Monthly Archives: January 2011

Commentary on the news, Health, Minnesota, Politics

The Moral Test of Government

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Winter                                             Waning Moon of the Cold Month

“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”   It is still said.
Hubert H. Humphrey

Ouch.  Latin infinitives and indirect statements.  I’m on Chapter 25 (of 42) of Wheelock now and the grammar and vocabulary isn’t getting easier, it’s getting harder.  Suppose this should not be a surprise, but I kinda hoped…  My mind has pressed out against my skull, then bounced back, a coup contracoup injury occasioned by working too damn hard.  Ah, ok.  I love it.  Still, in spite of the strib this morning, this love does hurt.  At least now.

The legislative grist mill has begun to grind and this time the sacks will be filled with coal dust as lives, especially lives of the most vulnerable, suffer hit after hit from the budget cutters.  There was an NCIS Los Angeles (see, Latin and pop culture within two sentences of each other.) recently that I thought was corny, about a military number cruncher who wanted to make the numbers names.  The plot was corny, but the point was not.  Just as military numbers mean real people dead or maimed, so do the medicaid, general assistance, aid to the disabled and the elderly numbers mean real lives damaged, often beyond repair, because most of these folks are on the edge all the time.  It takes the smallest thing to set them on the downward spiral.

GeekWorld, US History, Weather +Climate

The DOW Goes Up; The DOW Goes Down.

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Winter                                                  Waning Moon of the Cold Month

“I do not have what I own, nor do I have what I do. I only have what I am.” – D. Trinidad Hunt

Rising temperatures, even rising toward freezing, activate the doer in me.  I want to get out and plant vegetables, check the bees, but that time is not yet, is still a long ways away, so I’ll focus on the hydroponics, Latin and Titian for awhile.  Colder temps activate the thinker, the reader, the researcher and they still dominate.   So, it’s to the books.

The DOW goes up; the Dow goes down.  Life goes on; joy is found.  All I have to say about the market.

I still have one printer in spasms.  I’ve tried fixes from the manual–yes, I RTFM!–I’ve tried fixes from the internet.  I’ve tried letting it rest and I’ve tried hitting with this and than for an hour at a time.  Enough to make me sputter.  Guess I’m gonna have to give and take the damn thing to a repair guy.  The shame of it all.  One other task defeated me, setting up a home wireless network.  That required the GeekSquad. I like to DIY electronics.  Not this time.

Aging, Asia, Politics, US History, World History

The Times They Are A Changin’ (Still)

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Winter                                                             Waning Moon of the Cold Month

Temps have come up.  Near freezing on Thursday.  Break out the beer cooler, the barbecue and the hot dogs.  Time for a picnic Minnesota style.

Every once in a while I find myself driving in a part of the Cities I don’t know well.  Tonight was one of those times.  I needed to get the Urban League building at 2100 Plymouth.  Looked straightforward on the map, but, as usual, I wanted to try something, so I got off at the Olson Highway exit.  Hmm.  A bridge too far.  I had to wend my back north through side streets.  Finally found it and made it to the meeting.

Senate District 58, Linda Higgins.  The Sierra Club’s first in-district meeting with members and legislators.  A good turnout and a lot of good dialogue, back and forth on environmental issues, peace and justice and taxes.  Back in the car, back home.

How about that news that GM sold more cars in China last year than in the US?  Whoa.  Things change.  Our time at the top of the heap alone has come to an end.  I’m not with the dystopians who see us limping toward the next century, a much larger and sadder equivalent of Britain after the fall of empire.  Neither am I nervous about China.  Nothing in their 5,000 year history suggests to me that they will do anything more than shore up their borders and try to make as much money as possible while living interesting lives.

My own feeling?  The world will be better served with two different, but equal powers.  Will we stay there with China for the long haul?  I don’t know.  I don’t care.  How we live our lives here has become interwoven with China as an economic power, yes; but, will the superbowl or the world series cease?  No.  High school proms and McDonalds?  No.  Car trips and love of our national parks?  No.  Our wobbly, creeky democracy?  No.

Will the US change over the next 50 to 100 years.  Of course.  More Latinos.  Greater ethnic diversity.  More people in cities.  Sure. Will this makes us less American?  Nope. Will it change what it means to be an American?  Maybe.  But are we the same Americans as those in the first 13 states?  I don’t think so.  Different than Civil War America?  In substantive ways, yes.  So, it stands to reason that American will have a different flavor in 2111.  Not only am I ok with that, I celebrate it and hope my grandchildren and their grandchildren help make it special.

