You ARE old...

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)

'You are old, Father William,' the young man said,
'And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head -
Do you think, at your age, it is right?'

'In my youth,' Father William replied to his son,
'I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I'm perfactly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.'

'You are old,' said the youth, 'as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door -
Pray, what is the reason of that?'

'In my youth,' said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
'I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment - one shilling a box -
Allow me to sell you a couple?'

'You are old,' said the youth, 'and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak -
Pray, how did you manage to do it?'

'In my youth,' said his father, 'I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength that it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life.'

'You are old,' said the youth, 'one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose -
What made you so awfully clever?'

'I have answered three questions, and that is enough,'
Said his father; 'don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!

not so pro found

I think that the world's human genomes know that the jig is nearly up.

I was trying to figure out why there seems to be a rash of diseases and dysfunctions in the youth of so many of these countries. It's like some kind of weird self destruct switch has been hit.

It's like a built in mechanism designed to decrease the population or somehow make a mass of them less attractive for future breeding.

No seriously. There are like too many for this to be some kind of crappy water that is doing it all.

somepeoplegetit

I am consistently amazed by the ignorance people insist on presenting to the outside world.

I teach a civics and history class to 7th graders, these are students who are about 12-13 years old. Lately we’ve been going over the past and present of the situation in the middle east. Mainly I have also been re-informing them about the Israel/Palestine issue—since at the beginning of this they didn’t even know that Palestine is or ever had been a country. Somehow, not to my surprise, it was only footnoted in their textbook as a portion of Israel (i.e. Gaza Strip and West Bank, not one country).

Ok so that pretty much sets the stage for you. Now I have only really gone over the barest of facts with them, since, as in any school even the private one at which I work, History is relegated to a second class subject (just one step above art really) and this means we have a limited about of time to cover a large portion of world history. But even with my barebones style of information they have come to two brilliant conclusions—completely on their own:

1) The situation that the Zionists have imposed on the people of Palestine is very alike to the treatment the Jews of Europe suffered at the hands of the Nazi Government. In that, the Palestinians are relegated to refugee camps, prejudiced based on ethnicity, and have zero rights under the Israeli government. (now please don’t tire me with posts about how they are protecting themselves etc, etc. Israel started this mess. Read history. Then get back to me with something intelligent)
2) That this situation in Palestine and Jerusalem could be directly fueling the emotion of extremist Muslims that then feel it necessary to retaliate to the US’s apparent approval of the way in which Israel has chosen to govern the state.

Now tell me this. How is it that these CHILDREN with about 7 total hours of history and current events have come to these conclusions and the majority of modern American ADULTS cannot come to the same idea?

How is this possible?

This is an awful rant to begin things again on here, but teaching has been consuming my hiatus and this is the greatest revelation that came form it.

On the day the students came up with these points, I stood there dumbly for a minute and then dismissed class into a free period because it was apparent that I had nothing left to teach them on the subject.

Next week we begin African history…

a long dark teatime...

And with that reference I take a sabatos… that is a hiatus. I realize it seems like and inordinately short time that I have been bl0061|\| period to be able to take said sabbatical, but the situations of life present themselves anew and leave me with few other options.

I 54LL return so have fear of that.

An now we must certainly deal with the pressures of what topic to leave? With the distance of what is coming looming ahead the srews are to us to make this certainly at least something that can, or MAY be discussed at leangth… so then. Perhaps a favorite poem?

Each Note (--Jelaluddin Balkhi)

“Advice doesn’t help lovers!
They’re not the kind of mountain stream
you can build a damn across.

An intellectual doesn’t know what the drunk is feeling!

Don’t try to figure
what those lost inside love
will do next!

… life freezes if it doesn’t get a taste of this almond cake.

The stars come up spinning
every night, bewildered in love.
They’d grow tired with that revolving, if they weren’t
(They’d say, ‘How long do we have to do this?’)

God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Each note is a need coming through one of us,
a passion, a longing pain.

Remember the lips
where the wind-breath originated,
and let you note be clear…”

How long and lasting do these words ring a thousands of years after they were written. How do our lives cry up and say “how long?” when we live, or try to live without that love of som3Thi|\|G?!?! Friends, romances, kittens… anything!

