get annoyed because only boys can go there. Katie always feels a bit wistful that she wouldn't be allowed in.


We drove to our favorite Mexican restaurant in Notting Hill, Taqueria, for a late lunch. Check out these beautiful flautas I ordered, swimming in tomatillo sauce.


But you know what? I knocked one of the flautas over and it went into my purse, taking the spicy green sauce with it. What embarrassment. I tried to clean up as best I could. "Do you think Vladimir will see all the food on my dress?" I asked Mel and Katie. "I was going to ask him a question too."

"I'm sure he'll see that," my husband answered, "and think what a slob you are."

Nothing I could do about it, I thought, and swigged some of my daughter's margarita (I'd already finished mine).

After lunch, we swung by a Spanish supermarket on Portobello Road so I could buy some chocolate for making hot chocolate. The stuff comes in bars and you melt it down for hot chocolate, and it is delicious. I'd bought a few bars in Spain then stupidly left them behind in the fridge and wanted to replace them.

Then we raced back to Harrow to see Ashkenazy. He seemed like such a nice man. He lives in Switzerland but came to England to see the kids at the piano academy and encourage them in their studies and to answer any questions they had. Then he had to rush off to catch a plane to start a tour next week.

Here he is:

He answered all sorts of questions graciously, even strange ones like how did he think music could help achieve world peace.

"If all world leaders listened to Mendelssohn and Sibelius more, I think that would help," he said.

I asked him if he still gets nervous before performing even after all these years, and he admitted he did. I couldn't believe it -- I was talking to Vlad! Then I gushed, "I've enjoying listening to your recordings my whole life. Thank you so much."

This is Ashkenazy standing with the piano academy. See the tall boy in the green shirt behind him? That's my son Mikey. He will tell me off when he sees I've put a picture of him up in my blog.


After that, we got in the car, I finished the book I was reading, looked up and we were back in the bowels of Reading! Argh. I wanted to continue my dreamy afternoon in London....but no, reality calls.

Chick lit hits the buffers in the recession

Chick-lit heroines have fallen on hard times. The New York Times reports that the designer-strewn world of the chick-lit novel has vanished, as the publishing industry starts to catch up with the meltdown.

In Wendy Walker's forthcoming Social Lives, a Connecticut matron deals with dwindling resources as her husband is investigated for embezzlement. The Penny Pinchers Club, by Sarah Strohmeyer features a heroine who ends her spendthrift ways and starts salvaging food from the supermarket trash bin, as she suspects her husband of 20 years is about to leave her.

The thrifty heroines of these stories are perfectly chick-lit because the genre isn't based solely on a fascination with the bad behavior of the wealthy. According to one of the editors of Chick Lit: The New Woman's Fiction, the genre "responds through comedy to real situations confronting real women." At the moment, there's nothing more real than the recession.

Ants ruin trees' sex lives

from Live Science:

"Ants and ant-housing trees are a classic example of mutualism. The trees provide room and board for ants that ward off herbivores in return. But friends aren’t always what they seem, a new study shows.

Cordia nodosa is a South American tree colonized by ants, and one of them, Allomerus octoarticulatus, turns out to be as much fiend as friend. Sure, the ants protect the tree, but they also prune off its flowers, sterilizing it.

Hypothetically, they do so to force the tree to put its energy into growing rather than producing fruits and seeds. Inside hollow nodules in the branches called domatia, the ants both live and farm honeydew-producing scale insects for food. More growth creates more domatia, letting the ant colony expand."

Saturday stuff

What did you all do today? Because I work full time in an office, I spend most of my weekends doing chores to prepare for the following week. Today I had a huge cooking session. I made chicken pie, BBQ beans, lasagne and pesto to put in the freezer. I can't stand to eat processed meals from the supermarket so I have to make everything myself.

When I was at the supermarket, I saw a novel by Greg Iles. I have vaguely heard of him through Mississippi friends but he's not well known in England. I was so pleased to see a book set in my old town of Natchez, Mississippi, that I bought it. I was going to read it on what I thought would be sunny summer afternoon but this is England so there was no sun today.

We'll be heading into autumn without ever having had a summer. It's so depressing.

Tomorrow we are going into London to see the diplomas handed out for my son's piano academy. What is amazing is that Vladimir Ashekanzy, one of the world's greatest pianists, has agreed to give out the awards as well as answer questions from everyone. I've been thinking all week what I could ask him.

Can you think of anything? I thought of some lame question like what is the hardest thing you've ever had to play but that sounds really unimaginative.

