Not sure what was on the sidewalk after the rain, but it was fabulous for beagles (apologies for the windowscreen being in the way — you shoot these things as they happen; beagles wait for no man):
«Beagles Rolling in Something Good and Stinky»
Best quote of the night: From the fabulous Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Lady Mont of 1934’s «One More River», part of James Whale Night on TCM this evening:
‘Oh! I have a sharp pain right here! It’s either flatulence … or the hand of God!’
—One More River (1934)
Awesome. Especially for 1934.
We just spent four days in Dallas. And I spent 24 hours of that in Oklahoma.
Yeah.
So that happened.
Marriage Equality & Gay and Lesbian
Writing in the Texas Observer‘s Picture Show, «Josh Rosenblatt» discusses the great Patricia Neal/Paul Newman movie Hud and what Hud represents, then and now:
‘[Writer Larry] McMurtry and the film’s director, Martin Ritt, created Hud’s character not just to thrill but to warn. To them he was the embodiment of a growing malignant spirit in the country, a spirit interested only in greed and money and what can be taken. They were hoping to create a late-capitalist American devil.
…
‘McMurtry and Ritt probably figured that viewers would be appalled by such thinking and by the character behind it. But somewhere along the way, it seems the cautionary element of their movie got lost. In the decades following the movie’s release, Hud became a role model. His rapacious lust, his desire for money and success, his indifference to the lives of other people, his cruelty toward women, his sociopathic need to take, take, take regardless of consequence somehow became traits to be admired rather than abhorred. Look around Texas today and you’ll see far too many Huds, men who see making money as not just the ultimate goal but the only goal, who see women as things to be used and then tossed aside, who look at consumption as the point of life. Homer’s Texas has become Hud’s, a land where capital and commodification trump all.
‘Watching Hud now, I can’t help the feeling that somewhere along the way we missed the point—that plastics, or something far worse, has won again.’
—Josh Rosenblatt
For me, THAT is what Occupy Wall Street is all about … protesting the ever-accelerating epidemic of Hudism that infects every aspect of American life.
In a letter President Eisenhower penned to his brother, Edgar Newton Eisenhower, on 8 November 1954, he wrote:
‘Now it is true that I believe this country is following a dangerous trend when it permits too great a degree of centralization of governmental functions. I oppose this — in some instances the fight is a rather desperate one. But to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything — even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon “moderation” in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.‘ [Emphasis mine.]
—Dwight Eisenhower
He probably had the best understanding of his own party than anyone else, before or since. Unfortunately, the “their number is negligible” part is no longer true.
From the “More Things Change” department comes this paragraph about America’s religious rightwing … in 1958.
Writing in Life Magazine on «9-Jun-1958», Dr. Henry P. Van Dusen, president of the New York Union Seminary and chairman of the Joint Committee of the World Council of Churches and International Missionary Council notes a salient feature of America’s rightwing fundamentalist Christianity that would prove to be unchanged for the next half-century:
‘There are shortcomings in the movement. Its intellectual outlook is quite limited. For the most part, it is blithely indifferent to scientific and historical advances, including the proven results of modern inquiry into the writing of the Bible and the development of the church. Its Christian message tends to be so simple as to be incomplete. Its spirit is all too often narrow, bigoted and intolerant.’
—Life Magazine
You have to thumb through the pages to find the exact article, which is titled, “The Third Force in Christendom,” on page 113.
Also of note in the article is the tidbit that the Rapture is a relatively recent (1850-vintage) American invention. Which says a lot. But, like Dr. Van Dusen notes, historical advances and modern inquiry don’t mean anything. The Left Behind books are Jesus-inspired prophecy. Period.
And, of course, Dr. Van Dusen’s legitimacy is to be rejected as well, if you are part of the ‘Third Force.’ As I was told back in the ’70s, the World Council of Churches is actually a Satanic front; it will help usher in a false religion controlled by the Antichrist. So, you know, dude is just a shill for Lucifer.
I thought as we hit the 21st century that this sort of thing had gotten worse than it was in my childhood. Funny how it turns out to have been pretty much the same all my life. I suppose the only difference between now and then is that the ‘Third Force’ actually wields civil power, having rejected the policy of non-involvement in civil affairs it followed during my early years.
I witnessed the ‘Third Force’ up close and personal; for what it’s worth, take it from me that none of those people should ever allowed anywhere near the reins of state. Unfortunately, we’re probably already past that point.
