Feel Like Dancin’
Thanks for all your good thoughts as I – well, I didn’t prepare our taxes, I prepared the worksheet for our taxes. I used to do taxes, but taxes have gotten so complicated, now we have to pay someone else a bucket of money to do them for us. In the meantime, it takes a whole day just to fill out the sheets of preparation. It takes a year of saving receipts and records.
I discovered that in an increasingly paperless world, it is not so easy to document as it used to be. I used to dread filing, but I also knew where things were. A lot of my day yesterday was spent looking up accounts online, and printing off things. When we went more paperless, we also sacrificed easy access to good record keeping. AArrgh!
I remember my Dad always did the family taxes, and he would do them late in January, as soon as all the financial statements had arrived. We would give him hints about better ways of shielding his money from taxation, and he would say “I don’t mind paying taxes. I worked for the government, and the government put you kids through university by paying me a generous salary and health benefits and retirement.” We would shake our heads in wonderment – have you ever met someone who didn’t mind paying taxes? It must be generational.
We had a complicated year, financially, and in gathering all the records I noticed in my zeal to keep everything paid off and up to date, I actually OVERPAID our taxes. . . how often does that happen? AdventureMan and I have something to celebrate!
Those penguins are from a website called CafePress and they sell all kinds of adorable things, unique.
(At nine in the morning, it is still only 73°F / 23°C – wooo hoooooo! Gonna be a great Thursday!
The Annunciation
Do you have a million ways to avoid doing what you know you really need to do? (Like taxes?)
The Forward Day by Day reading for today had to do with Mary saying “yes” to God.
For my American readers – I bet most of you don’t know that there is an entire chapter in the Qura’n devoted to Mary, and that Muslims also believe Mary conceived as a virgin. I bet you!
Because I have more serious things to do, I spent some time looking for artistic works that showed what I think the Annunciation would have looked like. (To my Muslim readers, The Annunciation is the formal name for when the angel Gabriel – Jabreel – visits Mary and tells her she has been chosen to bear Jesus/Issa and Mary has a choice – and Mary says “Yes!”) (To my American readers – Yep, Gabriel is also in the Qura’n, and also John the Baptist appears as Yahyah.)
Before I go any further, the point of today’s reading is that we are supposed to say “yes” to God/Allah when he gives us a mission to do.
But I got distracted, looking for what I thought the Annunciation would look like. If you are curious, just Google “Annunciation + Art” and you can wile away your life on a huge array of artworks.
I selected a few to share with you that caught my eye.
The first one – this is just truly awful! Look at their sour expressions! The Angel Gabriel looks like he thinks God made a big mistake choosing this wench, and the Virgin looks like she thinks Gabriel is a con man or something. Look at the body language! Look at Gabriel’s hands, it is almost like he is shaking his finger at Mary. Look at Mary, see how she is pulling her robe tighter and looking like “Get this lunatic away from me!” See what you think of this painting by Martini:
To me, this one comes the closest in what I think Mary would have looked like – a 14 year old Palestinian girl. Even her clothing looks right to me. And look at her hands – her hands say “it is too awesome for me to understand, and I accept. It is a Coptic icon:
I love the feeling of this one, and that the artist captures the simplicity of “Mary” caught in her normal daily routines, surrounded by her household items and the awe and astonishment of the moment:
And here is my very favorite by Caravaggio. I love the protective posture of the angel, and the complete submission in Mary’s posture, I love the presence of God in the light shining on them both, and I love the way Caravaggio captures the feeling of enormous awe – it doesn’t take gilt and sumptuousness, the glorious essence of this moment was simple – Mary said “yes.”:
I know this feeling!
see more crazy cat pics
Big Plans, No Action
Hmmm, let’s see . . . plans drawn up, billions allocated for renovation and restoration and blah blah blah and nothing happens. Good ol’ Kuwait? Nope! The tragic quagmire of post-Katrina New Orleans. You can read the entire article at The New York Times.
