that girl

more republican pandering and offense.

palin is supposed to attract the disgruntled hilary supporters? other than common plumbing, what have these 2 women in common? can the media truly be THAT disingenuous??

we'll skip all the crap about her flip-flop on the "bridge to nowhere" and her effortless from-where-the-hell victory over hated and notoriously corrupt old hacks in her into-the-wild home-state. for now, we'll take a pass on the ethics scandal involving her pointy elbows and sharp pencils trying to get her ex-brother-in-law state-trooper canned. her youth, her visual appeal, her *feistiness* (um, gidget as 2nd in command?) her *first-dude* of a husband who is also a champion snow-mobiler. is there another female governor that can gut a fish in a trice? hell, this one can probably flay a bear in minutes just to bolster her anti-protection stance.

isn't the dirty lil secret that she is supposed to secure the ultra-cons who were not pledging to mccain and the evangelical bloc? she's in bed with big oil and gas, anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-conservation and favors creationism in the public school curriculum. she is anti-abortion.

james dobson of "focus on the family" announced earlier this year that he wouldn't and couldn't vote for McCain. today he pronounced himself converted, thanks to a ticket that now includes someone for whom "the sanctity of life" isn't just a political position.

palin has a 5-month old son with down syndrome. as an older mother, she took the test and decided to continue the pregnancy and have her son. "a blessing..." blah, blah, blah.

amazing that my head remained attached to my neck when i found this in a response thread in a ny times blog: (proves how dubious science is, i guess...)

"I’m a pro-choice Democrat, and it appalls me that 90+% of women who receive the diagnosis of Trisomy 21 “choose” to abort. This means that either (a) only liberal democratic women get pregnant with fetuses with Down syndrome, or (b) there are an awful lot of hypocritical Republican women out there."

please don't get me wrong, i laud palin for staying true to her core belief here. i do remain disgusted that such a private decision should be made part of her public and political persona. further, she was allowed to make a choice, something she wants to deny all other women, many of whom clearly share most of her politics. perhaps they don't have her access to nannies and such? her husband has 2 jobs plus a demanding hobby. she is a governor who will be stumping hard the next 2 months to win the white house. they have 5 children. who's tending the baby?

a "heartbeat away from the presidency" holds brand new meaning here with a very old dude whose ticker and health are so much in doubt. he's got almost 30 years on this lady! if mccain drops during an inaugural ball dance, how's palin gonna respond 6 months later to putin going all kruschev and pounding his shoe about ossetia? the cons have been trying to paint obama as inexperienced. what the hell does that make palin?

on some nattering head show, pat robertson (why is that loathsome reptile still sliming around with any say-so?) referred to palin more than once as "that gal". rush limbaugh (that big fat idiot) called her a "babe". are you for real? after the months of misogynistic horse-whipping of hilary, these guys turn the condescension onto one of their own? gaaah.i hope she can take dictation and type. maybe she can help mccain "make a google", as he still puts it.

lastly, ya gotta wonder: is hillary laughing so hard she wets herself, or beating some illegal maid with wire hangers right about now?

quotable

"she's got gaps, i got gaps, together -- we fill gaps."

~~rocky balboa on love

more of the same

"perhaps it was god who put these two great resources right next to each other. just to see what people would do with them." ~~ JOHN T. SHIVELY, chief executive of a consortium seeking to mine copper and gold near alaskan rivers that also nurture salmon.

yes. i'm sure that's exactly it. and if you listen carefully, god will tell you exactly what is the right thing to do.

a mineral deposit of staggering value, but of a finite amount, vs. the world's largest salmon run which produces an amazing amount of wealth each year and has renewed itself for millenia. mining of the gold and copper will release toxins into the river that will likely destroy it and kill off the fish forever.

what would jesus do?

conserve this

in a letter to his campaign manager, dated Oct. 26, 1904, teddy roosevelt wrote: “i must ask you to direct that the money be returned to them forthwith.” as roosevelt saw it: “we cannot under any circumstances afford to take a contribution which can be even improperly construed as putting us under an improper obligation.”

he was running for his first full term as president and had discovered a $100,000 contribution from standard oil.

if anybody else's head besides mine explodes trying to imagine this from any modern candidate let's just collect our spattered brain matter and move forward, ok? (i'm vaguely recalling a last-minute scramble to distance from that filth-monger abramoff, but that's an unnecessary digression here.)

after mccain flip-flopped on off-shore drilling, he pocketed $1.1 million from big oil and big gas in TWO WEEKS. no pretending here that obama's hands haven't dipped into the pool of texas crude because they have, however his "tax the hell out of the oil companies" stance hasn't exactly opened the hearts and minds in exxon's boardrooms -- most were small checks from employees.

