Category Archives: culture

little fish; too big of an ocean

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Five years ago,

….on July 6, 2004, Technorati tracked its 3 millionth weblog. …..seeing anywhere from 8,000-17,000 new weblogs created every single day.

At the beginning of 2003, according to a graph in the table in the article referenced above, there were less than 150,000.

I began blogging in 2001. I can’t do the math, but seems to me that when I started blogging, I was a small fish in a small pond, and that’s about where I like to be.

From a 2008 piece in the Blog Herald

Technorati currently states it is tracking over 112.8 million blogs, a number which obviously does not include all the 72.82 million Chinese blogs as counted by The China Internet Network Information Center. Blog statistics often concern the English language blogosphere but we should not forget about the millions of other blogs that are not always included in estimations.

My personal history shows that I like participating in the start of things – projects, businesses, relationships…. I liked blogging when the blogosphere was a newly evolving neighborhood. Now it’s a widespread nation, and I feel lost in its vastness.


When I attended the first BloggerCon held at Harvard in 2003, I was enamored of all the interesting people I met online. I met some of them in person at the conference, and that was even more fascinating.

A lot has changed in the past half-dozen years. Social media networks like Facebook and Twitter have become the new online connectors, adding another territory to what once was a manageable blogosphere.

I bought at GPS a while ago because I have such a bad sense of direction in the real world. I get a visual overload when I travel and lose my sense of direction.

That’s kind of the case with me and the blogsophere these days.

I’m just a little fish. And my little pond has merged with the overwhelming ocean.

I feel a little lost. And I don’t have a GPS (although the closest thing to it for me these days is the blogroll at Time Goes By.)

Maybe I just don’t have anything more to rant about in the face of all of those other blogs doing the ranting that I might want to do.

It’s a dilemma.

look for me at TGB

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I’m Ronni’s guest blogger today at Time Goes By, as she spends a couple of weeks in NYC at work and play, including participating in the Age Boom Academy.

From an 04/02/09 Time magazine editorial:

For the past several years, I’ve been harboring a fantasy, a last political crusade for the baby-boom generation. We, who started on the path of righteousness, marching for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam, need to find an appropriately high-minded approach to life’s exit ramp. In this case, I mean the high-minded part literally. And so, a deal: give us drugs, after a certain age – say, 80 – all drugs, any drugs we want. In return, we will give you our driver’s licenses. (I mean, can you imagine how terrifying a nation of decrepit, solipsistic 90-year-old boomers behind the wheel would be?) We’ll let you proceed with your lives – much of which will be spent paying for our retirement, in any case – without having to hear us complain about our every ache and reflux. We’ll be too busy exploring altered states of consciousness. I even have a slogan for the campaign: “Tune in, turn on, drop dead.”

Read the whole piece here. and go over the TGB to get my take on it.

Paul, Ringo, the Mararishi, me, and world peace

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Yup, I did it in the 70s — took a course in Transcendental Meditation. It was, indeed, relaxing. And, after all, the Beatles were doing it.

And now Paul and Ringo, along with filmmaker David Lynch, are promoting (and funding) introducing TM to public school students, especially those who are “at-risk.”

Of course, as the above linked story indicates,

“Public schools are not supposed to be in the business of promoting religion – and that means any religion,” said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “Advocating for a Hindu-based religious practice in public schools is the same as pushing Christianity or another faith. It’s equally unconstitutional.”

Personally, I believe that the process that is called “meditation” is a great stress-reducer and can open the meditator to attitude-altering personal insights that bubble up from the subconscious. But you don’t need a religious framework to accomplish that.

Shortly after the rise in popularity of TM, Herbert Benson wrote a book called The Relaxation Response, outlining a meditative practice that is really TM without a connection to any spiritual belief. Sort of a TM for the secularist.

From here:

The relaxation response represents a form of meditation which has been practiced for many years. The technique can be found in every major religious tradition. It is a simple technique, but it is not easy to practice or to incorporate into your life. You will find your mind wandering, and you will probably find it difficult to set aside the time to practice. It feels like setting aside 20 minutes a day to sit and do nothing.

If you do incorporate this or any relaxation technique into your life you may notice at least the following four benefits:

* You will gain increased awareness of whether you are tense or relaxed. You will be more “in touch with your body.”
* You will be better able to relax when you become stressed-out.
* You may even reduce the resting level of your autonomic nervous system – walking around more relaxed all the time.
* Your concentration may improve. By repeatedly bringing yourself back to the meditation you are strengthening the part of your mind that decides what to think about.

