I want to be there at the moment when history happens, when the world changes, when consciousness shifts, and when the people rise up and throw off the shackles of the elite, the status quo, and the comfortable
Strange... strains of "Share the Land" are running through my head and I can't stop them. Ow.
What ever happened to those glorious, naive 60's dreams of throwing off the shackles of the status quo, etc.? Were they totally crushed by 80's Reaganomics? Or are we seeing them rise again in the Entitlement generation? And if so, are they just as naive? As in, "I want enlightenment and I want it NOW, not three nanoseconds ago, and you don't expect me to put any actual work into this, do you?" kind of thing?
Lord knows I have enough college students who think that simply paying their tuition and occupying space entitles them to a good grade. Does showing up to the victory party for some candidate now entitle you to a place in the New World Order?
Somebody still has to do the work.
At least there will be no question over whether it is a forgery or not.
I kinda liked the person in what I take to be clerical robes who has been transformed into a crabby old woman.
The reclining sheep with its back to the viewer in place of the odalesque is just -- priceless.
Wow. I served three years as managing editor for an educational research journal, an actual paying job (even if it was grad student starvation wages). That's more experience than the Pitch Witch-with-a-B has. I could start my own "editor who knows it all" blog.
Or then again, not. All I learned from that and from writing professionally is that I know -->this muchthis muchthis much<-- very well, I don't know beans about a whole lot.
Here's an article from Snopes.com on the basic email that started this, minus the sob story about ol' Mom:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/immigration/socialsecurity.asp
Notice that most of senators on the list are Democrats or moderate Republicans.
Second, what would be the alleged reasons someone would have for wanting to prevent US citizens from leaving?
To stop those commie/terrist/traitor retirees from crossing the border to buy the same prescription drugs in Canada that cost them several times as much in the U.S.? Even though they're manufactured by the very same companies?
I dunno, just a thought.
The piece that I haven't seen explained yet, and perhaps someone can enlighten me, is why did the campus police approach the student in the first place? Surely not because he didn't have ID. They had to ask him for that. What precipitated this event? Was it something he did that prompted someone to call the cops? Were they doing a routine library patrol (do they do routine library patrols?) and decided to approach him and see if he belonged there? If so, why? Because of something he was doing? Because he was dark-skinned?
All the eyewitness accounts begin with the student in a confrontation with the police. But why was he approached in the first place?
They're preying on the uninformed, unpublished authors who crave to hear those six magic words: "We want to publish your book!"
New authors believe it will be hard to get published, and indeed it is, because you have to be willing to put the time and sweat equity in to learning to write well and learning to market your manuscripts to agents or editors. None of that is easy. The first rejections are frustrating, and they leave newcomers with the uneasy feeling that there's a secret handshake out there that they haven't learned yet, and if they could just learn it, they'd pass beyond that magic door and become a Published Author.
Airleaf is selling then an ersatz secret handshake.
Months later when they've discovered they've been duped, they'll either throw their manuscripts away and give up in frustration, convinced that the whole publishing industry is a scam, or they'll find their way to a writer's discussion board or writing group or other source and perhaps get the truth.
Unless they wander into PA's discussion board, of course.
Piffle -- I meant Don Wright. Though Wasserman is a great cartoonist, too.
I think this cartoon by Dan Wasserman sums it all up neatly:
http://www.gocomics.com/donwright/2006/10/31/
And now the hard part begins -- trying to mend everything that W broke and put this country back on a sane track again.
Another Oregonian here, who already voted last week. Love those mail-in ballots.
I just have one thing to say after the zingers delivered to the Republican party: I registered as a Republican, my parents' party of choice, in 1980, pre-Reagan and post-Watergate, back when the party still had true statesmen such as our own Mark Hatfield (I've met Mark O., and he's a perfect gentleman) or Eisenhower. The party changed during the Reagan years, with the rise of the "moral majority" who were neither moral nor a majority -- the first glimmerings of "we make our own reality." Maybe it had already been changing -- I was quite young and not very politically astute when I registered -- or maybe it was the taint of Watergate still clinging to it. I've watched it transform over these last couple of decades into something so far from what I took the party to be in my youth that I don't even know what it is any more. It's not the party of Lincoln nor of Eisenhower. What was once called "insane right-wing radical" is now called "conservative." What was once called "conservative," that is to say a true fiscal conservative who tends to support only needed changes to the system, is now called "liberal." What I took myself to be -- a moderate -- is now called "flaming liberal." What was once called "liberal" is now called "left wing radical," and all of those "liberal" groups are lumped together under the heading of "terrorist sympathizer." Hello, everyone, and welcome to the America we used to read about in bad sci-fi novels and think, "That could never happen here."
Now that I've cast my ballot, I'll be changing parties. To what, I'm not sure yet. But definitely not Republi-theocrat. Sorry, Dad. But at least I got to tell the happy little Bush supporter and Saxton (republican candicate for governor) supporter in the phone polls exactly how I felt about their candidates. Oh, yah.
Well, darn that reality-based liberal media, telling us that troops are getting blown to bits in Iraq. Don't they understand that The Decider makes reality for us?
And as for those troops getting blown up -- um, er, well, must be Clinton's fault. Yeah, that's it.
