Putting It All In Perspective

Let go of those negative thoughts.

This is something to think about when negative people are doing their best to rain on your parade. So remember this story the next time someone who knows nothing, and cares less, tries to make your life miserable.

A woman was at her hairdresser's getting her hair styled for a trip to Rome with her husband. She mentioned the trip to the hairdresser, who responded:

"Rome ? Why would anyone want to go there? It's crowded and dirty. You're crazy to go to Rome. So, how are you getting there?"

"We're taking Continental," was the reply. "We got a great rate!"

"Continental?" exclaimed the hairdresser, "That's a terrible airline. Their planes are old, their flight at tendants are ugly, and they're always late. So, where are you staying in Rome ?"

"We'll be at this exclusive little place over on Rome's Tiber River called Teste."

"Don't go any further. I know that place. Everybody thinks its gonna be something special and exclusive, but it's really a dump, the worst hotel in the city! The rooms are small, the service is terrible,and they're overpriced.

"So, whatcha' doing when you get there?"

"'We're going to go to see the Vatican and we hope to see the Pope."

"That's rich," laughed the hairdresser. "You and a million other people trying to see him. He'll look the size of an ant.

"Boy, good luck on this lousy trip of yours. You're going to need it."

A month later, the woman again came in for a hairdo. The hairdresser asked her about her trip to Rome.

"It was wonderful," explained the woman, "not only were we on time in one of Continental's brand new planes, but it was overbooked, and they bumped us up to first class. The food and wine were wonderful, and I had a handsome 28-year-old steward who waited on me hand and foot.

"And the hotel was great! They'd just finished a $5 million remodeling job, and now it's a jewel, the finest hotel in the city. They, too, were overbooked, so they apologized and gave us their owner's suite at no extra charge!"

"Well," muttered the hairdresser, "that's all well and good, but I know you didn't get to see the Pope."

"Actually, we were quite lucky, because as we toured the Vatican, a Swiss Guard tapped me on the shoulder, and explained that the Pope likes to meet some of the visitors, and if I'd be so kind as to step into his private room and wait, the Pope would personally greet me.

"Sure enough, five minutes later, the Pope walked through the door and shook my hand! I knelt down and he spoke a few words to me."

"Oh, really! What'd he say?"

"He said: 'Where'd you get the shitty Hairdo?'"

Courtesy of Doug.

To Blog Or Not To Blog

I've been giving serious thought to discontinuing my blog - maybe permanently, maybe temporarily. I'm not at all disappointed by my traffic. It's higher than I ever believed it would be. The problem is the time and effort it requires to do a decent job of it as opposed to what fruit the effort bears. I realize that's a difficult measurement to make.

My thinking is that many are doing a better job of blogging than I am, and an even greater number are doing equally good work. What really do I contribute to the conversation that's not already being said? I'm not one to post only occasionally. It's an every day job for me or nothing. If I took the blog to only occasional posts, the posts would come seldom to never. It seems to be an obsession or nothing for me.

I hope that you respect me enough to know that I'm not fishing for compliments about my blog or looking for bromides about soldiering on. I'm simply bouncing my thoughts off you, my readers, for better or for worse.

I've set up a separate email address on my sidebar for those who may be too shy to leave a comment. How to judge results versus time expended is what I'm trying to work out. In other words, could I better spend my time doing something else?

Of course, I'd still visit around and clutter up the comments boxes of other bloggers, so I wouldn't disappear. I wouldn't delete my blog, either, because I might change my mind.

"Unread Books" Meme

Like Padre Mickey, I spent a lot of time inside reading while the other kids were playing outside. Many on the list which are considered classic works of fiction, I read at a rather young age on my own.

From Paul, who got it from Padre Mickey, who got it from Caminante, and on and on, but that's as far as I'll go:

What we have below is a list of the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing users. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
The Brothers Karamazov (?)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair

The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad (excerpts in school)
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations

American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid (excerpts in school)
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Obama Is The Democratic Nominee

Fran made me do it. I have been thinking about the ongoing and endless campaign for the Democratic nomination. I'm not going to pretend that there is still a contest. The contest is over. Obama, short of an unforeseen catastrophe, will be the Democratic nominee. Like Fran, neither Clinton nor Obama was my favorite. Like Fran again, I liked Dennis Kucinich best. Next, I would have wanted John Edwards or Chris Dodd before either Obama or Clinton.

