#164 -- Andrew Willett
Looking forward to the report of your foray among the Robert Pattinson mad fans!
However, very much of the walmart merchandise is defective from the gitgo or falls apart REALY FAST.
Speaking of the time we lived in NO and there was no choice of shopping for appliances small or large without driving out of the city, except walmart.
And what they stock as food in in their "supermarket!" It was 95 percent processed / fast food / junk food with sodium and fat levels as well off the charts -- fruit and vegetables? fresh produce? ha.
Love, C.
[ "Reports that after the show he was seen cavorting with Harriet Beecher Stowe and Susan B. Anthony appear to be unfounded." ]
As well, it's notorious what uxorious spouse is Grant, completely devoted still, in public and private, to Mrs. Grant.
There are enormous numbers of works out there that get the lead up to, the War of Southern Aggression itself, and the aftermath, wrong, committed by very well known names. One of the most profoundly influential is D.W. Griffith.
Sadly, for history, and for mythology.
Love, C.
I wrote about this mess in my LJ blog last week as well.
The most significant thing about this major error about rivers and terrain in the U.S. Civil War is this book of Keegan's was organized around the theory that geography was the significant factor of the U.S. Civil War. And he got the geography all wrong.
That said, that Keegan would claim that the rivers protected the confederacy like a moat, remains even more inexplicable. Particularly since the early conquest of New Orleans by the Federal forces was possible because, um, well, it was on a river -- and that Vicksburg was on a river and the key to the success of the Wilderness Campaign.
If it is age that has cause Keegan to become so careless, I feel very badly about it. If it is merely carelessness, that is something else, but I, for one, will likely never know what that is.
Still and all somebody should have questioned him about that river stuff.
Love, C.
I know far too many people who are in exactly this situation of either don't sick or get better immediately or die.
And I hear the right of every sort saying this isn't their problem and they don't want to pay for the health care of these sick people. This includes my sister. Whose insurance will drop her in a hot minute if she shows up with, say, breast cancer.
As it stands mostly now your health insurance is good only as long as you keep paying ever higher premiums and deductibles -- and don't use it.
Love, C.
Today the New York Times caught up with this ML discussion, with a front page story on the sweat lodge disaster, and in the Fashion and Styles section, a story on parenting that posits yelling is the new spanking.
Love, C.
The thing about Hillary's health plan is that it was more complicated and more expensive than what was currently in place. It also included huge giveaways and power to the insurance industry. She was a good friend to the insurance racketeers' lobbyists then, and probably still is. But since she's Secretary of State now and not a senator, it maybe isn't so important.
Recall the insurance companies were in favor of it. For some reason then the AMA was not -- they were the ones who were making money hand-over-fist then. Now the insurance racketeers have cut deeply into their profits too.
Anyway that is why she wasn't able to rally people like me to her side in that really really really messy, complicated bad plan.
Love, C.
#512 ::: dcb
Yes, double that Bingo!
So many friends I know spend much of not most of their socializing off in another room with their very little ones, talking, reasoning, comforting them, time-outing them, in their years' long devotion to raising adequately socialized, happy, unselfish, thinking adults.
Judging by the results as children of many of these friends are now at young adult or adult stages, they succeeded brilliantly.
The time and the energy, the devotion, the constancy -- I am in awe.
This is why we are childless. We don't have what it takes.
Love, C.
Is poutine sort of a version of non-redemptive calorie intake, like chicken wings, which for some reason the city of seeming origin of them as a bar finger snack, Buffalo, called buffalo wings?
If what is meant by mysticism here equals transcendence, then there's an enormous swath of trancendence experienced regularly in the protestant Christian churches, particularly if you included the so-called 'Black' Church here n the U.S.A., and other parts of the former British Empire that were recipients of the involuntary African diaspora, like Jamaica.
Trance - transcendent: you will get there with music and dance, particularly if there are drums and campanas, played by those who know what they are doing.
A week ago yesterday, i.e. Sunday, a white friend of ours participated for the first time as a full member of a traditional New Orleans Second Line club. He is the second person not of color in his group (the first is old time president, called Old Joe -- who is an old time New Orleans Wobbly from the Irish Channel).
This is a huge life commitment: Our friends pay l $1500 dues annually, meeting with the group every second Friday all year to plan the annual parade, to discuss other business -- these are also mutual aid organizations for their members -- and to have made his own expensive matching outfit for the parade day (he bought $300 handmade ostrich leather shoes!) -- and most importantly then, via his dues and other ways, help pay for the outfits and other expenses on behalf of members who this year may not be able to meet their obligations.
The parade, of course, hires a brass band (see where the New Orleans brass band richness is maintained?) and the ropers who help keep the Second Line and the band in line form (as the clubs parade they pick up ever more people until there are thousands marching through the New Orleans streets that are the group's route); they also have scheduled rest stops -- the bars depend on their patronage as part of their annual revenue. Our friends group this year included Commodore's Palace as their mid-route rest stop.
Spouse was there, along with other Tulane friends in honor and support of our friend -- and because we love Second Lines on go on every one we can.
I was looking at the photos shot of our friend last Sunday. Some were with our other friends. When Spouse showed our friend these photos he had no recollection at all that these photos were taken at the rest stops.
