Poem: "What's in My Journal" by William Stafford, from Crossing Unmarked Snow. © University of Michigan Press.

What's in My Journal

Odd things, like a button drawer. Mean
Things, fishhooks, barbs in your hand.
But marbles too. A genius for being agreeable.
Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous
discards. Space for knickknacks, and for
Alaska. Evidence to hang me, or to beatify.
Clues that lead nowhere, that never connected
anyway. Deliberate obfuscation, the kind
that takes genius. Chasms in character.
Loud omissions. Mornings that yawn above
a new grave. Pages you know exist
but you can't find them. Someone's terribly
inevitable life story, maybe mine.

Parents Please!!!!

I have worked all weekend.  Please share this with you offspring!

You're a guy in your late 50s. You've just awakened and are looking at yourself in the bathroom mirror—as you do every morning. Only today you notice for the first time what must have been there for a while: the love handles, the once bulging pecs that now sort of sag. It gets you thinking. You realize that for some time you haven't had as much energy as you used to, you don't have as much interest in sex, there are times when you feel down and discouraged, and your friends tell you that you're more irritable than you used to be. Is this just aging? Is it simply the inevitable price of your nutritionally rich and exercise-poor lifestyle? Or is it a medical condition—one for which there might be a treatment?

NO!  It's time for some rubarb pie!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   Momma's little baby loves rubarb, rubarb, beeboop a ru-bop, rubarb pi!

It gets you up and goin' - when eaten in carefully calculated slices!

In keeping with the Blog entry earlier today about "Common Sense", may I submit for your consideration:

Modern Economics

SOCIALISM: You
have 2 cows, and you give one to your neighbor.

COMMUNISM: You have 2 cows. The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM: You have 2 cows. The State takes both and sells you some milk.

NAZISM: You have 2 cows. The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM: You have 2 cows. The State takes both, shoots one,
milks the other then throws the milk away.

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a
bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and
retire on the income.

SURREALISM: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take
harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You sell one, and force
the other to produce the milk of four cows. Later, you hire a
consultant to analyse why the cow has dropped dead.

ENRON VENTURE CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell three of them to
your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your
brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated
general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five
cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a
Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the
rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says
the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Sell one cow to buy a
new president
of the United States, leaving you with
nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public buys your
bull.

THE ANDERSEN MODEL: You have two cows. You shred them.

A FRENCH CORPORATION:
You have two cows. You go on strike, organise a riot, and block the
roads, because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You redesign them so they
are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the
milk. You then create a clever cow cartoon image called 'cowkimon' and
market it worldwide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You re-engineer them so they
live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows, but you don't know where
they are. You decide to have lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You count them and learn you
have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You
count them again and learn you have 2 cows. You stop counting cows and
open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION: You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You have 300 people milking
them. You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine
productivity, and arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION: You have two cows. Both are mad.

IRAQI CORPORATION: You have 2 cows.  They are a different breed than you neighbors.  You neighbors plant an IED in the pasture and blows up your cows while they graze.

WELSH CORPORATION: You have two cows. The one on the left looks very
attractive.

AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate. 

IRISH
CORPORATION: You have two cows except that they're both bulls. You blame the
English for lack of milk.

Literary and Historical Notes (From The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Kellor):

It's the birthday of historian Stephen E. Ambrose, (books by this
author) born in Decatur, Illinois (1936). He was 28 years old when a small university press published his first book, Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff
(1962), a biography of General Henry Halleck. Only a few thousand
copies of the biography were printed, and Ambrose assumed that it
had only been read by the academic community. But one day, he got a
phone call from the former president, Dwight Eisenhower, who had read
his book on Halleck and liked it so much that he wanted Ambrose to be
his own biographer.

Ambrose wrote several books about Eisenhower, including The Supreme Commander (1970) and Eisenhower: The President
(1984), and those books helped him make the leap from academic to
popular historian. He went on to write many best-selling books about
American
history, including Band of Brothers (1992) and D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (1994).

Stephen Ambrose believed that he became a successful historian
because he got so much practice telling stories to his students. He
said, "There is nothing like standing before 50 students at 8 a.m. to
start talking about an event that occurred 100 years ago, because the
look on
their faces is a challenge — 'Let's see you keep me awake.' You learn
what works and what doesn't in a hurry."

It was on this day in 1776 that a 77-page pamphlet called "Common Sense" was published anonymously,
making the case that the American colonies should declare independence
from Great Britain. It had been written by a man named Thomas Paine.
The pamphlet sold more
than 500,000 copies, more copies than any other publication had ever
sold at that time in America.

