I'm Worth Zillions

I am such a lucky woman. I have won the lottery over & over & over & over again. Reportedly - I am worth zillions! AND - what's more amazing still about my good fortune is that I keep winning the SAME two lotteries - REPEATEDLY! Is this even possible?! Mathematically? Statistically? I wonder! What is the probability that an anonymously squidly woman lurking in the ocean depths of the US could win the British & Irish lotteries multiple days of each week???!!!! Sometimes one each per day!!

So this all has me pondering . . . why aren't I winning any other national lotteries? Like in my own country? Gee - might it be because other countries actually require that you enter a lottery to win it?

Or . . . maybe its just that other national lotteries do not know the mysterious electronic pathway through the atmosphere that leads to my gmail spam box.

Maybe?

It's safe for rabbits - for now

Whew! What a relief. I expected, now that we have a wuss in the white house who thinks this isn't a "Christian nation,"that the Liberal/atheist/fascist/Marxist pansies would begin the assault on Easter I've been expecting for so long. After all, no one would attempt to make Christianity illegal and leave Easter intact.

But it didn't happen. We held a small party for friends on my boat and passers-by wished us a happy Easter and a happy holiday in equal numbers and not a single shot was fired. This morning, I can see two of the long eared symbols of Jesus crazing on my front lawn oblivious to the danger of Constitutional law. No more skulking down back alleys, collar turned up.

Maybe I shouldn't stop worrying though. Even though it's quiet on all fronts of the war, maybe it's too quiet.

Fox and its victims

One of our local solons has scrawled his opinion in the local paper that President Obama is a failure because while engaged in "befriending our enemies" and leading us toward Marxism, Socialism and Fascism in a manner so obvious that anyone who doesn't agree "hates America," he has "no answer for anything -- as is illustrated by having no solution for the piracy problem.

I don't watch Fox News, because I don't support villainy and sedition, so I don't know whether they have covered the US Navy's recapture of the Maersk Alabama from pirates. Yes, the American captain is still a hostage and that's because Obama is too cowardly to be dropped on board the pirate vessel with cutlass and pistol while growling ARRRRRR through the knife in his clenched teeth -- just like Reagan would do if this whole thing were a 1950's B movie. None the less, the US Navy is there despite Obama's pants-wetting cowardice, and reinforcements, including a counter-piracy task force, are on the way.

Meanwhile the wine-besotted surrender monkeys from France have successfully stormed another vessel freeing 4 hostages and killing the pirates. One hostage was killed. A multinational force is assembling in the region as a response to the increase in Somali piracy, but of course "Obama has no answer." Obvious to the Fox poisoned as well, is the fact that Obama has no answer to anything because he hasn't yet undone the damage done by the pirates George Bush sponsored on Wall Street and in the lending industry. It must be cowardice of course, unless it's the Marxist/Socialist/Fascist/Muslim extremist thing. Perhaps it's his cowardice that prevents him from continuing the "Kiss my ass you wog or we'll blow you all to hell" diplomacy, which in Foxspeak means cozying up to our enemies.

"Changes have been made" say a good share of the letter writing peanut gallery and if we don't see the danger we need to wake up. I suppose that means to tune in to all the warnings from Blowhardia on the radio and suck up the toxic twittering of Fox. Unlike the Kommanderguy, Obama is "surrounded by criminals." The end is nigh.

So anyway, the Kingdom of God has not arrived with Barak Obama; something that was not, pace the quick brownshirt Fox, expected by his supporters -- but that's enough to dub him a failure. He's certainly received enough mockery in his first steps down the Via Dolorosa to make Fox's cynical comparison compelling. Of course Jesus was surrounded by criminals and actually was a socialist in the extreme, but the irony -- all irony is lost on the ignorant army of the American Right. The stupid will be with us longer than will be the poor so we might as well accept it, but if only we didn't have the plutocratic pseudo-populists in Fox's clothing to make them the enemy of all things true and just.

Up to our knees in Santorum

"Watching President Obama apologize last week for America's arrogance - before a French audience that owes its freedom to the sacrifices of Americans - helped convince me that he has a deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions"

says former (hurray!) Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum in a Philadelphia Enquirer editorial titled The Elephant in the Room. Of course the problem with any elephant in the room is not that it's difficult to notice, but that the room tends to fill up with shit rather rapidly.

Of course nothing helped Santorum be convinced of anything, he's just, like any elephant, looking for whatever fodder he can find so that he can, as elephants do, digest it and turn it to dung. Conviction is what you call the straw you're grasping at when you're afraid of drowning.