in yet another flight of fantasy, mccain this week described himself as a "roosevelt republican." either he is completely ignorant of roosevelt's accomplishments and philosophies, or blithely assumes the same of the american public. (very sadly, either holds equal weight, i guess, huh?) so let's take a quick trip in the way-back machine to compare and contrast the republican party of 100 years ago and today, and we'll use mccain's new-found hero as the vintage model.

the rough rider has long been admired (or hated) as a trust-buster, for regulating industry and curbing the excesses of giant corporations. he favored the imposition of an inheritance tax and though a man of means, fought his party’s coddling of the very wealthy. he pushed for fair and equitable railroad transport rates and safer food and drugs. he was the first president to call for universal health care and national health insurance (!!!)

what really makes my forehead vein throb from mccain's bald-faced lie is the modern republican attitude towards the environment and roosevelt's crusades for conservation. if polar bears or peregrine falcons were found to contain oil, no doubt mccain would happily and personally wring every single one dry. (roosevelt's coinage of "good to the last drop" holds some serious irony here, lol.) when roosevelt became aware of the slaughter of birds for ladies' feathered hats, (5 million noble birds per year, like egrets and herons -- many mowed down by semi-automatic weapons) he decreed pelican island a sanctuary, the first piece of the national wildlife refuge system. his understanding that the iconic buffalo was nearly gone led to the establishment of 5 game preserves. he doubled the number of national parks, created 150 national forests, and was ultimately responsible for the guardianship of some 230,000,000 acres.

he was one of harvard's first naturalists, an avid bird watcher and wrote eloquently and lyrically about the natural world. he was friend to both muir and burroughs and wrote 35 books. republicans today attack anyone well-spoken or whom offers intelligent discourse as "elitist". (where's that damn eye-rolling icon?)

from a 1907 speech:

"in utilizing and conserving the natural resources of the nation, the one characteristic more essential than any other is foresight... the conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life."

i've blogged previously about bush's disregard for the consequences of his recklessness because of his whole infuriating and ignorant armageddon thing. yet the cons are putting on another con-job for the american public with this damnable off-shore drilling hoax. best guesstimates put recoverable oil around 20-30 billion barrels. much of it is off california, which has stated in no uncertain terms there will be no drilling off its shores. subtract those barrels from the pool and that leaves possibly as little as 7-8 billion. if we start drilling this minute, none of it will see the light of day for another generation and that is what the world currently consumes in about 3 months. yeah, a 90 day-supply. how's that for long-range thinking with the bonus potential to devastate and despoil our beaches, gulf and oceans?

teddy was no white knight. he was a jingoist and a racist, a social darwinist. (that part certainly fits many neo-cons, though.)

somebody please explain to me when conservatism, the act of conserving, a committment to responsible stewardship, entered the upside-down universe of the heedless exploitation of our people and our lands?

anybody?

it's a small world

the owner introduced me the other night to a new acquaintance. she was friendly and pleasant, although i was highly distracted by her patchouli and choice of shorts.

(her parade of fatty snacks after confessing a gastric band op deserves a whole other post, but i digress...)

i was subject to an agenda, so i wasn't making waves, just nice.

she is one of those people who never leaves their circle of safety. she lives with her sons, near her mother, in what is basically a *neighborhood* of lowell. she works in lowell. she grew up in the community. one of the ticket takers at our show was her cousin.

yet she'd never been to the lowell folk music festival, now running nearly 30 years. she was completely unaware of the series to which the owner holds a pass for summer music in the park. she'd been to 2 concerts in her life the night we brought her to her 3rd. and THOSE had been over 20 years ago. she'd never heard of the guy we were seeing. she never goes out for a drink or dinner. the thought of salmon and asparagus (the owner's entree before we met up) made her squicked. she never goes to a movie.

she asked me what i did, i paused and said "sommelier". blank stare.

that i live in boston was amazing to her -- she'd be lost and afraid.

this woman served in the navy with her husband and proved to be amenable to our designs, so i'm not saying she was laura ingalls in a hoodie. but... but... but?

a recent study by a cell phone company in japan tracked users by the gps in their phones. (yo, they don't have the same privacy laws we're so blithely surrendering without a whimper, k?) something like 80% never traveled or called more than 2 miles from their home.

a recent article in the atlantic got lots of buzz: "is google making us stupid?" my dearest friends and i use it as that long tail of culture and economics. we lose too much time in links to new ideas, writers and video and music. stuff we never would have found at the multiplex or the mall, even if we went to either. but the rest? they don't get stoopid, they just stay that way.

