Day: March 26, 2005

Now I am not trying to say that a white Florida woman has more value than a black Texan baby. I’ll let YOU be the judge of that. But just think, if a judge in Texas says to the hospital, you’re right, this kid should die, what is a human life worth anywhere in the US? And don’t forget, George W. Bush put his own goddamned pen to the execution orders for over 150 men and women during his stint as Governor of Texas, including, in at least one case, a man who was given demonstrably incompetent legal help (the lawyer slept through portions of the trial.)

(2019 says look up Terry Schiavo on Wikipedia, ’cause the article I’m referencing below is gone….)

Interesting, eh? The very spareness of the description of events, most of which point to a complete hijacking of the justice system, is heart wrenching. Of particular interest are the opening ten or so paragraphs, which lay the foundation for what follows. What happened to Mrs. Schiavo was a family tragedy. Now her parents are accusing Mr. Schiavo of murdering her! But if you look at the timeline, they tried to bring her home for three weeks early in her ‘convalescence’ and couldn’t do it, so they have guilt as well as all of the other issues to deal with…. Okay, folks, time for an exercise in comparative ethics. Warning, the little baby in the picture from the article below is grossly deformed…. and didn’t have 600 K US$ in a trust account at the time of his death.

(This story is gone too)

I light a candle for the Schiavos and the Schindlers, and I light a candle for Wanda Hudson.

I also light a candle for Peter T, who, when I said I was keeping a candle lit in my heart for him, said in his trademark puckish way, and in his wonderful South African accent, “But you’ll be putting it out before bedtime?” Bless all those who keep a sense of perspective and where feasible, a sense of humour.

2019 says he’s the guy I got Miss Margot from.

Poem – the Asanas
2005-03-26— Posted by: allegra

I have a friend who has spent a very long team healing herself from a traumatic childhood and a troubled adolescence. Part of her healing process has been yoga. Asana means pose or posture.

 

Asana one

white spikes of bone
stick out of the lawn
arrange yourself
so that you can sit among them
breathe
and be at peace

Asana two

bones are like that
alive, dead
they bruise and splinter
scatter marrow
fertilize the slow and frantic

arrange yourself
so that you take them
as your deepest camouflage

Asana three

throughout the canon
there is nothing like this
you must find this posture out
and teach it

you will not return harm for harm
the lifestream says
can you hear your higher self calling

in the posture, as in a trance
you hear yourself
-my machine took the message-
spirit shook awake and said
it doesn't matter,
and in the stretching muscles
you encompass and reveal
the world, a boy who had no bris
a girl who had no canopy
a woman who had no mother

pause and breathe

Asana four

forego motion, load yourself with oxygen
and energy
awareness beckons from behind the tv
and the rushing to work
the sirens, all the punctuation
for the living word of you

teaching with an open mind you learn
how limits dissolve and reform
like traumatized bone
fast damage and slow healing

geologic healing, sometimes

every cell knows where to be
it doesn't have to think
envy the body all its power
it never has to think
you call
and mostly it responds
arrange your bones
so that the body's will
is that of your quiet mind

Asana five

upward the inward
alchemical, the spirit
can transmute the split and spoiled

the burnt bone of our ancestors
the little-bits of flint

we knap ourselves
in the lap of life
we see the tool inside the rock
now remnant by the fire of memory
this posture is for making tools
so that we may build the land we love

Asana six

lost

on a page
lost in thought
indeed there are places I can name
that I don't want to visit any more
but they live inside of me
as if I never left them

some wounds never heal, there is no cure
for the death of love, no pretty closure
but to set the maggots on the wound
and hope they know when to stop

behind my eyes
in the hands that long
to hold yours once again
in my chest
in my shoulders
pain comes through
in bouts of helpless weeping

lost in self pity
wanting to damage the brain
that injures me so
yet seeing the flowers from the window
hearing someone giggle

I come to

it is time to sit again

walking octopods
2005-03-26— Posted by: allegra

http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/9999/walking.mpeg

yup,

http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/9999/rolling.mpeg

The little beggars are going for a stroll. The first walking Octopod is from Australian waters, the second from Indonesia. The great thing about this, of course, is that it used to be that in order to walk you either had to have an exoskeleton (“You cockroach!”) or a spine. Now that we KNOW that God made spineless creatures who can walk….metaphors will never be the same again.

Okay, if you have good taste, don’t go here. Especially don’t look at the Elvis. The accompanying descriptions are in some cases way better than the pix, but when they say, “the intertnet is forever” these are the kinds of pix they were thinking of……http://cameltoe.bolt.com/mens.html

Hm. Just noticed that it’s 4:20 am. I actually got enough sleep… went to bed early, for me, and napped half of yesterday.

What else is going on. Well, I TRIED to buy a bass, but Paul announced that we don’t have the money, so Katie and I will have to fire up the webcam and make a little extra money.

That actually is a joke, okay, so don’t sic the child abuse people on me. I’m going to sigh heavily now.

