Passage

My dear mom died night before last. We'll be, not offline at all, but very occupied for the next while, regrouping and helping my father who is staggered by this.

Peace out.

I honestly don't know

I have no time to pay attention to ANYthing going on in the world right now. OK, yeah, if I can write a blog entry, I could instead spend my time googling the mosque-at-G-Zero controversy and look at all sides.

I'd rather rant so here's what I think. I have no idea whether this mosque would be a shady attempt to slyly install something with radical Islamist ties there, or whether it's just your basic mosque of your basic Muslim faith.

Instead I'll spin off on what I'd like.

I'd like a mosque, a cathedral, a synagogue, a Buddhist temple, and a scientific foundation to be built at G-zero. All 5, in a circle. And in the center of the circle, a school of tolerance, sanity and, duh, knowledge, administered jointly by all 5.

I really have nihil patience right now with all this endless shit. I want all parties to call a halt to violence, put-down rhetoric, kinder-and-gentler "for your own good" urgings. I want a world of "This is who we are. If you want to know more, we'll answer your questions."

GOD I am SICK of all this SHIT. So much time, so many resources and lives wasted on it. All I wonder is, will the world grow up before it ends?

It's back.

Our gold medallion, for Top-Rated Seller status.

I should be sincerely sorry to see my neighbor's children devoured by wolves.

- Waldo Lydecker

You can say, and I'm not arguing, that Laura is sentimental melodrama.

Yes, it's full of 1940's social protocol and silly hats. Yes, as all my Twelve-Step Group friends have said many times, the love story is based on disaster bonding, the Lady and the Cop have little else in common, it isn't True Love.

But as filmmaking it's so well-crafted that it mends some of those plausibility seams, and if you don't buy that, it's still sumptuous to watch. The one Oscar it won, out of 5 nominations, was for cinematography, but the art direction was nominated too and the two work together. I don't think there's a single object, moment, or shadow in the movie that wasn't chosen to be there, and chosen well.

I find new things in it every time, which is why yall are being subjected to More Than You Wanna Know about why I love this movie. Complete with not-great screen shots in which I sometimes concealed the dvd-player controls and sometimes forgot.


Here in this flashback, Waldo Lydecker tells the detective how he used his newspaper column to mock the talent of Laura's painter boyfriend. Laura, still unaware that Waldo wasn't just her caring mentor but her stalker, found the column witty and insightful, and dumped the boyfriend.

The screenwriters could have written this scene various ways. Waldo is telling the story, but viewers could have seen Laura delighting in the nasty column all by herself - she'd certainly have told Waldo how great she found it. Or he could have come over to her place to observe her reaction, but sat with her at a breakfast table, with Laura fully dressed.

Instead they brilliantly, creepily, place Waldo there in her bedroom, while she, in negligee, is served breakfast in bed.

The camera pans away from Waldo quickly and focuses on a medium close-up of Laura giggling at the column. Possibly to make trimming out Waldo easy, to allow censoring if the Hays Office balked.

  But Waldo is definitely there and that adds an icky intimacy to their relationship. It's filmed to demonstrate both how un-platonic his feeling for her was, and how clueless she was about that fact. It's wonderful detail that adds dimension to the characters and a quiet clue to the murder motive that the viewers might or might not catch.

Everything in this movie is about detail. Starting with something little, look at Gene Tierney's outfit in the flashback scenes depicting the fateful day Laura Hunt introduced herself to famous critic Waldo Lydecker.


The costume designer has to outfit Laura for a major character development that takes place within a few hours.

This is a just-out-of-high-school Laura Hunt. Pre-success. Pre-sophistication. But smart, tasteful and ambitious, which is why she wants a celebrity to endorse a product and get her ad campaign noticed. In the restaurant scene, where she's vulnerable and naive, she wears a tasteful but unsophisticated suit with a boxy jacket. The jacket has a demure white collar and cuffs, country girl dressing professional.

 Shot down by the acid-tongued Lydecker, she returns to the steno pool at her ad agency.

But he has seen something exceptional in her - or sees a predatory opportunity. Take your pick. I choose both. Anyway, the repentant Lydecker comes to see her that same afternoon, to apologize and give her the product endorsement she wanted. But their roles have flipped. Now he's the uncomfortable one, on her turf, and wanting her approval. Laura has taken off the jacket and her outfit now looks, still unsophisticated and demure, but sleeker, showing innate good taste on a budget, and self-esteem.


More great costuming -- as the plot thickens, we need to suspect several people, including the weak, passive Shelby.  How to make this dork seem menacing...??

The coat. If he just stood there in his business suit with that gun, he'd look goofy, but with the coat over his shoulders like a villain's cape, he looks potentially evil.


The sets .... Oh my. There are three New York apartments shown, all belonging to well-off artsy folks. Each is unique, each reflects the owner. Waldo Lydecker, famous columnist and radio personality, has it all, including a leopard-skin chair in his bathroom, and a collection of masks on the wall that includes, as Detective Mark McPherson notices, one scary one given a central spot.


Laura's aunt is also well-off, but her taste is a little more classic and even staid. Hers is the home of an older woman with money, who wants acceptance by high society but can't entirely extinguish her showgirl origins (That, by the way is in the book - the movie doesn't bother to explain her) or lose her taste for superficial pretty boys who love her money.

Laura, now 5 years into being mentored by Lydecker, has been influenced by his tastes, but still likes sentimental music. And ruffles. The first few times I watched Laura, I thought those ruffled lampshades were just 1940's kitsch, but the sets are dressed with a lot more character insight than that. Laura Hunt is a self-made woman, with sophistication modifying her sentimental tastes, but not eradicating them.

My dvd of the movie has features including commentary by a film professor who mentions something I too noticed, but I think the professor misses the meaning in it. That's the importance of Bessie, the maid.


The film professor says that this, in which Detective Mark McPherson meets Bessie, is an unimportant little scene, but it's not. Bessie is a vital force in the movie and it's a key scene.