America has no right to speak ill of the NHS

I loved this column in the Times today by Janice Turner:

Dear America, for some time now we’ve realised that far from being your special pal, you’re not that into us. We know the love — like the extradition treaty between us — flows mostly one way. For his military loyalty, our previous Prime Minister got yo Blaired. For his exquisite hand-wrought presidential gifts, our present PM got White House gift shop tat. America, we sucked it up.

You can diss our food, recoil at our personal hygiene, cast our RSC grandees as 2D villains, send Gwynnie and Madonna to patronise us, fingerprint us like criminals at your airports, mow down our sons in “friendly fire”. But as the rage over President Obama’s healthcare reforms descends into attack ads and town-hall gunfire, don’t you dare speak ill of our NHS.

It is the one thing, in our digital, atomised, privatised, multi-ethnic age, that unites us; our irreducible essence, the very best of us. Healthcare free at the point of delivery is the principle upon which every politician across our spectrum — marginal self-publicists such as Daniel Hannan aside — now agrees...That America does not have universal health-care, that 47 million of your citizens live in fear of getting ill, appals and, frankly, baffles us.

Movie Plots That Could Have Been Solved in Minutes

Ever get frustrated that the villain rigs a complicated trap instead of just shooting James Bond in the head? Or that Batman doesn't just kill the damned Joker when he has him right in front of him? The truth is a whole lot of movies would be a whole lot shorter if their characters would just once say, "'Hey boss, I know this is gonna' sound crazy, but what if just this once, we tried not doing things the most complicated way possible?"

Here are some examples of how movie plots could have been easily solved:

Bitterness -- a new mental disorder?

Some psychiatrists are trying to get excessive bitterness identified as a mental illness named post-traumatic embitterment disorder. Of course this has some people who live perfect little lives, and always get what they want, questioning the new classification.

The so called "disorder" is modeled after post-traumatic stress disorder because it too is a response to a trauma that endures. "They feel the world has treated them unfairly. It's one step more complex than anger. They're angry plus helpless," says Dr. Michael Linden, the psychiatrist who put a name to how the world works.

Less book learning and more book burning

A regular commenter asked me to post this for the amusement of the rest of you.

The clip is of a guy who calls himself Jonathon Christian Webster and says he is the founder and pastor of a group called The Church of the New Revelation. He calls in sporadically to a late night talk show, sometimes many many months between calls. I have never been able to decide if he is serious, or if he is parodying fundamentalist perspectives- but he does know the arguments well and uses them in the same manner I have heard other pastors use them on am religious broadcasts from small churches in the south.

Here he advocates "less book learning and more book burning."

Sugar in healthy packaging?

Vitaminwater tells its customers to "hydrate responsibly." That means not drinking 125-calorie sugar rushes like ... Vitaminwater.



Could Vitaminwater be a part of the obesity problem? Not Vitaminwater alone, but this false fantasy we're buying into, that we are doing something healthy for ourselves by drinking the stuff and consuming other "natural" products. Are Whole Foods and health food stores part of the problem by pushing sugar and caffeine on us in healthier packaging?

from Alternet.com

What do you think? Do you drink this?

We love the NHS

There is an increasingly bitter debate over President Obama's healthcare reforms. Republicans and other campaigners have warned against the dangers of “socialised” healthcare and claim the NHS proves the pitfalls of Mr Obama's plans.

Britons furious at the American attacks have organised the Twitter campaign which is being supported by the prime minister.

The social networking site crashed yesterday with the volume of new messages for the #welovethenhs campaign. The PM has used Downing Street's own Twitter site to hit back.

The site, which has more than a million followers, carried a message last night which said: “PM; NHS often makes the difference between pain and comfort, despair and hope, life and death. Thanks for always being there.” It also included Mrs Brown stating “#welovethenhs — more than we can say”.

The Government is loath to intervene directly in the US debate but constant attacks on the NHS, together with inaccurate claims about rationing, have prompted unease.

Reactions to this article

I put a link up to this article on my Facebook page and got very interesting comments. Here's a sample:

Karin Malchow
I've been waiting for countries with healthcare plans to actively help counter the disinformation here. Thanks.

Jeanne Bernard
We like the national health care system in France, too.

Eileen Tuuri
I can't tell you how many times I, as now a Canadian resident, have been told how dire and dreadful my affordable, modern, accessible health care is.

