Agog on the Blog

       Maine repealed the law granting the right to same sex marriage by 53% to 47% with 40% of the vote turning out. We lost in our sister city Lewiston but won in Auburn where I taught so many years. Our Governor swears to continue the fight for same sex rights. He is not really in favor of same sex marriage but says he realizes that constitutionally it is the right thing to do.
     "Out" in his own way, the chairman from out of state who ran the California Prop 8 successful campaign and had the audacity to criticize our team for funding our campaign with out of state funds, appeared in public for the first time in a victory speech, proud to have led the opposition in this one.
 My facebook is loaded with comments from disheartened former students, parents and friends upset with our state. Had it not been revealed by tough newsmen, we wouldn't even have known his company was leading the ad campaign to fight to repeal the law. They tried to keep it secret. Ironically they didn't get their money's worth. Promised a fresh campaign designed for the region, they got exactly the same scripted ads that were run in California, but with different actors. I'm sure he'll appear in your state soon so there's no need to tell you about the misinformation in the ads. You'll see for yourself.

  I feel so badly for all the students out there who come from non traditional families, and for all those who live unhappily in traditional families but would rather follow their own hearts, and for all those whose otherwise in-law families ban them from hospital visitations, funerals, and even the apartments they shared with loved ones. And I feel badly for those who cannot break from tradition to do what is right.

Equal rights in Maine

so far 52% against rights, and 48% will have to live to fight another day 11:30 Pm, 3. 5 hours after polls closed

I WAS FIRST TODAY

I was the first in line today for the voting at the old high school gym. While waiting for the town clerk to yell out the official opening of the polls ( yeah, she actually does that with a stopwatch), I bought a calendar from the local Historical Society now ensconced in the town's oldest church ( 1847). It included a brief history of the town and it is no joke that it was once known as Bog Hoot (1700s). It was also known as Bog Falls and Jericho. It stood under standing water much of the year and over many many years they hauled in gravel and dirt to raise up the center of town- a massive project for a small  town made up of the poor and disenfranchised....and all by horse and wagons.
   Of course we had a better turn out than usual because of the equal rights issue which most of you know about. Ads lately have emphasized making it safe and supportive for all kinds of families...not just families of one man/one woman marriages. The opposition has claimed that we raised a lot of money from out of state when in fact their whole campaign is run by the same out of state corporation that ran the Prop 8 campaign so successfully.
  Another issue was whether or not to allow a casino in my area. I voted it down for years because the American Natives were turned down so many times. Then Whites got one passed farther upstate and on a ballot a couple years later, the Native Americans were turned down again. This time I voted for it since this tiny town supports a thriving porn store so why should we be hypocritical about it all?
   Yet another big issue is the Tabor law which we have voted down continually year after year which is promoted from the outside. It caps gov't spending which might make us happy on the state level, but if limited, would make our schools and social services suffer more than they are now. It really sounds good, but it is full of pratfalls.  For example, once again we are over budget and 200 million in cuts must be applied. Of course they hit the schools and public services first. The law would not allow them to recover those funds without a referendum vote. We just aren't going to get the vote out for every raise in taxes the state has to put up. Property taxes locally will escalate out of sight.
  We had 7 referendums in all and only one elected position to resolve. I must admit I voted for someone I don't know and hope he's a raving lunatic who shakes up the town fathers just by being there.

Aging Americans Ripoff Policy

I think I'm going to drop my membership in A.A.R.P. I have been a member since I qualified so many years ago. So far they haven't beat my home or auto insurance rates. I haven't had a need for their term life insurance nor anything else they have offered. I cant remember when I pulled out my card for a discount that was honored other than what I would be given as a senior citizen anyway. In my history with them, I haven't seen them effective in any lobbying interest that do anything for me. Maybe when they were younger and smaller they did some good work but I don't hear about it anymore.
  Though my membership isn't expensive, I can use the money for at least three glasses of  house wine per year when I go to retirement luncheons.
     I can do without the mountains of promotional junk mail trying to get my money with the best deals I could ever find, and don't. And I could do without the constant phone calls and emails for me to see a representative touring in my area. I just don't want to get out of my sweats and take a shower to see another salesperson just like every other salesperson. In fact I'm finding them downright invasive lately.
  Anybody else feel the same or differently?