The fact that president Obama told the French we can sometimes come across as arrogant is a simple statement of truth. We can -- and Santorum certainly illustrates it by pointing out how the French owe us their freedom, while ignoring that we owe the French the same debt. Of course only such an elephant's ass as he would require the French to grovel and eat up such merde as we feel fit to excrete -- and in perpetuity. His own arrogance would be a model for the Sun King.

Of course he fails to note that Obama also called Europeans arrogant as well, which renders the former Senators "convincing evidence" nugatory as well as dishonest. But what "values and traditions" is Santy talking about here other than arrogance itself if Obama is admitting that yes, we can be perceived as overbearing and pushy?

Actually I'm getting tired of treating this man's shit as worthy of comment -- as though he weren't a tin-horn blowhard without the wit or talent to do anything but cut bait for the Republican dementia mongers. You're an elephant's asshole Santorum; you and the Fox you rode in on.

A Gesture Well-Intended

Last week I was given a pink rose – individually wrapped in cellophane. It didn’t look wilted but it didn’t look exactly vibrant either. And the same could be said of the giver & the rose’s symbolic gesture.

It was the day of my annual post-40 rite of passage – my mammogram. After my yearly, teeth-grittingly uncomfortable procedure, I re-clothed & headed for the exit of the clinic. As I was headed out the door, the receptionist called out – "oh wait – here." In distracted fashion she aimed the rose in my direction & called out for the next patient – her focus now attending to other business. As I made my way out of the clinic I thought – oh – a rose. A pink rose. What should I do with it? Not being a flower person I felt awkward. Could I stick it in my purse? But then it might not be seen. Should it be seen? Would I be causing offense to the “cause?” Is this my badge of . . . hope? . . . courage? . . . what? And, did I want everyone I saw to know I’d just had a mammogram evidenced by my being saddled with a pink rose?

PINK has become the color of breast cancer. Pink ribbon stickers on car bumpers, pink packaging in grocery stores proclaiming which products donate to the cause. All of this pinkness is wonderful – it has raised awareness about a major health issue. It has helped to raise money for research. Yes – all of this is great.

But this recent rose ceremony has given me pause.

Am I beginning to sound cynical? I do not mean to be. But I guess that is the whole point of this post. I was so puzzled by this ceremonial lack of ceremony of a symbol - & its efficacy. When do symbols begin to lose their symbol-ness? And, when they do – should we switch to new symbols that resonate more strongly? When does a well-intended gesture, such as mammogram clinics giving out pink roses – become just a routine gesture that becomes, well, just a gesture?

We Americans are infamous for overdoing things to the point of rendering them meaningless. Call it a cultural idiosyncrasy of ours, I guess. But may we please not do so to symbols, to causes, to gestures – that still SHOULD resonate with a sense of urgency.

And as for my pink rose – I am sincerely grateful to the person who initiated the idea - originally. No doubt with heartfelt good intentions. However – the manner in which my rose was bestowed upon me was that of an office worker fulfilling a duty. And she did. She saw that I got my rose. And – in her defense – if I had to give women pink roses all day everyday while tending to a myriad of other duties – I’d probably become a bit mechanical, ceremonially, myself.

Not with a bang. . .

. . . But a twitter.

An e-mail from my Senator Bill Nelson (D. FL) informs me today that he will begin twittering and NASA has announced that Astronaut in training Mike Massimino will be doing the same. They're drawing a line that I will not cross.

I mean, I still have some pride in being adult and being able to read without moving my lips and able to follow something longer than 140 words without my thoughts wandering toward the need for iPodal noise injection and wiggling in my seat. What's next, the congressional record spelled out letter by letter on alphabet blocks by a fuzzy, green sock puppet? Three body orbital mechanics brought to you by the letter N?

Sure I'm interested in what Nelson has to say and I am interested in space technology -- but. Haven't we had 8 years of the dumbing down of everything already? OK, so maybe it's not quite how the world ends, but it sure looks like the way adulthood ends and as far as I'm concerned, NASA and Nelson and all the other bird brains can twitter this, for all I care.

When trolls attack

"How's the hope and change thing working out for you, moron?" reads the comment. If you're a blogger outside the red tribe, you're used to this sort of thing. You're used to the cut and paste pop culture snark bombs: how's the _____ working out, I don't think so, Hello, etc. Of course trying to rule while wearing only the hollow crown of cynicism only exposes the nakedness and weakness of someone who has to rely on mimicking sitcom characters to simulate insight or wit; and of course the smartest people around are called morons more often than the rest of us; far more often than actual morons are. It's a fact.