sorry but i don't have a link to a lulz kitty video here. i suck.

proof i remain an idealist: i like to think just maybe that woman will youtube bruce hornsby or remember the wine i knew she drank and have a day with a new difference.

it can happen.

censors, creationists, racists, evangelicals, neo-conservatives... all wanna make the world smaller. knowledge is dangerous. scope is treacherous.

one of the best parts of my life is knowing people who know the world is big. and THAT'S why it's scary.

hunters, gatherers and fiddle-faddle

the galapagos finch is an icon of darwin's theory of natural selection and remains a favorite to study. every year since 1973, members of that bird population, both parents and chicks, on the island of daphne major, have been weighed, measured and marked. their survival depends largely on their ability to open pods for seeds. in years of abundance, all birds thrive, but if the season is scarce, smaller beaked-birds die in droves, taking their puny genes with them.

over the course of 3 decades, annual measurement of finches shows that both body size and beak size evolved significantly, but they didn’t do so in a smooth, consistent fashion. instead, natural selection jittered about, often changing direction from one season to the next. as the abundance of different seeds fluctuated, so too did the beak sizes. however, if the measurements had been taken once every 10 years, or only then and now, the changes in beak size would have been wildly underestimated.

as part of my recent quest for better health, i keep stumbling upon the paleo-diet. in a nutshell, you eat what oog the caveman did. (stop snorting with laughter, please.) i appreciate the intent, but struggle both with the execution and the "i drank the kool-aid (or antelope marrow)" mania. the theory is to consume only what would have been available to our bipedal ancestors before farming and animal husbandry changed the menu. they bolster their argument with studies of modern hunter/gatherer tribes, the older members of which show no evidence of heart disease, osteoporosis, hypertension, tooth decay and general western-type age-related maladies. supposedly accidents and infections killed off most of them, while the less clumsy spent their dotage eating berries and sleeping alot.

day in the life: slow amble through latest leafy glade, bending or stretching to gather roots, fruits, seeds, leaves, etc. piling that all up in a basket of some sort, then hauling that load back to base. maybe a stroll with some pointy sticks to a nearby stream bed or shoreline for trout or pike. the occasional big romp to take down a beast. (the raw foodists tend to diverge off the path prior to the campfire/meat part, but i digress.)

i read "clan of the cave bear", too, ok? lots of all that sounds pretty groovy and peaceable, and supposedly a good amount of time was spent together in your little gang, relaxing and bonding, living your day with the cycle of the sun. naps were big, too, lol.

estimates are that these early folks accessed about 400-500 different edibles over the course of 4 seasons. we evolved with a simple gut that allows us to be omnivores. it was necessary for survival, ne c'est pas? contrast this with modern man? while our supermarket aisles groan with bags and boxes (10,000 new processed food products are introduced every year in the u.s.!!!) average joe eats a only a handful of foods, mostly grain, lots of fat and stuff nobody can pronounce.

what about the finches you ask? lol. what flies in the face of the paleo-proponents is the presumption that our bodies haven't changed in all this time. that smacks of stoopidly ignoring science. finches evolve flibbity-jibbity in a generation, but man hasn't shifted a midge in millions of years? we have been farming and herding for 10,000 years, but cooked lentils and cheese are toxic?

i'm not prepared to completely toss the genetic baby out with the bean cooking water. only 3 generations ago, my people were from places too poor to keep cows. sheep's milk wasn't really a *thing*, and hard cheese became a condiment, rather than a staple. nobody in my family drinks milk, we all hate it. even the feel of it on my tongue grosses me out. babies and small children have a digestive enzyme for milk proteins. unless kept active, that enzyme goes the way of baby teeth. on a date many years ago, he insisted we have ice cream. "sure, i haven't had it in ages." within hours, it was like food poisoning. i was in a fetal position in the back of the car and spent 12 hours wanting to die.

the other genetic contradiction here is the presumption that the plants and animals of long ago are the same as what we today buy shrink-wrapped and plu-stickered. even if i kept my own garden, my fruits and tubers would be very different than what those folks picked and scratched.