He was in the Zone, i.e. a trance. You march for at least 4 hours in whatever weather -- this is New Orleans, on Sunday afternoon, it's usually going to be HOT, and it will be humid. You are committed to complete the entire route, no matter what the weather is. You aren't merely walking. You are DANCING. You are expected to dance. That is what makes it a Second Line, not a mere parade. The brass band is there pumping you the whole time -- that is how you do it and how you get home, i.e. you move out of yourself, up there, and join with more than you even know. You are with an entire community of people who going there too, with routes of getting there this way that go back at least into the 19th century.
The peace on our friend's face afterwards ... and that of all who managed the entire route -- that is what it is about -- among other things.
The club members, like the people who join during the route, also belong to any one of the very many Black Churches of New Orleans, also probably practice others forms of what we loosely call "spiritism" though of a particularly local variety -- and many probably also belong to Mardi Gras Indian tribes. Community ....
I just thought I'd toss this into this interesting conversation.
As for corporal punishment of children -- I was beaten a lot with everything from extremely hard spanking of my dad's open farmwork hard hands (could not sit down afterwards) to fists, sticks, belts, hairbrushes -- and hardly ever did I believe I had actually been bad. It was more than obvious that most of the time this was because my parents were in a bad mood.
Love, c.
Sarah Vowell did an incredible piece way back in the day for what turned into "This American Life" (PRI - Public Radio International) on the Prayer Warriors of Colorado Springs.
This has been going on for decades now in the U.S. Reagan let them out from under the rocks, and the dubcheney regime was their time to parrrrrrrrrrrrrrrteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! They're not going home now, either.
Love, C.
xeger@687 --
Without even trying I can think of so many exceptions to your over-generalization that people who read poetry -- or by extension anything else for entertainment and / or for intellectual pursuit -- don't follow sports.
I am not one of them, but loads of my friends are, starting with Kit Kerr, who reads much poetry in the ages of the bards and minstrals, and who has recently concluded several cycles of Celtic knot interbraided chronicles her fans call familiarly, "Deverry." She's a passionate baseball and football fan.
She's not exceptional.
When you expand the definition of sports beyond football, baseball and soccer, the numbers are even higher.
I am not among those exceptions though. I generally loathe sport, unless they are working dog class trials.
Love, C.
#123 ::: Janet Croft
Serendipitously, I ran across mention of Barbara Erenreich's latest book _Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America_ and her shorter-version blog entry on the topic.
Erenreich always hits the zeitgeist bullseye, doesn't she? She is being interviewed, provided welcome guest slots, on all the radio talk shows these last two weeks.
I've found this tendency in the U.S. to be ever more disturbing. For me it began when my their 'guardian angels' and the guardian angels of other family members in all seriousness. My mother?????!!!! talking of guardian angels? The strict Lutheran religion in which we were reared, which she practiced, particularly eschewed such concepts as either pagan or Catholic or as ignorant, uneducated superstition. This was about 25 years ago. This is when I knew the nation had changed drastically from what it had been, and that the Enlightenment was effectively being rolled back just about everywhere.
Love, C.
#92 Fidelio --
From the keynote being presented by spouse in another hour or two at the Zócolo Conference on Hispanic Immigration to New Orleans:
After winning World War II, the country was as united as it ever got, as much of a nation as it’s ever been, reaching new heights of prosperity. But this feeling of general well-being was not extended to African Americans, who were literally second-class citizens. They hadn’t been slaves for a century by then, but under a color-coded caste system called “race,†a word with no useful biological meaning, they were a legally distinct class whose access to education and whose participation in the professions was very largely blocked. We heard a lot of talk after the flood here that – well, it’s not race, it’s class. But what is race, if not a class? My years of historical research have strengthened a conviction I already had – that racism is more than ignorant, individual prejudice. Racism is a system that encourages and organizes that prejudice, with the ultimate end of having a subservient class that will work cheap. What is happening to Latino laborers right now is racism in action.
The attainment of civil rights for African Americans, sometimes referred to as the Second Reconstruction, was perhaps the great social achievement of the century. It’s no accident that along with strong unions and civil rights there came a loosening of United States immigration laws. A new class of cheap laborers would be needed.
Love, C.
Isn't it reassuring in some basic human way that we all still enthusiastically interested in the weather? And talk about it with each other?
Love, C.
Snow in New Jersey, cold and rain at home in NYC and thunderstorms and 80's in New Orleans + Visit From POTUS.
Love, C.
Our friend's female feline, Mz M, not only shuns and dislikes other cats, she does not consider herself a cat.
Have not yet figured out what she considers herself to be, other than Superior Being To You, of course.
Love, C.
Open Thread-ness:
Kim Stanley Robinson on Olaf Stapledon and Virginia Woolf and Science Fiction and Historical Fiction.
It may not be what you think it will be.
Love, C.
#57 ::: Keith Kisser
There's much connection between the state of non-peace we're in and the state of the economy. The Haliburton-KBR darth vadar people are still building facilities in Iraq and in Afghanistan that are funded via contracts that have no oversight, no accountability -- and the money and responsiblity is still by and large non-traceable. None of this has been stopped, and the excuse is national security and we're at war. How much are we bleeding in Iraq and Afghanistan daily? Do we even have numbers?
Obama's done nothing to rein in or stop the state of non-traceable tax money to these same corps via the wars that the cronies began. He just changed the focus from Iraq (where we still are and are still expanding bases and facilities) to Afghanistan.
Love, C.
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