Society Blogs (898)

...not to get too maudlin here, but with all the terrible humans milling about, (creepy, Anita Hill dissing Joe announced today), it's easy to forget that the overwhelming majority of people, wherever we go, are upright morally. Twins' last undergrad semester winding down, and they asked dad to bring them a few needed things from home. I'm between cars, so using the vintage Aa touring road machine, weather permitting, while searching. So, before leaving, emptied the MC backpack of almost all really important stuff (Memoir draft, parents' estate docs, etc.) and loaded up with things for the girls. On the way back from their juniorversities, the thing fell off the bike. Doubled back looking for it, ---no luck. So to bank to block accounts, and phone rings. Seems a nice fellow, also a MC rider, found the thing, and had his wife call me. Cash, passwords, credit cards, etc. in wallet---all safely returned. Brought them some fresh home made maple syrup, and strawberry jam, which they seemed to appreciate. Nice people, among the Clintons/Obamas/Muellers/Soros' of the world.

Mister Godley’s gnomes

Mister Godley is very proud of his garden. He is especially proud of all his gnomes, he collects them and can’t understand why all the other gardens in his street are not full of gnomes.

Mister Godley has got gnomes with fishing rods, gnomes with wheel barrows and gnomes doing almost anything you can think of. He even has a gnome with its trousers down and showing its bottom to the people who walk past the garden. There used to be a gnome with its trousers down that wasn’t showing its bottom, but Mrs. Godley accidentally broke it with a hammer.

Mister Godley is very friendly and likes to talk to his neighbours. Whenever one of Mister Godley’s neighbours is walking past the garden, Mister Godley always seems to be standing at his gate. Sometimes Mister Godley’s neighbours walk home a different way and don’t have the chance to chat with Mister Godley.

Mister Godley likes to talk about lots of things, but his favourite thing to talk about is his gnomes. Mister Godley’s neighbours know all about all of his gnomes and where they all came from. There is only one neighbour who doesn’t know all about Mister Godley’s gnomes and that is the lady who lives next door to him. She is always too busy to talk to Mister Godley, even when she isn’t busy.

The lady who lives next door is a little bit like one of Mister Godley’s gnomes because sometimes when it is sunny she goes into her back garden and uncovers her bottom, but she doesn’t show it to the neighbours. Sometimes Mister Godley accidently sees her botom when he is rearranging the gnomes next to the bit of fence that has a hole in it. Mister Godley usually rearranges his gnomes when Mrs. Godley is out shopping.

Mister Godley’s other next door neighbour is called Mister Flowers. Mister Flowers also likes gnomes but he thinks one gnome is enough. His gnome is holding a spade and looks like it is digging a hole. Mister Flowers only ever talks about his gnome if somebody asks him about it, and nobody has ever asked him about it.

On the other side of the road from Mister Godley’s garden there is a garden with no gnomes in it at all. That garden belongs to Mister Sharpe. The only thing in Mister Sharpe’s garden is a big plant pot with a pretend tree in it that looks more like a brown stick with a big green ball on top than a tree. Mister Sharpe and Mister Godley don’t chat to each other very often. When they do chat they both stay in their own garden and they have to talk very loudly so that they can hear one another. When Mister Sharpe and Mister Godley are chatting the other neighbours like to come out to listen to them. Once, even a policeman came to listen to them. That was on the same day that Mister Godley went out into his garden and found that someone had put all his gnomes in his fish pond.


Did you like the story about Mister Godley and his neighbours? They all live on Connecticut Street, which is named after a place in America. All the streets in Mister Godley’s neighbourhood are named after places in America. There are lots more stories about the people who live in Mister Godley’s neighbourhood.

On November 21st, 1999 14 Cubans left their country on a small aluminum boat headed North. The boat had a faulty engine and took on water during a storm. Only 3 survived and were picked up by 2 fishermen who handed them over to the U.S. Coast Guard.

Of the survivors was a young boy Elián González, his mother (who was divorced from Elián's father) had perished at sea. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) released González to his paternal great-uncle, Lázaro who was living in Miami. Back in Cuba, Elián's father was not aware his ex and son had attempted to escape Cuba and wanted his son returned.

There was much publicity about the custody case as the remote family wanted to keep the boy in Miami. (according to Wiki) Attorney General Janet Reno ordered the return of Elián González to his father and set a deadline of April 13, 2000, but the Miami relatives defied the order. Negotiations continued for several days as the house was surrounded by protesters as well as police.