"eat food. not too much. mostly plants." ~~ michael pollan, "the omnivore's dilemma"

it's laugh out loud easy, isn't it?

i'm trying. here -- have some parsley salad. :)

mikey likes it

yeah, but he died eating pop-rocks and coke ;)

this is a small detail of much recent rumination about my changing/aging body and all that implies. (add the owner's distaste for what he sees and yeah, i've been getting busy... but i digress...)

all my life breakfast has been a trial. my parents would have half a slice of toast and a cup of coffee, but felt i should have *more*. school days, that meant cereal, right? i hated milk, so would crunch on the quisp/lucky charms/cheerios and sneak the remaining moo-goo to the dog, under the table, her tail-wagging (hello, pavlov.) one freezing kindergarten morning, my dad was who knows where, and my mother was late for work, she decided to make oatmeal for me. it was so gross in my mouth i cried in the dark beginning of day. not to sound tragic, but my mom knew she'd lost the battle. yuk. (shut up, dr. freud, about associations, k?)

cut to grown-up noodle.

i'm not inclined to eat unhealthfully, but my career and schedule make my day and fueling needs strange and erratic. every so often, i decide my diet needs re-tooling.

this happened a few months ago. so, um, duh! have breakfast! have a whole-grain breakfast!! i bought the colon-blow organic cereal, the plain yogurt to replace the milk and the fruit to make it less like pile-shavings. it really was tasty. and i was quite regular. (never really a problem, anyhow, but i do have a thing about that.) but 2 or 3 hours later? i was starving, and i'd already consumed more than 25% of my daily calories, with 16 or 17 hours waking hours ahead. disaster walking.

i felt bloated and puffy and hungry and out of whack.

ok, the cereal- for-breakfast thing is a conspiracy from big-moo and big-ag. way back when, kellogg was considered a nutso.

am i finally ready to start listening to my own internal self ?

i know lots of skinny healthy folks who have a big bowl of crunchy kansas goodness every morning, but finally i know it will never work for me. i don't doubt there are genetic variances in what may be best for different peeps, but i'm not prepared to lay it all down to heritage -- too many of us in the states are too much the mutt. if i did, i should have a guiness for breakfast and lunch (sandwich in every glass) and some green veggies cooked with a hint of pork (plus wine :) for dinner. actually that doesn't sound so bad, lol.

i'll stick with my fruit or toast to start, my big meal late day and then something light later. it's the only way to keep myself fueled while going til 2:00 am or later, ya know? that guy who said you shouldn't eat anything after 6:00 pm? you know he went to bed at 10:00.

there's more, but this is enough for now, lol.

carrying on

why do i even read it, when i know it will just piss me off?

karl rove, describing obama: "the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

gaaaahhhhh.

if i envision anybody skulking against the wall at a posh private club, making snarky remarks, it's rove. prior to his political ascent, what club would have let obama through the whitey-white doors? some mixed-race dude, who sounds muslim, with no pedigree or legacy reference? yet guys like rove can paint willy-nilly with that sloppy old brush and have it stick.

bush the elder, who infamously had never seen a supermarket plu scanner, managed to slant dukakis, a 1st generation son of greek immigrants, as a hoity-toity pinhead. (granted, he's a bit wonky, but far from out-of-touch like the blue blood tossing the muck.)

obama's father ditched when he was 2, he and his mom bounced around, she eventually remarried and farmed him out to various relatives. without alumnae letters or legacy leeway, he got himself into some of our country's most prestigious schools. (did you know he declined to indicate race on his harvard admissions app?) his first major job was as a community organizer on some of chicago's grittiest streets. can we say, "bootstraps", everybody?

last night on my pointy-headed npr, a reporter was interviewing some little kids in texas. they heard obama belonged to al qaeda. that he built bombs. that he was a known terrorist. they are not reading this shit on cereal boxes, now are they?

admittedly, part of the problem for dukakis, gore and kerry is they just couldn't/wouldn't play as dirty as their republican adversary. we are in the doldrums of august, so the drumbeats have yet to really begin. i know i'll be sickened on a regular basis before that november tuesday. go ahead, ask me why i don't watch tv news.

recently, i saw this on a print. it was a quote i'd never seen, but will stick with me:

"Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionaries."
~~fdr

they built this country. it's not a matter for shame.

these neo-cons excel at painting "the other" as dangerous. the only danger i see obama presenting is to the sickening status quo that has brought this country to its fiscal and moral knees.

at last...

finally getting a little hot under the collar, and in respsonse to the ridiculous gauge-gate that's got all the flaks flapping, obama shot one off to a standing ovation yesterday:

"It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant," he told a crowd in Ohio, then delivered the kicker. "Instead of running ads about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, they should go talk to some energy experts and actually make a difference."

like little katie connick said the other night: "obama, baby!"

thank you.

carry on. :)

obama-rama

he saw me, walked right over, winking as he said hello with a hollywood smile. he stretched out his hand, shook mine and said, "very nice to meet you, thank you for having me." so yeah, add another mega-celebrity to my ridiculous list.

another zelig moment, i was again elbow-to-elbow with incredibly powerful, intelligent and famous people. up close and personal, i got to hear obama speak casually to a well-heeled group of the faithful. (lol, the woman next me kept slipping off her manolos. they weren't even that high or pointy!)