By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: April 1, 2008
NEW ORLEANS — In March 2007, city officials finally unveiled their plan to redevelop New Orleans and begin to move out of the post-Hurricane Katrina morass. It was billed as the plan to end all plans, with Paris-like streetscape renderings and promises of parks, playgrounds and “cranes on the skyline” within months.
But a year after a celebratory City Hall kickoff, there have been no cranes and no Parisian boulevards. A modest paved walking path behind a derelict old market building is held up as a marquee accomplishment of the yet-to-be-realized plan.
There has been nothing to signal a transformation in the sea of blight and abandonment that still defines much of the city. Weary and bewildered residents, forced to bring back the hard-hit city on their own, have searched the plan’s 17 “target recovery zones” for any sign that the city’s promises should not be consigned to the municipal filing cabinet, along with their predecessors. On their one-year anniversary, the designated “zones” have hardly budged.
“To my knowledge, I don’t think they’ve done anything to any of them,” said Cynthia Nolan, standing near a still-padlocked, derelict library in the once-flooded Broadmoor section, which is in the plan.
“I haven’t seen anything they’ve done to even initiate anything,” said Ms. Nolan, a manager in a state motor vehicles office who has painstakingly raised her house here nearly four feet. “It’s too long. A year later, and they still haven’t initiated anything they decided to do?”
The library still bears the cross-hatch markings made by emergency teams in the days immediately after Hurricane Katrina, to indicate whether any bodies were inside (there were none).
The city official in charge of the recovery effort, Edward J. Blakely, said the public’s frustration was understandable, but he suggested that bureaucratic hurdles had made moving faster impossible. Mr. Blakely said crucial federal money had only recently become available, the process of designing reconstruction projects within the 17 zones was time-consuming, and ethics constraints on free spending were acute, given a local history of corruption.
Go For the Bloat
It is breathtaking in its audacity. In a report from CondeNastPortfolio.com we learn of a reverse approach by Carl Jrs. / Hardee’s – going full out towards mega-caloric burgers.
This post is dedicated to Mark, at 2:48 the b-side who is on a quest in Kuwait for the ultimate burger. I am afraid he is going to – literally – eat his heart out.
It was a patriotic statement that went a bit too far afield: an attempt to create the “ultimate picnic burger.” Called the Fourth of July Burger, it was tested last summer at seven locations by the West Coast fast-food chain Carl’s Jr. and consisted of a huge beef patty topped with pickles, ketchup, mustard, potato chips, and a hot dog. Stacked high and loaded with fat and calories, it was the food equivalent of the national anthem played through a sousaphone, a perfect distillation of a peculiarly American form of balls-out, postmodern gluttony that, at least outwardly, we’re all supposed to be ashamed of right now.
Yet for all its pomp and glory, it didn’t quite work. When John Koncki, director of product development for Carl’s Jr., talks about it now, he comes across a little wistful. It tasted really good, he says, but the name and the concept proved too much for the testers. “Sometimes,” the earnest Koncki says, “some of the sandwiches are so unique that consumers can’t wrap their heads around them.”
The uniqueness isn’t the only thing that’s hard to get your head around. During the past few years, CKE Restaurants, the parent company of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, has employed an audacious go-for-bloat approach that defies just about everything you’ve come to assume about the business of modern fast food. (See nutrition data for CKE franchises and other fast-food chains.) In an age when other chains have been forced to at least pretend that they care about the health of their customers and have started offering packets of apples and things sprinkled with walnuts and yogurt, Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. are purposely running in the opposite direction, unapologetically creating an arsenal of higher-priced, high-fat, high-calorie monstrosities—pioneering avant-garde concepts such as “meat as a condiment” and “fast-food porn”—and putting the message out to increasingly receptive consumers with ads that are often as controversial as the burgers themselves.
You can read the rest of this article, and similar articles, by clicking HERE.
