Blogging will be slim to none for a few days. Tomorrow Sparkly Seacow and I are taking the train to visit fambly in upstate New York. Back on Friday. Everybody have a safe and happy New Year's eve and day.
We really scaled back on gifts, and I especially feel like there simply isn't much I need or want. Mr. Ether and I are going to buy a new camera at some point (or that's what we say.) I prefer to be able to buy yarn or fabric when I'm inspired, or the occasional book. But I did receive 2 gifts of items that I've coveted for a while.
Two, this sewing book is a gift from our deceased daughter, Sophie, via Mr. Ether. Gifts from Sophie are a tradition, a way of remembering her.
The best gift we gave this year was a new iPod for Sparkly Seacow, after her previous one (which she had saved up for and bought with her own money) was stolen. We chipped in with our daughter Cinderbelle and grandparents, and made Sparkly very happy. She loves her music!
Reading Quaking now seems like ancient history -- I think I finished it last Sunday -- but I intended to write a review of it, so I will. I have a little extra time today since school was canceled because of snow, our second snow day in as many weeks. This one is particularly sweet as it butts up against winter break.We need work for all.
We want work for all.
We need work to be.
Give us work for all.
Give us work to be.
This week, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, the nonpartisan think tank on state and national education issues, released a scathing report that found that college tuition and fees have skyrocketed in the last quarter century 439 percent, three times the rise in median family income in the same time period.
The rise of college costs surpassed even the 251 percent hike in medical care costs. In the 1999-2000 school year, the cost of four-year public college represented 18 percent of median family income for the middle quintile, 23 percent for the lower-middle quintile, and 39 percent for the lowest income quintile. Those respective figures are now 25 percent, 33 percent, and 55 percent. They account for grants and scholarships. (Read the rest.)
And Crooks and Liars had this post up today, entitled Remember College?
I welcome these moments of remembering.You might assume from this that I couldn't give a rat's ass about these miserably inept crapmobile makers down the road in Detroit city. But I do care. I care about the millions whose lives and livelihoods depend on these car companies. I care about the security and defense of this country because the world is running out of oil -- and when it runs out, the calamity and collapse that will take place will make the current recession/depression look like a Tommy Tune musical.
And I care about what happens with the Big 3 because they are more responsible than almost anyone for the destruction of our fragile atmosphere and the daily melting of our polar ice caps.
Congress must save the industrial infrastructure that these companies control and the jobs they create. And it must save the world from the internal combustion engine. This great, vast manufacturing network can redeem itself by building mass transit and electric/hybrid cars, and the kind of transportation we need for the 21st century.
And Congress must do all this by NOT giving GM, Ford and Chrysler the $34 billion they are asking for in "loans" (a few days ago they only wanted $25 billion; that's how stupid they are -- they don't even know how much they really need to make this month's payroll. If you or I tried to get a loan from the bank this way, not only would we be thrown out on our ear, the bank would place us on some sort of credit rating blacklist). (Read it here in its entirety)
The Big ThreeI am going down to Washington, D.C. to ask for a handout.Watching the pigs belly up to the trough (with apologies to real pigs everywhere) over the last 6 weeks has been disgustingly predictable ... or predictably disgusting. Where is the help for "Main Street" that everyone was talking about during the election?
My industry is falling on hard times and needs at least $34 billion to cover basic operating costs—but I assure you the emergency aid isn't just for me and my associates. The truth is my industry is too big to fail, and if it were to go under it would have disastrous effects for the economy and millions of Americans lives.
No, I am not an automaker executive from one of the Big Three (General Motors, Chrysler, Ford)—I teach social studies to 13-year-olds and the Public Schools are my trade. (read the rest)
On Saturday night the esteemed bass player Mr. Ether (a.k.a. "Dog Park Guy") had a gig with the Reptile Palace Orchestra at the Mabel Tainter Theater in Menomonie, WI. I had been hearing about this theater for years and jumped at the chance to see it. It was built in the late nineteenth century by a lumber baron as a memorial to his daughter who died. (Interestingly enough -- to me anyway -- he built it at the urging of a local Unitarian minister; I don't tend to think of Unitarians as being active or even existent in the north woods of Wisconsin in the nineteenth century!)