The movie is famous for its theme of the detective falling for the dead woman whose murder he's investigating. He doesn't fall for her portrait, whatever other observers say about it. The portrait that the people who loved her draw with words does it.  The painting itself is merely a tangible object he can focus on ,and possibly own.  Bessie loves her employer deeply and blisters Mark's ears with a tirade about Miss Hunt's virtues as a kind, giving, wonderful, true lady, and this is the testimony that tips the scales for McPherson.

Bessie is the method by which the script makes a case for these two possibly having a reality-based love story. Bessie is a hard-knocks Irish woman who hates cops: "I was raised to spit when I saw one." She destroyed evidence to help her beloved Laura keep a good reputation even in death, and she's proud of it.

And McPherson is smart enough to admire Bessie, to let the evidence problem slide, and to see the value of having her as an ally. In that one short scene she drops her cop-hating ways and becomes his biggest fan. Watch her through her few scenes in the rest of the movie. She looks at him as though he made Laura rise from the dead.

Bessie sees that both Mark and Laura are exceptional people, each transcending the world he or she comes from, and it's her devotion to both that symbolizes a solid and reliable bridge between Laura's and Mark's worlds.

The film professor also mentions that Bessie wears the same outfit two days in a row. "It's a one-outfit role" she laughs. I don't think that's it.

Same dress, different day

For a maid who's been presented as uneducated, rather superstitious, and as having a black-and-white view of people, that is a very classy, tasteful dress. Especially for her to come do housekeeping tasks in.

She has actually just come directly from the funeral, according to the book, and apparently they wrote a funeral scene for the film but ditched it. That could explain her nice dress in the first scene, but not the fact that she's wearing it the next day, too.

Nothing says this, but the attention to detail in this movie is so good that I'm pretty dern sure we're meant to see Laura's kind and close relationship with Bessie in that dress. I think Laura gave Bessie the dress, either new or as a cast-off, and that's why Bessie wants to keep wearing it.  Strictly my opinion.

Judith Anderson.  I LOVE Judith Anderson.  You just have to listen as she delivers lines nobody else could speak without sounding like they had a mouthful of graham crackers:


"He knows I know he is just what he is. He also knows that I don't care."

I love Vincent Price, too. Watch him clench his jaw when he's nervous. Watch him always try to make himself look good, so that when he really is telling the truth, and when he's not, he's hard to sort out.

Clifton Webb. Sarcasm at its finest. "Haven't you heard of science's newest triumph; the doorbell?"

This is one case in which the movie is an improvement over the book. The book has a point-of-view problem that filmmaking sort of renders moot. In the novel, several characters narrate, but in each one's segment, the author is forced to tell us things that the current narrator couldn't know, so it kind of shifts into a vague omniscient narrator. I've been told that this is called "author intrusion." They dropped the narrator idea in the film. The camera simply takes us through the investigation.

Just watch it, or watch it again, in a good print. It's a lot of fun.

Me and Melanie Wilkes

I just finished a Live Chat with a rep to voice my concerns about problems with our online business. (I'm avoiding searchable keywords in this post.)

I wasn't expecting to get our highest-rated seller status back, but wanted to protest the policy, show what it's like on this end, explain the need for some kind of dispute/appeals process, and, basically Bitch Nicely.

Larry does more business work than I do, especially lately, but he told me "You need to contact them because I will turn into a New Yorker if I do it." I, on the other hand, will turn on the Southern Cream and Sugar.

Which I did, quite calculatingly. I was raised southern, raised to Work It and know how, but I also grew up in a different era from the one in which the people who taught me Southern Lady Behavior grew up.

I grew up in a revolutionary era; protests, feminism, skirts that did NOT cover our knees. One grandmother really had trouble with that. But not with short skirts (short within reason) when one was standing or walking. In particular, it was when sitting that a lady's skirt always covered her knees, and that was often achievable even with a mid-thigh skirt, if it wasn't a tight one. Ever after, I could feel very comfortable on my feet in a short skirt, but always spread it over my knees when sitting, or felt, if not guilty, at least aware of it when the style didn't allow knee coverage.

See what yall who weren't raised Southern missed? There are odd rules you don't even know about.

Anyway I was a grouchy anti-authority child in an era that encouraged that, and most of those proper southern behaviors became things I could do but not things that were a real deep-seated, autopilot part of me.

So with the online representative, I was partly calculating and partly not. Honest, there wasn't total cynicism in my niceness because I used to work for a county government, and got it in the face when someone was displeased with rules made way above my head. I hated the fact that hardly anybody grasps the obvious, which was that *I* had no power to change a rule for them. I know well that these reps are in the same boat. I've been on the receiving end, do NOT want to dish it out.

But I also knew that turning on the charm would make him/her (it was a her) more likely to listen. Nice, even vaguely witty words were more likely to get read, even if i repeated the complaints (A whole technique of its own -- rewording, to make it less of a dead-horse-flogging, and more like a clarification, or a refinement of the original thought), and my suggestions passed upwards (about requiring the customer to tell them what upset them, even if they don't tell us, thereby allowing appeal). Couple of repetitions of it being about power to dispute for us, couple of repetitions of how there really ARE nutjobs out there, who shouldn't have unquestioned power to hurt us financially. Blah blah.

And when I was done I felt wrung out.

So, Melanie Wilkes.

(This clip is completely unnecessary for this post, and both hilarious and annoyingly hyped up, but the part where Carol Burnett tells Dinah Shore to go stick her head in the punchbowl starts at about 1:45. It kinda goes with my point.)




Melanie in Gone With the Wind, typifies a woman who's physically fragile but mentally/emotionally strong. Much more adaptable to change than is her poor lost husband Ashley. Quite approving when Scarlett shoots the marauder, lies magnificently when the family out in the field starts to run home at the sound of the shooting, and has no compunctions about hiding the body.

But nice. Sweet. Self-sacrificing. And fragile.

It's supposed to show that physical fragility and mental strength can coexist, but as I look back on all the times I've gone into gear to Charm The Bleep out of someone, it tires me awfully. Not just now, not just stress or advancing age. Always did.