Sunrise and the Qatteri Cat
The Qatteri Cat started getting restless around 4 a.m. this morning. This was entirely my fault; I forgot the check the cat food before I went to bed and around 4 he likes to have his main meal of the day, take care of toileting needs, scramble around the house, listen to all the noises on the street – it’s his time of day. I knew QC was hungry, but I couldn’t make myself wake up enough to feed him.
He is a very polite cat – he just keeps coming back. By 5:30 a.m. and his 5th or 6th greeting, I was ready to get up. And I really am glad I did, as the sun is rising these days around 5:44 and I was able to capture the beginning of what I believe is going to be a truly glorious day.
The high today will only be 93°F / 34°C; it is a balmy 70°F / 21° C at 5:56 in the morning.
The only meeting I had scheduled for today was postponed, and I have the entire day to devote to organizing my taxes. I don’t know why I make such a big deal out of it, put it off, all it takes is focus and just getting organized, but for some reason I dread doing it make it worse than it really is. I even have a reward for myself when I get it done, so what’s my problem?
Have a great day out there.
Scientists Want Your MacBook for Earthquake Detection
I love this story. I’m almost afraid to print it today; you will think it is an April Fools’ Joke, but it is not.
My Dad, God rest his soul, was an amateur radio operator, with connections all over the globe. Amateur radio operators, monitoring the radiowaves, provided help and rescue to many a tragedy bound situation. I love the idea of Macs uniting in the same way, interconnecting, to help monitor and prevent earthquakes. You can read the entire article at WIRED.com
Everybody knows you can’t predict an earthquake. The only way would be to get inside a time machine, go into the future, and send back a message.
So seismologist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California at Riverside will use thousands of computers to do just that.
Well, it’s not exactly a time machine. Cochran and Stanford seismologist Jesse Lawrence have made use of the sensors built into many new laptops that sense when the computer is being dropped, and turned them into earthquake monitors. They hope to sign up thousands of users to act like a grid of detectors that can sense an earthquake before it does too much damage.
Like many earthquake early warning systems around the world, when a quake strikes, this system will send a warning to people living in large cities. Because electronic communication systems (in this case, the internet) are much faster than seismic waves, the warning should arrive before the shaking, giving people 10 or 20 seconds to take shelter.
“We can measure the seismic waves and then get a warning out to people before the seismic waves get to them. That to me is physically possible,” Cochran says.
Cochran’s system makes use of the accelerometers — tiny motion sensors — built into many modern notebooks, including Apple’s MacBook and Lenovo’s ThinkPad, as well as the iPhone and Nintendo’s Wii. Accelerometers detect movement and translate it into digital signals. In notebooks, they function as safety devices: When the accelerometer detects that the notebook is in free fall, the computer moves the hard drive head to a safe position in order to minimize the risk of damage when it hits the ground. But the accelerometers are also accessible to software, so they can be used for games or other applications.
As it turns out, one field that already makes extensive use of accelerometers is seismology. Usually these sensors are buried underground, generating much of the data seismologists use to model earthquakes. So in 2006 when Cochran saw a program called SeisMac, a light went on. SeisMac uses the accelerometers in Mac computers to let people shake their computers and watch the motion translated on screen into a graph. Cochran wondered if the same technology could be used in earthquake sensing, and suggested the idea to colleagues at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, where she was working at the time.
“I sort of said, ‘Hey, what do guys think if we take this accelerometer and make a seismic network out of it?’ And of course Jesse was like, ‘That’s the coolest idea I have ever heard.'”
Thus was born Quake Catcher Network. The two scientists — joined by Carl Christensen, a programmer with experience in distributed computing — started in September 2007.
Distributed computing was made famous by extraterrestrial-scanning network SETI@home, and Cochran uses the same platform, called BOINC, to collect data from the laptops in her project’s network.
Kuwait Green
There is a miracle in Kuwait. Suddenly, there are trees a bright, Easter-basket-grass green.
“What kind of miracle is that?” you might ask, you who live in other climates.
That bright spring-green is a miracle in a land where the true blue of the blue sky is often screened with haze, where the dominant color is a white beige sand, and, most important of all, where there has not been a truly significant rain the entire rainy season here.