Adams would always be somewhat jealous of the attention "Common
Sense" received, but even he had to admit that it was "Common Sense,"
more than anything else, that had persuaded most ordinary Americans to
support independence. Adams said, "Without the pen of the author of
'Common
Sense,' the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain."

Hospitality means something very different to us than the people back in the 1800's and earlier.  Today it means come over and have a drink and a few sandwiches.  Back in America's early history there were not many hotels and as such, people would keep a bed for travelers.  Abraham Lincoln himself would sleep this way when he was on the circuit as a lawyer.  They slept together, sometimes up to three in a bed and thought nothing of it.  In his book "Robert E. Lee," Roy Blount, Jr. tells this story of J.E.B. Stuart and Stonewall Jackson.

Stuart got to be such friends with the very dissimilar Jackson that once, on arriving in Jackson's camp in the middle of the night, he climbed into the sleeping Stonewall's bunk and contended with him for the covers.  The next morning Jackson said, "I'm always glad to have you, but you must not get into my bed with your boots and spurs on and ride me around like a cavalry horse all night."

Literary and Historical Notes (From The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Kellor):

It's the birthday of Elvis Presley,
born in Tupelo, Mississippi (1935). He learned to play the guitar when
he was 12, and his friends said that he could reproduce
perfectly almost anything he heard on the radio. After high school, he
got a job as a truck driver for the Crown Electric Company, and he
began studying to become an electrician. His career as a recording
artist only came about because of his love for his mother.

At the time, the Sun Record Company had a special recording studio
where anyone could come in and pay a small fee to record personal
records for themselves. In the summer of 1953, Elvis scraped together
four dollars to record two songs, "My Happiness" and "That's When Your
Heartaches Begin," as a present for his mother.

The recording engineer that day liked Elvis's voice, and somehow
those recordings made their way into the hands of producer Sam
Phillips, and that was the beginning of Presley's career.

It's the birthday of physicist Stephen Hawking, (books by this
author)
born in Oxford, England (1942). He went to Oxford University, but never
attended lectures. He was bored with most of his classes, because they
seemed too easy, and it was only after an oral exam that his professors
realized how smart he was. He had gone on to get a Ph.D., and he was
just starting to find his courses interesting when he was diagnosed
with ALS, a disease that slowly destroys a person's ability to move any
part of his or her body, while leaving the brain itself unharmed. His
doctors said he probably had two to three years to live.

At first Hawking was utterly depressed, and he considered giving up
on everything. But he decided to focus his studies on the mysterious
astronomical objects known as black holes, and he developed new
theories about how they function and what role they may have played in
the origin
of the universe.

In 1988, Hawking decided to sum up all the research on physics and astronomy in a book for nonscientists called A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. It went on to sell almost 10 million copies.

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, which took place on this day in 1815. It was the last major battle of the War of 1812, won with the help of a
pirate named Jean Laffite.

The war of 1812 had started for a variety of complicated reasons,
but mainly because the United States refused to put up with British
control of the Atlantic Ocean while the British were fighting a war
with France. When the war started, the United States had only existed
for a few
decades. By 1814, after just two years of fighting with the British,
almost all the buildings in Washington, D.C., had been destroyed, the
U.S. treasury was virtually empty, and the British Navy had blockaded
every major seaport on the East Coast.

At the Battle of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson managed to fend off the
British attempt to take over the mouth of the Mississippi with a ragtag
band of volunteers, Indians, and pirates. It was America's greatest
triumph in the War of 1812, but it turned out that it took place after
the war was over. The United States and Great Britain had signed a
treaty, ending the war, on Christmas Eve, a few weeks before the
battle. The news of the treaty just hadn't reached New Orleans in time.

Do you know why blond nurses carry red pens?  -- So they can draw blood.

Do you know that Adam was Church of Christ?  -  Only a Church of Christ'er could stand next to a naked lady and be tempted by an apple!

Do you know why Nuns make bad nurses?  -  Nuns are trained to serve only one god!

Gertrude the antelope was getting herself ready to go out when a heard of water buffalo ran through and stamped her to death.  She became the first self dressed, stamped antelope!

It's the birthday of journalist, poet, novelist, and biographer Carl Sandburg, 
born in Galesburg, Illinois (1878). He was a poet and a political
journalist, but he didn't have any real financial success until a
publisher suggested that he write a biography of Abraham Lincoln. His Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years,
published
in 1926 (see posting January 4, 2007), was Sandburg's first best-seller. He moved to a new home and
devoted the next several years to completing four additional volumes.

From the Writer's Almanac with Garrison Kellor