Cinema and Television

The White Countess

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Winter                                                    Waning Moon of the Cold Month

We finished an old movie, one I picked up in the abandoned movies bin at the supermarket, you know, where the poor dvds have prices like $4.99 and 6.99, coming down from their new price highs, now served up like, well, like a basket of oranges or a box of cereal.  Must feel bad.

Anyhow the White Countess languished there, so I picked it up, saw Ralph Fiennes and three Redgraves.  Enough for me.  We watched it over two nights.  A Merchant-Ivory film its depiction of late 1930’s Shanghai was marvelous.  Fiennes and the now deceased Natasha Richardson carried the main plot line.  It was slow in the first hour + but I’m a sucker for costume dramas with period settings and nobody does them better than Merchant-Ivory.  In the last hour or so, the film gained momentum.  A tender moment between Fiennes and Richardson had electricity.

Fiennes played Mr. Jackson, an American diplomat, a prime mover in the failed League of Nations.  Richardson was a displaced countess from Russia, an aristocratic survivor of the Bolshevik revolution reduced to working a dance hall to earn money for the rest of her family.  Mr. Matsuda, Hiroyuki Sanada, is a Japanese zealot who becomes friends with Fiennes while discussing Mr. Jackson’s past working on a “broad canvas.”  Fiennes says there is no longer a broad canvas and that his dream is to open a special bar.

He succeeds and hires the Countess as his hostess.  They become close and slowly fall in love.

Mr. Matsuda has a reputation as the frontman for Japanese invasions.

He succeeds.  The last scenes of the movie, played out against the backdrop of the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, show Matsuda on a balcony, his carefully tended hair disturbed slightly by a bomb blast as he surveys the invasion from a safe, high spot.  Meanwhile, Mr. Jackson has given up the bar of his dreams to seek the white countess and her daughter.  They meet and he leaves Shanghai with them for Macau.

As I see it, Mr. Jackson began his life working on a broad canvas, the League of Nations, but became disillusioned, an idealist still, but now, perhaps, realist, too.  His bar, his dream, dies in the invasion.  He is left then with only the smallest and most intimate canvas of all, love and family.

Mr. Matsuda, on the other hand, has achieved, for the moment, a master brush stroke on his broad canvas.

I think it deserved better than its 51% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

–

Bees, Garden

The Growing Season Begins. Now.

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Winter                                             Waning Moon of the Cold Month   -13 at 8 am today

Just slept 11 hours.  After a two-hour nap.  And ten hours the night before.  My body is at work, fending off this chest cold I have.  I feel pretty good right now, but I don’t think it’s quite done.  Still, fluids, steam baths and rest.  That’s the ticket.

Today I put some seeds in their places:  leeks, lettuce and chard.  The lettuce and chard, once they reach two leaves in size, will go up into the hydroponics for use now.  The leeks will 06-05-10_leeksandpeas670keep on growing, too, also up in the hydroponics once they become youngsters and not babies, but they will go in the ground outside as soon the ground can be worked. (I think.  May be a bit later.)  Over February, March and April other plants will follow the same process, growing up to two leaves, then getting transferred to the nutrient baths of the hydroponics.  Each one, in its own time, will go outside to the waiting beds.  They will augment the garlic, the strawberries, the raspberries, the asparagus already growing there.

This year our planting will be more informed by several years of growing vegetables together, Kate grew some before.  We’ll plant what we need for canning, preserving in other ways like drying and freezing.  We’ve eaten well from our gardens over the last few years, but not as well as we could.  There’s always room for improvement.

One area for improvement is management of the orchard.  That will occupy some serious thought in March and April.  Fruits, especially trees, are different from vegetables, more vulnerable to insects and disease.  We’ll see what there is to do.

This will be the first growing season with Kate home full-time, so we’ll test out how that works.  Bound to help.

