Nostalgia Lies

I’m getting pretty damned tired of these Facebook memes. Mind you, many are sweet and/or funny. Some are uplifting while others are simplistic and trite. They’re not all as ire inspiring as this:

God Bless the old America
I sure miss her

Which old America do these folks miss?

Is it the one where, if you had brown skin, you couldn't go to the same schools or use the same drinking fountain? Where you could be refused service at a restaurant because of the color of your skin? The America where you had to sit at back of the bus if you’re not white? Do they long for the country where it was OK to refuse citizens the vote based on their race, color or gender? Do they long for the  time when it was OK to use color coordinated racial slurs, even in supposedly polite company?

How about the America where you had to hide who you loved? Where it was great sport for gangs of ‘tough’ guys to beat the snot out of you or even kill with impunity all because of who you loved? Is it the America where life partners of 50 years could be barred from seeing each other when one was in hospital because ‘they’re not family?’ Thank Bast the Mittser wasn’t elected!

Is it the America where women routinely get blamed for their brutalization by husband, father, co-worker, acquaintance or complete stranger?  Where women make 77 cents to every dollar that a man makes for doing exactly the same job? Where a woman isn't trusted to make decisions about her own health care?

In Georgia the state House has just passed HB 954, which would make it illegal for a woman to have an abortion after 20 weeks of gestation, even if she’s carrying a fetus that will ultimately be stillborn. And why not? Pigs do it all the time, says Rep. Terry England.
No, seriously, “why not” is because pigs do it all the time.

Life gives us many experiences. It gives us experience–or, I’ve had the experience of delivering calves, dead and alive. Delivering pigs, dead and alive. And I want to tell you, Representative McCall, Representative Roberts, all of us–Representative Anderson–that have done that–Representative Black–that have done that, it breaks our hearts to see those animals not make it.

Because women are, of course, livestock, and when we see that 20-week ultrasound that shows that the fetus we’ve been doting over has anomalies incompatible with life and thus our much-wanted pregnancy will result in heartbreak, we let out a plaintive moo and then immediately begin wondering whether we’ll get alfalfa or timothy hay for dinner.

Oh whoops, we still live in that old America.

You simply MUST read this follow up post by Caperton over at Feministe. Really -- it’s TREMENDOUS!

Maybe I'm interpreting this meme post wrong -- maybe the sign writer is wistful for an America where politics was a way to govern not a big game death sport. Not a 24/7 propaganda fest. An America where the two big parties could sit down and occasionally reach real, honest-to-god compromises. Where one of the two big political parties *cough* republican/tea party *cough* wasn't spewing lies and misinformation on it's bought and paid for 'news station’ *cough* Fox *cough.* An America where acting like a meth fueled, rabid pit bull in response to those who disagree with you was frowned upon and, possibly, your buds might chastise not cheer you for your immature bullying behavior.

Beware wistful nostalgia -- it lies.

The 'right' has always sowed discord amongst those not as opulently moneyed. The game has always been 'get the middle class to resent and hate the poor.' Essentially, get the peasants to fight amongst themselves so they don’t notice that they’re being robbed blind.

This a big part of what made MLK so dangerous to them. He was waking the middle classes to the fact that it was and is the wealthy-beyond-comprehension class, the big corporations who are the actual takers, waking up to the fact that we were being manipulated like low rent carnival marks.

Conveniently, Reverend King was silenced.

Today is the 49th anniversary of Bloody Sunday when 600 peaceful civil rights demonstrators were attacked by police while marching from Selma, AL to Montgomery, AL.

Fish and Grands

Helen and family are in town for a couple of days. My grandnieces school, Saint Mary’s, had a field trip to the Aquarium yesterday. I met them at the tail end, after they’d seen the dolphins, patted the sharks (according to Julianna. Hmmmm. Reality or great imagination?) and ooed and ahed over the funny yet regal penguins. Forgoing the T, we hiked over to the hotel where the girls would be going for a swim at the pool.

Madison, Julianna, Helen and John, the girls' friend Abby, her parents and I paraded through late Friday Boston traffic. I dashed across intersections, with Julianna’s hand clasped in a death grip, scaring the crapoli out of her parents. Mind you, I looked both ways and there weren’t any cars...well, none real close anyway.

I attempted caution and restraint afterward. Truly I did!

Did you know? A one mile walk with children, with a group, takes FAR longer and is more tiring than doing that same walk on your own or with one other person. There’s so much fascinating stuff to see and so much pedestrian traffic. Yes, yes, I felt sort of like I was in that scene from the Matrix.