The color is painfully beautiful, the eye seeks it out and feasts on its vibrancy in an otherwise dull landscape. The tree that is showing the vibrant green is a little willowy, graceful. The green is probably only for a day or two before it fades into a duller green – still welcome because it IS green.
The second tree is my favorite tree in Kuwait, but I don’t have a single Kuwaiti friend who can tell me what it is. They tell me it is a very old tree, a tree that can live a long time on very little water, a tree often used to screen houses and provide both shade and privacy. I love the laciness on its leaves, the delicacy of its foliage. In contrast to the spring-green tree, the foliage is a more grey-blue-green, and it is a much taller tree. There is a delicacy about this tree, an elegant restraint and a timelessness that fascinates me. If I were Kuwaiti, if I had my own compound, I would grow this tree, I would grow many of them and watch their lacy branches sway in the slightest breeze.
Can someone tell me the names for these trees?
(PS I had to look up it – it’s + Possessive to be sure I got it right, above. I didn’t get it right at first, but it is right now. If you have any confusion, don’t be alarmed – it confuses all of us. If you click on the blue type, there is a very simple way to remember when to use it and when to use it’s.)
Bullying and 19 Minutes; Jodi Picoult
When my blogging friend Chirp makes a recommendation, I have learned to order the book and read it. She reads books that make you think! The latest book is Jodi Picoult’s 19 Minutes, a book about a kid who is sensitive and kind and funny, and plays by the rules – he is good at sharing, and listening and all the things we try to teach our children to be good at.
He gets bullied. From the time he starts school, he is bullied physically and mentally and emotionally. He does the right thing – he reports it. The schools do nothing, or so little that it only makes things worse for him. Pushed too far, one day snaps, he goes ballistic. He walks into the school and shoots 19 of his classmates.
One problem is access to weapons. Literally, physically teenagers have not yet developed the judgement areas of the brain. I am guessing in males it takes even longer, and I only guess that because of all the traffic fatalities and physical damage adolescent boys inflict upon themselves – and their victims. Maybe it is that fatal combination of poor judgement and testosterone that pushes them too far. Access to weapons – guns, knives, fast cars – makes them even more lethal.
Before I wrote this review, however, I had to do a lot of thinking. This book is about bullying, and even as adults we come across bullies. Our household helpers are terrified of the police – those who are here to protect us. The police use their position to try to bully phone numbers out of pretty Kuwaiti girls, and to exact sexual favors from the Asian domestics. Not all police are bullies, but if a person has that tendency, the position allows him/her to use that power wrongly.
And bullying doesn’t stop with graduation from high school. We are seeing the same kinds of behavior at universities – Virginia Tech – and in the workplace – “going postal” and GMAC just to name two. People who are bullied sometimes turn, they go out in a blaze of glory.
I’ve been bullied. People who are raised to have good manners are often victims of those who are willing to overstep the boundaries. We make excuses for them – we say they are oblivious. I am beginning to think that many a bully is NOT oblivious, but has learned to push to get his or her own way.
With men, the bullying is more physical, and it’s all about jockying for position – number one in the pecking order, the next promotion, the boss’s golf partner, etc. If you think women are gossips – you oughta hear the men! When I hear men “bantering” it’s all about who’s got the “biggest.” Or maybe, the devil whispers in my ear, it’s about who can make you THINK his is the biggest.
With women, in my experience, most of the bullies are physically bigger. They are women who – literally – throw their weight around. They are women who will interrupt anyone and override their suggestion with a loud voice. They are women who have temper tantrums, and hurt feelings, who go from person to person forming alliances that dissolve with the next disagreement. That’s the sad truth – a bully wants his or her own way – all the time. Once you go against them, you have to watch your back.
Picoult has done her homework. Bullies are often likeable enough people! A bully carries his/own burden, however – and that is a desperate need for popularity. You can see this in animal behavior; once a creature has achieved dominance, it takes enormous energy to maintain that position, so much energy that the rest of your life shrinks as your focus must be on maintaining dominance.