Then, too, in April, the bees begin to come out of their winter ball.  I over-wintered three colonies though I’m unsure about their survival.  I’d be surprised if all three pull through the 06-20-10_garden_6703winter, but delighted.  I’d understand if only two made it, but I’d be disappointed with one.  I’ve got a long ways to go before I’m a good bee-keeper, but I have years to go before I sleep.  Time enough.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Health, Retirement

Gospel

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Winter                                                          Waning Moon of the Cold Month    3 degrees

In all the hoopla and aftermath of the party I forgot to mention the gospel.  The good news.  The friend’s wife I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, the one diagnosed with cancer?  She came to the party.  Not only that she said her energy was better than it had been for a while.  She looked good, too.  Both she and her husband looked still vulnerable, the residue of concern, fear lingering.  She has a hormone treatment, recommended by her oncologist, that may keep the cancer at bay.  Not cure it, but keep it from getting a firm grasp on her.

As Leni said, another party goer that same night, about his throat cancer, “Well, you know, the goal now is to make cancer a chronic disease.  Something you can manage.”  He’s living proof, having survived in apparent good health for several years now.  He and the friend’s wife were not alone, either.  Hank, another party goer, has leukemia, a disease kept in check now for many years, so much so that it almost recedes into the background.

These are the three I know about.  There were probably others.  Cancer no longer has the skull and cross-bones attached to its every appearance.  Think of it.  Cancer is not a new disease.  It killed people relentlessly in all centuries before the last one.  Now, it begins to look, at least in many cases, like the caged tiger, pacing back and forth within its chemical compound, its lethality imprisoned, though not rendered harmless.

Kate has retired from the practice of medicine as others graduate each year to take up the responsibility, this tricky act we call healing.  It has more parts than chemistry and technology and knives, we know this, yet those parts themselves, the fruits of engineering and science, have a great deal to offer.  Perhaps this next century is the one where the enlightenment driven side of medicine will meet the ageless truths of the human spirit, joining together in a medicine, a healing for the whole person.   It may be that the last years of the baby boom generation, now upon us, will provide the impetus for this fusion.

Aging, Family, Retirement

The Hereford Queen

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Winter                                                               Full Moon of The Cold Month   0 degrees

Here’s a picture I took with my cell phone at the Great Western Stock Show.  That’s the Hereford Queen in white, all white.    Hereford Queen

Confusing.  Yesterday I had cold symptoms that I had to knock back for Kate’s party.  Thank you Dayquil.  Today most of the symptoms are gone except that nagging, worn out feeling, the sort you get when your body has other things to do than help you be alert.

Today marks the end of Kate’s second full work week of retirement, one in Colorado and one in Minnesota.  We’re still sinking back into it, realizing the nuances.  Probably won’t be clear for a year or two.  We need a full garden and holiseason cycle, too.

This has been a cold winter already and it will get yet colder tonight, though not as cold as last night.  A fire, a book, supper, TV and bed.  That’ll put this cold back in the bottle.

This was a busy week with the Target tour on Monday, the Woolly Meeting at Scott’s in the evening of the same day, getting ready for the Legcom and holding the meeting, then the last minute prepping for Kate’s party, the Expressionist tour yesterday morning, then the party in the evening.  That’s a lot for this guy in terms of outside obligations.  Next week looks a bit more subdued, though Monday looks like a lot going on, again.  This means I can get back in the Latin groove, push myself toward finishing Vanished.  It’s a keeper and I’ve a good bit of it done already.

Aging, Family, Retirement

Kate Has Other Things To Do

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Winter                                                                         Full Moon of the Cold Month      -18 outside right now

Woolly Mammoths on parade.  The herd came to the event last night.  Docents came, too.  Tom and Allison and Kathleen and Wendy and Joy and Carreen and Grace and Jean-Ann 6702011-01-20_0607and Paul. Paula came.  John Pastorius came.  Suwy came, not once, but twice, at the beginning and at the end.  From Shoreview.  Before and after work.  Kate’s nail lady and hair dresser came.  The Perlichs came, Lydia and Pam.  Greg and Ana came.  Nurses and docs and lab techs from the Coon Rapids Clinic came.  Jane and Dobbie West.  Around 100 over the evening.  Lois and Hank came.  Jettie Ann, Jean Ann, Mingjen and a couple of other CIF folks came.  There was even a woman who wandered in, not sure what was going on.  Once she realized it was a retirement party she went to the gift shop and bought Kate a small beaded purse that matched her jacket.