I don't think Melanie faded away at the end because "she never had any strength, all she had was heart." I think niceness sucked the strength out of her. Niceness Kills! That punchbowl can drown you. You know, just a thought.

I'm going away on a train

Not literally. It's something I say.

There's a wonderful 1950 movie called So Young, So Bad, about girl juvenile delinquents. A very very young Rita Moreno (she's billed as Rosita Moreno) plays a shy, sensitive girl who got left holding the bag for some crime (a robbery? Can't remember) committed by her creepo boyfriend. She's too emotionally delicate, cannot endure the rough life in the reformatory, and constantly says that the creepo boyfriend is surely going to come and break her out. I mean, he's so-o-o grateful that he got away and so-o-o sorry she got caught, and he lo-o-oves her with A Love That's True, so he'd never leave her in this awful place!

As the movie nears its end, young Rosita is driven over the edge of insanity. Clearly Creepo isn't coming but she dissociates and babbles: "I'm going away! I'm going away on a train! He's coming for me and we're going away! We're going away on a train!"

I've used it as an expression of Mental Breakdown, ever since.

A month ago ebay quintupled its fees to list a book for sale in stores. From 3 cents to 20 cents each. Making it nearly impossible to leave listings on for months until their buyer appears.

Only we got a break. We paid less. We got this break for being a Top-Rated Seller with outstandingly good ratings from buyers.

Today, we lost that rating, based on getting a 3rd poor mark for "Communication".

These marks are simple "click-the stars to rate." Anonymously. There is no way for us to know what we did or to whom we did it.

A week ago, a buyer wrote us a very frustrated email saying: "This is my THIRD attempt to get you to answer my question! I will leave appropriate ratings for this!"

Only we had never received the two previous emails. Everybody says that, but the messages, swear-on-the-Bible, never came. I checked every place a note or message could be left. I told her that, and she was nicely mollified, said "I understand, these things happen." I'm pretty sure the bad communication rating didn't come from her.

But that means that a lost message might have happened to someone else. Someone who did not try again. Who just decided we didn't give a rat's...

Or maybe not. Maybe it was something else. We aren't allowed to know, and can't dispute the particulars. It will -- or, it would -- cost us literally hundreds of dollars in higher fees and there is no appeal. Yes, I will contact them to dispute it, but if we get a break, it will be strictly because they took our word. That's because the system creates no details or evidence whatsoever.

I, The Buyer, can do this to a seller because they said something rude, or because they said, "I'm really sorry but we can't send you a diamond watch with your book for a dollar" or because they gave me a kind caring answer and perfect satisfaction, but closed the email with "Have a nice day!" and the phrase annoyed me. Or for no reason at all, OR by clicking the wrong star by freakin mistake.

Anonymous ratings are clicked by the buyer with the following instructions: "These are anonymous so don't be afraid to rate honestly!"

There's no reason to give anyone, ever, complete unfettered freedom to give unfair, unwarranted or erroneous ratings that will never be questioned. Sellers can only leave them positive feedback now.

There's also no reason why ebay can't require the buyer to give reason or details to them, to the ebay Powers ... and then simply keep the identifying info from us, so we can at least ask ebay to look at it again.

But there's no information, no appeal, and we can be accused without any method of defense. And it can cost us reams of money.

It will not cost us all that extra money, because we're dumping listings. Each would cost us if we let it renew. Those 20 centses would be a mountain of dimes in no time.

Instead, we'll have to constantly add and delete active listings. It will become time intensive. Meanwhile, we live here to act as my parents' assisted living, and recent health issues -- fortunately things that allow at least partial recovery -- are causing them to need a lot of our help these days. We were just on the brink of configuring our work, writing, and family activities into some kind of manageable routine, but that, because of losing our seller status, has now gone up in smoke.

The display on my camera is burning out.

Out-of-town guests are coming.

Just for today, I will not drink.

I'm online so much anyway that it won't really change my online presence, except that I will not be fine-tuning blog posts. Blogging is a great escape, swell way to vent, and general line to the world, so I really can't see giving it up. I may post a little less but it actually may not be noticeable. What's more likely to be noticeable is that I'll post off the top of my head. I'll sound more scattered, less thoughtful, and somewhat weirder. Thought I'd issue my disclaimer now.

Though I may be so strange already that that won't be perceptible either.

The Very Tiny Mantis

This little guy(?), who is hanging around upside down on the underside of our front rail, is the tiniest praying mantis I ever saw! He must have just hatched. That's a dime on the rail, for reference.

It really exists. Honest.

I won't try to pin the slowness of my completing this novel (which everybody's probably sick of my talking about, and which I'm sicker of than anybody) on all the real-life things that take a lot of my time. Some do, but I'd write at a snail's pace anyway.

It's not really a mystery story. A fairly attentive reader could figure out what the deal is very early, and that's the way I wanted it. But it's a plot with mystery elements, where events have to hide the true nature of what's going on, and to mislead some of the characters, and, honest, I'm probably too ADD to write stuff like this. There's too much to keep track of.

Every time I polish off another draft, I truly think it's done. I print up a copy and plan to read through it for typos and minor problems, sure that they'll be quick fixes and that I'll be hitting the "Make it public" button very soon. The picture shows 4 different drafts, going back a couple years.

This print-up is both a self-indulgence -- seeing it as a real book is like a reward, and I need that reinforcement -- and useful, because it's a lot easier to edit. I can catch typos much better in this format.

But then I find, not only typos, but true plot holes. Really really bad things, like an event.... followed by a chapter describing changes caused by that event that develop over a week's time.... only I kinda forgot that I wrote the chapter to take place only a day later.

It's not that these goofs are hard to fix. They're pretty easy. The problem is that I find them after so many re-readings that I fear other screwups/anachronisms/etc., will be lurking there even when I think I've caught and fixed them all. Readers will catch them right away and say, "That's ridiculous." The New Yorker magazine will feature me in one of their "Our Forgetful Authors" dingbats....