Thomas F. Dillingham
Just follow the money. The fearmongers (big insurance and big pharmaceuticals) depend on ignorance and formless apprehension (plus nativism and xenophobia) to fuel the protests. The protesters who attempt to masquerade as 'informed" merely repeat distorted or plain false allegations in authoritative tones and the dittoheads and palinophiles screech and yawp. What's really scary is that a Pew Center poll finds 61% approving of the protests.

Mike Allum
I loved that line "Don't let politicians decide how much your life is worth, let the doctors decide.". Doctors? Surely that's a misprint and should read "insurance companies".

Garnett Sailor
No, I have no insurance. I am uninsureable. I am not rich. I am an American, and I want the government to stay out of my life for the most part. My cancer victor daughter ("survivor" sucks) is uninsureable. Now, let's look at this the American way (BTW those horrible people you described are the most generous and charitable people in the whole... Read More world!). If you came up to me on the street with a knife and demanded that I give you my wallet, and I asked why, and you said because you needed the money for your prescription, people of every country and continent would call you a thief. However, when we ask the government to do it for us, it's somehow noble. In the U.S. there is no guarantee of anything other than the fact that we are born equal with the right to become unequal.

A religious witch? What's the world coming to?

My favorite TV show when I was little was Bewitched with Elizabeth Montgomery. Recently, it's been showing on a satellite channel in the UK, and I've been able to look at shows from the first year, when it was in black and white. I had been too young to see that when it actually aired.


It's so relaxing to watch childhood shows again as an adult. I'd always admired Agnes Moorehead's acting, especially in Orson Welles movies. She seemed so refined, so intelligent. So imagine how I felt when I read that she was actually a Bible Beater in real life.

from her wiki page:

In addition to her interest in acting, she developed a lifelong interest in religion; in later years actors such as Dick Sargent would recall Moorehead arriving on the set with "the Bible in one hand and the script in the other."

A Timely Bewitched Fact

I was thinking about Larry Tate (played by David White) today as they announced plans to free the Lockerbie bomber. Did you know that his son was on that plane? Apparently, White never recovered from this and died himself soon afterwards.

Pearls before breakfast

Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

Eliz again: It was famous violinist Joshua Bell -- and his Stradivarius -- playing that day. I'm going to have to pay more attention to the musicians I see playing in the London underground from now on.

Full story below:

Pearls before breakfast

Less likely to develop cancer and die

Hmmm....I'd better go to the gym during my lunch house instead of reading the TMZ gossip site and eating chocolate. On the other hand, I'm done for in the long-term anyway so what does it matter?

"People who are more active and exercise harder are less likely to develop cancer and die, suggests research published ahead of print in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

A higher use of oxygen consumption during physical activity is linked to a reduction in the level of illness in a person and their likelihood of dying from cancer.

Researchers from the universities of Kuopio and Oulu in Finland studied 2,560 men aged between 42 and 61 from eastern Finland with no history of cancer and assessed their leisure time physical activity over a 12-month period."

Free AK47 with every purchase

Enterprising retailers in the US are rushing to offer the ultimate in discount vouchers — a free AK47 assault rifle with every purchase.

Max Motors, in Butler, Missouri, has run out of pick-up trucks after word got out of its offer of a complimentary semi-automatic weapon with every vehicle. The success of the promotion prompted a Harley-Davidson dealer and a boat and tractor dealer to set up similar offers.

Mark Muller, of Max Motors — whose business slogan is “God, Guns, Guts and American Pick-Up Trucks” — said that he had been overwhelmed by the response and had to shut the offer down prematurely.

The company sold 200 vehicles in just ten days; 100 more than normal as gun-loving customers queued to upgrade their vehicles and get their hands on a weapon that can fire 600 rounds a minute.

Pickle Facts

People have been eating pickles ever since the Mesopotamians started making them way back in 2400 B.C.E. Here are some even more important things you should know about them. Thanks to Derry for sending this in.

1. In the Pacific Islands, natives pickle their foods in holes in the ground lined with banana leaves, and use them as food reserves in case of storms. The pickles are so valuable that they've become part of the courting process, helping a man prove he'll be able to provide for a woman. In Fiji, guys can't get a girl without first showing her parents his pickle pits.

2. Cleopatra claimed pickles made her beautiful. (We guess it had more to do with her genes.)

3. The majority of pickle factories in America ferment their pickles in outdoor vats without lids (leaving them subject to insects and bird droppings). But there's a reason. According to food scientists, the sun's direct rays prevent yeast and mold from growing in the brine.