Devotees of Transcendental Meditation believe that if enough people participated in the practice, world peace would be achieved. Well, maybe so, if meditation really does reduce stress and, therefore, related frustration and aggression.

But maybe it also would be true that if enough people practiced the Relaxation Response every day, we would move steadily toward world peace. Or, at least have a population less stressed and more insightful.

I wonder what would happen if public schools offered a “Relaxation Club” rather than a “Meditation Club” and used David Lynch’s foundation money to pay at-risk students to attend after school. It would be an interesting study to see if the process had a beneficial effect on those students. It would be the same process as “meditation,” but presented in a different package, one more legally appropriate to the “separation of church and state” Constitutional mandate.

The Transcendental Meditation website cites the value of meditation (AKA “the relaxation response”): creativity, focus, health, happiness, success.

I don’t know about “happiness” and “success,” but three out of five ain’t bad.

The site also quotes Dr. Gary Kaplan, a neurologist at NYU’s medical school:

“The TM technique simply and naturally allows the mind to settle down to experience a state of inner coherence and calm during which time the left and right hemispheres, and the front and back of the brain, begin to work in harmony with each other. This brain wave coherence has been correlated with improvements in memory, problem-solving and decision-making abilities. This change in brain functioning also affects the rest of the physiology, reducing high blood pressure, strengthening the heart, and overall improving health.”

I really do need to meditate (whatever you want to call it), but that means I have to spend less time online.

That’s the hard part.

Origins of the Specious

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The title of this post is the title of a book (that I have just ordered from Amazon), one of the authors of which I heard interviewed on NPR on my way back home today.

The authors’ website has a page on grammar myths that begins thusly and that is worth taking a look at:

The Living Dead

The house of grammar has many rooms, and some of them are haunted. Despite the best efforts of grammatical exorcists, the ghosts of dead rules and the spirits of imaginary taboos are still rattling and thumping about the old place.

It’s no longer considered a crime to split an infinitive or end a sentence with a preposition, for example, but the specters of worn-out rules have a way of coming back to haunt us. In the interest of laying a few to rest, let’s dedicate to each a tombstone, complete with burial service. May they rest in peace

According to the authors, many of those complicated rules of “proper” grammar that I expended so much energy on learning and then teaching my 8th grade classes back in the 70s are no longer worth worrying about.

Well, “makes me no nevermind,” as someone somewhere used to say. I’ve always known that language evolves. But is appears to be evolving faster than I.

I can’t wait to read the book.

Patricia O’Conner, one of the authors, appears on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 P.M. Eastern time. Click here on the third Wednesday of each month to hear Pat live. She appears on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 P.M. Eastern time. If you miss a program, click here to listen to a recorded broadcast..

graying out, outing gray

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Maybe I’m just more aware of it since I let my hair grow out gray, but I’m seeing more and more women in their 50s and 60s who are sporting various shades of naturally graying hair. The exceptions might be the women in Florida, who, my cousins who live there tell me, are all blonds.

The national census taken five years ago indicates that a little over 12% of Americans were older than 65 at the time. The census report also states that:

Projected percentage increase in the 65-and-over population between 2000 and 2050 [will be 147%]. By comparison, the population as a whole would have increased by only 49 percent over the same period.

Gray is in. Unfortunately, in some ways, gray is also the new Black, as we become more and more sensitive to the subtle ageism that permeates our culture. I don’t know anyone who has documented the negative and prejudicial attitudes about aging better than Ronni Bennett at Time Goes By.

But gray, nevertheless, is in. And, hopefully, the Gray Panthers, founded in 1970, will grow into an even greater force in the years to come.

Maggie Kuhn convened a group of five friends, all of whom were retiring from national religious and social work organizations. This first “Network” of friends gathered to look at the common problems faced by retirees — loss of income, loss of contact with associates and loss of one of our society’s most distinguishing social roles, one’s job. They also discovered a new kind of freedom in their retirement — the freedom to speak personally and passionately about what they believed in, such as their collective opposition to the Vietnam War.

Currently, the Gray Panthers are working to affect 8 major issues, with health care being the first on the list.

Gray is in. It’s in on the Internet as well. The Ageless Project lists almost 500 bloggers who are over 55, and every day, retirees who are comfortable using communication technologies because of their job experiences reach out into online social networks for diversion and stimulation,.