That's a joke. Twenty people might read this book if I get really lucky.

Anyway, I thought I'd show yall, right here, the true, actual, verified existence of the thing! See? There it is! It's real. Lousy, but real. And I'm certain that this next read-through and cleanup will be the final one......

I hope. Because I can't "system restore" this miserable, soundless, freeze-and-crash computer till it's done.

Sunshine. Again.

Does it get any more mundane or impersonal than a weather post? Well, I am sick of chirpy sunshine and I'm starting to take it personally.

Over and over, the forecast tells us we'll get a storm. What's more, over and over, the weather radar will show a big ol' Jabba The Hut of a storm system heading right for us.

So I act like it's real. I finish using the dryer or the stove. I shower early so as to not get fried by a lightning strike. I wrap up computer activities and shut down. We decide not to set the trap for our latest intrusive raccoon that night since the poor thing would sit out in a storm in a metal trap.

Then we wait. And the storm vanishes. It breaks up, or rains itself out before it gets here, or shrinks to a tiny green/yellow (green for light-to-moderate rain, yellow for heavy rain) blip on the radar that now misses us.

Last night, the big green-and-yellow Symbolic Storm was churning across the radar map, bearing down. No rain or electrical rumbling all night. Overcast all day today, until about 3PM and then the blasted sun came out.

AGAIN.

We get an odd shower, so it's not like we're under some kind of dark-fantasy-novel curse but it's not enough.

I like storms, and I even like simple dreary rainy days. Even I can get too much of that but my tolerance level for cloudiness is very high. I'm not a sunny person. I feel affirmed and nurtured by grouchy weather.

We'd need rain whether I liked it or not, though. I. Am. Sick. of pretty pretty pretty, sunny sunny sunny. Maybe I should go outside and wash the car.

First, assemble your ingredients...

Vegetable gardening has a down side. If the garden is a bust, that's frustrating. If the garden produces loads of stuff, I have to cook.

This year we got smart and planted in early March instead of June, and it paid off. My beets and carrots are looking impressive (pictures later), though that, as i discovered last year, doesn't mean there's any substantial root under all the lovely leaves. I'm leaving them in the ground for awhile because Larry's plantings are yielding so much. The squash started coming in, the tomatoes are piling up, and he's picked a couple zucchini.

I will never never never enjoy cooking for its own sake. It really is possible to be a good, if not great, cook, but never really find it fun. Means to an end. Period.

The home grown produce is forcing me -- horrors! -- to learn new recipes and processes. After i'd made 2 of my old standby squash casseroles, I had to blanch and freeze the extra squash. This being a new experience, I couldn't do it in my sleep, the way I can do longtime recipes I've made a gazillion times -- recipes that I have, actually, selected for my repertoire just because they're that easy and foolproof. Not that it's hard to blanch and freeze, but to discover that I had to, like, research and read instructions and everything.

Cooking, in my opinion, should be doable in one's sleep at all times.

But I pulled out and put back books until I found that Fanny Farmer explained it (Joy of Cooking doesn't tell you how to blanch vegetables for freezing - unless I just couldn't find it in the book. You gotta have Fanny Farmer. Or Google, but I like books), and got it done.

Today's project: zucchini. I've never bought or cooked zucchini. I decided to start with something decadent. If I have to actually work at this, I want a treat.

So! Zucchini Bread! I really love it when something that's actually a cake is named a "bread," which sounds like something that it's mature, responsible and healthy to eat.

Still, this would be Work. That 4-letter word.

All the cooking guides tell you to assemble your equipment and ingredients before you start. That's no problem. I wouldn't even consider starting without the most important equipment of all:

1. Music. Keeps my brain from shorting out. Well, usually.
2. My thickest, most comfy bedroom slippers.
3. A headband. Cooking is aggravating enough without hair in my eyes.

Oh...oh yeah, the edible ingredients.
Not pictured are the spices, eggs and oil. Or the zucchini themselves, but they are shown below.

This is our yield so far, but the heat and the bugs that plagued us last year are taking over again now that we're back into June (97 degrees f., yesterday, high humidity, ghastly, and the weather won't break for another day or 2). Anyway these 2 may be it for this year.

Notice the difference! I love genetics. The zucchini were planted next to the yellow crookneck squash and our bees cross-pollinated squash pollen into one plant.


And here's the bread. It hardly rose. It looks less than appetizing, to me anyway.

So I dreaded tasting it, but I steeled myself and sliced off some.

It's wonderful.

It's delicious. Seriously. I'm stunned. So I guess the whole thing was worth it! This will definitely join the recipe repertoire. After all, eating "bread," especially with green vegetables right there in it, is mature, responsible and healthy.

Why vote?

They give you a sticker. I like stickers.

God's will, my ass

To feel the truth in Christianity, I have to go back, back, deep into its quiet beginning, because the insane corruptions of it that I keep running into enrage me.

I'm talking about its earliest days when no one had any motive to make up the things they claimed --- not even the motive of being gathered 'round and listened to in awe and called "Wise One" or "leader." No liturgy, no "ology".

In that early dawn light, a handful of people walked through the world saying that they had met someone extraordinary, had been befriended and taught and embraced by God Himself, God willing to incarnate as a man and willing to feel every joy and misery it brings. It redefined joy for them, and they said it was for anyone who wants it, not just them for being So Special, which they weren't, particularly.

Stories of the disciples depict them often as dolts who had little understanding when Jesus tried to teach them things, who said, "Huh? Whuh?" a lot and, even wimped out and denied Him when things got nerve-wracking. If they were all, like, into themselves, they sure seem to have dismissed the golden opportunity to retcon their reputations, or else we'd instead have all kinds of boring stories of how Calm and Wise and "We totally got it!" they were when they hung around with Jesus.

That's why, no matter how mutated the faith has become with its bizarre later thousand-page theology textbooks, the beginning....the very very early beginning rings true to me.