On Thursday, April 20, 2000, Reno made the decision to remove González from the house and instructed law enforcement officials to determine the best time to obtain the boy. In the pre-dawn hours of Easter Eve, Saturday, April 22, more than 130 INS personnel and agents of the Border Patrol's special BORTAC unit as part of an operation approached the house, knocked on the door and identified themselves. When no one responded, they entered. Four hours after he was taken from the house in Miami, González and his father were reunited at Andrews Air Force Base.

The next day, the White House released a photograph showing a smiling González reunited with his father, which the Miami relatives disputed by claiming that it was a fake. After González was returned to his father's custody, he remained in the U.S. while the Miami relatives exhausted their legal options.

I was reminded how Easter affects people differently.

Can't two people from the same gender fall in love?

Sure they can.

Then, why does it become about their sexuality more than love ?

When I was at junior school, we used to buy bubble gum that came with picture cards. The ones I remember were a series about World War 2, Mars Attacks and the American Civil War. Some of the pictures were very gory, many of them depicting scenes of extreme violence. Such images would certainly not be sold to children nowadays, although, strange as it might seem, being exposed to them neither caused anyone any trauma nor produced any homicidal maniacs in later life.

The American Civil War series is the one I remember most clearly. In the little pack would be a flat, square piece of pink bubble gum, several picture cards and a pretend US bank note. The subject of the American Civil War certainly captured our schoolboy imaginations for the duration of their being on sale. For the playground bullies, they were like a gift from the gods. They would run up to some defenceless little soul and demand to know if he was “Union or Confederate”. There was no way of knowing where the bully’s allegiance lay, and if yours happened not to coincide with it, there were consequences. I don’t remember exactly what the consequences were, but I’m pretty sure it involved a measure of being roughed up.

Christchurch

Mass murder or terrorism


As daears keeps closing comments on such a tragic event

I have posted this blog to allow people to express their feelings

Please show respect

Thanks

I'll just say this: The torch has been passed to, and firmly grasped by the next generation....

"workers should be "excited" about having their jobs automated, but were not because of larger systemic issues in American society.

“We should be excited about automation, because what it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing in and investigating the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in,” she said, according to The Verge. “Because not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage.”

"we're reckoning with the consequences of putting profit above everything else in society. And what that means is people can't afford to live. For me, it's a question of priorities and right now I don't think our model is sustainable."

Ok, so...I didn't say this. Not this time. I don't need to "preach" anymore. These are the words of a politician...if you can believe it.

The building firm I used to be with did a lot of work for a country estate. There is a village attached to the estate and its old stone buildings are in constant need of repair or renovation, between tenants. One such property was No. 1 Main Street. This large stone cottage had been occupied by a retired couple, but, after her husband’s death, the wife had been asked to move into a smaller property.

The cottage needed a lot of work. We replaced all the plumbing, wiring and central heating, renewed most of the woodwork and replastered here, there and everywhere. We were on that job for two or three months.

On such long term jobs we would set aside a room for lunch breaks, where we would all sit at “snap time”, eating our snap. One lunchtime, while snapping in the winter gloom of that room, I had a sudden awareness of movement out on the landing, but by the time I had turned my head to look, all was still. There was an almost identical occurrence the next day.

On the afternoon of the second incident I was working outside when one of the locals came walking down the road. Bob was one of several villagers who I was on speaking terms with, after having worked in the village for a few years. When Bob got to the garden gate he stopped and shouted something like, “they’re keeping you busy, then”; I replied with a witty comment that didn’t come out quite right and left me feeling like a knob, but Bob was kind enough not to notice.

While we were chatting, I asked Bob what he knew about the history of the cottage; it turned out he could tell me quite a lot about it. Most of what he told me was just of passing interest but when he started to talk about an incident that happened there in the 1930s my interest became heightened.


Back then the cottage was home to the estate head gamekeeper and his wife. Two or three times a week the gamekeeper would go out in the middle of the night and lay in wait, on the lookout for poachers after his pheasant. He shared this duty with his two assistant gamekeepers, each taking different nights. He also, unknowingly, shared his wife with one of them, who would nip round to his place on the nights he was on watch.

It was on such a night that the head keeper cut his watch short, owing to not feeling well. His early return gave rise to much alarm, and the panic stricken assistant bolted like a scared rabbit, only to come face to face with the last man on Earth he wanted to come face to face with, standing at the top of the stairs. In his frenzied eagerness to be somewhere else, he made a lunge for the stairs, only to go headlong down them and arrive at the bottom with a broken neck and dead.

There are words to describe people who...

Park in the handicap access and walkway to a medical center.


Park so tight in the handicap zone that a handicapped person couldn't get in or out their vehicle.


Over stack the end of the dumpster instead of taking 3 more steps and throwing the trash in the middle.


Finish the roll and walk away.


The last one makes me wonder if they didn't have enough paper to finish the job, did they walk away anyway.