4. In the Delta region of Mississippi, Kool-Aid pickles have become ridiculously popular with kids. The recipe's simple: take some dill pickles, cut them in half, and then soak them in super strong Kool-Aid for more than a week. According to the New York Times, the sweet vinegar snacks are known to sell out at fairs and delicatessens, and generally go for $.50 to a $1.

5. Not everyone loves a sweet pickle. In America, dill pickles are twice as popular as the sweet variety.

6. The Department of Agriculture estimates that the average American eats 8.5 lbs of pickles a year.

7. When the Philadelphia Eagles thrashed the Dallas Cowboys in sweltering heat in September 2000, many of the players attributed their win to one thing: guzzling down immense quantities of ice-cold pickle juice.

8. If it weren't for pickles, Christopher Columbus might never have "discovered" America. In his famous 1492 voyage, Columbus rationed pickles to his sailors to keep them from getting scurvy. He even grew cucumbers during a pit stop in Haiti to restock for the rest of the voyage.

9. Speaking of people who get credit for discovering America, when he wasn't drawing maps and trying to steal Columbus' thunder, Amerigo Vespucci was a well-known pickle merchant.

10. Napoleon was also a big fan of pickle power. In fact, he put up the equivalent of $250,000 as a prize to whoever could figure out the best way to pickle and preserve foods for his troops.

11. During the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, H. J. Heinz used pick-shaped pins to lure customers to his out of the way booth. By the end of the fair, he'd given out lots of free food, and over 1,000,000 pickle pins.

12. Berrien Springs, Michigan, has dubbed itself the Christmas Pickle Capital of the World. In early December, they host a parade, led by the Grand Dillmeister, who tosses out fresh pickles to parade watchers.

Do you agree that great art requires great conflict?

Regular commenter OJ posed an interesting question in the comments section of this blog yesterday:

Do you agree that great art requires great conflict?

My first thought was yes. But I threw the question out for others and got these responses. What do you think?

Steven Wells Hicks
I don't agree. Most great novelists write daily in calm worlds as well as violent. Great art comes first from great craftsmanship and the steady application thereof. While it can certainly be the residue of great conflict, raw conflict isn't as important as the great craftsmanship and raw talent. Whoever cooked the "great conflict requirement" years ago was suffering from dual cases of self-importance and vanity.

Jim Dollarhide
Nice thought Steve. I used to preach that back in the days. About the craft(s) of filmmaking. My mentor, the late Jim Lucas, told me when I was about 20, "First you have to learn the craft. You can't think about the art until you have learned the craft"... He paused a moment and then said, "and it takes a lifetime to learn the craft".

Thomas F. Dillingham
Conflict in the world produces numbers of deeply frustrated and angry artists who are prevented from creating their art by the turmoil and disruption surrounding them. They do their best under the circumstances, and sometimes great art emerges from periods of widespread conflict (consider, for example, Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps, composed and first performed in a Nazi work camp--but in that case, the turmoil was mostly outside the camp).

Art (such as that of Shostakovich, Mandelstam, Akhmatova) that emerges from a context of great fear and repression is a slightly different thing. But what we perceive as great art may portray great conflict (implying serious subject matter that affects a great many people or implie the fate of whole nations), though it may have been produced long after the turmoil (as Wordsworth suggests), exploring its meaning or memorializing it in tranquillity. War and Peace was not written in the midst of resistance to Napoleon.

I think the question needs to be divided--the phrase "great art" implies a reception theory--what kinds of works do "we" perceive as "great" and why?--but it asks a production question--"what conditions encourage the production of great art and by whom?" The fact that Western culture has tended to value epic narratives (usually involving conflict... Read More) and tragic drama more highly than domestic melodrama or comedy would put a particular weight on that question. Is Jane Austen great art? Emily Dickinson? I would say emphatically yes, but though both portray conditions of great inner turmoil, and both lived (as do we all) in historical periods of considerable conflict and social change, both arguably lived lives of comparative tranquility and distance from the great historical events of their times. Among other things, this forces the consideration of the dominance of masculine assumptions about what constitutes great art. And so on.

Elizabeth again: Would you care to add anything to this discussion?

Jews who consider themselves secular rising

We're always going on about Christianity in this blog, but these are some interesting numbers -- looks like everyone is 'going secular.'

"THE number of American Jews who consider themselves religiously observant has dropped by more than 20 percent over the last two decades, as the share of Jews who consider themselves secular has risen.