BUT, and it is a very big BUT, I believe that Democrats must be careful about calling for Clinton to drop out of the race. Feelings run strong on both sides, for the supporters of Obama and for the supporters of Clinton. There are those from both camps who say they will not vote for the other Democrat. They will either stay home, or vote for the Republican, or for Ron Paul, or now for Bob Barr. A vote for Paul or Barr is as good as a vote for John McCain. That frightens me. The thought of McCain for president is as scary as the thought of giving Bush a third term.

I have my personal thoughts and feelings about Hillary Clinton's campaign, which I won't state here, but I think that the timing for her to drop out is her decision and that of her advisers. Perhaps she'll carry her campaign all the way to the convention. That is her right. Above all, Obama should continue, as he has been doing, to resist the temptation to weigh in on the matter, as should his close advisers, and perhaps his supporters could give that some thought, too.

Democrats will need the votes of the Clinton supporters in the general election to win, and the time to start to make peace is right now, whether Clinton is still in the race or not. The decision on when to end her campaign is hers, and she must be not be seen as having been pushed.

BUT, another big BUT, both Obama and Clinton should stop attacks on one another right now, this minute, this second, and concentrate their criticism on John McCain. It's vital to the future of our country!

For what it's worth.

Pray For Senator Ted Kennedy

From the Associated Press:

BOSTON (AP) — A cancerous brain tumor caused the seizure Sen. Edward M. Kennedy suffered over the weekend, doctors said Tuesday in a grim diagnosis for one of American politics' most enduring figures. "He remains in good spirits and full of energy," the doctors for the 76-year-old Massachusetts Democrat said in a statement.

They said tests conducted after the seizure showed a tumor in Kennedy's left parietal lobe. Preliminary results from a biopsy of the brain identified the cause of the seizure as a malignant glioma, they said.

The diagnosis is grim, indeed. Pray for Sen. Kennedy and his family and friends.

Department of Duh!

From Juan Cole at Informed Comment:

The Moroccan government broke up a terror cell in Fez that was allegedly planning an attack in Belgium. If this story is as advertised, it underlines that radical Muslim extremism is best fought by establishing warm relations with Muslim allies such as Morocco, the security forces of which are far more able to break up such cells than is the US Pentagon. That is, diplomacy is more important to counter-terrorism than sheer military might.

I say that Cole makes a lot of sense. I hope that our next president gives this idea a try.

Feast Day Of St. Alcuin Of York

For biographical information on Alcuin of York, please read Ormonde Plater's excellent post at Through the Dust. Ormonde, who is a retired archdeacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana, regularly posts on the lives of the deacons of the church. He has written two books about deacons, Deacons in the Liturgy (1992) and Many Servants: An Introduction to Deacons (2004).

James Kiefer's shorter biography at the Lectionary:

Alcuin was an Englishman from York, born into a noble family about 730, and educated by a pupil of Bede. Having become a deacon, he was made head of the cathedral school at York around 770. In 781 he was asked by the Emperor Charlemagne to become his minister of education. He accepted, and established schools at many cathedrals and monasteries, and promoted learning in every way he could. In the preceding years of constant wars and invasions, many ancient writings had been lost. Alcuin established scriptoria, dedicated to the copying and preservation of ancient manuscripts, both pagan and Christian. That we have as much as we do of the writings of classical Roman authors is largely due to Alcuin and his scribes. (He is credited with the invention of cursive script, in which the letters are connected for greater speed of writing.) To Alcuin, backed by Charlemagne, belongs much of the credit for the revision and organisation of the Latin liturgy, the preservation of many of the ancient prayers, and the development of plainchant. He and his fellow theologians at Charlemagne's capital of Aachen (or Aix-le-Chappelle) were important advocates of the doctrine that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son jointly. Unfortunately, the East, which regarded the Emperor at Byzantium as the sole Emperor, resented Charlemagne's assumption of the title of Holy Roman Emperor, and this hardened their opposition to the aforesaid doctrine, thus contributing to the rift between East and West.