We gave away fabric bowls, a pillow, a purse and a pint of Artemis Honey.  Conversation ebbed and flowed.  Servers passed sparkling cider and champagne, appertifs, too.  One, a Kobe beef with shrimp in truffle aioli sauce got rave reviews.  The Turtle Island String Quartet played through the speakers and the buffet always had a few folks at the counter.

Some wandered off into the museum and came back.  Many had not been to the museum before.  Many had.  Kate wanted the event to provide closure.  She said it did.

Then we loaded up the truck and drove home, the temperature dropping degree by degree to -13 as we got home.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Weather +Climate

Pale Shadows

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Winter                                                             Full Moon of the Cold Month

“Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded, because it is so easy not to battle at all, to just accept and call that acceptance inevitable.” – Audre Lorde

This full moon, out in a cloudless night sky, cast long shadows onto the snow, pale threads of maple trees, birch, oak, lying dark amidst the luminous reflections.  These midwinter full moons have an especially lonely feel, as if the world they illuminate were devoid of animal life and the plants, all the plants have stopped growing, resting now, unconscious perhaps, perhaps unaware of the moon at all, only dumb branches and trunks casting shades of themselves into this quiet world.

There are days, nights, too, when I feel as if the full moons of these midwinter months inhabit my mind, where my thoughts can only produce pale shadows of themselves, the shades of ideas, not the full, living, breathing concept, but one quiet, moonlit and small.

Tour this morning with Hamline philosophy of art students, seniors.  It was all right.  We traveled with the expressionists while they rejected impressionism and the camera, used colors and shape and line and flatness instead, pushing inside, painting the heart and the mind, regions not accessible to the senses or photographic techniques.   The kids themselves, all seniors, seemed a bit dull to me, misshapen and doughy, indifferent to their own learning.  This saddened me, made me wonder what’s happening on college campuses these days.  Is life so barren?  To be sure there were the two girls, young women, who gamely noticed Matisse’s color scheme, Rouault’s thick shapes, the flatness of Bacon’s canvas.  Perhaps it was the formal analytical method that we used, a nod to the class.  It was a substantive tour, but it seemed uninspired and uninspiring.

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Politics

Free Speech and Fast Saints

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Winter                                                 Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

Cameras and inks and papers, oh, my!  Then, new glasses and seven bags of groceries.  We’ve been gone and the larder was bare of important items like milk, turkey slices for the dogs, veggies and fruit, bread and bagels.  Now it’s not bare.

JPII is on a fast-track for sainthood.  Just like today.  Fast foods and fast saints.  Just can’t wait, can we?

JPII’s successor, the German Shepherd, has taken on major moral issues recently, like, the right name for your kid.  No weird ones.  He’s also cranked up the heat, already at record highs set by JPII, on theologians teaching at Catholic schools, gays at mass and those pesky liberation theologians.  Whoever said the divine right of kings is dead?  It lives on in its last bastion, Vatican City.  (pic.  Yikes!)

The whole Gifford/Tucson shooting controversy.  We have rule of law and one of those rules is no prior restraint.  This means that we cannot stop someone from committing a crime until they’ve actually committed it.  This gives us big trouble with at least two categories of persons:  pedophiles and psychotics, especially paranoid psychotics.  We know the probability of their offending is high, but until they act out there’s nothing we can do.  Anyone who has dealt with the seriously mentally ill knows the difficult line walked in their care and treatment, a line between limiting freedoms and giving the individual a realistic chance at living in community.

Does this mean that the gaseous explosions protected as free speech had no affect on Loughner?  I doubt it.  Some peoples minds are more porous than others, more open to outside influence.  It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which a paranoid psychotic decides that Rush Limbaugh actually knows what he’s talking about, that Sarah Palin is a respectable political figure.  O.K.  Maybe only a paranoid psychotic would think either of those things, but it only confirms my point.  His actions did not exist in a vacuum.  Neither did lynchings in the rural south nor do gay hate crimes in many (most?) parts of our country.

Can we or should we stop Limbaugh, George Beck, Sarah Palin, the tea party gas bags from using inflammatory rhetoric?  Regrettably, no.  Part of the idea of free speech is that discerning citizens will tell the demagogue from the statesman, the propagandist from a public servant.  It does appear that discernment may well be at an all time low in the current US, but it’s not the first time.  Those of us with other views must speak, too.  And act.