And why bastardizations of it infuriate me. They hurt the most vulnerable. Not wanting it is one thing. Wanting it but being driven away from it by some twisting of its tenets is another.

So lately I keep running into personal stories by Christians who are undergoing horrific pain and suffering -- illness, accidents-- and are saying "This was ordained by God," and my blood pressure threatens to blow the top of my head clean off.

I don't want to explode at them. I admire them. They're a beautiful affirmation of not rejecting God, of being sustained by God through pain. Why they need to believe not only that He allowed their pain, but that He ordained it, I even kind of understand.

I've heard too many abuse victims say of their abuser: "He had a good reason." Making God the Ultimate Abuser, whose abuse we must not only accept as "reasonable" but celebrate --"His hurting me to glorify Himself is a privilege!"-- is similarly twisted thinking. Who could blame anybody for rejecting such a religion?

If God is a sociopath, send me south.

Each one who's written a "God ordained this" essay has hauled out the Bible verses about how God's wisdom is not our wisdom and God's ways are not our ways, and I'm on board with that. If I'm to believe in God at all, I have to believe that His essence is way beyond human understanding, and agree with Paul that on this earth we see only "as through a glass, darkly."

We want explanations. We want to believe that when we hurt there's some reason, some way it's making good triumph over evil.

It does and it can, but that God can transform us and overpower evil does not require that God use us as bait. Why would He need to? To use suffering that evil visits on us, for turning the Adversary's own deeds against him, is plenty -- for God to instigate suffering would be nonsensical, and superfluous.

The whole basis of the Biblical God -- call it literal, call it metaphor -- but the basis is that God wants unblemished joy for His children and that we, humanity, let evil into the world. And that, even in getting us through this now-painful life, God does not cause the pain.

The many wrongs that we do to one another are the biggest source of our pain, and we may eventually get beyond them, whether there's a God going "Finally the dimwits get it!" or not. Others, the random things, may, because we can't stop them, be The Devil's best weapon, but the message is and always was that evil is not God's doing.

Take that lovely Book of Job ("Please!" Haha, I understand). Does God perform the acts of torturing a follower for the revelation of His Glory?

Does He even come up with the idea?

NO. It is Satan's will, not God's. God is certainly depicted as Sovereign, and could refuse to allow it, but does not, according to the book.

In the opinions of many, that makes Him a useless, if not a non-existent, God.

Understandable. But no matter how you feel about the God idea, there's a clear difference between allowing hurt to come down on us, and instigating it, hiring the Adversary as hit man for the dirty work. A big honking difference.

So kick my blog to the Christian curb, but I'm not OK with the idea that God would ever create suffering for His people "for His Glory, hallelujah!" That appalls me beyond words, though I obviously can come up with a few.

For some people the agony of life seems almost all-encompassing. But through the relatively light problems of my past and present, and through whatever may come, the one thing that must stand, that must be there for me when there's nothing else, has to be the belief that God would never never raise His hand against me.

I weep for my faith, and I long for its cool dawn of simple belief that something holy had happened.

"Doing that for which we came."

My paternal grandfather was an Army surgeon who cared for the wounded in France during World War I. How cool is it that we have a candid snapshot of him playing checkers during his off hours? Even my grandmother didn't know the exact where, when or who of this photo -- she merely wrote on the back "Stuart & friend - 1918 -or 19".

He wrote the description, below, on the back of these 2 postcards, which my grandmother kept.


Began work in this hospital April 1, 1918. Receiving patients from the greatest battle in history the German western offensive directed at the junction of the English and French armies. The casualties were terrific and the wounds horrible. Men were mangled beyond comprehension. The battle started March 21 and many of these cases were wounded during the first three days, and had received no attention since. Needless to say, the infections were all of a severe nature.

Madame Brisoniér is in charge of this institution, there were no French physicians to


look after the patients so they called our Camp Hosp. #14 A. E. F. The French in attendance are very delightful. The patients are very brave and have much courage.

The work is the most interesting I have ever had. I feel at last that we are doing that for which we came. The reconstruction surgery holds a great amount of interest for me.

