Home - Roundup - Insert a Trite Metaphor About a Corral

Insert a Trite Metaphor About a Corral

Posted on August 7, 2004 in Roundup

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

  — George W. Bush

This roundup covers the period from 30 July to 5 August 2004.

square298.gifNo one seems to like the summer weather which everywhere that is not the western United States seems to be hot and humid, endless days of thundershowers. Pam, John, Robert, Ellen, and Francis all mentioned it prominently in their blogs. Meanwhile, Jeremy worried that the ocean is turning to acid.

Doug the Mute Troubador who is arriving in The Big Orange this week shall find the weather extremely dry unless I missed seeing an oncoming hurricane in
the weather report. When we walked in Caspars Wilderness today, the grass was bright yellow, the fire level at very high, and the dirt lofting every time we put a foot down. Welcome to August in Southern California!

Politics


  • Will was the only other blogger who I saw who mentioned Hiroshima Day. (Corrections may go in my tagboard)
  • Brian wonders how well Maine’s proposed “Fat Tax” will fly:

    Maine has the highest rate of obesity among the six New England states. Not surprisingly, Maine is also 33rd in per-capita income….(relatively poor states have high correlations to obesity rates (Mississippi, the poorest state has the highest obesity rate of any state). But, they also have less tax revenue to go around to do anything about it through governmental means.

  • chari is angry over a smear ad being run against John Kerry in swing states such as Florida:

    Each of the men in the ad claim they served with Kerry. Of course, they don’t say where, when or how. They also claim Kerry ‘lied’. About what? There isn’t any explanation for that either, other than one vague reference to the way Kerry may have gotten one of his purple heart medals, which still didn’t explain anything at all.

  • LQ added that fellow war hero John McCain condemned the ad and noted that of the six men who served with Kerry on his boat, five support him and the sixth is dead.
  • Andrew posted a suspiciously close Fox News poll.
  • Kris threw a fit after reading one too many right wing letter to the editor claiming that everything was going fine in Iraq.
  • Stephen explained why he isn’t Green:

    Apart from the pro-abortion platform, my chief difficulty with the green party is the somewhat naive belief in the perfectability of humankind. TSO comments that the “Resurrection People” tend to have forgotten the importance of fallen human nature in much that surrounds us. If the resurrection people have forgotten it, the green party never knew it.

  • Jeanne noted how the war in Iraq has become a covert operation, aided and abetted by substandard press coverage.
  • Allison thought Kerry called it right on how many jobs it takes to remain alive in America today.
  • Mileah shook her head at the “chicken little” strategy of the Department of Homeland Security:

    Does it make any sense to give out the names of the buildings that al Qaeda is supposedly targeting? I mean they are talking about mobile truck bombs and the key word there is mobile. Even the least motivated terrorist cruising around in a van loaded with fertilizer and fuel or a homemade nuke can turn on CNN or his local news for that matter and see that they are going to have a hard time striking the Citigroup building this week.

  • Randy castigates a commentator of an article by Marc Cooper for employing moral relativism as a tool for saying that Castro’s human rights abuses weren’t as bad as Pinochet’s:

    When I was doing training for Amnesty International we never compared countries in terms of their level of human rights abuses. There is only one number of acceptable torture victims, there is only one number acceptable of persons being imprisoned for the non-violent expression of their beliefs: zero.

  • Medley saluted Howard Dean for calling Bush out on the politicization of terror alerts.
  • Mike talked about the human cost of corruption in South Africa:

    I picked up a driver’s licence at the traffic department earlier this week and, while there, bought a licence-holder—a pale shade of police-sunglass blue. It cost only R5,00 but I felt the widows and orphans of the thousands of cops killed each month while sleeping in their vehicles at the side of the road deserve the money.


Culture


  • maria reflected on the pathologicalization of worry:

    Mothers who think with hearts and minds, here is something to get your blood boiling a bit … though try not to show it, or you’ll find yourself with a new medical tattoo – I mean label in your file that will tag you as a trouble maker – much as you were tagged and dealt with back a few hundred years ago when they burned you, or more recently, only decades ago, when, if you argued, they carted you off for lobotomies.

  • Tracy fumed about the special treatment given some patients:

    I once worked at a hospital where they had an actual wing designated to VIPs. One night I had a “split” assignment, meaning I had some patients on that wing and a few patients “around the corner” (on another wing). I had been standing at the med cart when a nurse at the desk had called out to me, “Hey Tracy, one of your VIP patients needs you!” I had answered simply, “Hey, ALL of my patients are VIPs.”

  • Stan wrote of Rimi’s encounter with a man wearing newspapers who told her:

    One of two things is true: either there are two viewpoints in competition, one of which had big tent flapping yesterday and the other of which had walled face. Or there is one viewpoint which featured loose face today and warnings yesterday. Fear is a source of blood to fill the spongy soft tissues of pride. The bedrock of our coalition is our refusal to face the fact that we disagree; to be revolutionary is a matching vehicle in every yard, because equality is what revolution aims for.

  • Victoria read The Time Traveler’s Wife:

    This was a compelling love story where the main character is “chronologically impaired”, i.e. he has no control over when and where he travels, though his subconscious must have something to do with it since he ends up in his own past and future as well as his wife’s.