Between a rock and a hard place kind of quote:

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
  - F. Scott Fitzgerald

I can't count the number of times I have awakened in the dark hours and wrestled with the  angst of where I would prefer to be...back in that awful dream or here  awake in the awful reality of what I have to face when I get up.
 In the glory of the golden years, sometimes the ailments of muscle cramps, arthritis, etc transfer between worlds, and its just better to be awake where I can do something about it. Have you ever experienced knowing in the dream that if you could just wake up, you could take care of the pain while in the dream you can't move to escape it?
 Credit where credit is due, I have really begun to enjoy wonderful dreams lately. My super powers have returned like when I was a kid and the jumping as high as I could in the awake hours, transferred to jumping high enough to fly in a dream. But I still don't like to catch myself in a dream, clinging to a ledge 100 stories up on a skyscraper. WTF is that anyway?

Antarctic Taxi

My young friend , Jeff Alexander, has been all over the world at 31-mostly working as a guide for an international touring company which provides outdoor life in all kids of environments. His latest adventure will be to drive this "taxi" the next four months between the airport and the famous McClellan Research institute in Antarctica. He just posted this picture of the vehicle on Facebook. To give you an idea of its size, the tires are 5 ft in diameter.

Australian Dust Storm

"By the early afternoon of September 24, 2009, when the same satellite acquired this image, the thick dust that had covered the eastern shore of Australia previouly, stretched in a long plume from northern Queensland to New Zealand. This image shows the northern portion of the plume off the coast of Queenland. The tan dust is densely concentrated in a compact plume that mirrors the coastline. The gem-like blue-green Great Barrier Reef is visible beneath the plume near the top of the image where the tan dust mingles with gray-brown smoke from wildfires." ( from NASA)
 I don't know about you, but this just astounds me in the light of global warming and prophesies of doom.

"By the early afternoon of September 24, 2009, when the same satellite acquired this image, the thick dust that had covered the eastern shore of Australia previouly, stretched in a long plume from northern Queensland to New Zealand. This image shows the northern portion of the plume off the coast of Queenland. The tan dust is densely concentrated in a compact plume that mirrors the coastline. The gem-like blue-green Great Barrier Reef is visible beneath the plume near the top of the image where the tan dust mingles with gray-brown smoke from wildfires."

Last family institute:

 I went for my 7 week haircut today, right on schedule. After 25 years, I'm accepted as a fellow old timer and allowed to share in the stories. I am aware however that I will always be "from away". Russ's Rusty Razor, the locals call it behind his back- is a one room shop with one chair, and a few scattered plastic chairs around with a big picture window looking out onto the town square. the walls are covered with a mounted front page newspaper NIXON RESIGNS, and countless mounted fish, deer heads, and assundry trophies.  Pictures of sons, grandsons,  and great grandsons all holding prize fish catches line the barber's counter top. Around the room are the daily papers, and a grand assortment of hunting and fishing magazines. No telling how far back they go.  The place is made and designed for "hanging out" and swapping yarns.
  Arta was in the chair when I got there. He's 92- has smooth skin without a wrinkle in it and pure white hair and plenty of it. Russ was in the middle of a joke, as always."Three Black men wuz discussin' what plants to crop..." and I just can't share the rest here. then in walked old John....taking a full five minutes to cross the 12 ft space twixt the door and a chair. Yep, flannel shirt, suspenders, baggy old wool pants, and scruffy shoes, hair aflyin' all over his head. It would have to be combed with a steel rake before it was cut.  He tossed his old Irish style pancake hat into the chair and thenpainfully he lowered himself on the hat.( so he always knows where it is)  Then he and spent a couple minutes trying to lean his crooked old hand carved cane against the wall. He's 96.
  After 5 minutes or so, Russ had already told the two gentlemen that they knew each other. Old John never heard a word, and suddenly shouts out feebly "By the sweet Jesus, is that you Arta?" Arta says they live less than a stone's throw from each other( through the woods) but hadn't seen each other in forty years.
  I'm here to tell you they had some stories to tell. " My graduating class was 13 strong." John: oh I went to a big school. Mine was 19. But two of 'em don't count as they was from Bath." And the two of them laughed their asses off. I wished my haircut would last all afternoon as the two of them went on about the characters they had known in their classes, who had passed on, old pranks they used to play, taking the train to school in those days. "That was the dumbest thing they ever did was let them railroads go. They ain't never come up with a public transportation like that agin." ( The old train station up the street is now a restaurant refurbished in beautiful hardwood with etched glass and burned wood designs- only freight trains move by there now) "Ayuh, and I remember takin' the figure 8 trolley from Lewiston to Brunswick and back and then on up to South Paris and Norway all for a nickel. ( the route formed the figure 8)