Sad news from north of the border: «NDP Leader Jack Layton succumbs to cancer»:
‘Layton’s wife, Olivia Chow, and his children, Sarah and Michael Layton, issued a statement announcing his death. “We deeply regret to inform you that the Honourable Jack Layton, leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, passed away at 4:45 am today, Monday August 22. He passed away peacefully at his home surrounded by family and loved ones,” the statement read.
‘Details about funeral arrangements will be forthcoming, it said. The family released a letter from Layton to Canadians just after noon. Layton’s death comes less than a month after he announced to the country that he was fighting a new form of cancer and was taking time off for treatment. Layton had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in late 2009 and underwent treatment for it. He continued working throughout that time and also battled a broken hip earlier this year. Layton used a cane for much of his time on the campaign trail this spring as he led the NDP to a historic victory on May 2.’
—CBC.Ca
In a «final letter to Canadians», he wrote some words that Americans south of the Canadian border could learn from also:
‘My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.’
—CBC.Ca
His final words have been posterized by «Stuart Thursby».
R.I.P.
Culture and Society & Stupidity
«This» is American children’s future … and many education deformers, from Gates to Broad to the Waltons, are eager to embrace it. A FastCompany article on education at the top high school in Beijing contains this money quote:
‘Such complaints don’t surprise Jiang, the Yalie school administrator, who is experimenting with ways to soften the focus on the gaokao. “The best and brightest in the education system are educated in a way that doesn’t permit them to contribute to society,” he says.
‘Zhang Xiaolu, a teacher and gaokao grader in Nanjing, adds, “A lot of teachers tell students after they graduate from high school: ‘Please forget everything you have just learned.’ Because the teachers know that what they have taught is useless. A standardized test means standardized thought. I tell students, ‘It stuffs your heads so that you have no time to think about other things.’ This is the policy of keeping people in ignorance.”’
—FastCompany.com
And this is the system the corporate privatizers want for us. So VERY glad my school days are 30 years behind me!
Flags should be at half-mast today. The Times remembers a 30-year-old disaster with very long term detrimental affects on the country:
“… the impact of the Patco strike on Reagan’s fellow Republicans has long since overshadowed his own professed beliefs regarding public sector unions. Over time the rightward-shifting Republican Party has come to view Reagan’s mass firings not as a focused effort to stop one union from breaking the law — as Reagan portrayed it — but rather as a blow against public sector unionism itself.
“In the spring, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin invoked Reagan’s handling of Patco as he prepared to “change history” by stripping public employees of collective bargaining rights in a party-line vote. “I’m not negotiating,” Mr. Walker said. By then the world had seemingly forgotten that unlike Mr. Walker, Reagan had not challenged public employees’ right to bargain — only their right to strike.
“With Mr. Walker’s militant anti-union views now ascendant within the party of a onetime union leader, with workers less able to defend their interests in the workplace than at any time since the Depression, the long-term consequences continue to unfold in ways Reagan himself could not have predicted — producing outcomes for which he never advocated.”
—New York Times
One of the greatest regrets of my youth was ever voting for the Gipper.
All strapped in without an S&M party to go to. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of some health improvements … Nighty night!
[drumroll, please] So here are my sleep study results:
I stopped breathing 289 times during 5.5 hours of so-called sleep, giving me an average of 52.4 incidents per hour. The longest incident lasted 24.6 seconds. I didn’t even know I could hold my breath that long … but apparently I can.
Only 11.2% of my sleep was considered good (normal for most people is 20% at least). Stage R sleep is usually 25% of sleep time for normal people; I had … 0.
Worst was that my oxygen saturation was up and down during the night; there were 162 times when it dropped below normal. The lowest level it went to was 83%, which lasted for 7.5 minutes. Just for reference, even my Dad with his COPD is normally 96-98%. I averaged 94.4% all night long.
So, the diagnosis is severe chronic sleep apnea, which gets worse when I’m on my back. I check back in tonight for another study; this time, I’ll be attached to a CPAP machine like Frank’s and we’ll adjust it to find out what works best for me. Then a machine of my very own to take home. Those scenes in Alien where the little aliens attach themselves to people’s faces? Yeah, that’ll be Frank and I every night from now on.
But hopefully, it’ll do something ‘bout the exhaustion. Fingers are crossed. For now, I’m wored out from last night and just driving to and from the hop-sital. So I go take a nap now … wonder if I can break that 289 record?