Readings:

Psalm 37:3-6,32-33 or 112:1-9
Ecclesiasticus 39:1-9
Matthew 13:47-52

PRAYER

Almighty God, who in a rude and barbarous age raised up your deacon Alcuin to rekindle the light of learning: Illumine our minds, we pray, that amid the uncertainties and confusions of our own time we may show forth your eternal truth, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Iran Next? - Part 2

From the Jerusalem Post:

The White House on Tuesday flatly denied an Army Radio report that claimed US President George W. Bush intends to attack Iran before the end of his term. It said that while the military option had not been taken off the table, the Administration preferred to resolve concerns about Iran's push for a nuclear weapon "through peaceful diplomatic means."

I don't believe a word that comes from the White House about Bush's future actions.

Army Radio had quoted a top official in Jerusalem claiming that a senior member in the entourage of President Bush, who concluded a trip to Israel last week, had said in a closed meeting here that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were of the opinion that military action against Iran was called for.

The official reportedly went on to say that "the hesitancy of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice" was preventing the administration from deciding to launch such an attack on the Islamic Republic for the time being.

Condi and Gates into the breach! Let's all hope that their "hesitancy" is powerful enough to restrain the war-mongering top leadership. Whoever is the next president will have more than enough dirty messes to clean up. I pray that a war with Iran will not be one of them.

Meanwhile three US aircraft carriers are in place patrolling in the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean.

"Iran Next?" - Part 1 is here.

Photo from the AP

UPDATE: If you'd like to take action, go to True Majority to send this message to your senator:

"Don't let this administration lead America into another conflict in the Middle East. One war is already too much.

I urge you to support S. Res. 356, which would require that any military action against Iran be explicitly approved by Congress."

Frank Rich Is Rich

This past weekend, Jenna Bush was married quietly back at the Crawford ranch. The colors for the bridesmaid's dresses were chosen from Texas wildflowers. Sweet.

Republicans were stunned by their loss of a House seat in red, red Mississippi to Democrat, Travis Childers.

In his opinion column at the New York Times, Rich says:

[Republican] Party leaders have been haplessly trying to identify possible remedies ever since. It didn’t help that their recent stab at an Obamaesque national Congressional campaign slogan, “The Change You Deserve,” was humiliatingly identified as the advertising pitch for the anti-depressant Effexor. (If they’re going to go the pharmaceutical route, “Viva Viagra” might be more to the point.)

Yes!

In the election for the Mississippi house seat, the Republicans went all out against Childers, throwing everything at him but the kitchen stove.

The G.O.P. didn’t merely step up its expensive negative campaign, attempting to take down Mr. Childers (who is a white, conservative Democrat) by linking him with Mr. Obama, a ranting Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Nancy Pelosi. It also brought in the party’s big guns. Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain recorded mass phone pitches for Mr. Davis. Karl Rove and Mr. Cheney campaigned for him.

Surely they knew that Cheney was better left in his undisclosed location.

The vice president’s visit was last Monday, the centerpiece of a get-out-the-vote rally in DeSoto County, a G.O.P. stronghold. “We’ll put our shoulders to the wheel for John McCain,” the vice president promised as he bestowed his benediction on Mr. Davis. Well, he got out the vote all right. In the election results the next day, the Childers total in DeSoto County increased 142 percent, while the Davis count went up only 47 percent.

Note to Republican candidates: you don't want Cheney's shoulders on your wheel.

Rich goes on to write about how tough it will be for McCain and the other Republican candidates to distance themselves from the Bush administration and its disastrous policies, which they supported whole-heartedly.

Hard as it is for Mr. McCain to run from the Bush policies he supports, it will be far harder to escape from Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney themselves. When Mr. McCain accepted Mr. Bush’s endorsement at the White House in March, he referred three times to the president’s “busy schedule,” as if wishing aloud that the lame-duck incumbent would have no time to appear at, say, get-out-the-vote rallies. Alas, Mr. Bush and company are not going gently into retirement.

Read the whole column. There are many more juicy bits on both parties that you won't want to miss.

Luiz Is Doing The Lambeth Walk, Too

Luiz Coelho has left a new comment....

Hey y'all... I almost missed this...

I'm going to Lambeth too. I was selected a couple months ago by the Brazilian church.

I don't need donations, however, since I have a bursary. However, I'm going to start an art project there that will be online within some weeks, so, please, stay tuned!

Mimi, can you please update this piece of info for me? Bisoux.

Avec plaisir, Cher Luiz. Bisoux à toi!

Luiz blogs at Wandering Christian.