  For a bland sunny autumn day, it was just a great way to spend an afternoon. As for my hair, it's never been so short.

Pretty good sized station for a small town, but we used to be a mill town- long ago closed down now.

Me and me new laptop:

15.4" Macbook Pro 2.4 mgh processor and 2 gigs ram.
Mac has come  along way since I last bought one. I find this incredibly convenient in countless ways and am just thoroughly enjoying my experience. I have pretty much restored everything I want and elminated things in the transference process that in reality I seldom use. Of course for a few weeks now I have been running on old used Macs and the speed of this just has me dizzy. The 15.4" screen is wonderful. In a softly lit room the keyboard is backlit...a super feature. Finding things and relabelling is a whole lot easier.
  Lately I have become addicted to Farmville, Farmtown on Facebook and even my good "old" iMac that fried in a thunderstorm couldn't handle the graphics without the spinning wheel of death. This one moves right along with ease.
  Now this is the second time I have bought a refurbished Mac. The last one lasted longer than the previous ones I bought new and would still be alive had I not been so stupid and that one day plugged into the surge protector instead of the more convenient wall at the time. This one also has a 7 hour battery that pretty much lasts that long...what a relief that is. I do notice my laptops from Mac seem to go bad about two days after a service contract is up and I kind of resent those contracts almost as much as I resent them on Sears products. It amounts to $100+ per year and I almost never have to use them. I must admit however, that the Apple people ARE there when I do need them.( which is more than our school systems can say).
  Anuyway, I am loving it.

An old parallel: history repeats itself in many ways

 "If Christians were being attacked the same way, or heterosexual couples were being attacked the same way, I would be fighting for them."  Charliz Theron had to say about the current equality battle our nation is going through. Check out Bob's post over on "I Should Be Laughing" here. The tactics being used by both sides are sometimes reprehensible and even fearsome. Each claims foul bantering back and forth. It would take an entire judicial system created for just the occasion to determine just how much anyone is threatened by the beliefs of the other.
   There are protocols in how those in power and those not in power deal with each other. The underdog traditionally will use tactics those in power feel are unfair. In our own historic American Revolution, the British cried foul when our forces used non traditional fighting tactics by hiding behind bushes and trees to raid more traditional British fighting forces. Yet the colonists were fighting a war that could be compared in it's day to what we attribute to terrorism in our day.
  In political wars, the use of lies, deceit, and selective information-propaganda, are the weapons. Christian organizations, for example are campaigning for traditional marriage and against any gay rights whatsoever, yet refuse to reveal identities of contributing financial supporters. They claim that their constituents have been threatened with violence and thus have a right to protect their identities on petitions and donor groups. Yet the record shows that no one has been beaten of killed for being heterosexual. Quite the opposite for Gays.
   Lawyers ad litigants brought into the fray in PSO's are claming that the entire country will face a total slow down of the justice system when the courts are clogged with civil cases after an equal rights agenda is passed. does that sound Ante-Bellum to you in the racial equality test we had?
   My point is that the more two opposing ideologies atatck each other without using reason, the more they become like each other. After WWII came the social prototype-Communism vs  Democray, which is still strongly proliferated.
  What was the catalyst that kept the two sides from destroying each other? Nuclear, mutual annihilation. What is the catalyst now if any? That all sides of all issues are threatened by the Taliban and/or El Quaeda, a way of life completely different than either Communism or Democracy. As Americans we seem unable to unify unless we are hit up side the head by a third party's interests.
  An astute teacher I had once told me...The more we fight an enemy of any sort, the more like him we become. Certainly we have seen plenty of evidence of that in the two great ideologies. Both sides did their share of dirty fighting, hush hush operations, spy vs spy, as well as stockpiling war weaponry. both sides propagandized how their way of life was bettr than th other and how corrupt the other was. both sides pleaded they only wanted peace and human dignity to prevail, and both sides claimed the other violated that principle.

