I took an online IQ test today. I usually avoid such things — they threaten the delicate balance between arrogance and shame. I will say that the verbal stuff — analogies, in particular — was easy. The math was harder. The SATs told me that years ago. But there were several spatial/graphical examples that I never grasped. I truly had no clue what was expected of me. At times like that, my left brain punts to my right brain: Here, you figure this out! Perhaps I should have used my left hand to make those selections. For all I know, my right brain pulled it off — he can’t say, really. My left brain is still miffed. He’ll be in his room for hours throwing books and toys to let the whole house know he’s suffered a grave injustice. Ah, but nothing coaxes him out of his corner quite like a tasty metaphor. mjh
Around the ‘sphere
Been catching up on some blog reading and, in the custom of our cohort, have some recommendations for you.
I feel for the sense of injustice over at ABQrising (http://abqrising.wordpress.com/). As one listed twice (in your face!) in the Alibi’s recent list of local blogs, I extend a welcoming hand to another local blog with potential. This, even though none of my blogs appear in its blogroll. (Is there a blogroll big enough for me and Mario Burgos?)
It says something that I enjoyed the cartoons more than anything else at irReligion.org (particularly, Jesus – Meet Prometheus from russellsteapot.com). Unlike Believers, atheists don’t seem to congregate, even virtually. This site looks like it gets a lot of visits, FWIW.
This one is just too cool and I wonder how long it can keep it up: strange maps (hat tip to my homie jfleck).
Harry Potter: Pronunciation Guide | Scholastic
http://www.scholastic.com/harrypotter/books/pronunciation.htmGRE Vocabulary Word Scramble
National Novel Writing Month – National Novel Writing Month
http://www.nanowrimo.org/Finally, via Albloggerque, a Sunday Poem. I was ready to forget this until I read the last 4 lines. Damn, that’s fine. mjh
Found Letter, by Joshua Weiner
What makes for a happier life, Josh, comes to this:
Gifts freely given, that you never earned;
Open affection with your wife and kids;
Clear pipes in winter, in summer screens that fit;
Few days in court, with little consequence;
A quiet mind, a strong body, short hours
In the office; close friends who speak the truth;
Good food, cooked simply; a memory that’s rich
Enough to build the future with; a bed
In which to love, read, dream, and re-imagine love;
A warm, dry field for laying down in sleep,
And sleep to trim the long night coming;
Knowledge of who you are, the wish to be
None other; freedom to forget the time;
To know the soul exceeds where it’s confined
Yet does not seek the terms of its release,
Like a child’s kite catching at the wind
That flies because the hand holds tight the line.
Bug Photos
I’ve somewhat surprised myself by developing a fondness for photographing bugs. (It is very important to surprise oneself now and then.) Flowers are easy (except in a breeze) and who doesn’t love birds? Bugs are harder to ‘capture’ and, perhaps, love. I’ll provide you with a link to my bugs photos, but be sure to look at Candyflossgirl’s photos, too. mjh
www.flickr.com
|
Six Legs Or More – a photoset on Flickr
(From either of these links, you can discover various bug groups and tags on Flickr.)
Lily Pad and Beyond
Lily Pond is a small alpine lake in far southern Colorado (just barely north of New Mexico). I’ve always called it Lily Pad, perhaps due to some collusion between my dyslexia and pun-center, that cluster of cells chuckling in a corner of my brain. I’ve posted a photo of Lilly Pad on my flickr account.
Now for a confession: I may not have gotten out of the car for this one (I can’t remember). We enjoy what we call “car hiking.” I’m a little embarrassed to admit that we sacrifice a real connection to the land that can only be achieved on foot for the easy sightseeing, trading the details for the blurry big-picture. There we go, burning fossil fuels, generating pollution, dust and noise, tearing across the scarred landscape for our own selfish pleasure. We might as well be on ATVs pulling snowmobiles behind us.
The only mitigation for our selfish acts is to share some of that pleasure with others. If someone sees a photo or hears a story and thinks, “that’s must have been fun,” then that may thumb the Karmic scale back towards neutral. Please help us with our penance by reading my journal and/or looking at some photos. peace, mjh mjh
Ah, Wilderness! » Conejos Journal – July 2007
One of these pictures was highlighted by New West.
Good Riddance
I can’t imagine anything finer or more poetic will be written about Karl der Grosse than what Bill Moyers has written. I quote a small part; read the whole thing. mjh
Bill Moyers Journal: My Fellow Texan
“Karl Rove figured out a long time ago that the way to take an intellectually incurious, draft-averse, naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket and make him governor of Texas, was to sell him as God’s anointed in a state where preachers and televangelists outnumber even oil derricks and jack rabbits. Using church pews as precincts, Rove turned religion into a weapon of political combat — a battering ram, aimed at the devil’s minions. Especially at gay people. It’s so easy, as Karl knew, to scapegoat people you outnumber. And if God is love, as rumor has it, Rove knew in politics to bet on fear and loathing. Never mind that in stroking the basest bigotry of true believers you coarsen both politics and religion.”