The UK, Canada, and the US all have websites about bullying, trying to put a stop to it in the schools. What do they define as bullying?
People calling you names
Making things up to get you into trouble
Hitting, pinching, biting, pushing and shoving
Taking things away from you
Damaging your belongings
Stealing your money
Taking your friends away from you
Posting insulting messages on the internet or by IM (cyberbullying)
Spreading rumours
Threats and intimidation
Making silent or abusive phone calls
Sending you offensive phone texts
Bullies can also frighten you so that you don’t want to go to school, so that you pretend to be ill to avoid them
What can people with manners do against a bully?
In general, the first thing to do is tell an adult – it doesn’t have to be your parents. Additonal suggestions suggest creating your own support network – create a wide network of friends. Join interest groups, in our out of school.
When our son was bullied in school, he worked hard and earned a black belt in karate, and then went on to earn further degrees, and to teach karate – while still in high school. Just knowing that he had a lethal skill made him walk differently, made the bullies afraid to target him. He went to a magnet school, where there was a high degree of chaos, and he sought out and made friends with the biggest people he could find. He used his head. He made it through. Of all his accomplishments, one of the things that made us most proud of him was his ability to stick it out and to prevail.
I worked in a high school. My office was a safe haven for many kids, kids who found high school dynamics pure hell. Most of them were emotionally years ahead of the crowds roaming the hallways, the cruel kids, for whom high school will probably be the highlight of their lives.
“You’re going to love being an adult,” I would tell them. “Hang in there. For them, this may be as good as it gets, but your life is going to get better and better.”
Geeks don’t always get a lot of respect. The two guys that graduated high school at the bottom of the class with my son already had a flourishing computer networking business going. If you haven’t noticed, most of the people who are making it big financially are people who have learned how to use their heads.
I have learned something else. You can beat a bully at his or her own game. Bullies usually rely on instilling fear in others, but rarely do they do their homework.
Choose your battles. Bullying hurts everyone. If you see someone being bullied and you can do something about it then and there, stand up for the person being bullied. All you have to do is say “that’s not funny, just stop.” Many times bullies are so shocked at being challenged, they will stop! If your judgement tells you it would be unsafe to say anything, quickly tell an adult, a supervisor, a manager, what you have seen.
If a bully is trying to push through something you believe is wrong, you can quietly discuss things one on one with others, and make a plan. You can call for a vote! You can quietly stand up to a bully. You can tell a bully “it’s my turn to talk” and they have to shut up! (When you do this, you have to be very careful to listen when the bully is speaking so that everyone knows it really IS your turn to talk.) You can use a little gentle humor – bullies usually only like humor when it is aimed at someone else. They haven’t a clue what to do when it is aimed at them!
If it is annoying, but not something worth fighting over, let the bully get his or her own way. They usually end up shooting themselves in the foot, self-destructing. The adult bully ends up driving people away, and then wondering why he/she has no friends?
Living your own life well is your best revenge!
Thank you, Chirp, for another book that really made me think!
April Fool’s Sunrise
No, there is no trick. It is only an April Fool’s sunrise because of the date – April 1st – and because it was never clear whether the sun would really appear or not, with the thick clouds. I’ll take clouds over that haze of pollution any day. Or it may be that the clouds are obscuring the haze of pollution, which seems to be a daily occurence, so I won’t rule it out. I can’t SEE it, however, so I have no evidence of it being there, and I will be a great big April fool and tell myself if I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.
At 0700 the temperature is 75°F / 24°C and there are thick fluffy clouds that – I wish – look like they could turn into rain clouds.
Recent Comments
intlxpatr on Yellowstone: Old Faithful to C… Michelle on Yellowstone: Old Faithful to C… Cathy on No Grown-Ups in Charge intlxpatr on Waiting for Snow intlxpatr on Waiting for Snow Wikipedia Donate Button
Amazina
Early Voting in Florida
Here There and Everywhere 