We made it, in one piece per person even. Yea!

After they had their swim, Jen picked me and my grands up. Yup, Helen and John got a date night and The Amazing Bob and I got the kiddles. You know, it’s been a very long time since we’ve had young ones around. Leastways, none that aren’t of the feline persuasion.

I’m just hoping I haven't fucked up too badly.

We had fish and mashed potatoes for dinner with cupcakes for dessert. Then it was time to change into jammies and chill. I combed Julianna’s hair (Madison had her's under control), reminded them to brush their teeth (and supervised the task's execution) and then, then TAB and I fell into bed.

Should I have given them a bath? Should there have been broccoli at dinner? Should we have played a game of Chutes and Ladder? (I don’t have it, by the by) A round of Jacks? (these, I have)

Eh, there will be other times. I’ll get notes from Helen for next time. Really!

Meantime, there's hot chocolate and blueberry pancakes for brekkie. They will, if nothing else, be well fed.

Elephants and grandchildren never forget.
-- Andy Rooney

Never have children, only grandchildren
-- Gore Vidal

The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?

If my grandchildren were to look at me and say, 'You were aware species were disappearing and you did nothing, you said nothing', that I think is culpable. I don't know how much more they expect me to be doing, I'd better ask them.

-- David Attenborough

“Keeping up the appearance of having all your marbles is hard work, but important.”
-- Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

“And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.”
-- Martin Amis, London Fields

“Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence.
Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance.
Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence.
Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.”
-- Yoko Ono

The Friday Cat Report

They grow up so fast! Yep, talkin’ about kittens. Specifically this one.

At right is Ellie, my boss’ new mouser supreme, back in December.

This, at left, was Ellie last week with Jen, my fellow Cat Doormat Lodge member.

I’d heard that orange tabbies are always male  (no, as it happens, not always) and figured that either Ellie was an exception (we thought she was a she) or, because she’s so very pale, creamsicle-esque even, this meant she wasn’t a true orange tabby.

Turns out she’s a he. And he’s getting huge. Reaching monster cat proportions.

When I’m working in the office versus home, he likes to sit atop my computer tower and stare down at me. I know what he’s thinking, ‘why aren’t you playing with me? Throw something NOW so I can chase after it.’ This is generally followed by him batting my eye drops and/or reading glasses onto the floor and then into some far corner under a desk or cabinet.

Of course.

What can I do? I have to retrieve my crap and toss him one of his toys.

He also likes to scale my chair like Tenzing Norgay ascending a particularly challenging section of Everest's North Ridge. The goal, it seems, is my shoulder where he perches like a quasi tame parrot.

Amazingly, despite all his antics, we manage to get work done.

At right is Rocco in his new 'heated' cat cave. I've thrown an old fleece lined hoodie over top to keep in more of the meager heat. He seems content if cranky that spring is taking its lazy ass time about arriving but then, that's how all of us feel.

When he takes the occasional swat at me (patting him too much at just the wrong time or angle?) I feel like I've got a teenager. 'Aw Mom, canya not give me some space?!'

Coco is also very much looking forward to spring when she can sit on the porch with me and get carried on tours of the garden. She isn't allowed off on her own when outside since she's such a flight risk. I'm sure, all the same, she'll find a way to fly, to lead The Amazing Bob and I on chase and hunt expeditions through our neighbors' yards.

Rotten cats!

Dance of the Fireplug Fairies

Jen and I were having a post work adult bev (Yes. As usual) when we noticed that the usual sports talk program wasn't on the teevee. Even when the barkeep's a lady type person, there's always some manly man gab fest or diversion on screen.

Nope -- they were showing a women's gymnastic meet. Astounding!

This, naturally, resurrected a question I've long had. Why ruin a perfectly spectacular floor routine with clumsy, clownish even, attempts at classical dance?

Why, I really do wanna know WHY female gymnasts, not the dudes mind you, are expected to be graceful, capering sylphs with extra, added wild gravity defying moves?

Ballerinas, by the by, are generally taller than tumblers. Companies want their women dancers to fall between 5’2” (bare minimum) and 5’7” (max). The danseurs tend to be long limbed and lithe. Gymnasts, on the other hand, are almost always quite short -- as tiny as 4’9” (Shawn Johnson and Deng Linlin) and, generally, not more than 5’3”. They tend not to look so much like elegantly dying swans as springy fireplugs.