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2007/08/my_fellow_texan.html
– – – – –
[mjh: Put a little more bluntly by Meyerson.]
Harold Meyerson – Rove’s Blind Spot – washingtonpost.com
“Rove always believed that with the right mix of legislation and presidential leadership, constituencies could be moved from the Democratic to the Republican column, much like pieces on a chessboard. Green identifies five policy initiatives that Rove thought would create a Republican majority and that he and George W. Bush decided to pursue: establishing educational standards, pursuing faith-based initiatives, reforming immigration laws, creating health savings accounts and privatizing Social Security. Thus would the Republicans destroy teachers unions, mobilize the moralists and win over Hispanics. Thus would they break the link between the American people and government programs and create a world in which Americans’ well-being and security depended almost entirely on the markets.
“Early in Bill Clinton’s presidency, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol had persuaded Republicans to oppose Clinton’s health-care program on political grounds: The provision of universal health coverage would permanently help the Democrats and hence should be defeated. A couple of years later, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in tandem with Republican strategist Grover Norquist, began proclaiming that government programs such as Medicare and Social Security were artifacts of the industrial age, and, now that the economy had moved on to the information age, Americans would rely on the market for their security if only those creaking relics from the New Deal and the Great Society could be disposed of. By 2000, Rove and Bush had joined these peewee league intellectuals in arguing that the economic changes of our age required the lowering of the old safety nets.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/14/AR2007081401330.html
Local Loco Priorities
Does the Media sensationalize, trivialize and infantize? Well, the Journal’s home page reflects the ranking of the paper’s front page today, though the difference in story emphasis is much more dramatic in the print version. There you’ll find the top story above the fold with a font normally reserved for cataclysms. We read that the mayor believes our local golf courses are in peril! Peril, people! Gasp. Farther down the page, below the fold, a smaller headline notes that suicides and accidental deaths are up in New Mexico. No telling what the suicide rate is among Journal readers, but shutting down the golf courses would dramatically reduce the death rate by lightning and skin cancer. Given that there are thousands of golf courses in the desert southwest, I doubt the suicide rate for golfers would rise much.
Many years ago, in response to Saint Pete intoning that all public lands must be available to ranchers, I recommended we graze cattle on the golf courses. Now, as the mayor and the Journal use this threat to galvanize the public into bullying the council on budgetary matters, I take my lead from Newty Gingrich circa 1994: let ’em close! mjh
The Collapse of the Republic(ans)
ABQjournal Opinion: Letters to the Editor
Government and Bridge Failed State Full of Deficient Bridges
AMERICA HAS built more transportation infrastructure per capita and per unit of gross domestic product than any other member of the G8. We may not be capable of maintaining it all, because we are enthralled by the mantra of “low taxes.” We are paying the price in lives lost at home and in Iraq. …
This is the cost of the success of Republican adviser Grover Norquist— famous for his widely-quoted comment that he would shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub”— and let America fall apart. [mjh: I hope Norquist drowns in his own violent metaphor someday.]
That’s what the Republicans have done ever since Ronald Reagan was elected and Norquist founded the misleading “Americans for Tax Reform” (for the rich). Now we pay the price. Highways fail. People die. A Republican governor and president prove again they don’t know how to run and sustain a country, a war and a highway system. Remember how we haven’t recovered from Katrina, yet?
We can’t keep cutting taxes and expect success. We are a great country and we need to pay the real cost to keep it great— and fight our wars. That means we pay taxes today. We do not borrow against our children and we do not let America fall apart.
JOHN HOOKER
Los Ranchos
de Albuquerque
Amen. The penny-pincher’s credo is: “You’ll get my fair contribution to the commonwealth when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers — until we eliminate Death Taxes!”
The fair-and-balanced Journal, mindful of the accusations of its liberal leanings — pause to snort, howl, laugh, wipe tear from eye — answered Hooker’s thoughtful letter with another:
Can’t Pin Collapse on Bush
… Don’t these whiny Democrats have anything better to come up with? The liberal politicians in Washington don’t know how to lead, so they shift the blame of everything that goes wrong in this country over to conservatives. That is dishonest and disingenuous on the part of Democratic politicians. …
KIM BERGET
Albuquerque
Once again, I have to wonder if the conservative view isn’t really some bad joke from liberals attempting to make conservatism appear brain-dead. But, no, they really believe what they think.
Shall we ignore that Republicans ruled the land from 2000 to 2006 and 1980 to 1992 before that? (And acted like a guerrilla army in the years between.) Hasn’t the “conservative view” been very thoroughly tested and discredited? Had enough yet? mjh