The girl from Iraq who has written so movingly of life in the city of death leaves for refuge in Syria. Read her whole post about the escape, which includes the following.

via emailer myrln:
Of course: 4 days before the 9/11 anniversary and who knows how many days before the great Petraeus report (written by the White House), a bin Laden video “surfaces” and is being “studied” by u.s. intelligence (oxymoron) agencies for validity. Tape obtained from “jihadist” website, BUT it is now no longer available at that site. How convenient. When are folks gonna catch on that this kinda shit goes on every time there’s an important decision to be made and they want to insure there’ll be no opposition to their direction? Not in Congress, certainly.
In South Korea, the Chairman of Hyundai was convicted of embezzling over 100 million from the company and sentenced to 3 years in jail. An appeals court, however, suspended the sentence because he “is too important to South Korea’s economy to go to jail…” Teach your children well, as the old song goes, only today means they need to learn to make millions so they never have to worry about jail.


via the one true b!X:
Down in Australia, the GOPresident manages to mistake the APEC summit for an OPEC summit, refer to “Austrian” troops instead of Australian ones, and (deja vu!) try to leave through the wrong door.
You can’t help wondering if something really IS wrong with Bush’s brain. We know something is very wrong with his capacity for critical thinking, but I’m referring to his physical brain. Lapses like those he displayed in Australia are very similar to those my mother had early on in her dementia. These days, of course, her misnomers are really off the wall and are not consistent, either. I often have to rely on her pantomiming to give me an idea of what she actually wants. Yesterday, she wanted her toothbrush, but she kept saying “place.” There’s no way I would have made the connection to her toothbrush if she hadn’t mimed how it’s used.
I don’t know why I watch the local (NYC/NJ) news. Yes I do know why. I can’t stand not knowing what’s going on. Today’s broadcast featured a couple of individuals who operate (make that past tense because they’ve been arrested) a couple of hair braiding salons in New Jersey. They were going back and forth from their home village in Africa and kidnapping pre-teen girls to work in their salons. The girls were forced to put in 14 hour days, seven days a week, and never saw a penny for their efforts. They were kept as slaves and forced to live in squalor.
It seems to me that most crimes are about money. Money for drugs. Money for cars. Accumulating more money. I like money as much as the next guy, but I always figure that I have to work to earn it. And I never seem to be able to accumulate very much. It’s a good thing I’m not high maintenance, since I’m the only one available to do the maintaining.

The above cartoon is for those of you who know the relationship I have with my brother. Heh.

We were eating lunch at the table near the window when my brother pointed to the bear cub, just outside, raiding our bird feeders.

We went over to the breezeway to get a better look, and I also got some video.
Unlike the raccoons, who totally demolished the feeders, dragging them away and leaving them, useless, on the hillside, the bear, having knocked the feeders to the ground, gently pawed and licked them, getting as much of the food as it could but not mangling the feeders in the process.
Even my mother was fascinated by the cub, who was about the same size as the giant white Malamute my brother had years ago. She kept thinking it was a dog; I’m not sure she remembered what a bear is.
“She’s so pretty,” she kept saying.
And, indeed, it was a beautiful bear cub, hungry and preparing for winter. I wondered where its mother was, where it was going to find food here on the mountain, which is getting more and more populated.
We knocked on the window to scare it away after it had eaten all the bird food that was out there. It was still hungry, nosing up at a hanging flower basket, hoping for something more before it sauntered down toward the lake, toward our neighbor’s house, where, I assume it hoped to find a garbage can or two.

No, I’m not referring to earthquakes.
The talisman that I made for r@d@r was delivered to him today. I hung it askew for this photo; r@d@r needs to decide how he wants it hung.

And I put b!X’s in the mail this morning. He really does need to find another job.
And now I need to find more willow branches. I think I saw a willow tree near the side of the road toward Poughkeepsie. I wonder if I’ll get in trouble if I just pull over and cut off some branches.
And if someone sees me and asks why I’m cutting off willow branches, I wonder what they’ll think when I tell them it’s to make magic that shifts the universe.

In case you haven’t noticed, i have a new box in my sidebar that shows the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the U.S.’s invasion. I got it from www.justforeignpolicy.org, a site I got to last last night after one of those marathon linkfests. So, I don’t remember how I got there, but I’m glad I did.

