October 25, 2008
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Emerging from Hiding, Briefly
I’ll admit it: I have been avoiding Xanga, barely blogging, and hardly surfing around here at all. I have also gone entire days here at home without turning on my radio (and if you know me, you know I don’t watch TV), or pulling up Google News. Yesterday, I checked my email and found that it had been four days and almost a thousand messages since the last time I’d downloaded the lot from my ISP.
Greyfox and I have both made a conscious effort to talk about things other than politics and the economy in our precious cell minutes each night. Regardless, we end up, almost against our will, discussing absurd current events and the corruption of those in power.
After a couple of days of deliberate avoidance, this morning I absent-mindedly asked Doug to turn on the radio while he was up off the couch stoking the wood stove.
[...elipsis: That reminded me that I haven't checked the fire since Doug went to bed, so I got up and stoked the stove. We have just come through our first sub-zero night of this winter -- yes it is winter here, already -- and the temp is still in single digits this morning.]
I’m glad I did come out of my seclusion for a bit, although I intend to turn the nattering thing off when I’m done here. I have enough dread and panic impinging on my empathic consciousness, without having the stories behind them pouring in through my ears.A sampling of things I heard and peripheral matters I found when I went online to learn more:
Imprisioned Chinese dissident Hu Jia won this year’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom from the European Parliament, in the face of threats from China, after the Nobel Committee picked a safer choice. You can find kudos and praise for him, as well as some heart-rending stuff about his ill health and his family’s forced relocation and house arrest, just about anywhere you look. I found some frequently overlooked aspects of his situation at The Peking Duck.
If you are a country music fan, you probably know about Jett Williams, Hank’s posthumous natural daughter. I hadn’t known anything about her until today. The radio bit piqued my curiosity, and I found a bit more from the Library of Congress and Wikipedia.
Please don’t trounce me for my ignorance, but until I heard today that Barack Obama is being attacked for having attended a Bilderberg Conference, I was only vaguely aware of what Bilderberg is or does.
Critics claim the Bilderberg Group promotes the careers of politicians whose views are representative of the interests of multinational corporations, at the expense of democracy.[source: David Rockefeller's Memoirs] Journalists who have been invited to attend the Bilderberg Conference as observers have discounted these claims, calling the conference “not much different from a seminar or a conference organized by an upscale NGO”[Turkish Daily News] with “nothing different except for the influence of the participants.”[Turkish Daily News]Realistically, our next president will probably be either John McCain or Barack Obama. I hope it will be Obama. There are some other choices, even besides the perennial Ralph Nader. The Green Party’s ticket includes two descendants of African slaves, former U.S. Representative from Georgia Cynthia McKinney [what Wikipedia has on her] and Hip-Hop journalist Rosa Clemente [her Wikipedia article here]. The environment is only part of the Green platform. It would be interesting to see them get a chance to work toward a better planet. They certainly couldn’t do any worse than what we’ve gone through for the past eight years. I wonder what percentage of the voting public hasn’t ever heard of McKinney and Clemente.
Cynthia McKinney
Rosa Clemente
Comments (4)
I confess, I hadn’t heard of them until I voted this morning and saw their names on the ballot.
And I thought I was informed.
Hugs and Warm Wishes
Is your new stove a warm bundle of excellence? Will you be warmer than last year?
ya, heard of them back in ’07, when I was trying to find out more about nader.
“Oh, I wish I owned this one… someday.”
you might be able to torrent it using programs like utorrent, and websites such as isohunt or the pirate bay. it’d take forever on dial-up, but hey, depends how much you want it, how much doug uses the internet, or any number of circumstances that only you know about.
…
Unless music theft violates your ethics. Whoever this guy is, he’s probably dead by now - which means he won’t make shit from his work unless they pay royalties in heaven.
As a general rule, if it’s not Johnny Cash, or that one song by Kenney Rogers (“The Gambler”), country music creates a perpetual tedium. My grandmother seems to hate most of the artists from her era that I like. Conversely, everything she likes is slow, dull, and makes me feel sad. Now there’s “good slow and sad”, like Cash’s cover of the Nine Inch Nails song, ’Hurt’. But that is not it. She tends not to like music very much.
Interesting pic of McKinny you pulled, btw. What an odd facial expression.
There’s a movie on about Cash right now
. I want to see the movie with 60′s avant-garde artist Tim Buckley in it, or the one based on Jim Morrison/ The Doors that a fellow sailor told me about. We’re all sailors in the ocean of life. And Jim Morrison floats my boat. 
What a sex kitten
@Apocatastasis - I saw Jim Morrison do his song and dance, on Light My Fire and Break on Through (to the other side) at the Magic Mountain Music Festival in spring of ’67. Fifth Dimension were there, too. Did you ever hear “Beautiful Balloon”?
Morrison was yummy, indeed. A while back Ray Manzarek, the Doors’
keyboardist, talked to Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, about the
origins of the band. It started one day when Manzarek ran into Morrison on the beach. I learned a lot, listening to him, mostly about
the musical backgrounds of the members.
In prison, my main source of news was a radio broadcast played over the
PA system as we waited in line for our evening meal. That’s where I
was when I learned of Jim Morrison’s death. Many of us wept. Less
than a year previously, same place, same time of day, I had learned
that Jimi Hendrix died (on my birthday), and then Janice Joplin. Thus
all 3 of those deaths are associated in my mind, and associated with
bad prison food and women weeping.
Piracy is okay with me, but Amazon gave me a $25 discount freebie, and free shipping, so yesterday I pre-ordered that Hank Williams set, and paid $4.99. I don’t like much of today’s new country music, but Hank is in a class by himself, and I have a thing for old, “lost” recordings, writings, etc.
@the_tramp - The new stove is still new. Biggest difference from the old one is that this one does not have a thermostatically controlled draft. That means that the fire is easier to keep going at warmer ambient temps, but we are still learning how to regulate it. It draws air for combustion from outside, up through a hole the floor, and that cuts down on drafts in here. Wait until it gets really cold, and I’ll tell you if this new stove is adequate.