Year: 2011

Where they say they can’t look at my broken tooth because I’m scheduled for a cleaning. Really? What the $@:(@ is wrong with this damned country?

Wordgathering

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Tim Tebow: Higgs Boson’s Quarterback

News Flash: Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva have discovered a data "spike" at the mass of 125 Gigaelectronvolts, a phenomenon which profoundly resembles the bone density of NFL player Tim Tebow. “It’s too early to say we’ve found the Tebow particle,” said team leader Magnus Kraper, who added: “we think we will find it late in the fourth quarter.”

 

 

Poor Michelle Bachman, who doesn’t understand what she’s up against.  

Quotes from Newt Nixon:

If an individual wants to be a leader and isn't controversial, that means he never stood for anything. 

I want to say this to the television audience. I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service. I have earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I can say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got.

I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around a campfire but are lousy in politics. 

Politics and war are remarkably similar situations.

 

Brianne Murphy, a lawyer in Syracuse, is a Democratic candidate for the 25th Congressional District seat. She writes about how Newt Gingrich's recent comments about poor children are inaccurate and offensive in the Readers' Page of today's Syracuse Post-Standard.

Education, not manual labor, is the only way to break the cycle of poverty. Investing in education, offering students assistance and supporting programs like Say Yes to Education will create a more educated work force and level the playing field, just a little bit, for poor kids like me that want to do better than their parents. As a child of limited means, I was able to work my way through George Washington University and Brooklyn Law School, with the help of federal programs and hard work. As a server at Morton’s Steakhouse in Georgetown, every day was a choice between working and studying, and my need to pay rent often outweighed the importance of grades. Many nights I waited on my more affluent classmates. During college, I spent a year living on a friend’s couch and I graduated in three and a half years to save money. It was not easy, but it was worth it.

So to Gingrich, I would say: Poor kids work harder; their very survival often depends on it. Our children are not simply a source of cheap labor and method of cost-cutting for corporations; they are the future of this country. Instead of a broom, give them a book.

 

You can read her full comments here:

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2011/12/opinion_today_give_poor_studen.html

https://www.cpj.org/imprisoned/2011.php

No two things look alike. Memories of childhood are pure melancholy. Analogy is all we know for sure. That man's crutches are my grandparents. Shadows sway on the bookshelf. The third book on the left is like a house where Strindberg once lived and where he believed in ghosts. I once met a very old man in a working class bar in Helsinki who told me how he and his cousin used to knock on Strindberg's door and run away. 

This morning I am thinking of the Estonian poet Jan Kaplinski, Zen Buddhist and linguist. Now winter frost comes to the trees and early, too dark for neighbors, I bent to the frozen grass and found a maple leaf in ice–so perfect it was a child’s wish. And the moon, just past full, was imperial above black windows. My heart was loud under my shirt as I stood on the lawn. Soon the essence of things will be more visible. The leaves are gone now.