The test wasn’t bad. Lots of wires hooked up and gook in your hair, but I got to sleep quickly. I got up for potty visit at 4:30 and then went back to sleep for another two hours. He woke me up at 6, unhooked me, and now I’ll have a shower to get the gook out, and go have breakfast.
Will get the results when I see the doctor at 8:45. Sometimes, if you stop breathing 30 times or more an hour, they will stop the test and fit your for a CPAP during the night. They didn’t wake me up, so I’m assuming I probably have apnea, just not at the high level. Frank is at 16 and I’m probably somewhere in that neighborhood.
At any rate, if it results in better sleep and feeling better in the mornings, this was well, well worth the time and effort. And even the $134 in cash out of pocket for our contribution to the extortion er, insurance company.
Off to the shower!
Been a quick process; after my regular doctor suggested that this was the next step in my seven-years-long medical odyssey, he made an appointment for me. I met with a sleep doctor this morning, they had an opening for a study for tonight, and he’ll see me and give me results first thing in the morning. That’s pretty amazingly fast.
Doc thinks it’ll turn out to be “fairly severe” apnea, but we’ll see. So very NOT looking forward to having an alien clamped to my face every night, but living like I’ve been living in my waking hours needs to come to an end.
The adrenal drama, after seven years, came to a close yesterday with an agreement that my adrenals are in stasis with existing drug treatment, that surgery will be indicated only if they go out of control again, and that imaging them every year or so and doing monthly obeisance to the pharmaceuticals for a couple of ‘scripts and we’re done. Seven years. Expenses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in three states. Hospitalizations. ER visits. And on and on and on and now we’re down to this. I’m more exhausted than when we started, so the apnea is, as I said, our next step in the process. So is losing 40 pounds, but that’s another story for another day.
Now the trick: Getting to sleep on a Tempurpedic away from home, four hours before my usual bedtime, without having one to three heavy beagles sleeping on me and without my nightly two-hour soak in the tub. Sigh.
Well, let’s get on with it …
Culture and Society & Politics
How did he know how «today’s Republicans (and President Obama)» would be? Amazing.
Seen on «Leftwing Cracker».
Woke up to huge spinal pain this morning and had to wait for tramadol to kick in and get going. Then it started pouring rain, so I guess that’s what’s going on.
Glad to be in Tennessee, though, rather than that place I used to live in two states to the west. It’s 108 degrees there (and has been for days and days), and dry, dry, dry. Just the thought of it makes me shudder.
In the mid-70s, my dad wanted to raise pigs, so he built pens on the back of our acre of ground and went to town. We spent lots of time chasing them around, since they were escape artists (not as good as beagles, but pretty good).
This pic is me as a sixth grader in 1976 doing some pig wrangling of some young piglets. Wish I were that skinny again!
Poor piggie. We both ended up fat, but he’s the one got eaten.
Found: Boys Military School Ad found in the Miami News | 4-Jul-1961
A slice of American life from the early ’60s. More on the school «here».
For context, the DDR began laying putting up what would become the Berlin Wall a month later. More on the crucial year of 1961 in Friedrich Kempe’s very excellent «Berlin 1961».
Love those lines, “Ideal for the boy who is loafing around all summer” and “two days of anti-communist instruction and communist tactics.” Ah, the Sixties.
Still true, 159 years later.
“For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”
— Frederick Douglass
From Howard Zinn’s «A People’s History of the United States»:
“When the Declaration of Independence was read, with all its flaming radical language, from the town hall balcony in Boston, it was read by Thomas Crafts, a member of the Loyal Nine group, conservatives who had opposed militant action against the British.
“Four days after the reading, the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up on the Common for a military draft. The rich, it turned out, could avoid the draft by paying for substitutes; the poor had to serve. This led to rioting, and shouting: ‘Tyranny is Tyranny let it come from whom it may.’”
— Howard Zinn
We never stray far from our violent, avaricious roots. Happy birthday, America!
It’s the 50th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s death, and Larry Harnisch over at the Daily Mirror has «all the juicy details»:
“The [anniversary] has prompted a variety of articles, including an op-ed piece in the New York Times by A.E. Hotchner, who portrays the famous novelist as being obsessed about FBI surveillance. He told Hotchner: ‘It’s the worst hell. The goddamnedest hell. They’ve bugged everything. That’s why we’re using Duke’s car. Mine’s bugged. Everything’s bugged. Can’t use the phone. Mail intercepted.’
