Shopping for oatmeal, Helena Bergstrom, 37, admitted that she was flummoxed by the label on the blue box reading, “Climate declared: .87 kg CO2 per kg of product.” Read more...
› › 6.01.09 • Last Man Standing: On Clint Eastwood
Especially useful critique of the toxic mimic of Mars goes down into the compost bin.
Last Man Standing: On Clint Eastwood by Akiva Gottlieb for The Nation
People have been writing Clint Eastwood's obituary for about as long as the man's been making movies. This is not without his encouragement. Every new picture is a valediction, as every ending ushers our martyred hero off into the shadows to his eternal good night. Read more...
› › 5.29.09 • Inspiring Elder
The mayor of Mississauga (3rd largest city in Ontario) is an 88 year old woman who has been mayor for 31 years. The city is debt-free with 7 million in reserves.
› › 3.09.09 • Illinois Declares Pluto is Still a Planet
Every now and then a story comes along that seems to be true in spite of every cell in your brain telling you it can't be. Welcome to one of those stories.
In 2006, you'll remember that the International Astronomical Union announced that Pluto was to be expelled from the planetary club, reducing the number of planets in the solar system to eight. Cue mayhem in schools, where teachers were obliged to rip up wallcharts and console their pupils, who were understandably forlorn at the fate of their favourite planet.
A US fireman who lost his power of speech in a traffic accident has been taught to speak again by parrots.
Brian Wilson, from Damascus, Maryland, suffered life-threatening injuries in the accidnet 14 years ago. He also lost his ability to speak.
But he now claims that the chatter of pet parrots confounded the bleak outlook of doctors, who were convinced that he would spend the rest of his life in bed at a nursing home.
"Two birds taught me to talk again," he said. "I had such a bad head injury I was never supposed to talk any more than a two-year-old."
But two of the birds that he had had as pets since he was a child "just kept talking to me and talking to me".
› › 1.15.09 • Master List of Obama Aikido/Zen/Tao Way From The Daily Kos
What follows is my analysis of the Obama Campaign filtered through the lens of my understanding of Taoism, specifically as it relates to passages in the Tao Te Ching ("Book of the Way and Its Power"). This essay will not be exhaustive, but I hope it serves as an informative piece, especially for those of us interested in strategy and novel thought. Novel thought for many in the West, anyway.
› › 1.15.09 • Astute Use of I Ching on Political Conundrum From The Daily Kos
There has been an ongoing question on this blog and many others about the issue of bringing accountability to the criminals we call the Bush/Cheney gang. Obama has been coy about his full intention in this matter. Man, can he keep his cards close or what? The poker player knows his game. Of course, this has driven an already rabid bunch of progressive lambs to ever greater doubt. Will he or won't he?
Santa Claus asking Congress for a financial bailout.
› › 11.24.08 • The Political Compass
"The old one-dimensional categories of 'right' and 'left', established for the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today's complex political landscape." So says The Political Compass, which also rates your political beliefs on another axis, authoritarian vs. libertarian. With one social axis and one economic axis, The Political Compass attempts to more accurately map your political beliefs.
› › 11.11.08 • There's No One as Irish as Barack Obama
US President-elect Barack Obama's roots have possibly been traced to 18th century Ireland and a village called Moneygall in County Offaly.
Irish band, Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys have highlighted Obama's Irish heritage with the song, 'There's No One as Irish as Barack Obama.'
› › 11.05.08 • My Father, George Wallace, and Barack Obama
By Peggy Kennedy Peggy Wallace Kennedy is the daughter of George C. Wallace and Lurleen Wallace, who both were governors of Alabama. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama, with her husband, Mark Kennedy, a retired state Supreme Court justice. They have two sons, Leigh, a decorated veteran of the Iraq war, and Burns, a college sophomore.
I heard a car door slam behind me and turned to see an elderly but spry woman heading my way.
The night before, a gang of vandals had swept through the cemetery desecrating graves, crushing headstones and stealing funereal objects.
My parents' graves, situated on a wind-swept hill overlooking the cemetery, had not been spared. A large marble urn that stood between two granite columns had been pried loose and spirited away, leaving faded silk flowers strewn on the ground.
I was holding a bouquet of them in my arms when the woman walked up and gave me a crushing hug. "Honey," she said, "you don't know me, but when I saw you standing up here on this hill, I knew that you must be one of the girls and I couldn't help myself but to drive up here and let you know how much me and my whole family loved both of your parents. They were real special people."
I thanked her for her kind words as we stood side by side gazing down at the graves of Govs. George Wallace and Lurleen Wallace.
After a few moments, the woman leaned into me and spoke almost in a conspiratorial whisper. "I never thought I would live to see the day when a black would be running for president. I know your daddy must be rolling over in his grave."
Not having the heart or the energy to respond, I gave her bony arm a slight squeeze, turned and walked away. As I put the remnants of the graveyard spray in the trunk of my car, I assumed that she had not bothered to notice the Barack Obama sticker on my bumper.
Sarah Palin was de-witched by nutball pastor? What a shame. By Mark Morford at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Here's one way to make a small child's eyes go wide in creepyfun terror: Mention the existence of witches.
Real ones. Living ones. Witches living and existing right over there, just off the highway, in sad eerie-looking ramshackle hovels and trailers and barns not a mere few hundred yards from your speeding car, right up there in the parts of rural 1970s Idaho my family would pass through on the way to our little getaway lake cabin up north, deep in the misty, foggy, sunbaked summerland memories of my childhood.
Oh yes, the witches were there all right. At least, my parents sometimes hinted that they were, relating, as we zipped by these sweet-but-gloomy little towns, tallish tales of mysterious disappearances and unsolved murders and maybe a mutilated farm animal or two, and then they'd chuckle and wink to each other as my sisters and I stared out the windows, equal parts enchanted and suspicious and petrified.
Of course, to my 8-year-old imagination, these Podunk witches were at once terrifically real, and yet somehow, given how they lived in these weatherbeaten tobacco-spit burgs, also sort of tacky, like a cross between the Blair Witch and an emphysemic Wal-Mart greeter Š- gaunt harridans in bad housedresses who kept small oozing things in jars and ate live rabbits and picked their six remaining teeth with the bones of small children and watched too much daytime TV and chain-smoked Winston menthols.
Listen to highlights of a news interview with the Somalian pirates. Originally broadcast by Rachel Maddow on Air America.
› › 09.22.08 • Giant Wall Street Bailout or Nigerian Email Spam?
Hank Paulson gives a brilliant and funny perspective on the proposed $800 million Wall Street bailout:
Dear American:
I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.
Wolves Spreading Westward Across Europe (From Deustche Presse-Agenteur)
Hamburg - The mournful howling of wolves is echoing these days through the forested woodlands of eastern Germany for the first time in centuries, according to conservationists who say that wolves are spreading into Western Europe now that all their natural enemies have long since disappeared.
The cunning canine is even outsmarting its most dangerous mortal enemy - man. Wolves are encroaching on urbanized areas, even being spotted on the outskirts of large cities like Berlin.
