Blughuh?

What really, really, really mystifies me is Paris Hilton.

1. Why is she such a media star?

2. And why does she bear such a uncanny resemblance to Donald Trump?





Read more about things that mystify others at participating Bloghuh? blogs this week:

Aprosexic
Blue Witch
bob's yer uncle
Changing Places
Depthmarker
In the Aquarium
Jen&HerBoat
Kitchen Witch
La Que Sabe
London Daily Photo
Purple Pen
Quixotic Evil
Who Knows Where Thoughts Come From?

Small Town Life

We have another storm heading our way this weekend and are still recovering from the last two. Many of the older residents are finally venturing outside after five days of being snowbound. The streets are still a mess with what used to be six foot tall piles of snow at almost every intersection now melting into dirty, icy, rock hard, four foot high lumps of snow. Every street except Main is either rutted, icy, and slushy or has been plowed down to a rock hard table covered with a thin layer of ice. Since most of the sidewalks on the side streets are still not shoveled walking is treacherous. Diving is not much better.

The storm has been hard on us, some more than others, but the ones that have suffered the most are the wild animals. I went by the grain elevators last week and saw a large flock of turkeys picking at some spilled grain they had found on the ground. A farmer I talked to over the weekend told me he saw a herd of around fifty antelope standing in a corn field near the highway when he was driving to town . Other people have seen pheasants standing along side county roads near their houses. All the animals are looking for food.

When the first storm hit my husband knew the pheasants, quail, and prairie chicken would be having a hard time finding food so he went over to one of the grain elevators and bought enough corn to fill two 15 gallon garbage cans. He then drove out to the country and spread it in areas where the birds could find it but still have cover; windbreaks, culverts , and dense tall grass. The last thing he wanted to do was create fast food outlets for the coyotes by spreading it out on top of the snow in the middle of an open area.

After thinking about it some more he knew that the little he was doing wasn’t enough and started making some calls. When he was done he had about 1,500 pounds of donated waste grain in twelve 30 gallon barrels, a flat bed truck and driver to bring it all to a central point in town, and a soon to be published article in the town newspaper. The article informed people that the grain was available free to anyone who wanted to help out the wild birds. It requested that farmers coming to town stop by and pick up some of the grain to spread under any cover available on their CRP land. As of today only four barrels of grain are left but my husband said, if needed, he will be able to get more. My husband is definitely one of the good guys.


No Bloghuh? post today.


Read more about things that mystify others at participating Bloghuh? blogs this week:

Aprosexic
Blue Witch
bob's yer uncle
Depthmarker
Jen&HerBoat
Kitchen Witch
La-Que-Sabe
Purple Pen
Quixotic Evil
Who Knows Where Thoughts Come From

Bloghuh?

Bloghuh? starts today. What is Bloghuh, you ask? It is a group blogging exercise thought up by Blue Witch that is..."an attempt to reinspire the uninspired and revive some of the old bloggy community co-operative spirit that frequently seems to be so far away these days". For the next seven day we (the participants) will be writing about the things in life that mystify us. You know, like where that missing sock goes when you are doing the laundry.

Now, the best part about this exercise is that you do not have to actually have a blog to participate yourself. You can e-mail me or any of the other bloggers with your contribution and we will post it for you. You don't have to use your name if you don't want to either, being shy is OK with us. You can use a pseudonym or post it anonymously.

Quick, what do chimpanzees eat? You thought or said bananas, didn't you? Why wouldn't you? You have seen Cheetah eating bananas in Tarzan movies. You have seen chimps eating bananas in Jane Goodall's documentaries. You have seen chimps eating bananas at any zoo you have ever visited during feeding time. You have seen chimps eating bananas in cartoons and on TV shows. You have seen chimps with bananas in the books you read when you were a child. You have even seen Curious George eating a banana.


Two Facts about chimpanzees and bananas:

1. Chimpanzees are from West, and Central Africa.

2. Bananas originated in Malaysia.

Most people consider bananas as the primary food source of the chimpanzee but chimpanzees are omnivores and eat a combination of meat and plant material. They do eat fruits in the wild but not bananas. They also eat leaves, seeds, flowers, insects and small mammals like bushpigs, monkeys, baboons and bushbucks.

What mystifies me is how bananas got connected in our minds with chimpanzees in the first place.


