Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country on March 16, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged Dana Priest, Top Secret America on March 15, 2012| Leave a Comment »
When I was a low level reporter, I covered school board and town hall meetings. I reported about a ban on feeding migratory birds that raised a ruckus because it meant our kids could no longer feed the ducks. I gushed over one too many holiday home and garden tours. Until I reached a point in 2001, when I said, “No more.” We attended the Bride’s college graduation and threw her a celebratory clambake in our backyard that Spring. And that Fall, I stood at our town’s 9/11 memorial service, (we lost 13 and the town across the river lost 37 people) totally numb and in shock, thinking at least I was spared from writing about this because, “There are no words.”
Dana Priest is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Washington Post and she was a keynote speaker at our new town’s Miller Center. If you missed the part where I explained the Miller Center, check it out on the blogroll in the right margin. Priest has gone where most men fear to tread, deep into the heart of our military-intelligence complex to try and explain how we currently find ourselves fighting a War on Terror, and just what that means. It is humbling to listen to her speak. Her book is titled, “Top Secret America” and her take away? “We have too much redundancy and waste in our intelligence community.”
This woman did her homework; she started counting the secret government agencies (about 1,300), planes that flew rendition prisoners around the world to secret prisons, private intel companies (about 1,900), and people with top secret clearance in this country. Guess how many? 860,000 people – “…that’s about 2.5 times the size of the District of Columbia itself…The capital of Top Secret America is located around the National Security Agency, which is about 35 miles north of Washington, D.C.” Every year, starting in 2002, top secret agencies would more than double in size and produce 50,000 intelligence reports each year! That number just boggled my mind!
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/
Before CIA Director Leon Panetta flew to Afghanistan to meet with Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai about the latest atrocity committed over the weekend when an American soldier randomly killed civilians, he was preparing his budget. In an interview with The Post, Panetta said that he’s begun “…mapping out a five-year plan for his agency because the levels of spending since 9/11 are not sustainable. Particularly with these deficits, we’re going to hit the wall. I want to be prepared for that,” he said. “Frankly, I think everyone in intelligence ought to be doing that.”
But how can we be prepared for some clerk throwing books into an incinerator? How can we anticipate a soldier running amok? Investigative reporters like Priest are invaluable to a free and open society. She heard that she had, “…no need to know,” about her subjects too many times to count. But she persisted. At such a critical time in history, I’m planning on reading this book. Are you old enough to remember when women could only write housekeeping copy for newspapers? 
Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged Kaizen, Spring Cleaning on March 13, 2012| Leave a Comment »
“It’s Springtime and birds do sing,” is a line from an old Shakespearean song and boy are they singing this morning. It seems to me they are heralding in Spring Cleaning; that age old ritual we all learned and promptly forgot in the midst of all-weather fabrics. Once upon a time there were slipcovers to change, curtains and blinds to wash, rugs to be beaten or shampooed; all along with a veritable bevy of mind-numbing chores to keep us busy. Quick, to the ladders with Windex! It’s no wonder we love to watch Downton Abbey – all those hard working servants, seamlessly in the background, keeping the manse in tip top shape. But now?
Not so much. We modern day homemakers have Dyson vacuums and Jetson-like self-cleaning ovens to make our lives easier. Still there is something in the air that makes us want to shake off the Winter blues and throw open our doors to sunshine and stink bugs. Maybe not the bugs. What’s an empty nester to do? No more stinky boy gym bags to disinfect. No need to upend drawers full of sweaters and woolen socks to pack away in cedar closets. That’s it! Organize your closets!! It’s amazing how cluttered a closet can get in one little year. And if that’s too overwhelming a task, start small.
Kaizen baby! The Japanese approach of using “small steps” to attack a bigger issue was first implemented for factory workers, probably at Toyota. It roughly translates to “continuous slow improvement.” I learned about it at a Canyon Ranch lecture eons ago. Let’s say your goal is to take better care of your teeth. You don’t say to yourself, “I’m going to brush after every meal and floss every night.” You start small, maybe saying “Tonight I will floss one tooth.” Then gradually you will accomplish your mission.
So yesterday I ordered a truckload of mulch for Bob, lucky man! And then I set about cleaning and organizing the space between our 2 sinks. It had become a pile of rarely used make-up, hair rollers, discarded travel samples, and anti-aging creams and contraptions. I opened the window and lit a clean laundry scented candle. And buried beneath the clutter I found a picture of me in a bathing suit in Sea Bright, NJ at forty. And now I have my mission!
Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged Pinterest, Scarpa, Shoes on March 10, 2012| 1 Comment »
Recently Mother Nature sent a tornado roaring through the Bride’s city and then dumped 8 inches of unexpected snow on us. In the midst of all this, hunkered down in the basement with her dogs and laptop, my lovely daughter thought she’d send me an invitation to join Pinterest. Without thinking, without knowing exactly what it was I was doing, I said “Sure!” and clicked OK! Instead of writing, or drawing a bath for stress relief, I was trapped by snow in my study and started Pinning away…
All of a sudden I had 33 followers, most of whom I don’t know, and 25 people “repinned” a picture I tacked onto my virtual bulletin board of a lap pool; this means they copied it into one of their Boards. What is Pinterest you might ask? Well I’m sure whoever invented it is going to make a bundle for one thing. It’s a platform that let’s you tack up pictures you find online (not from Facebook mind you) under “Boards” that you can create and rearrange at will. Reminds me of those collages kids make in middle school on poster board. For instance, my lap pool was under a Board I called “To Build or Not to Build.” Look at people’s Boards and you get a pretty good idea of what makes them tick. Attention Dr Jim, my Psychologist brother. People are Pinning pining for lap pools, puppies and travel spots. They are posting pictures of food they either want to make or have made. The Rocker’s band (Parlor Mob is on tour now – http://www.theparlormob.com/tourdates) asked their fans if they should join Pinterest. Overwhelming answer, “NO,” make music please.
So astute! Another great way to waste your time alone, in front of a computer. And yet, it has become a guilty pleasure. Here is where you can yearn for something, express your creative self, find like-minded, creepy strangers? But the way I think of it is the way the Flapper would cut out pictures and hang them on the refrigerator. She was a big Norman Vincent Peale gal. If you just visualize something, your mind will make it happen. The yin and yang of build it, and they will come.
Whoa! Someone just “repinned” my picture of an Oak Bluff’s carousel horse. This was under my “Favorite Things” Board. It is the oldest, still standing carousel in the US on Martha’s Vineyard, and my kids loved it when they were little. I wonder if the person repinning knows anything about it, or if she just likes the picture? I made a new Board today called “Smart Women” cause I was tired of the sexist tilt our country is experiencing and seeing all these stick skinny or glam celebrity pictures on other Boards.
Who benefits? Probably it’s free ads for some and just fun for others. My favorite shoe store Scarpa
Scarpa
My Closet
Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged International Women's Day, Ultrasound Bill on March 8, 2012| 1 Comment »
We women were thinking globally long before computers and airplanes flattened the world. But excuse American women for not knowing much about International Women’s Day. The holiday actually started as part of the Socialist labor movement in Russia in the early 1900’s (probably why it was played down over here) and quickly spread to encompass voting and other civil rights. I love this picture – kind of ironic, the sign about the power of reproduction, isn’t it? 
“Our employers have wealth, we have the power of reproduction”
The strange thing is, I’d never even heard about an international holiday for women until I was abroad, and going out to dinner. I was hand delivered a rose with a bow by the maitre’d. It seems that most men on the planet earth give the women in their lives flowers on this day. It’s like Mother’s Day in the states, only for daughters, sisters, grandmothers, aunties, cousins and unsuspecting female American tourists.
http://www.internationalwomensday.com/about.asp
As a proud, bra-burning 70s American feminist, I was slightly dismayed. Really, what started out as a fight for civil rights has ended up as a hallmark holiday – with all of the floral swagger and none of the good sales. I’m heading out to my card shop now, I’d like to see if they have any IWD cards next to the St Patrick’s Day greenery.
Yesterday our Governor signed into law a bill that will require a hateful, misogynistic, humiliating procedure be carried out by a doctor, nurse or tech at an extremely fragile time in a woman’s life. Maybe this woman is just too young, maybe she was raped, maybe she learned that the zygote she is carrying has no chance of survival due to some genetic anomaly. Well, the transvaginal part of the ultrasound before an abortion has been removed. But the transducer must still, by order of our government, be scanned across her belly and she must be asked if she’d like to watch and listen to the heartbeat. Then think about it for a few days and come back for the procedure, all on her nickel.
