~ What's the Big Deal? ~

by Tina~in_ut

I wasn't even aware that the President was going to speak on Tuesday until I read that LynnD was upset last week. Whenever that happens, I look up Yahoo news or CNN to try and figure out what has happened to upset her. I saw that the President was going to give a speech to the nation's children and that some people were upset about it. I just couldn't fathom why. I read that conservatives were concerned that the President was going to force his ideology on impressionable young minds. All I could think of was, "You've got to be kidding me!" He's the President. You listen to him. He will obviously (obvious to me anyway!) have to speak to their level. He's not going to stand there and in one breath tell the kids to stay in school and then turn around and try to explain Health Care Reform to them. That's insane.

I may not have voted for the man, or agree with most anything that he says, but I was brought up to respect my elders (except the really, really old like DeeDee!) and those in authority. This whole mess is just another example of people not respecting others. When I was young, I rarely saw a parent questioning or challenging a teacher or principal. Now it's an every day occurrence. At work, I oftentimes see co-workers going over supervisor's heads to speak to a manager. I realize that sometimes it's warranted, but rarely. Whether you want your children to watch the speech or not, what kind of message are we sending them by making such an issue out of this?

After talking to Dianne on Thursday, I realized that I hadn't asked my husband how he was handling this "issue" at his school. Well I didn't have to. He came home from work on Friday all fired up! His words: "I'm damned if I do, and I'm damned if I don't!" The directive from the Diocese is to show the speech and follow the lesson plan (which I hadn't heard about), but to let those parents who want to, keep their children home if they do not want them to watch. The school isn't equipped to show the speech to each class at the same time. They have decided that since the speech will be online, they will wait and show it and follow the lesson plan. Half the parents have asked him, "You aren't showing that, are you?" while the other half are asking, "You are showing that, aren't you?" One parent has already told him that she is keeping her child at home because she wants him to watch it live!

Kids aren't Democrats or Republicans. THEY ARE KIDS!!!! Listening to the President of the United States encourage them to get a good education is a good thing. Listening to him tell them to stay in school is a good thing. Listening to him tell them to not do drugs is a good thing. Just the fact that he's addressing them IS A GOOD THING. Some are saying that his approval rating is down and he's trying to boost it with this "stunt"! Children have no clue and don't care and parents need to shut the hell up about it around them and have some respect! Happy Labor Day!~

Tappin and a Snappin!!

He always puts a smile on my face,
his music draws me in

my feet go a tappin
my fingers go a snappin
my hands go a slappin

Perfection!

Enjoy!

~ Motherhood ~

by Tina~in_ut

I took this video in the spring.....forgot all about it. These ducks were here last year, but in our front yard. This time, they were looking in our backyard for a safe place to lay her eggs. They were very smart. They didn't choose my yard! They chose someone else's. Hubby's dog would have had a field day with them!



I walk by a canal on my evening walk and the other night I saw the mom with her ducklings. They were absolutely precious. I wish I had my camera with me. I tried to get close to them, but mom was very protective and scooted them away from me, as any good mom would do. She made me think: We are both moms. I wonder if she too has those days when she thinks her kids are little shits! Ahhhhh....motherhood!~

My Mothers Garden

I saw a link on Rosie's site the other day, I had no idea what it was about, so daring me clicked on it, and wow was I surprised. Its a documentary about a woman who is a hoarder, she has collected so much stuff that she can't even move around in her house anymore, so she sleeps outside. The video below is part two of a part 6 series, if you have time you should watch all of them, it totally blew me away. I can't even imagine how the mind must work, when it thinks you need to save everything. After watching all of the videos, the only thing I could come up with is she was lonely, and by collecting all this stuff, somehow it comforted her.