What then is purposeful without the wind sounding out our notes?

Gesundheidt

Oh Archway cookies!

Fantastic delight of taste--

Tomorrow we diet.

the weeping boy

"What weeping face is that looking from the window?
Why does it stream those sorrowful tears?
Is it for some burial place, vast and dry?
Is it to wet the soil of graves?"
--Walt Whitman


It's amazing. It's surreal. As if once wasn't enough. Like a movie-- just when you thought it wouldn't get worse, it suddenly does. I felt brought low when I first read this on the BBC news site. I imagined some huge panel being bought off with oil money, I thought, "How could someone conscientiously actually vote for this man to be man of the year?" I mean seriously folk whichever side of the line you stand on--MAN OF THE YEAR? That means that he stands in line with Martin Luther King! I was depressed. Could we still be so blind STILL? The "War" in Iraq stands at an all time low, yet this bungler still preaches that things are great. His staff has had a HUGE turnover, unprecedented in wartime for a secondterm president, and yet people insist on acting as if this is all business as usual, which only serves to make it just that.

Yes folks I was deeply saddened. Then I read what the line of award recipients really included... and then I laughed. Here's to the magazines ability to pick out the winners and great leaders of the past century!



Previous "Time" magazine "People of the Year" recipients include:

1938 - Mr. Adolf Hitler (this is one year before the start of WW II in Europe-Sept, 1939)

1939 and 1942 - Mr. Joseph Stalin (before he acquired Poland, Chechoslovakia, Hungary Romania and Bulgaria murdering millions; and encouraged Kim II to invade South Korea)

1979 - Mr. Ayotollah Khonmeini (published mere months before he declared the US to be a "Great Satan.")

1985 -Deng Xiaoping (three years before the massacre in Tianamen Square, helped create the Red Army)

skurd

You know what scares me? FEBREEZE. What the heck is it? At the risk of sounding like some old curmudgeon sitting on a porch somewhere, waving my cane at the neighborhood... —the stuff scares me.

I mean come on. They say in the add that this stuff EATS ODORS. What the crud? What kind of thing consumes odors and then disappears?! Odors are created when a certain element has become “atomized” (as in an atomizer, not as in deconstructed into a base particle) and can be picked up by the olfactory hairs, etc. Now, as far as I know, there is still nothing that can defeat the 'conservation of matter' “law.” In that, you can’t take something and make it into nothing... So what the heck is really going on here Febreeze?!? WHERE ARE MY SMELLS GOING!?!

See what I mean? I mean this is frightening Area 51/Bush Conspiracy type of stuff... I'’m telling you beware the Febreeze!

Besides, I like my smells. What kind of world is this when if there is a smell in the air we SPRAY something to eliminate the odor? I mean . . . things smell for a reason. If you smell something rank in your house you damn well better just go and find out WHAT THE HELL IS MAKING THAT SMELL. I mean this is how bodies are discovered in shallow graves and so forth. I mean come on... who in their right mind says, “"Woooo! It smells like poop in here. Spray some Febreeze."” I mean, wouldn’t you or I say, “"Uh… Where is the poop?"” I mean really. WHERE IS IT?! I NEED my smells. They tell me things. There was a study from Purdue University that was all about how smell can unlock memories and thoughts that we are UNABLE to unlock any other way. You’re smells are important people! Don’t send them to smell hell or some bizzare oblivion in which they are transmorgraphied into something that tells you nothing of its origin.

You know what else really scares me? Apparently NO ONE ELSE has had this thought. Which, if true, is a feat in an of itself... But I digress. But it is true! Try and Google “'evil”' and “'Febreeze'” and you get NOTHING! Well I mean there are a few sites with the words evil and Febreeze in them, but that is just coincidence (if you have a million monkeys creating a million blogs… you will get Shakespeare... or sites that mention Febreeze and evil). So I guess I will be the first. EVIL FEBREEZE. There. Well cats and kitts, now you know!

By a strange irony while I have been typing this, by cause of one of this room’s other occupants, there has been an odorous interuptus fill the air... I think I’ll have to open a window...