The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found that around 3.4 million American Jews call themselves religious — out of a general Jewish population of about 5.4 million.

The number of Jews who identify themselves as only culturally Jewish has risen from 20 percent in 1990 to 37 percent last year, according to the study. In the same period, the number of all US adults who said they had no religion rose from 8 percent to 15 percent.

According to this report, Jews are more likely to be secular than Americans in general.

About half of all US Jews – including those who consider themselves religiously observant – claim in the survey that they have a secular worldview and see no contradiction between that outlook and their faith, according to the study’s authors.

Researchers attribute the trends among American Jews to the high rate of intermarriage and “disaffection from Judaism” in the United States."

And a sixpence for her shoe

I just heard that my god-daughter is getting married next March so I immediately started the search to find a sixpence for her shoe.

"There is an old wedding rhyme which goes..... "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a sixpence for her shoe."

The first sixpences were struck during the reign of Edward VI in 1551 and continued until they were rendered obsolete in 1971 and remained legal tender until 1980. Sixpences were also traditionally put into Christmas puddings. Children would hope to be the lucky one to find the sixpence, no doubt it also encouraged children to finish their pudding."

Yeah, I'm such a 'free thinker' -- put me near any traditional occasion like a wedding, and I'm jumping back into tradition with both feet. I'm even going to order two sixpence so my daughter will have one.

Regular commenter Theresa told me she had a sixpence in her shoe for her first marriage and it didn't do a bit of good!

Another comment from a relative in New Orleans: "Just a warning....my sixpence caused a very painful blister. I spent my entire honeymoon (and simultaneous hurricane evacuation) hobbling around on a bum foot. BUT....the marriage itself has been FAR less painful!"

Optimistic women live longer

I don't know about this study. I had a grandmother who was so mean and surly that we used to call her Cramps. She lived to be almost 100. And my mother was a sunny optimist who got Multiple Sclerosis and died too early.

What type person are you? Let me know in the comments section. I think I'd call myself a 'depressed optimist' probably.

"Optimistic women live longer and healthier lives than their pessimistic peers, a new study suggests.

Specifically, researchers found that women who see the glass as half full are at a lower risk for developing heart disease, and have a lower risk of dying from any cause, than those who see the glass as half empty.

The new research, detailed in the journal Circulation, also found that women with a high degree of cynical hostility — defined as harboring hostile thoughts toward others or having a general mistrust of people — were at a higher risk of dying in general.

"As a physician, I'd like to see people try to reduce their negativity in general," said Dr. Hilary A. Tindle, lead author of the study and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. "The majority of evidence suggests that sustained, high degrees of negativity are hazardous to health."

The lighter life

To its many customers, the LighterLife diet is a chance to transform lives - at a price. The ultra-low-calorie regime, endorsed by Coleen Nolan and Antony Worrall Thompson, is said to achieve extraordinary results, with dieters losing as much as a stone a month - and keeping the weight off.

Critics say the punishing 500-calorie-a-day regime can be linked to eating disorders, heart attacks and memory loss, and can even prove fatal. Nevertheless, 150,000 have completed the diet, which restricts food intake to shakes and soups for 100 days and is combined with group therapy sessions aimed at helping customers sustain their weight loss.

Lighter Life is very popular in the UK. But then I saw a photo of the founder of it, Jackie Cox. Here she is:


Now doesn't this make you think that the entire system must be suspect if she looks like this? But now that we have been learning logic on this blog, I know that is a fallacy. Just because she can't take care of herself doesn't mean that her Lighter Life ideas aren't sound.

But still....I wouldn't try it if it's not something she can do herself.

How can I stop a cat biting the &^%$£ out of me?

Our new foster cat, Dizzy, is a biter. I will be gently petting her, and she'll attack me, biting my hands and arms. I know she doesn't mean to cause me intense physical pain but it's not very nice.

What can I do about? I was angry at her then I asked the cats charity what her history was so I could understand her better.

It turns out that she was living in a home that got repossessed by the bank, and she was ousted. She had also been living with two younger cats that she hated and never got along with.

Oh, I thought, poor thing. Now that I knew her situation, maybe I could be a better foster mother, and she would stop attacking me.

This morning she waited outside the bedroom door for me to get her breakfast. "Poor Dizzy," I said, stooping over to pat her head. "You've had such a hard life. Don't worry, we'll take care of...."

Never got to finish that sentence as the damn cat started biting my feet and scratching them up. I'm trying to figure out what to do, and have seen one solution:

What do you think? Should I get it?