“Hotchner describes getting Hemingway’s FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act: “Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the F.B.I. released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all.
“‘In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s fear of the F.B.I., which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.’”
— The New York Times
The report includes original documents as well. A fascinating read.
Four years ago this afternoon, we lost our beloved Bayley Murphey Beagle. It still hurts and I cried. We miss him loads still; even though the three beagle brothers do fill up the space, there will probably always remain an empty hole in our lives that used to be occupied by Bayley. He does continue to fill our hearts, so that’s at least something.
Politics & Culture and Society
I was the first registered Republican in my family. I cast my first vote in a presidential election for Ronald Reagan, the second for George H.W. Bush. I listened to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, thought I was a Dittohead, and was one of the few who watched and liked his television show. I actually cried when George Sr. and Barbara left the White House to Bill and Hilary in January 1993.
And then the Republicans lurched to the fringe, became immoderate, aggressive, in-your-face, and triumphal, became harnessed to extremist religious philosophy. They attacked anytime President Clinton breathed. Limbaugh yelled (in 1992) that he was happy to be in the opposition; it’s more fun, you can snipe and bitch and moan and not have to actually do anything. The Republicans launched their Contract on America (er, I mean for).
And then, in 1994, came Harry and Louise. Corporate money flooded in, and the Republicans steamrollered and destroyed health care reform, dooming hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to premature death over the next 16 years. The militias and ti-foilists, precursors to the Tea-baggers, came out. And all that culminated in terrorist Timothy McVeigh’s murder of 168 people in my own backyard in the service of a right-wing political philosophy.
I mourned the loss of health care, as well as the Murrah Building, and ranted and railed against my party. In 1996, I registered as a Democrat, voted for Bill Clinton and then watched the Republicans continue to make war, year after year, against the middle class, and especially against gay and lesbian Americans like me.
I’ve been trying to remember exactly what the turning point for me was. And I’m almost 100% certain it was health care reform. When the Republicans attacked and destroyed the possibility of a saner, more humane health care payment system, they also attacked and destroyed me. I returned to the Democratic fold where my family had originally been for the better part of a century.
I didn’t turn on the Republicans, as the saying goes; they turned on me.
Their behavior right now, as we wait for the final House vote, is beyond disgusting. No lie too big or too outrageous to read into the Congressional record or give to the cameras at CNN.
But to me, it doesn’t matter what happens in November; I realize the Democrats will probably pay a price. And I don’t care. It takes courage to do the right thing, they’ve finally grown a bit of a pair, it’s the right start. And if they lose control, fine. The resulting nastiness will, once again, prove to Americans who too easily forget history, that the right does not have our best interests at heart, only those of corporate boards and religious charlatans.
Will watch the final vote and the president’s statement following. And be finally relieved that 100 years of obstruction of a basic fundamental human right has finally ended.
From the right-wing side of the aisle comes this absolutely fabulous quote (wonder how long his staff worked on this gem?). It’s off-the-charts hyperbole, infinitely untrue, but a classic, nonetheless. Is this really what you Republicans are reduced to?
“You’ll be getting your pre-natal care from TurboTax!!”
Awesome.
Feargal, Fergus and Fredrik turned three years old today. Pics and video of the day’s celebrations (which included beagle baths) are now up at «their website». Enjoy!
And Happy Number Three boys!
… and it’s available «here». Enjoy.
The beagle boys escaped tonight, the first time they’ve given us the slip since June. They’re fine — they’re asleep all around the den right now. The strong winds this evening had blown the front gate open a crack, just enough for them to test it and push against it and get out, and I heard the gate slam in the wind and bolted out the back door, but by that time they were long gone.
The only thing working in our favor as we went through the ritual of panicking and getting our coats and flashlights and rushing up and down the block and driving to the neighborhood on the other side of the woods was ….. the cold. It was 24 degrees outside, 10 degrees with wind chill. About 20 minutes after we’d first discovered them gone I was standing on the front lawn wondering where to look next. Fred and Fergus appeared from the driveway of the neighbor’s house on the north side of us, trotting anxiously, their tails tucked between their legs. We got them back in the house after much loud scolding and door-slamming.