The wounds range from slight shell wounds to mangled masses of flesh and bone.

~~~
Kind of an abrupt end, but the cards aren't postmarked and were surely enclosed with a full letter.

Wherever some are destroying, others are repairing.

Wishing all a good weekend!

More sleep would help

This is gonna be one of those How I Spent My Week entries.

Saturday, May 8:

Harley-Davidson Bike Week is beginning. It happens every May. It is not a "week." It's 3 weeks. The roaring goes on most of the night. The rest of this week will take place under a lack of sleep. But, hey, there's nothing in particular going on.....

2PM: I get some ice out of the standing freezer. I walk away, expecting the freezer door to close itself as always. 8 hours later, at bedtime, I go back in (It's in the laundry room) and there it is. Caught on a wastebasket. Wide open. Much meltwater on the floor.

The outmoded technology of the freezer, combined with my laziness has had a benefit. It's an oldie, and needs defrosting. I haven't done that in 4 years. The ice buildup is still partly intact and some stuff still frozen. This only reinforces my belief that procrastination pays.

A large turkey has started to thaw, meaning I need to move it to the fridge, meaning I need to rearrange the fridge. I salvage some important stuff, but Larry's foot-tall snowman, made from the recent rare snowfall, is now a puddle in an aluminum pan, which is genuinely upsetting. The rest -- OK, if i close the freezer everything will refreeze and I won't know what came through and what has merely refrozen. But too much of the contents were expired items that needed throwing out anyway, and I am frikkin-A going to bed and not starting a piece-by-piece assessment tonight.

Sunday, Mother's Day. My father makes a wonderful cassoulet for dinner and gives us some. He's done a lot of cooking for 40 years now. He likes it. I can't even get him to stop, but I try to reciprocate more. Then I do some long-overdue cleanup of the laundry room. Larry has heavy-duty yard and garden work on his plate.

Monday -- A major rethawing and disposal of other freezer contents. Any leftover time is devoted to editing TWO book projects. One (my novel's final event) involves rewriting. The other involves searching through a lot of books for material. You'll get the particulars on that one, within 2-3 weeks. I think. The way things are going, don't hold me to that.

And: Oh crap, I have unpaid bills!

Tuesday -- A lot of business shipping to do (People are buying stuff!! Thank you, God!) Then it's roast-the-turkey time. I make a full dinner of it and take some to the 'rents. More editing.

Wednesday -- Mom has a doctor's appointment in Conway, about a 45-min drive. While she was getting ready to go, I had perused their bookshelves and borrowed a C. S. Lewis book, to see what Lewis said about "The World's Last Night." We get onto the Bible topic while I drive. I hadn't realized that the Rapture wasn't mentioned as such in any of the apocalyptic material, only by St. Paul in a letter. "Where did he get the idea?" I muse and she immediately answers, "He was referring to Matthew, where Jesus says 'Two will be in the field, and one will be taken and one will remain.'" I love talking to her about this stuff. She and I are spiritually on so much the same page, both irritated by the same negative, punishment-oriented, simpleminded interpretations, though she's a nicer person. I attempt to read while Fox News intrudes on the blaring waiting-room TV. I despise TV being forced on everyone in waiting rooms. The world hates readers.

Thursday -- Like a Mature, Responsible Old Person, I've given in and made my appointment for the [bleeping] routine colonoscopy, so this is the day of my pre-procedure consult. I sign in and am told that the insurance company will declare anything it turns up a "pre-existing condition" because we changed insurance last August. I cancel and set a September date.

I come home, eat too many potato chips out of frustration, and we pack the items we've sold for another (yes!) big shipping day.

Friday -- After we have a wonderful breakfast of Larry's blueberry pancakes, Larry heads alone to the PO and grocery store, and I head off with Mom for a different doctor's appointment. This waiting room also has a blaring TV, but it's tuned to Cartoon Network.

Back in my chair, I sigh. All kinds of intriguing audio/video offerings are getting posted by my friends on their blogs and Facebook. Problem is, all my editing has to be done on the old soundless PC. I plug in the Mac briefly and catch some of them. The phone rings. My brother, I'm told, will arrive after midnight. We are the Guest Quarters. Nothing is ready for a guest.

I have a few guest-prep duties, but most of it falls on Larry. He does a lot of laundry and cleaning anyway, and this week - oy. Anyway, those done, it's back to WinDuhs and my word processor. I've made time this week to pointlessly argue online but not to have fun. I decide to look over drafts of unfinished blog posts for something I can give a quick going over and post without much effort.

Another Saturday, and this enormous turkey will never end. Saturday is devoted to picking it over and making turkey pot pie, then dumping as much of the carcass as will fit into the crockpot for stock. I. Am. Sick. Of. Turkey. I make two pies and take one to the parents. My brother's one-night visit ends, but he's always fun and it saved us $8.00, or whatever the postage would have been, since we could send our nephew's birthday gift back with my bro. instead of having to mail it!

I wanted to get him the Leggo Taliban Hideout, but they were out of them, so I had to settle for a different set. OK, I'm lying. There is no such Leggo set. Anyway, I love getting out of the packing as much as I love saving the 8 bucks.

Sunday -- and I do nothing but edit. And obey the head-scratching orders of 3 demanding cats. Maybe tonight we'll get some rain which will keep the motorcycles off the roads and let us sleep.

Good night.

The nerve of these liberal professors.

Paris, 1121 :

...Around the year 1120, [Peter] Abelard published a little essay on the Trinity that was to prove more damaging to him than all the knives of Heloise's avengers [....]

Abelard "has defiled the church," [Bernard of Clairvaux] wrote to a Roman cardinal, "he has infected with his own blight the minds of simple people."

[Charged in absentia], Abelard arrived the next morning for the disputation only to find that the format was that of a trial.... He declined to participate in the proceedings and appealed directly to the pope to decide the issues presented....Innocent II condemned him as a heretic, excommunicated his followers, ordered his books to be burned in Saint Peter's Square, and commanded him to retire to a monastery, there to be perpetually silent. [1]

Paris. Unknown date, 1192-1203 :

From the Chartularium universitatis Parisiansis.
Letter from Stephen, Bishop of Tournai 1192-1203, to the Pope:

The studies of sacred letters among us are fallen into the workshop of confusion, while both disciples applaud novelties alone and masters watch out for glory rather than learning. They everywhere compose new and recent summulae and commentaries, by which they attract, detain, and deceive their hearers, as if the works of the holy fathers were not still sufficient, who, we read, expounded holy scripture in the same spirit in which we believe the apostles and prophets composed it. [2]

Oxford, c.1380 :

When [John Wycliffe's] doctrine on the Eucharist appeared, the friars and monks, the orthodox theologians of the place, united with the Chancellor Berton and a few seculars to condemn the thesis. A university officer was sent into Wycliffe's lecture-room to enjoin silence upon him. There he was found, propounding to his audience the impossibility of accidents without substance, and of the other metaphysical absurdities which he alleged against Transubstantiation. He appeared to be a little taken aback at the decree, but replied that it could not shake his opinion. [3]

University of Pavia, 1433 :

On Sunday, January 22, 1433 a public examination of a candidate in law was in progress in the cathedral. At the point in the proceedings where anyone in the audience might oppose granting the degree [Professor of Rhetoric, Lorenzo] Valla rose and apparently did exactly that, no doubt with sharp comments about the ignorance and barbarous language of the legist....The presiding bishop ordered Valla's arrest for precipitating the breach of decorum. Valla fled the church with law students in hot pursuit.

In one night in February 1433 Valla wrote a slashing attack denouncing the practice and teaching of civil law and its major figures, the revered Accursio, Bartolo, and Baldo degli Ubaldi. ... His was the first of several humanist attacks on traditional legal studies. [4]

University of Padua, 1555 :

While at Padua, [Professor of civil law Matteo Gribaldi Mofa] made little secret of his religious views. He did not attend mass, probably expressed himself freely, and opened his home to ultramontane Protestant students.. He also spent his vacations at his castle in Protestant Switzerland. The Paduan bishop became suspicious and Gribaldi's concurrent [i.e, fellow professor] denounced him. [Refusing to rebut the allegations] Gribaldi left Padua on April 25 1555. The University of Tubingen in Lutheran Wurttemberg immediately hired him....Gribaldi further developed his anti-Trinitarian views and arguments for religious toleration....and he lost that position in 1557....The Catholic University of Grenoble hired him for the second time in 1559. As at Padua, fellow professors denounced him for his religious views, but academic differences may also have separated them....Gribaldi again lost his professorship and retired to his Swiss mountain home, where he died in 1564. [5]

University of Bologna, 1570 :