"No one at the beginning of 1989 expected that, by year's end, the Cold War would effectively be over, and no one imagined when Mandela emerged from prison, that apartheid would soon be driven out of his country. The Dalai Lama reposes his faith on such surprises -- the sudden result of what has been building invisibly for years -- as if to say, as he put it once, "Until the last moment, anything is possible."I couldn't help thinking about election night (was it only a month ago?) as I read that passage.
Oh yeah, that guy.
This is the sunrise that greeted me when I got up at around 6:45 to let the dog out. Soon I will be making winter squash gratin and a broccoli salad to take to my mother-in-law's for dinner.
What else did we see?
It was fun to do something so spontaneous.
Today's global financial cloud got you feeling gray? Vermonter Jim Merkel sees a silver lining.Back in 1989, the Long Island native was a weapons engineer who helped design a cutting-edge computer that could transmit military secrets, survive a nuclear blast and, a decade before the dawn of the BlackBerry, fit in the palm of his hand. Sitting at a hotel bar in Stockholm, Sweden, he was drinking in his accomplishment when a bulletin flashed on television. (Read the rest here.)
In the article I posted yesterday, someone was quoted as saying "There is no silver lining." There is a disaster mindset that we are in -- that the "experts" and the media are urging us to be in. They want us to scream, "The sky is falling" and hurry to demand bail-outs for our favorite banks and corporations. I quite agree with the gentleman in this article that we are being handed a gift, in a way. A chance to quit our unsustainable ways and find a different way to live. A couple of years ago I was saying that perhaps an economic depression would be a good thing in the long run, forcing a return to different values.
"There is a huge, looming problem about what to do with people who are unemployed," said Dr. David Nash, dean of the Jefferson School of Health Policy and Population Health in Philadelphia. "The short answer, regretfully, is that there is no good answer for these people."I have an answer. It seems to me that was has been happening in the arena of health care for so long, with insurance companies getting fat off of the suffering of ordinary people, is analogous to war profiteering. I may be naive, but I say, take them over. Nationalize health care.
"As someone who grew up in Germany and lived for some years in Canada and got used to portable, life-cycle health insurance, I have always been amazed that Americans preferred the ephemeral health insurance that comes with the job at a particular firm and is lost with losing that job." Reinhardt said. "Now, the foolishness of that preference is becoming clear to many middle-class Americans who spent their life denigrating 'government' health insurance."Frankly, I find it hard to muster much sympathy for people who are waking up only now."
"There is not a silver lining," Nash said. "What's coming home to roost here is the historical accident of having private health care insurance tied to the place of employment. There is no way out if it is tied to the source of where you work."
Thanks, Dr. Nash, for blaming the victims. Middle-class Americans have been duped by a Congress who allowed health care to become a commodity instead of a right.
The only people I hear denigrating "government" health insurance are Republicans and wealthy people.Americans have been asking for health care reform for years, and we keep getting "solutions" shoved down our throats that benefit the insurance companies. Unlike members of Congress who have what amounts to a socialized health plan (paid for by us, the People,) the average American has been forced to choose between mediocre or downright bad health plans. There has been no meaningful health care reform. I still seethe when I think about the "blue ribbon panel" that Hillary Clinton chaired, on which sat CEOs from several of the major health insurance companies. Oh yeah, they were really going to come up with a plan that benefited us.
We are living in scary times, and I don't know what it is going to take to make the powers that be change their course and do what's right for the people who really make this country run.
DCup is a clearinghouse for all the good memes. I happily jumped onboard this one. And then I didn't post it. And then Quaker Dave did it too. So I was re-inspired.