Short, springy fireplugs just can’t pull off the long, smooth, elastic and artistic beauty of classical (or classical-ish) dance. Nope, they all end up looking like they’re coyly and quickly tossing off stripper moves with a surfeit of jazz hands.

Then there’s Lloimincia D'Chelle Hall, a gymnast at Louisiana State University. Check out the vid at the link -- seriously. Go now and watch. I’ll wait right here.

You’re back? You saw the molto fantastic awesomeness of Ms. Hall? She is something new, fabulous and wholly different.

Chica funks it up fierce! This, THIS is how dance and gymnastics should be mixed. JUST like this! Of course, I’ve no clue what she’s dancing/tumbling to (deaf here, ‘member?) but, visually, her moves match her height, build and the fact that she’s doing double pikes and side straddle leaps, not dancing Swan Lake.

Lloimincia D'Chelle Hall is an utter joy to watch to say the very least.

Best yet, perhaps, she totally looks like she’s having a great time. She’s the very first gymnast I’ve watched who actually appears to be enjoying herself. Also too, unlike the other heavily muscled pixies, she’s not wearing make up to rival a pole dancer’s.

Ms. Hall looks like the athlete she is at the same time she brings women’s floor ex up to the level it’s tried for since, possibly, it’s advent -- a mix of dance and tumbling.

Check her out!

She's a Killer Queen

Coco emitting her savage death rays

The honored dead

Savoring success, Coco took to her high castle in order to sleep off the adrenaline rush of the hunt

Dunno how many times I walked past that poor, sad corpse this morning.

I don’t turn on the lights first thing in the very early morning. Warum? Well hells, I may be a morning person but that doesn’t mean I tumble out of bed like Chellsie Memmel zipping off a few quick Double Arabian Pikes.

Nope, I ease into my pre dawn wakefulness.

I’d fed Coco, Rocco and Gaston, cleaned the litter box, put on a pot of espresso roast, fired up the magic email machine and realized, ‘huh, reading glasses. need them.’ I scaled the much-steeper-at-five-AM stairs, turned on the bathroom light and began hunting about in my cockcrow, bleary eyed way. And there he was -- our wee mouse cadaver. How many times had I just missed stepping on his tiny inanimate carcass, crunching those minikin bones under my slippered foot?

Hmmph. This would explain the first floor mess -- it was as though a hurricane tore through the living room and kitchen. One did -- Hurricane Coco after her poor, doomed quarry.

Naturally, I had to give her treats and praise her awesome, death-dealing ferociousness. Of course.

Queen -- Killer Queen

Brambles and Thornbushes

Why, WHY would anyone go to a college that teaches creationism, (the imagining that earth was created 5,000 years ago), as fact and evolution as junk science?

As Bill Maher has said "This is a school you flunk out of when you get the answers right."

Though accredited, make no mistake, Liberty U (regionally accredited)., Bob Jones (TRAC accredited) and Patrick Henry College (nationally) are churches (with particularly twisted interpretations of their god’s teachings). They are right wing warrior training centers.

Let’s say you make it through all four years. You’ve got yourself a brand spanking new BA. Who hires graduates of Sunday Schools on Steroids?

Chick fil a?
The Salvation Army?
Cracker Barrel?
Papa John’s Pizza?
Denny’s?

Seriously, the church...pardon me, the college,  grooms students to be faceless, soulless soldiers in the right wing war on America all while training them to be good little Rush Limbaugh christians.

(HuffPo)

Limbaugh recently told his devoted listeners, "If you believe in God, then intellectually you cannot believe in manmade global warming."

Mind you, it’s hard for any college grad holding a bright shiny, fresh outta the box Fine Art or Liberal Arts degree to get a gig in their field (my first post degree, post carnival job? Waitress. The breakfast shift at Friendly’s no less.). So, why handicap yourself even further by spending your family’s hard earned dough (or ill gotten gain perhaps) on a college which is considered by most to be, at best, a joke?

Do kids flock there because they want to be amongst their own kind? Are they afraid of being contaminated by the sinful, heathen world? Do they feel they can only truly be safe at one of their own indoctrination centers...sorry...schools?

Must be. Bad things could NEVER happen at a so called Christian college, right?

(NY Times) 

For decades, students at Bob Jones University who sought counseling for sexual abuse were told not to report it because turning in an abuser from a fundamentalist Christian community would damage Jesus Christ. Administrators called victims liars and sinners.