The following post is by MYRLN, a non-blogger who is Kalilily’s guest writer every Monday.
Wanderlost in Languageland
Language is our major means of communication. But sometimes it doesn’t cleanly live up to that function. That’s not language’s fault, though. The fault lies with those who use it…or misuse it. Meaning us. In the hands (and minds and mouths) of its users, language often goes down strange roads — sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately, and sometimes through carelessness. Accident leads to some funny or incomprehensible or just plain dumb results. More sinister is the deliberate manipulation of language for what are ultimately dubious or selfish or manipulative ends. Carelessness often creates undesirable or questionable outcomes.
For example, the overuse of the word “hero” falls into the careless basket. Nowadays, many legal acts only slightly outside the ordinary activity of daily living are labeled “heroic.” A dog barks to scare an intruder, a child calls 911 to save a parent, a person joins the military. All “heroes.” No harm, you say? Well, what about when someone acts in a truly selfless, important way that has deeply meaningful results? Like the first-responders on 9/11, or the G.I. who dies throwing himself on a grenade to save his buddies. They’re heroes, for sure, but overuse of the word has diminished its meaning. The barking dog and the G.I.: both “heroes?” Both acts of equal status? Unh-uh. By labeling both with the same word, we’ve robbed the term of its real heart. And thus the G.I.’s unselfish act of its important meaning.
Language’s accidental basket is much more fun, ‘though sometimes annoying — as when a t.v. talking head after a commercial break says “Welcome back” to us. Huh? We’ve not been anywhere, just sitting in front of the t.v. all along. “Welcome BACK?” Then there’s the truck driving the main road in front of your car. On its tailgate is a sign: “Construction Vehicle. Do Not Follow.” What do you do? Pull off the road ’til it’s gone? Turn and go the other way? And product instructions/descriptions, too, can be baffling. The shampoo bottle says, “Lather, Rinse, Repeat.” Something that open-ended has you washing your hair every second of the rest of your life. Or the juice bottle: “Shake well before using.” Like you’re a dog ridding its coat of water? Or the small/tall kitchen trashbags. What makes for a “tall” kitchen or defines a “small” one? Oh, and there’s the Department of Motor Vehicles conundrum: at a 4-way STOP sign intersection, four cars arrive simultaneously, one
at each sign. Which car proceeds first? The one on your right, says DMV. Okay, great, but…uh…each of the four cars has a car to its right. Now what? Uh-oh…language making for an hilariously incomprehensible situation. Permanent gridlock.
Of real concern, however, is the manipulation of language for questionable or sinister ends…especially by government. “Weapons of mass destruction,” for example, used to evoke fear and/or anger to get a particular action started. “Detainees” — guilty of anything or not. “No terrorist attacks since 9/11 proves administration policy is succeeding.” (Yeah, and spitting once daily in each direction is also responsible.) “Mission accomplished.” Richard Powers, in his 1991 book, THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS, wrote, “Wars come down to the control of information,” (suggesting the “encoding” of language, using it in deceptive ways). That’s a truth we’ve learned the hard way in this Iraq conflict. The current administration has, at every turn, withheld, distorted, and contradicted information by deliberately misusing language. Powers’ point was about keeping an enemy from knowing what you’re really doing. Our problem is a government doing the same to its own people. Assisted, perhaps, by the fact that, as a recent study discovered, only 1 in 4 adults read a book in a year.
Maybe what we need is to deal with language the way a 5-year old child does: by continuously asking, “WHAT?” until clarity is achieved. Maybe then language will be returned to its major function: communication.

Well, it’s not REALLY an empty nest because my grandson has just begun his half-day Kindergarten class, but my daughter has already launched her next career.
She has just set up her online store to sell the products of her very artful eye. My sidebar has had her general website up for a while: 1505 Photovisions, which also links to her store.
Over the past several years, she has developed a talent for capturing moments in nature that most of us usually miss as we hurry along to get done what has to be done. Taking the time to show her young son the marvels of nature gave her a chance to rediscover them herself — and to wait for that perfect moment to capture them digitally.
This happens to be one of my favorites.

So, if you’re in the market for any note cards or gifts with original nature photographs, check out my daughter’s online store.
Meanwhile, I’m ordering this mousepad:

For years, I’ve been trying to track down a novel that I used when I taught 8th grade back in the 70s. I remember the kids really liking it, and I remember the name of the book being “The Child Kings.” I swear that the author was Rebecca West, but that can’t be right.
I’m thinking that maybe it was a short story — but, at any rate, the tale tells of a day when everyone in the world wakes up to discover that the children are the physical size of adults and the adults are as small as children. Their minds remain what they were, but the difference in physical size changes everything.
I’d love to know if anyone else ever heard of this book.
I have this novel on my mind right now because I just answered a question on Facebook posed by one of my blogger friends about what book/s I read more than 10 years ago that I would recommend. As I thought about my answer, I realized that my taste in reading matter is not very sophisticated.
The two books I listed in my answer were The City Not Long After, which is really a young adult novel, but I thoroughly enjoyed “watching” the surreal machinations of young artists as they use their magic to save the city of San Francisco. I still own my 1990 paperback copy of that book.
The other book is If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him. That book was given to me at a very low point in my life and it helped me turn my life around. Maybe it spoke to me because Sheldon Kopp, the author, was a psychotherapist who understood the power of story to stir insight and understanding.
The part of the book I remember most was his comparing people on this planet to those in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Like them, we are all pilgrims, and we survive emotionally by telling our stories to each other.
I guess that’s why a lot of us blog.
P.S. Sheldon Kopp was the one who originated the eschatological laundry list that still surfaces in emails. These are the first few:
1. This is it!
2. There are no hidden meanings.
3. You can’t get there from here, and besides, there’s no place else to go.
4. We are all already dying and we’ll be dead for a long time.
5. Nothing lasts!
6. There is no way of getting all you want.
7. You can’t have anything unless you let go of it.
8. You only get to keep what you give away.
9. There is no particular reason why you lost out on some things.
10. The world is not necessarily just. Being good often does not pay off and there is no compensation for misfortune.
11. You have the responsibility to do your best nonetheless.
12. It is a random universe to which we bring meaning.
13. You don’t really control anything.
14. You can’t make someone love you.

Today I put the artifact that I made for r@d@r in the mail. After he gets it, I will post its photo.
Is it really magical? It is according to my definition of magic.