Somebody’s Trying to Make Me Blog…

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…Thank you very much for the meme, Mr. Carlson.

A- Available or Single?
Single, but if you ask my dad, I’m not available.

B- Best Friend.
Princess FlickerFeather

C- Cake or Pie.
Both.

D- Drink of Choice.
A medium light roast with a shot of vanilla.

E- Essential Item.
Umm.. All my beauty stuff. And my shoes.

F- Favorite Color.
I don’t have one. I mean *just* one.

G- Gummi Bears or Worms.
Gummi candy? Give me chocolate!

H- Hometown.
S. St. Paul

I- Indulgence.
Bet you can’t guess.

J- January or February.
February. Birthday parties and Valentine’s Day! Oh wait, never mind.

K- Kids.
Hmmm…About kids. I generally like them, and I want my own, but I can’t stand other people’s ill-behaved little monsters.

L- Life is incomplete without…
God. And music. And chocolate. And shoes.

M- Marriage Date.
Who’s marriage date? Next question.

N- Number of Siblings?
One crazy sister.

O- Oranges or Apples?
Pineapple.

P- Phobias/Fears.
Clowns. Graven images. And heights freak me out a little bit.

Q- Favorite Quote.
“True beauty lies within- But a little lipstick doesn’t hurt, and you may as well put on some powder, stand up straight, and dazzle ’em while you’re at it.” ~Lillian Berg

R- Reasons to smile.
When I just cooked the best food ever and everybody liked it!!! Go, me!

S- Season.
Spring and Fall.

T- Tag Three.
Tiger Lilly, Princess FlickerFeather, and Strommie.

U- Unknown Fact About Me.
I’ve got a boyfriend….don’t tell my dad (or Kevin!).

V– Vegetarian or Oppressor of Animals.
Oppressor. And I’m not sorry.

W- Worst Habit.
Bad habit? Me?

X– X-rays or Ultrasounds.
What kind of question is that?

Y- Your Favorite Foods.
I love Indian, Italian, Mexican, Chinese…etc..etc…

Z- Zodiac.
You’re asking me my sign? Does that line really work?

Eggs-straordinary!

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O.k, this is weird.

My parakeet is normally very feisty (feisty here meaning: Put fingers into her cage, don’t have fingers anymore.) But these past few weeks she’s been even nastier. Yesterday, I found the reason.

I was sitting on the front steps with my bird, and she was screaming at me, as usual. All of a sudden, she goes down to the bottom of her cage and starts tapping around under the shredded newspaper toy that we put into her cage. She lifted her head back up and dragged away some of the newspaper, as if to say, “Look what I did!” Lo and behold, an egg, sitting there so innocently!

I couldn’t catch my breath for a minute. It was tiny (although it looked too big to have come from her) and round and pinkish-white. I ran inside and grabbed the phone to call my best friend who owns 3 birds that she and her mom raised from eggs.

“Angelina!” I cried. “My bird laid an egg!” I proceeded to tell her what I had seen. (Note: My bird had not mated with any male birds.)

“Yeah, that sometimes happens. If a bird wants an egg badly enough, they can lay one, but it will be empty. She knows it’s empty, that’s why she isn’t sitting on it.”

I was freaking out. It’s so sad, though. It’s like someone called you up and said there had been a miscarriage. MD and I feel sorry for the poor bird, because her bottom is all red and swollen. So the reason that my bird is being even more nasty than usual is because she was guarding her egg (No, Kevin, I don’t want your bird extermination services).

Ciao for now!

Dying easy, II

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A few days ago I put up a post referencing how safe our lives have become and suggesting that we had to go looking to find things to kill us, and usually found them embedded in the things we’ve used to make our lives easier.

Our desire for easy and convenient kills us with useless calories, toxic drink dispensers and mutated nutrients while we celebrate progress and our exceeding cleverness. Why, to do without these fruits would be regressive, even primitive.

Morally we also like things easier, and we don’t like to put the hard work in to examine ourselves and cut the slack out of our lives, thinking that as long as everything “looks good” then we must not be too bad. We certainly don’t want to be bothered with the work of taking a stand in the hopes of changing others (unless we’re one of those who can’t wait to change everyone but themselves), so we watch that video, play that game, revel in those lyrics. Why, to do without our rationalizations, to be willing to say something is actually evil, would be regressive, even primitive.