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My Mothers Garden

The Kennedy's

its seems like forever the kennedy name in my life
i was very young when president kennedy
was killed i remember my mom, always talking of him,
with sadness in her voice, he was their future,
and without him the world seemed so sad, as i grew,
his children grew with me, again the name kennedy lasting forever in my mind

camelot, the story of king arthur and his knights
of the round table, this camelot has been associated
with the kennedys for many years, and i have seen why,
a king and his followers, there is a quote
by the endearing jacqueline kennedy
that was taken from camelot "don't let it be forgot,
that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment
that was known as camelot"
that is the story and the myth of how it began

i was on the beach at the jersey shore,
lying on a beach blanket with the atlantic ocean
a few feet from me when on the radio it was announced
the son of camelot, john jr,
was missing, his plane lost from radar over the atlantic
i remember thinking, he is dead, he cannot survive this,
the beautiful couple that i envied so much, dead together
at the bottom of the ocean, this ocean that i loved so much
had taken away a idyllic couple, i stared at it with dread
it seemed to be a kennedy legacy
longevity for this family was not to be

ted, the patriarch of this family, to me so bold and strong,
he took over where his brothers
could not, he fought for the american people when
others did not, he was a figure
that you knew my name with just one glance, his fight
for the people with live on forever, even tho his fight
for his own life was lost

on saturday as he was laid to rest, my mother,
the staunch republican watched the coverage
with gloomy eyes, she named them all, these kennedy's
as if she new them well, her eyes
told me the story of this kennedy legacy,
no words were needed, quiet she was,
as she remembered growing up with them,
as so did i

Shirley's Bottom #4

by Whabby

Last week, owls, I left you with a burning question. You’re trying to measure the duration of an event, the journey of a pulse of light up and down the shaft of your spacecraft. You yourself are stationary, looking up from the ground, while your spacecraft, which I’ve decided to call “Shirley”, is traveling at a speed of one kilometer per second along the line formed by your outstretched right arm. You and George (who, by popular demand, is naked) start your stopwatches at the same time. George starts his when he toggles the searchlight on and off, and you start yours right then and there because you immediately see the flash of light coming from the searchlight through the floor. But, do you and George still measure the same amount of time for the light flash to travel up to the ceiling and back?

To answer that question, we have to deal with an obvious problem that arises now that Shirley is moving and you are stationary. Since it takes the flash two seconds to travel up and down Shirley’s shaft, when the flash gets back to the floor, Shirley is no longer directly above you; she’s two kilometers down the line to your right. That’s no problem for George; being inside Shirley, he still sees the flash just as he always has. But you, being far away, can no longer see the flash when it passes through the floor, so you don’t have any signal on which to stop your stopwatch.

To deal with that little complication, I’d like to take some poetic license with Shirley’s glass bottom. Let’s assume that her bottom is programmed to automatically rotate (angle itself) just precisely enough that the light flash, when it hits the floor (and is seen by naked George), is reflected at just the right angle to travel directly back to your eyes. That way, both you and George see the return flash of light, and you both have an event to base the stopping of your stopwatches on.

Physically, the situation is illustrated in the figure above. From George’s perspective, the light goes straight up to the ceiling and straight back down, just like it would if he was shining a flashlight on the ceiling from the floor of a moving train. Meanwhile, from your perspective, Shirley is moving at one kilometer a second. In the second it takes the light pulse to reach the ceiling, Shirley has moved one kilometer away; while the light’s reflection comes back down, she has an opportunity to move another kilometer away. When the flash finally reaches the floor, it is reflected immediately along the straight dotted line right back to you. In this way, you continue to see the flash, too.

OK, now, what are the results? Still pretty disappointing, I’m afraid. Light takes only a tiny amount of extra time, 1/150,000 of a second to be exact, to cross the two kilometers that separate Shirley’s bottom from you. Although the flash is reaching you just a teensy, tiny bit later than it reaches George, the difference is far too tiny to show up with a measuring device as crude as you hitting a stopwatch.

Still, you’re not satisfied. You know that, compared to George, the light had to travel two additional kilometers. Since you know this distance precisely, you decide to simply program your stopwatch to, not only automatically subtract your brain processing time, but also automatically subtract the additional time required for the light flash to travel back from Shirley to you.