We then went with flashlights up the street hunting for Feargal, and he eventually appeared, running skittishly along the side of a house a couple of doors up from us. We were yelling our lungs out at him to stop, but he was either scared stiff or more interested in the smells in the grass. Luckily, he sprinted toward the open gate and ran into the backyard and waited at the back door for me to let him in. All in all, a quick end to a blood-pressure-raising episode.
One breakout every eight months is not frequent, but it’s still nerve-racking for us when it happens.
Culture and Society & Civil Liberties
… to keep up a blog like this one, which has, at various times in the past, been chock-a-block with details and observations from our lives. Living two years back in California, with the attendant extreme stresses, drained the blogging impulse from both of us. Plus, there was the whole medical drama on my part.
It would be great to have all kinds of observations about Nashville here, just as we did in Ann Arbor, but … well, we’re older and tired-er than we were in Ann Arbor. But still, we’ll try to do better.
Two things: Voters of Maine, except the quarter million who voted to stand up for marriage equality last Tuesday, … well, they suck. Marriage equality is coming to the United States and you will be embarrassed by this travesty of justice, this orgy of discrimination and hate, when the day arrives. I’m holding fast to Dr. Martin Luther King’s statement, “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.” As the LA Times reported:
“It is “one of King’s most riveting lines, spoken in Montgomery, Alabama after the long and dangerous march from Selma in March, 1965. King said he knew people were asking how long it would take to achieve justice. “How long?” he asked, over and over, making listeners desperate for an answer — and then he supplied the answer. “How long? Not long. Because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It was a refrain King came to use often, sometimes referring to the “arc of history,” sometimes to the “arc of the moral universe.”“
The arc is bending toward marriage equality. It will come, probably before my I leave the planet. And that, I will hold to fastly.
Secondly, I finally summoned the will and physical ability to return to the classroom and do a half-day substitute teaching, first time in six months. I have another assignment lined up for next Tuesday. It was exhausting and it was my limit (I’m not ready for full days yet), but it was also fun and reminded me why I like teaching kids. I’ll get more and more into the daily grind until the end of school in May, then have some rest time and will start a second master’s degree program, to become certified in the early childhood autism special education and applied behavior therapy. That program at Vanderbilt starts in August, and I’m looking forward to it.
In the meantime, the beagles are fat and happy and having fun in the leaves. I found a largish tick on Fergus yesterday, that had to be removed before going to work; it was probably a souvenir of our tramps through the woods on the battlefield of Chickamauga last weekend. Otherwise, the boys are doing great.
And Nashville … an awesome place to live. We’re coming up on the first anniversary of the flight out of California to safety and haven of Tennessee. And don’t regret for a minute the decision. Plus, our landladies and neighbor and neighborhood and schools are far superior to what we left behind in Brentwood.
So, it’s all good.
I once got death threats for taking a stand like this … but … «the Duncan Banner reports that DPS has reached a contract agreement with Air Evac» (the reporter doesn’t mention the cost) to cover student athletes if they get injured in any situation.
Why just the athletes?? Where’s the coverage for ALL Duncan students? Why does Oklahoma put such a premium on the athletics over academics and athletes over scholars?
I mean really … if a kid at DHS has a heart attack and collapses, are they really going to say, “Oh, you’re not on the football team? Well, a regular ambulance is on its way and your parents will be billed. Hope the ambulance gets you up to Duncan Regional in time and that your parents have insurance.”
It is understandable that coverage is needed for games. But the Banner article notes that even if the athletes are not in a game, just, say, sitting on a school bus that has a wreck, the mediflight coverage will be there for them. And what about regular students on the buses? They’ll airlift you to Oklahoma City if you’re on the wrestling team, but leave you for ground transport to Duncan Regional if you’re a plain old regular student?
It would probably help if the article were better written. What is the cost? Does it really exclude regular students? Is it really just for the athlete class? So many questions.
But again my conscience, still intact on this issue, makes me draw my line in the sand again, taking an unpopular stand that got me in such hot water in the summer of ’89, 20 years ago … such hot water that people flooded my parents with obscene and threatening phone calls, there were calls for my tarring and feathering and being run out of town on a rail and for awhile there we were genuinely afraid for my safety.
But I said it then and I repeat it now. I didn’t back down then even in the face of vile threats. I have to take the same position then and now: Academics should always take precedence over, not a back seat to, athletics. Yes, even and especially in the state of Oklahoma.
When you sign contracts for exclusive helicopter airlifts for injured athletes, you send several messages: That athletes are special and elite, and regular students are somehow not deserving of the same kind of perks and considerations. You devalue non-athletes.