It’s far easier to act as if the “science” of our morality has all been settled, that evil has been driven from our land along with the wild, man-eating animals, leaving us this convenient, easy life where we assume everyone’s just naturally got it all figured out and evil is merely a quaint concept to be manipulated for power and ratings, or to describe how someone else votes. Or else a venial sin is blown up into a huge paper dragon so that certain warriors can similarly puff themselves up to do battle with it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

And then someone shoots up a school, pours acid on a playground slide or opportunistically twists another person’s name and reputation for personal gain on a national stage and we gape in horror and wonder how anyone could do such a thing even though it happens in one form or another every day. Meanwhile, the TV networks that won’t show a fan running out onto an athletic field because it gives the yahoo the exposure he’s looking for and only encourages others, trip all over each other to broadcast the addled rantings of a self-absorbed maniac.

A friend who is a carpenter recently opined, after touring several million-dollar homes, how disappointing the workmanship was in these beautiful and expensive abodes. Things certainly looked nice, but to a practiced eye the mistakes and cover-ups for the mistakes were jarring. Something might look right, but if it’s not properly squared up it’s eventually going to sag and crumble, no matter how expensive and modern it is.

I can’t imagine the architect is too pleased.

Taxiing at the airport

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Now even a half-dressed Paris Hilton, carrying a bottle of Grey Goose and a chihuahua while eating a ham sandwich will be able to get a cab at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.

In a rare display of Minnesota resolve the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) voted unanimously to take a hard line in imposing stricter sanctions on cab drivers who refuse to accept fares from passengers carrying alcohol. While the policy calls for penalties for any driver refusing a fare unless the would-be passenger is drunk or disorderly, it was enacted in response to some Muslim cabbies refusing, on the basis of their religious beliefs, to transport passengers carrying alcohol. A first offense calls for a 30-day license suspension and a second requires a two-year suspension (the previous penalty was that the driver had to go back to the end of the cab-line, which might be as much as a two-hour wait for another fare).

While this policy was written primarily in response to refusals to transport passengers carrying booze —more than 4800 “refusals of service” in the last five years — there have also been incidences of Muslim cabdrivers refusing passengers with service dogs (service pigs would be right out). I think it’s likely the MAC was also concerned that if it permitted refusals-of-service based on alcohol and dogs that it might next be dealing with religious refusals to transport unescorted women, Jewish passengers and arbitragers dealing in pork-belly futures. Therefore the line was drawn, and it’s a hard one.

It’s not clear to me whether the MAC has the authority to keep a cabbie from plying his trade anywhere other than at the airport. There is also the usual talk about this decision being challenged to the Minnesota Supreme Court on the basis of the MAC, being a government organization, is required to make “reasonable accomodation” for religious beliefs. I’m not a lawyer, but I think they have to take it to court first before a case can go to the Supreme Court. Also, the MAC is a customer, not an employer, of the cabbies; don’t know if that makes a difference.

If it goes to court it might make for an interesting ruling that could affect policies such as other governmental organizations (e.g., cities) being able to set terms for prospective vendors on the paying a “livable” wage or having a certain percentage of minority employees and/or owners in order to receive contracts.

As I’ve written before, I have a certain admiration for people sticking to their religious principles on the job, especially if they are prepared to pay the “market price” for their choices. Ultimately if a cabdriver perceives permitting alcohol inside his cab to be on par with, say, selling booze then it might be time to prayerfully consider another career.

Dying easy

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When I walk outside to get the newspaper in the morning I never think to check first for skulking lions or packs of wolves. I drive to work with my seatbelt fastened and six airbags surrounding me and don’t bother to keep an eye out for bandits. I go to work in a building that’s never had a cave-in or been attacked by a whale and doesn’t even keep a tally board of how many accident-free days in a row have gone by. I come home to a delicious dinner that I didn’t have to risk life and limb in acquiring (and we haven’t bought any hydrogenated foods in years). If one of my children develops a cough I don’t worry that it’s the plague. My government hasn’t threatened to drag me away in the middle of the night for years.

Yep, our lives are pretty easy and danger free these days — or so I thought. I mentioned to my wife the other day that I had a case of bottled water in the trunk of my car if she needed any. She said I should be careful not to let the bottles get too warm because she heard they’ll release a toxic gas into the water. A few weeks ago I was eating with a group of folks and the discussion was about how cooking food in a microwave alters the molecules and destroys its nutritional value. This is supposedly especially true for vegetables, which I generally avoid anyway, but it makes me wonder what would happen if I microwaved a Twinkie. It seems to me as if the only way to go is up in that case, nutrition-wise.

Now when I was growing up I often heard that if you sat too close to that new-fangled color television set it would make you sterile (today they say that about laptops). I sat close to the TV anyway and it doesn’t seem to have had any effect. Of course, as a kid, I also drank out of the garden hose all the time — something else they now say you’re not supposed to do. The TV didn’t stop me from having children, and the laptop came along too late to impact our family planning (bringing one home all the time, however, does seem to have an affect on my sex life).