  • Aurora laid out a theory of blog:

    Frankly, I think public online diaries are just a bit stupid. But, there are few rules on the Internet, and no one really forces you to read many of those LiveJournals or pages and pages of pet photos, anyway, so I’ll try to stop sounding even a little elitist. Just to clarify, however, there is a difference between a personal post and a diary post, but the line sometimes gets smudged.

  • Manda reflected on a common problem facing the writers of academic research papers:

    In my short time working in research, I sometimes saw people struggling to show positive results from their work, even when the results were… not so positive. This is sometimes irritating, though understandable, because really who wants to say “I fucked up”?

  • Treesong expressed what he means by the word “liberation”.
  • Stu shared two “juxtapositions of fate”.
  • Nancy compared American dried apricots to Indian dried apricots.

Religion


  • JCecil joined in the critical commentary about a recent letter from the Vatican regarding the differences between men and women:

    My own view is that men and women are fundamentally different from birth. Furthermore, sexual orientation is formed largely in the womb. What I seek is not to have people at war with their gender and sexual identity and orientation. Rather, I seek a world where the variety God gives us at birth is truly celebrated and each variation is recognized for its true gifts. I do not want women priests who act and talk like male priests. I want women priests because I want to hear the insights of women as women from the pulpit and in the confessional. I believe in gay unions because I believe God calls certain persons to loving union with the same gender through their nature.

  • Al-Muhajabah lashed out at those who mischaracterize the ethnicity of American Muslims.
  • Nathan announced that he would be observing a seven day period of blogging silence preparatory to the Feast of the Assumption. (August 15).
  • Rae shared an email about the relationship between Christianity and paganism.

Personal


  • Rachel has moved Willow Green.
  • Doug is headed our way.
  • Happy Birthday to Natalie!
  • Bill talked about something he likes to do in the nude:

    Since college days, I have brushed my teeth in the shower. In the morning, I take a shower. And my three faithful readers know that I am a shower freak. Being without a toothbrush causes an extreme and debilitating disruption in the whole showering process. It is kind of like a scratch on an old-fashioned vinyl record that causes the same thing to play over and over and over again.

  • Lauren learned to watch what she says around her son, Ethan.
  • Jenny became the most senior postdoc in her lab, goading her to pray:

    I would like to show appropriate, servant, leadership in my role as a postdoc in my research group.

  • Leigh celebrated her new found power to blog wherever she wishes:

    I can also now finally blog on my bowery front porch, amongst the pots of flowers, wind chimes, and bird feeder. Ah, the tranquiity . . . so soothing, so Zen. I feel compelled, however, to confess that after wistfully complaining to everyone I know that the birds weren’t coming to my bird feeder . . . after whinging at tedious length that I felt overlooked, insulted, and horribly slighted because the birds were clearly smugly turning up their little bird nostrils embedded in their little bird beaks at my exceedingly fine and well-stocked bird feeder . . . well, the birds have finally come.

  • Seraph began to whine about workshop politics but decided to talk about the beach instead.
  • Francis broke his silence to speak of lethargy:

    The summer’s come and gone. To be more accurate, it never really quite arrived. There were no stretches of sunshiney days, everytime it seemed to start, it would be cut short by grey and cool and melancholy weather that helps one understand the problem of high suicide rates in this country.

  • Kathryn is undergoing the joys of toilet training her daughter:

    For the past few days, I have spent hours a day on Elizabeth’s potty training project: trying to coax her back into a diaper; trying to find the one she took off; cleaning up the wreckage in the bathroom; and trying to establish some kind of rules for when and where she can take her diaper off; and chasing her around the house.

  • Roberta enjoyed quality time with her granddaughter:

    I haven’t gone berry picking for eons, but that’s where GD and I went last week. Unfortunately it was to a raspberry patch instead of a blueberry patch. But nevertheless, despite the absence of all that I have mentioned above, it was still enchanting in its own way.

  • M. Luminous painted:

    The cat was torn between his disgust for the smell of paint, and his curiousity at the empty bookcases that were all pushed together in the center of the room while I painted the walls. His solution was to spend his days outside in the heat, rather than to enter the house while this was going on.

  • Jill had to get over seeing her mother flash the finger at her sister.
  • Madge went into holiday mode.
  • Terje celebrated the first anniversary of his ordination.
  • Andrea posted an undated roundup of Singaporean weblogs.

Photos


  • Andrea: Aureole
  • Irene: What Firey Eyebrows You Have!
  • Mary Lou: What men will be wearing at the beach
  • Coup de Vent: Welcome Strange Things
  • Bill: Sunset from the Nursing Home
  • Sally: Roast Suckling Pig

Poetry


Missing Bloggers


Recent Reading

Petitions & Appeals


Web Links

Let us waive that agitated national topic, as to whether such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on American shores; let us waive it, with only one thought, that if they can get here, they have God’s right to come; though they bring all of Ireland and her miseries with them. For the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world; there is no telling who does not own a stone in the Great Wall of China.

  –Herman Melville

  • bipolar disorder best blogs badge
    Healthline

  • Recent Comments

  • Categories

  • Archives