On October 6, 1570, the Bolognese Inquisition arrested Girolomo Cardano, first ordinary professor of medical theory at Bologna....Without the trial records of the Bolognese Inquisition (of which little survived), it is not possible to determine which ideas were found objectionable and which errors he abjured. Certainly Cardano expressed views that ecclesiastical authorities might have found offensive. He strongly endorsed astrology and prepared a horoscope for Christ. He held Christianity to be the true religion but criticized religious writers, especially in the early church, for foolish statements. He wrote a defense of Nero in which he noted that the criteria for judging historical figures were historically conditioned and often wrong. He marveled at men who willingly endured martyrdom for various religious systems, not just Christianity. At times, Cardano seemed to adopt a relativistic view toward the world's religions, and he seemed indifferent to the institutional church. [6]

Harvard, 1700 :

At last, in 1685, Increase Mather came to the rescue by consenting to assume the place [of Harvard President] temporarily, giving it such time as he could spare from his duties as minister of the Second Church of Boston. [...] This was wholesome neglect, for it left the running of the college in the hands of the two tutors, John Leverett and William Brattle, both of them able, liberal and broadminded men. Excellent teachers, sharing their enthusiasms for science with their students, they labored to make Harvard a liberal arts college abreast of the best English standards. [...] Had Mather been more observant of what was going on under his very nose and less concerned with buttressing the control of the orthodox group over the college by means of a new charter, he might have checked this liberal drift. [7]

By the later years of the decade Mather had come to worry about the direction of the college -- the liberal direction. ... [In 1700, Mather] issued his Order of the Gospel, an effort to recall to New Englanders the great charge that history had given them.[8]

Let the Churches pray for the Colledge particularly, that God may ever Bless that Society with faithful Tutors that will be true to Christ's Interest and theirs, and not Hanker after new and loose ways. This is a matter of no small concernment. For if the Fountain whose Streams should make glad the City of God, be corrupted, Posterity will be Endangered thereby. [9]

Hungary, First Obstetrical Clinic of Vienna General Hospital (teaching clinic for university medical students), 1847 :

A young Hungarian physician named [Ignaz] Semmelweis...observed how frequently puerperal fever occurred in patients attended by students who were accustomed to go directly from the autopsy room to the maternity ward, and he came to the conclusion that uterine infection is caused by matter introduced into the birth canal from outside sources, through the hands of the nurse, doctor or other attendant. He succeeded in greatly reducing the amount of puerperal fever in his maternity clinics by the simple measure of requiring all attendants to wash and disinfect their hands before examining a patient. Other doctors were strongly opposed however to the ideas of Semmelweis and his methods were never widely adopted or well-known until long after the independent work of Lister (beginning 1864) had finally brought about the general use of antiseptic techniques. [10]

At the time, diseases were attributed to many different and unrelated causes. Each case was considered unique, just as a human person is unique. Semmelweis's hypothesis, that there was only one cause, that all that mattered was cleanliness, was extreme at the time, and was largely ignored, rejected or ridiculed. He was dismissed from the hospital for political reasons and harassed by the medical community in Vienna, being eventually forced to move to Pest [11]

--

[1] Richard E. Rubenstein, Aristotle's Children (Harcourt, 2003), pp. 116-125.

[2] Lynn Thorndyke, translator and editor, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (Norton, 1944, 1975), pp. 22-3.

[3] George Macaulay Trevelyan. England in the Age of Wycliffe (Longmans Green and Co., 1948), p. 298.

[4] Paul F. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Johns Hopkins, 2002), pp 210-11.

[5] Grendler, pp. 187-8

[6] Grendler, pp. 188-9

[7] Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, The Puritan Oligarchy (Scribner, 1947), pp 152-3.

[8] J. David Hoeveler, Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges (Rownman & Littlefield, 2002), p. 47-9

[9] Increase Mather, Order of the Gospel Professed and Practiced by the Churches of Christ in New-England (1700, undated Kessinger reprint), p. vi

[10] Kenneth R. Burdon and Robert P. Williams, Microbiology (Macmillan, 1968),

[11] Wikipedia, s.v. "Semmelweis."

Cardpatibility

Larry and I got married in a real church and everything, so we had to fill out the Episcopal Church's questionnaire to assure it, and incidentally, us, that we really knew each other well enough. We got a high score. But they forgot to ask the question that would have docked us a point.

Greeting Card Style. Every family has its own special-occasion traditions and, as we discovered, greeting card style was very different in our families. In his, cards are beautiful and serious. In mine, a greeting card must, always, be funny. After some adjustment to each other's card styles, we managed to meld our inherited styles nicely.

Each mom gets the appropriate card type, and I liked the one for my mother so much, thought I'd share. Click to enlarge if you like. By American Greetings, available at the nearest K-mart.

On this National Day of Prayer

...I invite you to read a piece by a conservative, born-again Baptist. Who thinks the ruling that the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional is right, that Franklin Graham should not be the speaker at the Pentagon's event, and says :

The separation of church and state is a Christian idea that is to protect the church from being corrupted by Caesar. We do not need the government to tell us to pray, because that would suggest they could also tell us not to.

His blog, and the book he wrote, are both called For God's Sake, Shut Up! and he's quite thought-provoking.

A balanced life. Not.

I don't do those blog memes except on the rare occasion when the question(s) really appeal to me, but an individual question will occasionally jumpstart me on a topic.

This time, the Wednesday Random Dozen (link is to my friend Catherine's answers - she does it regularly) asked ten things I really have nothing interesting to say about, and two others that struck me. Though they rather annoyingly rub my face in my faults:

1. What room in your home best reflects your personality; and

2. How do you maintain a balanced life?

A what? A "balanced" life? That's one of those "shoulds" that nobody actually does, right? Like rotating your tires, or always tightening the #%$ing child-guard cap back onto the pill bottle even when there's no possibility of a small child around, instead of leaving the cap loose and easily removed.

Seriously, I guess most people try to balance their lives but I gave that up ages ago. I work best when I do one thing that I feel driven to do and neglect everything else, and then change course and do something else.

For a week now I have been pounding at the novel (remember my novel? That brick wall I've been beating my head against for over 4 years?). Nothing else. Kitchen's a mess. I've done no business work to speak of. Barely reading, not writing anything else. Just Total Immersion.

It's not a burst of writing enthusiasm. It's more that I want the blasted miserable thing out of my life. Done. Sunk into that great sea of self-published plankton, never to be seen again. My love/hate relationship with it is on the outs right now, and I'd really rather be saying something else than saying what it ... says. Not that I don't still like my basic world-view as depicted in this college dorm of 1973-4. But I've been there an awful long time.

Which brings me to Question One. My alleged office is where I beat on this and other projects, and appropriately enough, it reflects the Real Me to an alarming degree. It's a chaotic mess.

But part of the problem is tchotchkas. Knickknacks, doodads, thingamajigs. In decorating magazines, you see lots of interesting knickknacks on bookshelves, often in front of the books. You can tell that the space is staged and not designed for use. WHO wants to move a gift shop's worth of stuff to get out a book?

In real life, true Book People have a separate place for tchotchkas. I'd give anything to have one, but aside from a single dedicated shelf on which there's no more room, it's a dream for the future. I'd never have shelves like you see in this post, if there were any other place to put these things. I love my tchotchkas and the people who gave them to me. Each one has a story.

The little wooden Viking is a figure I've had since I was 7 years old. I think some classmate gave it to me for that birthday, but I don't really remember. I love it beyond all reason. The moose is a McDonalds toy from at least 40 years later but it seemed to be just what my Viking needed. Some cool little figures come with model railroad gear, and Larry gave me some that were "me" kind of things.

But they get shuffled into weird configurations as I try to gain access to what's behind them, and, just as each knickknack has a story, there's a story -- at least, a sequence of events -- behind the current position of each one, too. Not necessarily an interesting sequence, no matter how odd or amusing the final placement is. Things get bunched and placed inside other things and then moved off to any stable surface when the shelf behind them needs access.

But the process can create a weird version of Accidental Art.

Honest, every one of these nightmares of clutter that you see is exactly as it was, not staged for the photo. Many people would say, "I could not stand all that clutter!" I actually have a hard time with it too. I periodically organize. Then it slowly reverts to its natural state. These photos catch it at its end state in the process and a cleanup is called for. I see no permanent solution until I have the afore-mentioned tchotchka space. But I can cope with it. After all ....

How Not To Get Any Work Done, part 832

He was beginning to regret terminating his psychotherapy. The white discs were back.