Of course if you look back at every post I've made in the last few years, you'll not find a single "hope and change"slogan. In fact if you have the patience and stomach to read all or part of it, you'll note that I'm most consistently a doom and gloom nihilist with no hope for or expectation of change, unless it be decay. Still, I'm sure the armchair assassin thinks he really scored and perhaps he's getting his 5$ per post bonus from the GOP to boot. There's nothing to be done really and as I said, I'm a nihilist and a pessimist; I expect no better from my fellow apes.

If I did, I would have to feel insulted by the assumption that I was stupid enough to think a new president -- any new president -- could reverse the damage of decades in two months: two months of sabotage and opposition by people who ran the ship aground and pay sticky-fingered troglodytes to ask how the hope and change is going for us. Need we ask how the election went for them? or how the supply side, zero regulation market thing is going? Those tax breaks for Wall Street tycoons making you rich? Hello! I don't think so!

“I’M GLAD YOU DIDN’T SNEEZE”

Today marks the anniversary of the assignation of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr in 1968. Dr King had traveled far on the civil rights road but he knew the struggle was far from over.
In fact, his last speech to the sanitation workers of Memphis on the eve of his death is peppered with references to his own premonitions.

The most recognizable excerpt of that speech:

“Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

Of course, he was receiving multiple threats daily and had already been attacked on several occasions. Given the violent history of the equal rights struggle in America, it really would not have taken much in the way of clairvoyance to know how tenuous his hold on life really was.

But there is an excerpt from his speech that night that doesn’t usually get coverage and I’d like to rectify that here because in it lies a message of hope and love that can never be stabbed or shot or strangled away:

“You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, "Are you Martin Luther King?"

And I was looking down writing, and I said yes. And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that's punctured, you drown in your own blood--that's the end of you.
It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states, and the world, kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I've forgotten what those telegrams said. I'd received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I've forgotten what the letter said. But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at that letter, and I'll never forget it. It said simply, "Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the Whites Plains High School." She said, "While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."

And Dr King, so touched by this simple message went on to say:

"And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream. And taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama, to see the great movement there. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been in Memphis to see a community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze."

Imagine all the events that might NOT have happened had Dr King sneezed. Sometimes it's the small, seemingly insignificant things in life that have the greatest impact. Dr King, I'm also glad you didn't sneeze.

Information Overload?

Kathleen Parker's column yesterday was about how we're exposed to too much information. In it, she notes that "the world produced 161 exabytes (an exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes) of digital data" in 2006. "[T]hat's 3 million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By next year, the number is expected to reach 988 exabytes [emphasis mine]."

This is, of course, truly astonishing. I tend to believe that humans are pretty adaptable - impressively capable of parsing the constant barrage of information - but information overload has been shown to...well...make us dumber. Parker continues:

[...] brain research shows that we do our best thinking when we're not engaged and focused, yet fewer of us have time for downtime. (If you have to schedule relaxation, is it still relaxing?)

Daydreaming, we used to call it. Ask any creative person where they got their best ideas and they'll say, "Dunno. Just came to me out of the blue." If you're looking for Eureka -- as in the Aha! moment -- you probably won't find it while following David Gregory's Tweets. Or checking Facebook to see who might be "friending" whom. Or whose status has been updated. George Orwell is . . . More likely, the ideas that save the world will present themselves in the shower or while we're sweeping the front stoop. What the world needs now isn't more, but less. The alternative to mindless activities for the mindful is turning out to be not a less-informed nation but a dumber one.

Unchecked "infomania" -- yes, there's even a term for this instapathology -- can lead to a lower IQ, according to a 2005 Hewlett-Packard study. The research, conducted by a University of London psychologist, found that people distracted by e-mail and phone calls lost 10 IQ points, more than twice the impact of smoking marijuana -- or comparable to losing a night's sleep.

I certainly don't want my IQ to drop 10 points. So, what are your thoughts on this? Are we exposed to too much information? Clearly there is an astonishing amount of it out there, but is that necessarily bad? Can we, if we choose, ignore the plethora of needless information while still being able to quickly summon that which is useful? What does this mean for future generations more dependent on this network of knowledge?

Der Flughaven

The average flight delay at FKI is 30 hours longer than next worst airport and the customer service help line connects you to a hat store in Stuttgart, but that's just a minor criticism of Prague's Franz Kafka International Airport. Corridors end in the middle of nowhere and you're likely to spend an eternity in the security check, or should I say Czech.

No, I'm not making it up. You can't make this stuff up, unless you actually are Kafka and of course you couldn't pick a better name for the labyrinthine, frustrating and surreal airport. Czech it out and maybe next time JFK won't seem quite so bad!



And for heaven's sake, don't put FKI on your itinerary on April 1st!