WOUNDED BIRD

Monday, January 9, 2012

PRAYER FOR 2012

My prayer for 2012 is for
A fat bank account & a thin body.
Please don't mix these up like you did last year.
AMEN!

Don't blame me. Blame Doug.

BOROWITZ REPORTS...

January 9, 2012

Other Republicans Agree Not to Tell Rick Perry Where Next Debate Is

‘Only Humane Thing,’ Candidates Say

Read the rest at The Borowitz Report.

GLASS ORGAN - BACH'S TOCCATA AND FUGUE IN D-MINOR

More lovely sounds from the Glass Duo, thanks to Paul (A.).

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY FROM RICK SANTORUM

If you can take one part out, if it's not for the purpose of procreation, that's not one of the reasons you diminish this very special bond between men and women. So why can't you take other parts of it out? It becomes deconstructed to the point where it's simply pleasure.

Rick's on a roll! The statement is from an interview, which is posted on YouTube. The conversation is nearly 45 minutes long. Watch if you care to. I didn't.

How would you like such thoughts thrust upon you for four years?

Read more from Charles Pierce at The Politics Blog at Esquire.

UPDATE: I watched approximately 20 minutes of the video, (It was difficult!) and Rick did, indeed, say the words above.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

PONDERISMS - PART 1

1. I used to eat a lot of natural foods until I learned that most people die of natural causes.

2. There are two kinds of pedestrians: the quick and the dead.

3. Life is sexually transmitted.

4. Healthy is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

5. The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.

6. Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

7. Have you noticed since everyone has a camcorder these days no one talks about seeing UFOs like they used to?

8. Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.

9· All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.

10. In the 60's people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

My brother-in-law sent me twenty ponderisms, but I know some of you have short attention spans, so I divided them to post in two parts.

THE FACE OF OCCUPY NEW HAMPSHIRE

Occupy New Hampshire

Every now and then, as Kathy Thorndike stood on the curb near the park where the Occupy The New Hampshire Primary encampment is located, and as she waved her signs demanding that big money be excised from our politics, a car would drive by and someone would blow their horn and a sleek young voice would tell her to get a job.

As it happens, Kathy Thorndike has a job. She's a health-care administrator overseeing a geriatric care unit near her home in the lakes region around Laconia. As it happens, her husband has a job, too. He's a contractor who built his business after starting out as a laborer and then becoming a carpenter. As it happens, her parents had jobs, too. Her father was a podiatrist, her mother a nurse. As it happens, her children have jobs, too. Two of them are nurses. One of them is a contractor. As it happens, one of her daughters is underwater on her mortgage. Another one of her children has to work overtime at two jobs in order to provide for Kathy's grandchildren. The notion that Occupy is made up of unemployable layabouts is one of the things that makes Kathy Thorndike as angry as an otherwise mild person can get. The other is what she calls the "propaganda" that Occupy has no coherent message. Her message, she says, is the facts of her own life.

"People are really struggling in the middle class," she said here on Saturday afternoon, as a man in a long red robe carrying a sign saying "Fight American Imperialism" rang a cowbell not two feet down the sidewalk. "I was raised in the middle class. I raised my children in the middle class. My children are not middle class. They're all professionals — they're nurses and carpenters — but they're not able to be middle class anymore.

"I got to stay home with my children, and we were middle class, and my husband was a laborer, for goodness sake."

What an amazing change in a generation. Nurses and carpenters are no longer assured of a place in the middle class. I'm reminded of my friend who was laid off his job in computer technology at age 62 and has not found a job three years later. He and his wife may yet lose their home. Companies are not falling over each other to hire folks in their late 50s and early 60s, even highly-skilled people with excellent references and experience. Many of the 'layabouts' are just such people as my friend.

Read more by Charles Pierce at Esquire's The Politics Blog.