~~~

No, I did not make up that funny caption. The creator of this hilarious website called Unhappy Hipsters gives his own delightfully snide captions to the --- well, if you like it, you like it, to each his own, but --- to the minimalist modern architecture photos found in several design magazines.

He also runs a caption contest on occasion (not, I don't think, at the moment), so you'll sometimes see duplicate postings of the same photo with various reader-supplied captions, but there are more new ones as you page back.

Take this pillow and...

Pillows, however great, eventually go flat and limp, not to mention yukky. The only thing to do with worn out pillows is toss them into the guest roo-- I mean, dispose of them in an environmentally responsible manner, and get new ones.

In the department store, I get that sense of foreboding that we all get when we see some version of the dreaded phrase "New and Improved!"

It's Bigger! It's Better! It's Today's Luxuriously Oversized Pillow!

On Pavlovian cue, I am expected to lust after this extravaganza of polyester batting. My brain effectively disabled by the hypnotic code-word, "luxurious," I am now supposedly unquestioning about a few ... questionable things.

One is that: unless the human neck has elongated since standard pillows were invented, having more pillow acreage causes at best no enhancement of one's sleeping experience.

This improves my life how, exactly?

When I try to force the new wider pillows into the old pillowcases, the reason for this innovation becomes clear.

I cram. I jam.It's now an enormous cylinder. I'm not done yet. It's mostly in, but off-the-round. I must rotate the pillow in one direction and the case in the opposite by repeated yanking, until the corners finally line up.

Cool. Now, if I can make it a shape on which a person's head could rest without rolling off, I'll be all set.

For a moment, I toy with the idea that they've worked hard to plant in my mind. That is, to dash back to
Bed, Bath and Be Bankrupt, credit card in hand, and replace all of our too-small pillowcases.

Store employees are watching the parking lot for me and checking their watches. They were told at Inservice Training never to say anything like "Oh, won't you need some wider pillowcases too?" as they ring up the initial sale. That could as easily tank the sale as it could close it for bigger bucks. Hooking the customer isn't enough. Business wisdom dictates that if they get me to take those pillows all the way home, they've landed me for pillows and cases too. I'll be back within days. Hey, maybe (they pray) I'll go wild and get whole new sheet sets...! No no, mustn't ask for the moon when we have the stars.....

Our crack investigative dumpster-diving team has salvaged a disc from the critical board meeting of J. P. SpringFade, Inc., at which this plot was hatched. We now go public with the secret Powerpoint presentation behind this bedding debacle.

Lights, please.











But what they have failed to predict is my ability to predict the lifespan of my new oversized pillows. These initially-lush pillows are cheaply made in China and will deflate enough to fit in the old cases. Soon. Very soon.