I get really cheesed off at the Canadian political common taters who say OOOOO we should have given refugee status to those deserter Yanks. Because they are fighting in an illegal war, doncha know. I just don’t get it. I mean, can’t they go back to the land of the free and experience the joy of armed maniacs threatening their wives and children while they are in jail while the cops look the other way? The conscientious objectors will be perfectly safe and under constant scrutiny while they are serving in some high class military pokey for like a hundred years. And when they get out, if industrial civilization hasn’t collapsed in the meantime, they can get a really good book and movie of the week deal. In fact, if their wives are not negotiating something like that right now, they are dumber than I am, and that’s going some. This crap about an illegal war is just that, crap. Canadian Immigration is used to hearing about gang rapes and getting your business firebombed and having your Gestetner tossed under a halftrack. The humanity! If we can ignore all the people who actually ARE getting harassed half to death in furrin lands, why should we get all cry baby about an Amurrican who’s made an unhappy career move? Man, I wish I’d gone into firearms earlier, but strictly as a personal development thing. It isn’t something I’d join the army to learn about.

Played Munchkin – just noticed that it DID have an extender pack – twice last night. Keith won and Paul won, but the second game I had a hand to dream of and was at level 9 when Paul made level 10 and won. He even picked up the Divine Intervention thang. We are still playing cooperatively rather than competitively, but I imagine that will be over the instant we play with either Brooke of the CBL or Rob of Nine.

I have never seen quite the gathering at the golf course for beers after work on Thursday, which was Friday, because of Good Friday, before. I was the only female (I manfully carried on anyway…) at least until Liz, Rob of Nine’s fiancee, showed up and that actually cheesed me off as I wouldn’t have minded speaking to her but I promptly had to leave because Paul had to go to work early and I had to go and pick up chocolate for Katie and I kinda wish I hadn’t because I had an entire pack of Winegums to myself because I mean, if you’re buying chocolate for SOMEBODY ELSE and you can’t eat it because it will trigger a migraine, you have to buy something as a consolation prize. Damned long sentence, that, and not very intelligible…. anyway, there were a couple of people there pounding ales who virtually never attend, although it’s not like I go every time Jim E. calls beer. Can you believe it? George’s going away party was at an Undisclosed Location? When I hear stuff like that I think Drunken Orgy… and camera lenses cracking all over the lower mainland. An unnamed person did a SPOT ON imitation of another unnamed person, and I laughed so hard I nearly spit beer all over my end of the table. Good thing all the men I work with have such wonderful reflexes. My refluxes, on the other hand….

Riverbend posted again, thank heavens. She’s marking the second anniversary of “Shock and Awe”. It’s the first time I remember her mentioning her dad, she’s always just talking about her mother.

Paul Wolfowitz may not get the World Bank job…. not because he’s an incompetent chickenhawk, as some other common taters say … but because, as reported in the Daily Mail, he can’t keep it in his pants. This is really scary. Have you seen a picture of Paul Wolfowitz? Or a pic of the woman who has royally p*ssed off all of her neighbours, because when Paul shows up at her place his security detail is there all night? Yeah, I know I’d sleep better knowing that armed dudes with Get out of Jail Free cards are playing pinochle in the car outside my pied a terre, and that Paul Wolfowitz is actually having sex within 100 meters of me. Brrrrr ….. and don’t tell me ugly guys need lovin’ too, I’ve DONE my share. Actually, I just found a website with pics of all three of them side by side. It’s some weird thing that says Paul Wolfowitz is a tool of the Other Side…. according to Tom Clancy? I’m rubbing my eyes but the words are still there.

I remember a buddy of mine, many many years ago, saying to me that the difference between Republican scandals and Democratic scandals (and this was BEFORE Bill Clinton, okay?) is that Democratic scandals involve bodily fluids, and Republican scandals involve large portions of the Federal deficit. So what I’m coming around to here is that maybe somebody has figured out that money is great, but bodily fluids are more fun especially if you can mix the two together. I quote from the Daily Mail “However, Wolfowitz’s only comment on the complaints has been a terse statement issued through a Pentagon spokesman. He said: “If a personal relationship presents a potential conflict of interest, I will comply with bank policies to resolve the issue.”” I find what his wife … and there’s a certain amount of confusion about his marital status, unusual in such a devout Republican … said about the situation amusing. Anybody who wants to read the rest of it can go to http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html? in_article_id=342048&in_page_id=1770. You’ll have to take out the space in the middle. Found the Daily Mail link on Rawstory.com, which still isn’t as much fun to read as Drudgereport.com. Although they claim to be competition. I think the folks who dream up the headlines at drudgereport.com must all be people who did their BComm speciality in Bait and Switch techniques; those people are appalling.

Not that I’m expecting DJD to read this, but if you are, here’s an item you might have missed; Camille Paglia INCLUDED A PAUL BLACKBURN POEM in her new book about poetry. Of course, it’s “The Once Over” instead of something better, but what can you do. For those of you who have no clue, Paul Blackburn was the premier American poet of his generation, I wrote a long poem called “In Colours Unsuspected” for him, I have a couple of pictures of him over my desk, and if I could raise three people from the dead so I could talk to them for an hour, one would be Emma Goldman, one would be Dorothy Dunnett and the last would be Paul Blackburn. My mother, of course, would be raising dead relatives so she could talk to them about the finer points of genealogy, but I am crasser by far than that….Okay, I’ve been doing this for an hour, I can stop now. I can stop anytime I want.