  I don't think we've come up with that third power more threateniing than the equality issue or the medicare issue either for that matter. The problems of this  coming decade are well defined
   

OUTSTANDING MUSIC: Playing for change

PBN is still annoying with their  commercial free television with 10 minute fund raising promos, not to mention the only good programming i ever seem to catch is during fund raising times. Let's see, the pain of that is five minutes of programming and 10 minutes of urging us to Give Give Give.
  But last night I saw a wonderful show:

Playing for Change: Peace Through Music:Grammy-winning producer Mark Johnson fosters global awareness by recording local musicians from around the world, then mixing together the separate performances into a unified whole.
I put some of the clips on my video bar in the right hand column or you can check it out HERE.

One commentator noted that religion, politics, governments, philosophies tend to separate us, but music is the one element that seems to bring people together ( I might add that a good pot luck supper is pretty effective too sometimes). This program shows an end product with over 100 musicians in what appears to be a world wide performance of a song because of this man's incredible mixing skills.

Series email reminder allows you to subscribe to get an email reminder for each upcoming episode of a series. PBS will send a tune-in reminder each time the series is showing on a channel in your selected lineup.

PBS does keep your email address in order to send recurring email reminders. Your email is used for no other purpose. You can edit or remove this reminder in schedule preferences, which is accessible from the main schedule interface.

remind me:	the day before the broadcast the day of the broadcast
include episodes on:	all channels in my over-the-air lineup all channels on my favorite station only
email address:
confirm email:

remember my email address on this computer only (you will not need to type it in every time you request a reminder [not recommended for shared computers]).

Tell a friend allows you to recommend a program to a friend via email. We'll send one-time email from you to your friend containing a brief program description and link to this program to let them know that you thought they might be interested.

PBS does not keep email addresses used to send this recommendation.

your name:
your email:
friend's name:
friend's email:

Don't get around much anymore: an apology

I haven't been around to do much with my blogging friends. I have excuses. In the past month I have been through the thunder storm frying of my imac laptop which was my traveling home, through an old HP laptop where the screen died ( a friend has taken it assuring me it is a software problem), and now an old eMac desktop which makes every move of the cursor like an old dial up experience. It just can't handle the sizes of the blogs. I just gave up for a while. I ran out of patience. I just sat me down and quit.

 Now I have awakened to the fact that Blogspot has a whole new format for images and I has me sum ketchin up t'do.

However the eMac was powerful enough to get me to the Applestore where I ordered  a snazzy Macbook Pro with a nice wide screen, a lit keyboard, a super drive, and all kinds of bells and whistles.
  I had forgotten the last days of teaching was that one of my many physical problems was using a desktop literally on a desktop. It just wrecks my back and neck and takes hours and hours and Tylenol after Tylenol to recover from a school day on a desktop. I have gotten used to a recliner with support for my back and a wireless mouse on the arm, and laptop where it was designed to be- in my lap. And in just a few days, that will all be back with my new jazz hands Macbook Pro and I'' be making the rounds of all your wonderful blogs again.
  See you all soon I hope.