Read more about things that mystify others at participating Bloghuh? blogs this week:

Aprosexic
Blue Witch
bob's yer uncle
Depthmarker
Jen&HerBoat
Kitchen Witch
La-Que-Sabe
Purple Pen
Who Knows Where Thoughts Come From

Well, so that is that

W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the Decorations back into their cardboard boxes-
Some have got broken-and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed up, for the rest of the week-
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted-quite unsuccessfully-
To love all our relatives, and in general
Crossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and
failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.

Epiphany

We three kings of Orient are;
Bearing gifts we traverse afar,
Field and fountain, moor and mountain,
Following yonder star.

Meme Time

THE RULES: Each player of this game starts with the ‘6 weird things about you.’ People who get tagged need to write a blog of their own 6 weird things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave a comment that says ‘you are tagged’ in their comments and tell them to read your blog.”


Kathryn over at Knit Together tagged me back in the middle of December and it has taken me this long to get my list down to six. Here we go.



Six Weird Things About Me

1. I like the smell of gasoline. I'm not a sniffer or a huffer but I do find the fragrance of gasoline pleasant.

2. I was very limber as a child. Flexible enough to bite my own toenails, which I did until about the age of seven.

3. Bright light, including sunlight, makes me sneeze. Light reflecting off a white wall can also make me sneeze.

4. If given the choice I would pick a green salad over a piece of cake any day. I cannot stand anything too sweet.

5. I do not eat the heels of store bought bread but love the end pieces of fresh baked crunchy bread. When I was a child sometimes eating the bread heels meant we might be out of food for the next day or two.

6. Because of a quirk in my brain I am a bad speller. I can not visualize words in my head. Even now I can be typing and think of a word but not know how to spell it. I had to change a sentence in #5 because I could not think how to spell the word anxiety. I could not even misspell it well enough to get it to come up in the spellchecker. It is spelled correctly here because I went to IMDd and looked up Mel Brooks and then searched his list of movies for High Anxiety.

I am not going to tag anyone else but if you would like to play, feel free, it is kind of fun.

Some Have Greatness Thrust Upon Them

Gerald Ford was a nice guy. And college athlete. And a World War II veteran. And a former Congressman. And a member of the Warren Commission; which investigated and released a report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. And the only person to become both Vice-President and President of the United States without being elected to either office by the people. And...a nice guy.

Gerald Ford was appointed Vice-President by President Richard Nixon when his running mate and current Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigned after being charged with income tax evasion in October of 1973. This was in the middle of the Watergate scandal. When tapes of conversations in the Oval Office (the President's private office) showed that President Nixon had participated in an attempt to cover up the scandal and in attempts to block the investigation into it, he resigned rather than face impeachment proceedings. He did not want to go down in history as the only President removed from office for committing a criminal act. On that same date, August 9, 1974, Gerald R. Ford became the 38th President of the United States.

Now, even though the US Congress could no longer impeach the former president for his actions, criminal charges could still be brought against him. On September 8, 1973 Ford using "the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution." granted Richard Nixon a full and unconditional presidential pardon, which meant Nixon could never be prosecution for any crimes he committed while he had been President of the United States. Ford justified this action by saying in his speech to the nation he was doing it in order to put an end to the "bad dream" of "bitter controversy and divisive national debate."

He also said that, "In this,(pardoning Nixon) I dare not depend upon my personal sympathy as a long-time friend of the former President, nor my professional judgment as a lawyer, and I do not.

That last part was a lie as he admitted to journalist Bob Woodward during an interview in 2005, "I looked upon him as my personal friend, and I always treasured our relationship," Ford said. "And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon. I didn't want to see my real friend have the stigma.".

Gerald Ford was a nice guy. He was also a man who, when the chance of greatness was thrust upon him, threw it away when he put friendship ahead of the oath of office he took when he became President of the United States.

Some Achieve Greatness

I must admit here and now that I watched the cellphone video of Saddam Hussein's hanging. The tape that played over and over on cable and network television news since last December 30th (the one that stops just after they put the noose around his neck) was not enough. No matter how many times they played it, no matter how many times I heard or read that the man was now dead, deep in my heart I had a suspicion that Hussein was not dead. It was not beyond believe that he had been smuggled out of that little room the second after the tape ended.