It’s hard to tell just what to take seriously anymore. I suppose anything that makes our life easier has just naturally got to have some insidious, toxic trade off (if only Eve had paid attention to the warning label on that apple!). I did some on-line research on the always reliable internet and there might be something to the microwaving thing (here, here and here, — oh, and don’t use one of these to dry your pet after a bath) and to the toxic water bottles, though there appears to be more concern about reusing bottles than the amount of PET that might leach into your premium H20. Still, it’s got to be safer than drinking tap water, right? Maybe not, unless of course you’re trying to avoid the harmful effects of fluoridation.
It’s enough to make you want to get your water direct from a clear mountain stream, as long as you don’t think to much about what all those fish and ducks have been doing in it.

I don’t know, I suppose the next thing they’re going to tell us is that watching television makes you fat.

This just in …

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There was so much in the news this week to comment on and so little time to do it. Let me see if I can sum up:

People were shocked when a Shock Jock called Anna Nicole Smith “an empty-headed ‘ho’,” but not as shocked as they were when Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson couldn’t find a microphone or a camera in order to apologize for maligning the Duke lacrosse players, who were conclusively proven to not have been the fathers of little Danielynn.

So, did anything important happen in the world that I might have missed?

Challenging Word of the WeeK: laconism

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I haven’t done one of these words of the week for awhile, but the popularity of the movie 300 reminded me that I never included one of my favorite entries from the book 1000 Most Challenging Words:




Laconism

(LAK uh niz um) noun



Or laconicism (luh KON uh siz um) We are more familiar with the adjective laconic (luh KON ik) than the noun laconism, a concise style of language, brevity; also applied to a short, pithy statement. Laconia was long ago a country in the southern Greece, with Sparta as its capital. The Spartans were concise, brusque, and pithy in their speech, hence laconic, under which entry in this author’s 1000 Most Important Words we read: “Philip of Macedonia wrote to the Spartan officials: ‘If I enter Laconia, I will level Sparta to the ground.’ Their answer: ‘If.’ Caesar’s famous ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ (‘I came, I saw, I conquered’) is a famous example of laconic speech — not a word wasted.” When General Sir Charles Napier (1782-1855) finally completed the conquest of Sind, a province of India, the story goes, he cabled the War Office one word: “Peccavi” (Latin for “I have sinned”). Quite a laconism, and quite a paronomasia in the bargain, even though the cable is generally believed to be apocryphal. And finally, the message radioed by an American pilot in World War II: “Sighted sub, sank same,” an alliterative laconism.



My example: Don Imus might wish he had spent more time working on his laconisms.





From the book, “1000 Most Challenging Words” by Norman W. Schur, ©1987 by the Ballantine Reference Library, Random House. I post a “Challenging Words” definition to call more attention to this delightful book and to promote interesting word usage in the blogosphere. I challenge other bloggers to work the current word into a post sometime in the coming week. If you manage to do so, please leave a comment or a link to where I can find it. Previous words in this series can be found under the appropriate Category heading in the right-hand sidebar.

Weekend weather report

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Global warming, my frosted hind foot!

It’s not so unusual to have cold weather or even snow in April for a day or two, but we usually don’t end up monitoring the windchill. The roaring winds on Friday and Saturday would slap you down and drive an icicle through your heart, not to mention the Reverend Mother’s peonies and aliums.

Ok, despite the headline and how this post starts, I’m not going to go on about what the weather was like here the past few days. If you live here you know, and if you don’t, you don’t care. But I did notice some oh, inconvenient, truths while huddling in the basement near the warm TV.

Saturday night Rev. Mom and I settled in to watch one of my favorite movies, Local Hero, which I had received as a birthday present. The movie was filmed in the 80s, and at one point a couple of scientist characters are talking about how they proved they can prevent the coming ice age by rerouting the North Atlantic Drift . Yes, 25 years ago if anyone was talking climate change it was in terms of global cooling.

After my wife retired I switched from the DVD player to highlights from the Masters. The announcers were huddled together in the Georgia night wearing stocking caps and parkas, their breath puffing in great white clouds as they talked about how the unnatural cold and high winds were making the tournament a disaster for the players and causing high scores.

Sunday I watched the Masters live as it played out in balmy temperatures that climbed as high as 50 degrees. In the short commercial breaks I flipped over to the Twins game. This was only the second game in what had been meant to be a three-game series because Friday’s game had been called, not on account of rain or even snow, but simply, “cold”. I saw Joe Mauer standing at the plate in the bright spring sunshine, great clouds of his breath obscuring his famous sideburns.

You know, if this keeps up we might want to go back and look at those theories on how to reroute the North Atlantic Drift.