When will you get it through your heads. We are smart, we women, and we know what we are choosing and wouldn’t it be lovely if we didn’t have to do this, but ultimately it’s a decision for the woman to make with her doctor. Let me repeat, woman plus doctor equals reproductive rights. I honestly thought religion had no place in our public policy decisions, but ladies , march on. Let’s send our governor some dead roses, shall we?
http://soundcloud.com/carcon/09-dead-flowers
Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged Free Speech vs Vitriolic Speech, Rush Limbaugh on March 6, 2012| 1 Comment »
Talk show shock-jocks have a problem. Though I never, ever listen to Rush Limbaugh, word on the net is that he feels invincible. After the embarrassing photo op of an all male congressional hearing about birth control (yes ladies and gentlemen, this IS the 21st Century and we have not stepped into a time machine, or have we?),
Limbaugh decides to call a female Georgetown law student, a “slut” and a “prostitute” for sitting alone and testifying on the Hill about her friend, who could not afford to pay for the birth control pill. This friend has polycystic-ovarian-syndrome, and she’s gay, so she’s not using it for contraception. She’s already had one ovary removed. And after 3 days of ranting on about this young law student who had the unmitigated gall to stand up for women everywhere, Limbaugh suggested she send him her sex tapes!? Now after losing countless advertisers, and two squeamish half-hearted apologies, this good ole boy is still talking at Clear Channel.
Is it fair to start the comparisons?
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/05/opinion/frum-rush-limbaugh-fairness/index.html?hpt=hp_bn9
Yes, I think it’s fair. Don Imus got the boot for calling a woman’s basketball team at Rutgers “nappy-headed hoes.” It’s not a right/left issue to me. It’s common decency, it’s civility….but some things are still protected in this country and speech is one you won’t hear me complaining about. I understand Bill Maher used the “C” word about Palin, and I think that language is indefensible. However, he is on a cable channel, you can unsubscribe from HBO….radio waves are everywhere, and everyone ostensibly can listen. The Rocker would wake up to Howard Stern in the morning, and if that’s what it took to get him to school, so be it.
Here is your reality check for today:
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/video/2012/03/06/jon-stewart-on-rush-limbaugh-hes-extremely-loud-incredibly-gross
I heard a woman say, “I tried to be a toe up kinda girl.” She was talking about knitting socks; she starts at the top and works her way down, which is the opposite way of most knitters. Most of us like people who start at the bottom and work their way up the ladder of success. We Americans will always root for the underdog, at least that’s what my Dad taught me. And this is where Limbaugh was like Imus in the Morning, they used words to bully from the top down on their radio pulpit. Shame on you. It’s time you guys got out from under our skirts!
Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged Bluebirds, Michael Mann, Tornadoes on March 4, 2012| 2 Comments »
This morning I woke to a line of deep slate grey-blue mountains. No wind, some sun and the feeling that Spring has definitely arrived. But on Friday, I should have known something was up. Sitting down at the computer in my third floor aviary office, my thoughts were interrupted by a beautifully indignant bluebird. First he flew at my window like a kamikaze pilot, then he sat down on the windowsill and proceeded to peck at his reflection, occasionally looking me right in the eyes. “What an orange breast you have Mr Bluebird,” I said. He just kept knocking.
Bob speculates that it’s mating season, and the bird saw his reflection as a territorial challenge. I’m not so sure, because two things happened later that same day and they both had to do with nature and destiny. Killer tornadoes swept across the South and the Midwest, with one aiming straight for the Bride and her Husband in Nashville. This was the second storm in 48 hours, first taking 13 and now about to take 38 lives. A friend who grew up in tornado country says you just get a feeling when they’re coming – the sky changes color, rain comes sideways and the wind will switch directions. And then there’s the sound of a train. We were on the phone with our daughter, who was home alone and had heard the sirens.
Luckily, she has a basement. Gathering her dogs, laptop, cell and a book, she headed downstairs. It was late afternoon, the Groom was still at the hospital and she was scheduled for the graveyard shift. We watched the radar loop online, tracking the tornado which touched down just south of the city. I was the Madame Defarge of knitting while Bob tracked the eye of the storm and sent text after text. It’s almost impossible to imagine or describe my feelings for that hour, until she instagramed a picture of her hand, outside, holding a golf ball sized piece of hail. The “all clear” siren had sounded.
But I did say two things happened on Friday. I learned that our state Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli was thwarted by the VA Supreme Court in his race against science and reason, vs UVA and Michael Mann. If you recall, I wrote about the Climate Change scientist here:
https://mountainmornings.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/baby-its-cold-outside/
This is Mann’s response to winning his battle over politically fueled religious nutcase deniers: “I’m pleased that this particular episode is over. Its sad, though, that so much money and resources had to be wasted on Cuccinelli’s witch hunt against me and the University of Virginia, when it could have been invested, for example, in measures to protect Virginia’s coast line from the damaging effects of sea level rise it is already seeing. One would have hoped that the fact alone that the Inspector General of the National Science Foundation last year looked into the allegations by Cuccinelli and other climate change deniers against me, and found that there was absolutely no basis to them, would have ended the attacks against me. But as I describe in my just published book “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars”, they are part of something much larger—a coordinated assault against the scientific community by powerful vested interests who simply want to stick their heads in the sand and deny the problem of human-caused climate change, rather than engage in the good faith debate about what to do about it.”