So, when I heard that the execution was caught with a camera phone I started searching the Internet and quickly found a website that was showing it. By the time I got there almost three million people had watch this video. I hesitated for a moment before I clicked the play button as bubbles of nervousness percolated in my gut. What I saw was crude camera work with the image bouncing around and the sound of angry voices in the background. When the phone was held steady I could see Hussein standing on the hanging platform as the noose was placed around his neck. The voices got louder and then there was a loud bang and Hussein's body and head dropped quickly out of the frame. He's there one second, then he is not. Next there was darkness. I knew what was coming because I had read a description of what is on this video and I wanted to turn my eyes away. I could not seem to do this but I did turn my body away from my computer screen. I was still trying to decide if I wanted to see what is next but before I could make up my mind I saw a close-up of Hussein's head and broken neck in a circle of bright white light. Shock and a slight feeling of nausea raced through my body.

Oh God, why did I want to watch this? Because I no longer believe what I see on the news or what my government tells me. The news is censored and our government lies to us all the time. Ok, writing "all the time" is a little paranoid but I do believe that this administration lies to us quite a bit. After the execution of Hussein we were told that President Bush went to bed before the hanging took place and that his staff did not awake him to tell him Hussein was dead. That was upsetting to me. I thought it showed a lack of respect for the troops that are over in Iraq and especially the ones who have died. Wasn't Hussein the great evil of the 21st century? Wasn't his death Iraq's only true hope for democracy? Now all of a sudden his death is meaningless? So meaningless that the President did not even stay awake for it?

But wait. What if the story of Bush sleeping thorough the execution is a lie. What if the story was one of his adviser's idea? Tell the world that Bush slept thorough the hanging. Thus send a message to our enemies over in the Middle East that Hussein was such a nobody the president of the great United States Of America did not think his death more important that that of a dog. My, my aren't we tough? I am so sick of this game. Why don't we get to the real issue in all these power plays on the part of Bush and our perceived enemies. Let's get them all in one room, give them each a ruler, and have them drop their pants. We'll quickly find out who the big man really is here.

Some Are Born Great

The deaths of three famous men during Christmas week got me thinking. I am talking about James Brown, Gerald Ford, and Saddam Hussein. I mean, could you ever imagine any of those men in the same room at the same time? That the three of them should die in the same week is a little mind boggling to me.

Some men are born great and James Brown was born with a talent so large that if he had been an automobile he would be a turbo jet engine rocket car. In comparison most entertainers today are a KIA OPTIMA.

Whoa-oa-oa! I feel good, I knew that I would, now
I feel good, I knew that I would, now
So good, So good,
I got you

James Brown died early Christmas morning. I was shocked when I heard the news. James Brown? The Godfather of Soul? Soul Brother Number One? The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business? Dead?

...this is a man's world
But it wouldn't be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl

James Brown fascinated me when I was a teenager. Calling himself "the hardest-working man in show business" was not just ego on his part. I can see him in my mind's eye on a stage with all that processed hair piled high above his ugly/handsome face. He is wearing a skin tight suit with drainpipe pants that stop right at his ankles. His feet, clad in a pair of black pointy shoes with a bit of a high-heel on them, are moving so fast they are a blur.

Baby baby baby, Baby baby baby,
Baby baby baby,Baby baby
I got the feelin', baby baby

With sweat pouring off his face and that rough almost scratchy voice screaming out the lyrics of the song he was singing James would give us all he had.

Get up, (get on up)
Get up, (get on up)
Stay on the scene, (get on up),
Like a sex machine, (get on up)

Then would come the moment we, the live audience and us at home, were waiting for.

We're people, we're just like the birds and the bees
We'd rather die on our feet
Than be livin' on our knees
Say it loud, (I'm black and I'm proud)

James would fall to his knees in exhaustion and stay there with eyes closed and head bowed. One of the members of the band would come over and put a cape across his back and then help him to his feet.



He would slowly lead James, head still bowed and shoulders hunched forward, off stage. But...right before he reached the wings James would do it! He would straighten up, fling the cape off his back, race back to the microphone and start singing and dancing again while the crowd roared its approval.

Please, please, please, please me (You don't have to go)
Baby please, baby please, please me (You don't have to go)
Baby please, baby please don't go (You don't have to go)

Was it corny? Hell yes, corny-er than the state of Iowa but it was also a bit of showmanship and James Brown always had that.

Come here mama....and dig this crazy scene
He's not too fancy....but his line is pretty clean
He ain't no drag,
Papa's got a brand new bag

Mister Brown, you will be missed.

Oh Papa! He's doing the Jerk
Papa!...he's doing the Jerk
He's doing the twist ... just like this,
He's doing the Fly ev'ry day and ev'ry night
The thing's....like the Boomerang.
Hey....come on
Hey! Hey!.....come on

This Year's Resolution

Keep it simple.

Rose Is Rose