first deval patrick spoke, then senator kerry, and his anger was palpable. that mccain has ridden the war hero wagon to political success while he was swift-boated to defeat as a traitor must cause unfathomable pain. he went so far as to proclaim mccain a danger to the country.

it was a birthday party, so both he and the governor were serious yet light-hearted, and obama took the stage to thunderous applause. yeah, he's got it. that can't quite be defined, but you know it when you see it -- charisma. he spoke over twice as long as scheduled and even this old cynic found herself welling up. his idealism, his sincerity, his fierce desire to bring america back to greatness through good works and a rectitude that our founders would admire, spoke to the young noodle still inside me who believes people are good and want to make the world a better place.

he covered a lot of ground in a concise way, was self-effacing and never once slurred mccain. taking the campaign high road worked for our current governor, but will it win the country?

obama is looking to raise nearly $500 million, so i'm guessing mccain has a similar target. (staggering. truly.) we already see where the republicans are putting their money through garbage like the britney/paris ad. obama curved elegantly around the the race card and his "funny name" as fodder and spoke forcefully about the divisiveness of that kind of propaganda. (my brain was burning with memories of shrub claiming to be a uniter, not a divider. aaaaaaahhhh!!!!) however, a recent ny times poll found that only 31% of white voters had a favorable opinion of obama, so even clumsy ignorant ads will hit an easy mark.

as i listened, i kept wondering when and why intelligence and a fine education became a detriment in politics. shrub went to yale and mccain graduated from the naval academy, yet they successfully sneer at the equivalent diplomas of men like gore, kerry and obama. (that shrub was only a legacy and barely got by within a drunken haze, is a digression that only angers me, so let's not.) public schools and libraries were founded well early in this nation, our forefathers respecting the importance of an informed populace. (ok, just white boys, but hey.) how did the neo-cons get so far in dissing liberal smarts? general ignorance helps solidify their tyranny, agreed, but how did it happen? maybe i'm crazy, but i want my president to be smarter than me, ok?

maureen dowd (she was a journalist once, right? now she just writes to incite. reading her is masochism i can endure in public, i guess...) wrote a pithy piece this week comparing obama to jane austen's mr. darcy. GAAAAAHHHH!! from where does the impression of pride or hubris in this man come? and why is she recklessly perpetuating it? she's playing the race card in a back-handed way, is she not? mocking him as an uppity darkie? it pissed me off in a way that really surprised me.

there was another op-ed piece in the times asking where is obama's landslide. but he doesn't need one, does he? shrub won in 2004 by only 2.5%, the slimmest margin of any sitting president. his handlers parlayed it into a mandate to further trample the constitution and plunder the country.

in both 2000 and 2004, i went to bed on election night thinking my guy had won. ugly wake-ups, you bet. in only 8 years our country has been made into a shameful mess.

i still have hope.

i know some of you think it's tim wakefield, but right now? obama da man.

lifestyles of the very rich, but not necessarily famous

(might be my longest blog title. where's my damn p.a. to check? oh, yeah, not an approved line-item.)

not long ago, i read an article that sales and profits at super-luxury houses like lvmh, burberry, richemont and hermes have soared in the last several quarters. partial credit may go to global brand presence, yet to me this just gives further proof of the rich getting richer everywhere. yeah, the dollar is weak, but phooey on you if your margin so slim. (g'night, bennigan's; hello dubai, you sexy thang.)

i have landed back in the stratosphere, and the irony is not lost. a few days before i started, my employer was putting on a wedding for over $600,000, while i was being helped by my kind attorney (rara avis, si) who reduced his rates to stave off my foreclosure and ruin. this morning we had a small bridal shower, for extra large women, that cost nearly $400 pp. tomorrow we are having a mad political fund-raiser, $30,000 pp for the full monty. it is completely sold-out, yet lots of folks are clamoring for seats.

3 months ago, when my wallet got stolen, i had to roll change to pay my mortgage.

the rich are indeed different than you and me.

6 ways to sunday

or: keep your knives off my vay-jay.

this is messed up in so many ways, i'll just quote it here for everyone's enjoyment and bafflement.

oh, yeah, and the procedures each cost about $10,000.

"Australian doctors have raised concerns about clinics offering vaginal cosmetic surgery, warning the trend towards so-called "designer vaginas" may be exploiting vulnerable women.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said procedures being offered included "vaginal rejuvenation, revirgination, designer vaginoplasty and G-spot amplification".

"What is involved in these procedures is often unclear since recognised clinical nomenclature is not being used," it said in a position paper released this week."