Bluebirds, tornadoes, and hockey sticks, oh my. Can you hear them knocking?
Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged Books, Hedy's Folly, Old Hollywood on March 1, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Ivy Farmers gathered again last night to discuss the book Hedy’s Folly, by Richard Rhodes. The day was rain soaked, falling out of the sky in buckets along with a cacophony of thunder that surprised Ms Bean. Unlike my Buddha, she was not afraid and simply raised her ears and eyebrows as if to say, “That’s interesting!” My friend Barbara drove this time through puddles and patches of ground fog to our “meeting of the minds,” to discuss Old Hollywood celebrity, genius, and German Shepherds who routinely escape their Invisible Fence. Now their owner must appear in “Dog Court.”
Hedwig Kiesler, aka Hedy Lamarr, was one of Hollywood’s earliest film sirens. I vaguely remember seeing old black and white movies of her on late night TV before TCM. What I didn’t know is that she was an astonishingly complicated, and smart woman who escaped Vienna and the looming Nazi threat (she was Jewish) while at the same time abandoning her husband, Fritz Mandl, an extremely wealthy, and abusive Austrian arms dealer. In this book, we find that the “most beautiful woman in the world” has a brain, and that she teams up with a New Age musician, George Antheil, originally from Trenton, NJ to invent “…a radio-controlled “spread spectrum” torpedo-guidance system, for which they received a patent in 1942.”
Because Hedy was a glamorous movie star, and George was an avant garde composer, the US government did not take them seriously. However, cell phones, GPS and Blue Tooth technology today are only possible because of their unlikely collaboration and invention!
We wondered if being a beautiful and brilliant woman today poses the same challenges. I’ve heard that single Harvard women don’t like to drop the “H” bomb on unsuspecting dates. Really guys, still?
Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged Gun Violence, High School, School shootings on February 28, 2012| Leave a Comment »
“The world breaks everyone…”
Another school shooting, this time in Ohio. Another teen died this morning, making two so far. We hear there was a football coach who chased the student/shooter out of the school, that he and another teacher had donned bullet proof vests they kept in a closet. And of course, the media is focused on the perpetrator, TJ Lane who is 17 years old and described as a “quiet” kid by some and an “outcast” by others. He attended an alternative school, for at-risk students. It was most likely a half day program – mornings at the regular school campus, afternoon bus to the vo-tech or alternative campus. Have we learned anything since Columbine?
Well, the book Columbine by Dave Cullen was surprisingly cogent and illuminating. It’s not about the stereotypes, outcasts, jocks vs goths or greasers and preps, depending on your decade. It’s about depression and pschopathology. It’s been reported that 6% of American teens suffer from clinical depression – that adds up to 2 million kids! Until we can revamp our educational system to serve ALL our young people, and not by shuttling the disconnected off to another campus, we will have to rely on teachers to buy bullet proof vests. Until we control how, where and who can buy guns, (sorry GOP) we will unfortunately continue on our wild west path.
My heart goes out to these families. And not just the victims, but to the Lane family as well. And now the President is being criticized for being “snobby,” for articulating what every single parent wants for their child – achieving a post HS degree. To survive high school with your confidence intact is a noble thing. The survivors in Ohio will have to fight to return to some kind of normal. We all navigated our way through adolescence in different ways. I was the song and dance girl, Bob was the brainiac, the Bride was brilliant and carried a big field hockey stick, and the Rocker? He was my music man who couldn’t care less about the hierarchy.
“…and afterward many are strong in the broken places.” Here is the rest of Hemingway’s prose that Clinton didn’t read: “But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” Thanks Ernest.
Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged Dogs, Grandparents!, Knitting on February 25, 2012| 4 Comments »
Here is a picture of Ms Bean this morning, waiting patiently. She is waiting for me to get up, to feed her, to let her out, to pick up her totally demolished Lambie Pie and throw it high in the air so she can jump up and catch it on the fly, thereby exhibiting her long, gorgeous GoGo Gadget legs. She is waiting for Bob to reappear at the door, for the wind to die down so she can go out and look for him. She is waiting for me to drop a little crumb of my granola breakfast since it looks like I’m not moving anytime soon. She is wondering if there is any trace of rabbit or deer in the front yard under her favorite viburnum. She is wondering what I’m looking at. Just because her collar is askew and her ears are floppy doesn’t mean she’s not very particular. She is. She is particularly good at waiting.
Ms Bean’s humans are not quite so patient. Can you guess what we’re waiting for?
MountainMornings 