Too long has becoming gray (in the larger sense of growing older) been something to avoid at all costs, although the costs to those doing the avoiding are high — all of those hair coloring treatments and anti-aging creams, and even botox and plastic surgery.

How much healthier to be gray and proud of it and all of the experience and wisdom it implies.

Go Gray!

first we take Manhattan
then we take Berlin

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Those are words in a Leonard Cohen song that keep running through my head as I read about the religious right in Texas trying to make fundamentalist changes to the state’s Social Studies curriculum. There are terrorists and then there are terrorists.

A press release from the Texas Freedom Network examines the situation, providing

…. the names of “experts” appointed by far-right state board members. Those panelists will guide the revision of social studies curriculum standards for Texas public schools. They include David Barton of the fundamentalist, Texas-based group WallBuilders, whose degree is in religious education, not the social sciences, and the Rev. Peter Marshall of Peter Marshall Ministries in Massachusetts, who suggests that California wildfires and Hurricane Katrina were divine punishments for tolerance of homosexuality.

The Texas Freedom Network is a nonprofit, grassroots organization of faith and community leaders who support public education, religious freedom and individual liberties.

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No, neither I nor my keyboard has gone completely haywire.

The above are the first lines of the results of geneticists’ efforts to sequence the genes of the swine flu (renamed H1N1).

I don’t understand any of that scientific mumbo jumbo. I also don’t understand why (from Harper’s Weekly):

Egypt, which has no cases of the flu, ordered all its pigs killed, especially slum pigs; police at Manshiyat Nasr slum fired tear gas and rubber bullets at rioting Coptic Christian pig farmers.

Well, I guess I do understand why. I just think it’s stupid.

Some sciences might be awfully hard for lots of people to understand, but, I swear, even more often, I find it hard to understand the people who don’t understand.

I watch my home-schooled grandson as he moves each day toward understanding more. While he already knows “where babies come from,” my daughter has been waiting for him to ask how they got there. And he finally did, the other day.

Using videos on the web and available books designed to help children understand the process of conception, gestation, and birth, my daughter is helping her son to begin to grasp the complexity of it all.

While I am unswervingly Pro Choice, I also understand the awesomeness of fetal development. And that’s why I don’t understand why those who oppose abortion don’t make a big deal of disseminating information about how babies come to be and how “sacred” (see 5th definition here) and amazing the actual, factual process is. I wonder, if young children were instilled with awe while explained the facts, would they be more likely, as teenagers, to avoid unwanted pregnancies — not out of fear of some god, but rather because they would value life more. Maybe it shouldn’t be called “sex education.” Maybe it should be called something more scientific, like “human procreation.”

C’mon, even Sarah Palin’s daughter admits that abstinence doesn’t work. She certainly has learned that from her own experience.

Knowledge and understanding can sidetrack many bad decisions, and “knowing” and “understanding” are not the same thing. If children truly were helped to understand the scientific marvel that they are as human organisms — right from the very beginning — perhaps as they mature, they would have more respect for themselves and for other living things. And then, maybe, abortions wouldn’t be necessary except in extreme cases.

Of course, I’m just speculating. What do I know? I’m just a little ol’ grandma raising hell at the keyboard and trying to understand this world that seems to be “going to hell in a handbasket.” (Hmm. Why a handbasket, I wonder.)

Some extreme things that are happening I understand and accept, some I understand but despise, and some I just don’t understand. All of the above are reflected in the following, again lifted from Harper’s Weekly Review:

Sweden recognized same-sex marriages.

A food-service industry survey found that schoolchildren would like to replace lunch ladies with robots.

Kenyan women’s organizations called for wives to boycott sex, and for prostitutes to be paid not to work, until leaders in the coalition government stop feuding.

South Korea bioengineered four fluorescent beagles

A senior Buddhist monk in Thailand named Phra Maha Wudhijaya Vajiramedhi vowed to teach gay and transgender Thai monks better manners, which would include the elimination of their pink purses, their sculpted eyebrows, and their revealingly tight robes.

Officials in New Delhi were investigating the case of Shanno Khan, an 11-year-old girl whose teacher allegedly forced her to stand in the hot sun for two hours as a punishment for not doing her homework, ignoring Khan when she promised to learn her alphabet and begged for water. The girl fainted and was hospitalized. “I never want to go to school again,” she told her mother, and died a day later.