I’m hoping there’s more to this than just what is presented in the article. Having been Duncan Public Schools’ Head Cheerleader (Director of PR), I do also still believe that DPS is a wonderful district and has its students’ best interests first and foremost. But I think, pun intended, they’ve dropped the ball on this one. I hope I’m wrong.
Culture and Society & Politics
• «We lost Walter Cronkite this week» (along with the last vestiges of American journalism).
• In Salt Lake City, the ‘Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’, which had no problem blitzkrieging California and spending millions getting Prop H8 passed, is «extremely unhappy now that us queers are shoving back right in their own front yard» I say, “More Kiss-Ins in front of hateful churches! Amen.
• In San Francisco, the NTSB will investigate the crash of two Muni Metro light rail trains at West Portal station that «injured 48 on Saturday. I’ve ridden those trains and gone through that station many times; this was no surprise.
• In New York City, The Right Stuff‘s Tom Wolfe writes, on the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, that «NASA neglected to hire a philosopher and that the space program ended the moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface». He posits that Werner von Braun was just such a philosopher, but, and this is the money quote, “Unfortunately, NASA couldn’t present as its spokesman and great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht with a heavy German accent.” The program, he says, is doomed from the lack of a philosopher just at a time when it should be “building a bridge to the stars.”
• According to an internal report issued last year, the Justice Department — the federal department charged with protecting civil rights and civil liberties — under Alberto Gonzales, «blacklisted applicants for internships and honors programs based on their membership in LGBT or other “liberal” groups». “According to the Justice Department’s 2008 internal report, candidates to the Honors Program whose applications indicated liberal affiliations were rejected at a high rate, around 55 percent, as opposed to candidates who had conservative affiliations, who were rejected at a rate of about 18 percent.” Color me unsurprised.
It’s a mere 74 degrees in Music City. Happy mild summer Sunday!
Currently Reading: The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens.
Never forget: Brisenia Flores, victim of right-wing hate.
Above: Morning Through Our Bedroom Window | 23-Aug-11 | «More Photos»
Header Image: Dumaine Street near Bourbon, New Orleans, LA | 27-Jun-11
Home
The Start Page
Archive
Everything We've Written
Ask
About This Site
Collect
Our Media Collections
Contact
Contact Us
Feed
Syndicate this site in Atom
Link
Recommended Reading
Look
Photograph Galleries
Read
The Blog
Alternative Film Guide
Thinking Film
Blurbomat
Dooce's Husband
Civil War Memory
Reflections of a High School History Teacher & Civil War Historian
Conelrad
All Things Atomic | The Golden Age of Homeland Security
Conelrad Adjacent
Atomic Secrets, Missing Persons and General Cold War Strangeness from the obsessives next door at CONELRAD.com.
Dooce
A Crackpot, Plain and Simple
FP Passport
The blog of Foreign Policy
I Blame the Patriarchy
Patriarchy Blaming
Joe. My. God.
Average Joe
Pleasant Family Shopping
A Nostalgic Look Back at Supermarkets, Discount Stores and More from the Past
Random Thoughts
Random Thoughts from Random Places
Serial Ganker
No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulderblades will seriously cramp his style.
The Daily Mirror
Larry Harnisch Reflects on Los Angeles History
Towleroad
A Site with Homosexual Tendencies
Airline Meals
Airline Catering News, With 22,000 Pics from 597 Airlines.
Airliners.Net
The Best Airplane Information, Aviation Photos and Aviation News with 1,842,095 photos online.
AV Herald
Incidents and News in Aviation.
Aviation World
Pilot and Enthusiast Superstores in Toronto and Chicago.
BTS: Airline On-Time Statistics
Detailed Airline Performance Data.
Flight Aware
Live Flight Tracking.
KBNA Air Traffic
Nashville International Feed from LiveATC.Net.
Michael Boyd's Aviation Hot Flash
News and Opinion from the Boyd Group.
Seat Guru
Airline Seating Charts.
Uniform Freak
Cliff Muskiet's 1002 different stewardess uniforms from 406 airlines.
Hannah Bell's Journal
On Public Education
Schools Matter
Issues in Public Education Policy
Enclave
Nashville North-by-Northwest
Nashville Post Politics
Political Views
Nashville Weather
NWS Latest Conditions
Pith in the Wind
Nashville Scene's Blog