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
Mohandas Gandhi
Well, their message to Exxon sure beats the message they sent to Leeuwenhoek when he wrote to them about the "animacules" he'd discovered in water droplets:
20th of October, 1676
Dear Mr. Anthony van Leeuwenhoek,
Your letter of October 10th has been received here with amusement. Your account of myriad 'little animals' seen swimming in rainwater, with the aid of your so-called 'microscope,' caused the members of the society considerable merriment when read at our most recent meeting. Your novel descriptions of the sundry anatomies and occupations of these invisible creatures led one member to imagine that your 'rainwater' might have contained an ample portion of distilled spirits--imbibed by the investigator. Another member raised a glass of clear water and exclaimed, 'Behold, the Africk of Leeuwenhoek.' For myself, I withhold judgment as to the sobriety of your observations and the veracity of your instrument. However, a vote having been taken among the members--accompanied I regret to inform you, by considerable giggling--it has been decided not to publish your communication in the Proceedings of this esteemed society. However, all here wish your 'little animals' health, prodigality and good husbandry by their ingenious 'discoverer.'
Hendrik Oldenburg
Secretary of the Royal Society, London
Getting "published" is easy. You can take your book to Kinkos and "publish" it by having them print and bind it. You can send it to PublishAmerica (if you don't mind ambiguous language in the contract regarding who owns the copyright). You can send it to Lulu or CafePress.
Getting it distributed so it can get into bookstores, where the majority of books are still sold -- that's the hard part.
Marketing it so that people want to read it -- that's the other hard part.
Writing, re-writing, getting good editing, re-writing some more so that your book glows with a professional sheen -- that's the other other hard part.
And those are the parts that vanity publishers leave out of their glowing advertisements.
To #60, I can see where beasts for traction wouldn't do well in that area, and agriculture might be problematic. What did they do beside fishing/whaling, just out of curiosity?
The land between the mountains and the coast was rich with all kinds of resources. Cedar trees were used in countless ways -- as lumber for building plank houses, for carving dugout canoes, a houseposts and all the various types of totem poles. The fibrous bark was shredded and twisted to make cord for fishing nets, bindings, and clothing. If I recall correctly, famous Chilkat blankets were woven with dog wool or mountain goat wool over a warp of cedar fibers. Nettles were also used for fiber. Cattails were woven into mats, and many other fibrous materials (spruce roots, beargrass, etc.) were used for baskets.
In the summer, families moved upriver, often taking planks from their houses to set up temporary houses, and spent the summer gathering food. Spring and summer were time for gathering native blackberries, huckleberries, and lots of other fresh foods. These were dried and carried home for storage. When the salmon ran upstream, the people would catch as much as they could for smoking and drying. Salmon formed their staple food. They'd use smelt rakes to gather up thousands of fish during the smelt run, and a kind of smelt called eulachon was processed for oil. There were vast trade routes (known to the white settlers later as the "grease trails") involving the trade of eulachon oil with people inland for items that the coastal people couldn't get, such as obsidian for projectile points.
The coastal people also hunted to some extent. Elk, deer, and bear were needed not only for meat, but for skins. The estuaries were full of ducks and other waterbirds that could be eaten, as well as all the different types of clams and other shellfish.
The thing with diet/non-diet sodas is that the choices always seem to force people to choose between caffeine and calories. I adore restaurants that serve up diet lemon-lime or caffeine-free Coke. If it's late at night and I don't want to light up like Buzzy the Hummingbird, I may not want to sugar up, either, because these days I don't need all the extra empty calories. I know at a private party it's extra work for the hosts, but these days more and more people are calorie-conscious. Plain bottled water is okay, too.
You just know that because the plot was foiled, the far right will use it to say, "Look, we're keeping you safe from terrorism! We caught 'em, we did! We did that! Stick with us! Stay the course!"
And had the plot NOT been foiled and a plane or two or more had been blown up, the same far right mouthpieces would say, "Look, this just proves we have to get even tougher on terrorism! Stick with us! Stay the course!"
And meekly, Americans accept the added strain and inconvenience because gods know none of us want to have our flights interrupted by a sudden explosion and rapid descent. Every dull flight is a good flight.
I wonder, sometimes, as I muse about such incidents, and how they arise just before elections -- is it the far right doing some dramatic grandstandins? Or does Al Qaeda itself prefer to keep King George and his minions in the White House because having the Great Evil to fight against is the best terrorist recruitment tool?
Or perhaps a bit of both?
Well, you know what Rummy said: it's not a classic civil war.
Whatever "classic" is supposed to mean.
Does he mean a war in which a country is divided into two geographic parts, splitting over an issue of some sort, and one part of the nation try to secede from the nation as a whole, as in the American civil war?
Or is he referring to two groups of different religious persuasions, as in the English civil war?
Or perhaps a conflict of ideologies and the distribution of power, such as the French Revolution?
Is it not classic because the two sides didn't put on blue or gray uniforms, fire cannons and muskets, and shout, "Fix bayonets! Charge!" as they pelted across fields at one another?
Please, Rummy, do tell us what a "classic" civil war consists of.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2007 | 5 |
| 2006 | 58 |
Total: 63 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Writerious:
Show all comments by Writerious.