Joss Whedon:
a man who rights women

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Actually, he “writes” women. And he writes them the right way — multi-faceted females who serve as role models for all genders. They are not perfect, but they struggle to do the right thing. They love and they war. They are strong and they are vulnerable and they make mistakes. And they’re smart. And they care.

Joss Whedon (whose new “Dollhouse” series has its female characters pushing even more boundaries than ever) is not a name I knew, even as I got wholeheartedly, back in the late 1990s, into the tv series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Granted, at age 69, I’m not considered part of the demographics that would be drawn to teenage Buffy, but let’s face it: superlatively creative writing, clever humor, and a complex and spunky heroine should be appealing to all ages (at least those of all ages who still appreciate irreverent spunk and and still have some imaginative curiosity).

After Buffy, there was the short-lived and unique Firefly television series (and subsequent off-shoot movie, Serenity), which boasted several totally different female characters whose escapades explored just about every facet of the most compelling female archetypes. Oh, don’t get me wrong — the male characters were just as compelling, and I still have fantasies about Nathan Fillion (who is currently starring in the series Castle).

And that’s when I started noticing the name of Joss Whedon, writer, who is young enough to be my son and whose mother sure brought him up right. The more I learned about him, the more I liked him. I like him for what he writes and for how he thinks.

On April 11, he received the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism, addressing a crowd a Harvard with his customary honesty and humor. Watch this and you’ll be a Whedon fan too.

Whedon’s new series “Dollhouse” has not generated the audience that his fans hoped, and so, learning from the fate of the too-late-acclaimed “Firefly,” some of those fans are touting a WATCH DOLLHOUSE WEEK, beginning on Monday the 27th, to generate interest in having the series come back next season.

I’ve watched every episode of “Dollhouse” thus far, but I’m going to re-watch it all next week, recognizing that there are probably all sorts of subtle and quirky bits I probably missed the first time. There are always more to Whedon’s stories and diaglogues than it first seems.

In many ways, “Dollhouse” is framed differently from his other series, and this site provides a good analysis. Most important, I think, is the following paragraph from that piece.

One of Whedon’s perennial concerns is masculinity in a feminist era: if women are so powerful now, how are guys supposed to relate to them? It’s a good question, and one of the better themes a male writer can explore, if he’s willing to do it honestly. Whedon has offered solutions before but they’ve always been imperfect, because they haven’t addressed how pervasive gender inequality is, and how much we’re all complicit in it, how our thoughts and perceptions are informed by it from Day 1 simply because it is the context in which we live. In Dollhouse, he’s giving it deeper and more sustained focus than ever, and is more willing than ever to implicate masculinity: in parallel to the story of how the dolls work to reclaim their personhood, there’s the story of the people who take it away from them on a day-to-day basis, and how they justify their actions.

The idea of the “Dollhouse” has stirred some controversy among viewers and critics. For me, that’s even more reason to watch it.

Join me for Watch Dollhouse Week. You’re never to old to be a fan of a creative spirit like Joss Whedon.

the funk and flash of elder style

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A comment on my previous post led me to this site featuring stunningly attired elders.

Appropriately entitled “Advanced Style,” this site is constantly adding photographs that illustrate just how creative, funky, and individual elders can be in the way they dress. I can’t help notice that many of the photos are of people who live in New York City, where style is queen.

As a tease to get you over there to look around, here’s a look at three of my favorites.

The site welcomes photo submissions of elders in full regalia — or even just elders with remarkable style. Send to Advancedstyleinfo at gmail dot com.

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At some point back in the early 70s I had a book called Native Funk and Flash. I wish I had held onto it, because here on Amazon, a collector’s copy is worth $100.

I copied several of the designs in the book into embroidered embellishments on clothing. I put one design on the bottom side of a denim skirt that I made. It was called “four faithful fish feeding on the bread of life,” with a circular braided bread image in the middle and four fish facing the bread, each positioned in one of the four directions.

My most elaborate project reproduced the rising phoenix (pictured on the butt of the woman on the front cover, above) to cover the whole back of one of my husband’s muslin shirts. I embroidered it all with various colors of metallic thread.

I still have that shirt in a storage bin in the cellar. I’m going to dig it out and post a photo of it because that glowing phoenix is one of the most beautiful things I have ever created.

Ah those 60s! Even though we were married and parents, we still had a lot of funk and flash.

(For images from the book: Native Funk and Flash, link over to Knitting Iris.