(Washington Post) 

“At the heart of the struggle is a fear that is rooted in the need to self-protect,” he wrote. “All such ‘fears’ are usually masked by a rationale that the reporting of such abuse may ‘damage the reputation of Christ.’”

I only mention it but this branch of alleged Christianity would do well to read the Sermon on the Plain.

Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?

A good tree does not bear rotten fruit, nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit. For every tree is known by its own fruit. For people do not pick figs from thornbushes, nor do they gather grapes from brambles.

And from Mister Samuel Langhorne Clemens:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

How can any of us learn and grow if we exist/journey/experience only one small nook of the world?

Summertime and the Livin' is Easy

In last night's dream it was summer.

I was reclining in a beach chair out in the yard, working on some tricky layout for a print job, contentedly surrounded by lush spring green grass. Of a sudden, I noticed a matte black, beetle, the size of a small dog with a carapace to rival any tank sitting next to me.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

Still, bugs and all, I can’t wait for summer and the days of laying about in the yard. The Amazing Bob will be listening to the Sox with Gaston flopped out next to him on the warmed slate squares at the foot of the stairs. Oni, Jen and I will be buried in our sci fi tomes and novellas. Coco will be in my lap with Gus all comfy in Jen’s. Our lone wolf Rocco, eschewing the madding crowds...and shit, will be curled up in a patch of sun on the back porch. There will be bowls of guacamole and salsa, grilled asparagus for dipping and amazingly fabulous Jen-crafted light, misty even, cocktails.

At high tide we’ll cross the street and jump into the cool salty bay. OK, Jen and Oni will jump in. Me? Being the wickedly tippy thing that I am, I’ll wade in with my big old inner tube. TAB will sit on the seawall steps, cooling his tootsies in the lapping waves.

And then we’ll go back to our lawn chairs, books and the big game.

Ahhhh, summer!

Next winter, in an effort to head off our usual winter stress, blahs and illnesses, TAB and I are considering a change of scenery. Now, not being Rockefellers or Bushes, we can’t absent ourselves for the entire season but, possibly, we can duck out for a week.

Will that help? Potentially.

A friend, who’s from the Dominican Republic, told me about Cabrera. He said there was great surfing and the town hadn’t been overrun with tourists yet. This was a couple of years ago and it seems, since then, the joints gotten all discovered out. RATS!

Where to go on the cheap that’s warm and sunny?!

Another thought is Amsterdam. Of course. TAB and I can spend befogged days in the coffee houses around the Leidesplein before we head to the Alto for an evening of hot jazz.

Again I ask -- will this help? Hells, can’t hurt!


Lena Horne singing Summertime from Porgy and Bess

Almost Here

The Vernal Equinox is just 18 days away -- March 20th -- and all I can say is that me and the damn cats can’t fucking wait!

While the Midwest is due for more blizzard action and parts of the South will have ice storms, up here in jolly New England we’re expecting no more than a few light snow showers. Good. Solid. Awesome.

This past Friday, I had my first fall of the winter (and I was shocked that it came this late in the season). I was walking up a very busy section of Sea Street -- from Granite Print, my day gig, to Froggies for a post work adult bev with Jen. There were a few houses in a row where it appeared that the snow and ice hadn't been cleared all damn winter. Rush hour traffic was thick and whizzing past so marching along the side of the road wasn’t an option.

I was carefully picking my way over the ice ruts and furrows when *WHAM* my feet decided they needed to go all airborne. Luckily, I managed to land on my knees not my delicate, tumor riddled noggin.

I’m fine. In fact, I was ducky-ish right afterward apart from a little ache in the knees and being royally pissed that the good homeowners hadn’t bothered to clear their walks.

Nearly everyone around these parts shovels their patch of pavement. Even down here on the Neck where there’s more traffic from walkers, bikers and joggers than cars (so pedestrians and autos share the road quite amiably), the paths for us perambulating types are generally always cleared right down to that pavement.

Yeah, I know. Maybe the residents are old and can’t get out to do the work. Conceivably they’ve no family or friends around to see to their lawsuit-waiting-to-happen walkways. Perhaps they're unable to pay one of the local kids a few shekels to do it for them. Feasibly they’re just thoughtless dicks.

Dunno.

Bottom line -- I’m fine and Spring is almost here, we’ll be back in the 40s later this week and my trike ride yesterday (when the temperature rose to a near balmy 37º) was fabulous!