As I said, with Shirley just two kilometers away, that extra time is so negligible that you won’t notice it. You and George continue to measure the same two-second duration for the event. It would appear that Einstein has still not shown up to the party!

Still, something about this entire setup is beginning to bother you. The figure above provides a strong hint that there’s a geometric complication to this situation. Now that the spacecraft is moving, there’s something about the path that the light has to take from your perspective that’s different from the path it takes from naked George’s perspective (which is just straight up and down).

What is that something, owls? Just Lin zeroed in on it in last Wednesday’s comment section, and even figured out what it means as far as the duration of the event is concerned. Feel free to speculate about it yourself in today’s comments. Why? Well, the more you “stay ahead” of our little thought experiment, the less disruptive it’s going to be later on when Einstein finally makes his grand entrance!

Why I support a Public Option

by Lynnd

The story below is from a blog by Shannyn Moore. I did not share all of it, just the main part of Lennie’s story. You can check out Shannyn at:

Shannyn Moore blog

I can imagine awful things. That's why I'm a terrible flier. This week, I sat across from something I couldn't imagine.

I remember the story. On December 1, 2007, a Palmer, Alaska man attacked his father and his father's fiancé with a machete in the middle of the night. Leaving them for dead, he drove to Anchorage and shot three people, killing one, injuring two.

Tuesday, I had lunch with Lennie. She survived the machete attack that killed her fiancé. The hospital stopped counting after fifty "chop wounds", from head to toe. One of her two uninjured fingers still wears the ring of the man she loved. She smiles a lot. While we were talking, she liked something I said and offered a "high 2 and ¾" instead of a "high 5".

She told me about that horrifying, long ago night. She described the sound a machete makes when it hits your skull. She didn't feel her ear being severed, or her fingers. Her funny bone is gone, but she joked about her sense of humor being intact. She recently lost her dog, Bear, who defended her during the attack.

Her assailant screamed while he chopped her, "Why are you making me do this?" over and over. Her voice hushed when she shared with me that an angel helped her reach the phone to dial 911. Unseen hands held her legs up to keep her from bleeding to death while help was on the way.
Lennie was released from the hospital with only five days worth of pain pills and the inability to feed, bathe, use the bathroom or dress herself. She didn't have insurance.

She told me she would rather be hit with a machete than go through the de-humanizing experience of not having health coverage. Lennie supports a public option. She doesn't want anyone to have to fight harder for health care than she did against a possessed man determined to kill her.
The man wielding the machete, Chris Rogers, is now serving time in prison. He's entitled to health care under the 8th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. His victim doesn't want the death penalty for him; she doesn't even want his health coverage taken away. She wants everyone to have the health care they need. The surgeries to repair her claw-like hand, like the leg brace that helps her walk, were pro-bono by doctors who were unable to watch the current system ignore her suffering.

"At least I'm not bitter," she likes to say, usually after some nightmare story about pain management. We chatted over chicken and grilled cheese about public option possibilities. I shared with her my meeting Howard Dean a few weeks ago. I told her how the message between President Clinton, Senator Kennedy, Dr. Dean, Valerie Jarrett, AFL-CIO leader Richard Trumka and others were rallying the grass roots across the nation for public health care. I assured her the public option was already a compromise from a single payer system...and we were going to win. We had to, it's a life or death matter.

"I sure hope so," she said. "I have a pre-existing condition. It's called attempted murder."

This is just one story of a failed health care system. Calling it health care is being generous in my mind. I personally know two people who WORK and can not get insurance because of pre-existing conditions. One has Hep C (contracted through surgery and a blood transfusion) and the other has a heart condition, he lost his job found new work but the insurance plan will not cover him. In both cases medical attention is required, not an option. It literally is about life and death.

I am at the point in this issue that I would like to go before a death panel and beg them to take me out! So I don’t have to see the suffering around me and feel helpless to do anything. That and the fact I cannot take the crazy fear mongering around me. Just my humble opinion.



Get the facts please visit:

Health Action Now

This site is from AARP. The myth versus fact section is very enlightening.