I am pleased to say I shop locally at Ace Hardware on Willy Street. It's a little more expensive, but I can find almost anything I need there including clear Contact Paper and Velcro (essential teacher tools) for sale by the yard. They give me mis-cut keys to use for counting (kids love keys), they have a store dog, and the last time I was there one of the owners told me that he went to elementary school where I teach now. Many years ago.Remember, every dollar you spend is a vote.This is what Home Depot's founder Bernie Marcus said on a conference call yesterday:
"If a retailer has not gotten involved with this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to Norm Coleman and these other guys," Mr. Marcus said, apparently referring to Republican senators facing tough re-election fights, then those retailers "should be shot; should be thrown out of their goddamn jobs."
It's nice to know Home Depot supports the death penalty for not supporting their politics. The coming EFCA fight is going to be bloody.
Read the whole story here.
Humans and kangaroos are close cousins on the evolutionary tree sharing a common ancestor 150 million years ago, according to Australian researchers.
Scientists have mapped the genetic code of the Australian marsupials for the first time and found large chunks of DNA are the same. (Read the rest.)
Cool.
"I catch his eye and realize that his hand has moved on to me."
All this talk about the dog the Obamas are going to get inspires me to say (again) that I am head over heels in love with my dog, Molly. Molly came to us almost a year ago. The plan was, she would live with us for 3 months until our friends could bring her to their new home in New Zealand. During that time our beloved corgi Georgia died, our friends began to question whether the trip and subsequent quarantine would be too hard on Molly, and we fell in love with her.
Molly is 12. I know she isn't going to be with us for many years. But she has convinced me that, as cute as puppies can be, older dogs can be amazingly rewarding.
And finally, live action footage of what we have to put up with every single time we take Molly in the car, courtesy of Cinderbelle. This was last Christmas, shortly after Molly came to live with us:
What is former HHS secretary, Republican candidate for president, and governor of Wisconsin Tommy Thompson up to these days?In Sarah Palin's interview with Fox News' Greta Van Susteren this evening, she referred to bloggers as "kids in pajamas sitting in the basement of their parents' homes" spewing out mean and inaccurate things about her.My favorite Pee Wee's Playhouse moment ever was the episode where Pee Wee is having a pajama party. Cowboy Curtis arrives looking nervous, pulls Pee Wee aside, and informs Pee Wee that he doesn't wear pajamas. Jokes like that were why Pee Wee got busted for lewd and lascivious behavior. He was the best thing on Saturday morning TV since Hot Dog.
The Mormon church actively campaigned for the passage of Proposition 8 in California. Does this bother you as much as it bothers me? Let HuffPo know: james@huffingtonpost.com
This week the BBC has an article about the common ancestor, still living, of all of the world's deep-sea octopi.
And I would just like to say to all of the squid and octopi who might be reading my blog, at that temple in Japan back in 1974? That was my sister who bought the "octopus on a stick", not me. I was a vegetarian. And I don't eat anything with tentacles or suction cups.
When our daughter was born on February 3, 1996, her great grandpa -- who kept track of such things -- told us it was the coldest Feb. 3 in Wisconsin history.Just to make you shiver a little early, the Winter Awareness Week folks also point out that Wisconsin's all-time lowest temperature was -55 on Feb. 2 and 4, in 1996 near Couderay, also in Sawyer County.
"Readings of -30 or colder have been recorded in every month from November through April," they say. "Of course," they add, "readings in the 50s, 60s and 70s are possible."Don't we know it! It was in the low seventies earlier in the week. Now it is snowing!
And this final reminder from the Weather Service: "The only month without a tornado in Wisconsin is February. Be ready."I love Wisconsin!
This just in! OK, not really. Just a few scenes and vignettes from my experience on election day, 2008.
A Halloween traditionalist ...
And a truly scary something.
Cigarette hanging off her lip, she rasps at me, "Yeah, Gramma's got the kid for the night. Honey, grab 2 or 3 candies for Gramma." A few Halloweens ago, she was out in front of her house in her bathrobe, terrorizing trick-or-treaters with a chainsaw. What fun!
Wow, I just had visits from a bishop, a baby, and an Incredible Hulk-like guy. And another little girl who said, "Don't you teach at Emerson?" The little kids are tapering off, and now it's the older kids. In another half hour or so it will be the big kids in garbage bags, or no costumes at all.
Let's get a close-up of your shirt. Nice!
I hope you had a good one!
