Monday Musings: January 17. 2011

Today is obviously Martin Luther King Day - two giant steps forward. Today is also the 50th anniversary of one of the most pivotaly speeches in American history - President Eisenhower’s (Republican from Kansas!)  “Farewell’ speech in which he warns America of the military-industrial complex.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Listen to this segment on NPR. Disappointingly, they understate the case as America marches a thousand steps backward:

Watch the video. No, no! Don’t watch it. Close your eyes and get past the grainy black and white image, so out of phase with our shiny HD world. Listen. Listen with Iraq and Afghanistan in the front of your mind.

We are a nation of hopeless addicts. It’s no wonder we can’t solve the problems of mere drug addiction in the United States, when we are unwilling to honestly address our addiction to the obscene amounts of money that flow - often unchecked and unaudited - into the military-industrial complex coffers. With the economic downturn, it’s even more critical. Now we/Obama can’t cut jobs. Jobs that have been carefully spread around through districts with willing  drug lords - called Congress - as the enablers. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during Obama’s ‘Come to Jesus’ moment when he figured out that he was ‘hooked’, too - with a near collapse of the economy.

We chose not to pay much attention to Eisenhower’s message. We also chose not to pay much attention to the rise of corporate influence that has undermined and grossly distorted our democratic processes. No wonder the Tea Party is angry. I am too.  I just wish they’d be angry at the real perpetrator rather than the laundry list of red herrings that the punditry on Fox points them at.

Case in point: Florida and The Clean Water Act.

Listen to this segment on NPR.

Poor babies. The State of Florida - handmaiden, in this case, to RepubliCorp and Big Sugar et al - is being ‘picked on’ and made an example of by that nasty federal government. If this isn’t a perfect example of the tail wagging the dog, nothing is. It’s also a textbook example of how corporate interests - fanned by Fox - are really behind the effort to inflame the uninformed - the Tea Party particularly - with rallying cries of “FEDERALISM is running RAMPANT!” Gasp. Gag. Sob. Crocodile tears.

Having worked for an environmental services consulting firm, I had to learn a bit about The Clean Water Act. I learned that it was a really good thing. It has pre-emptively kept our waterways, estuaries, and wetlands thriving and vibrant for wildlife - and people. We have cleaner drinking water, and a better environment for it.

I’m also from Florida, and watched, horrified as giant agri-business and real estate took out their dicks and pee’d all over some of the most beautiful, unique and endangered wetlands in the world. Repeatedly. Turned them into cesspools. All the while telling the simple-minded that it was jobs that were at risk, and the economy, and that the government that would protect this priceless jewel was the enemy. No, it was their corporate profits at risk. Untold is the story of how tourism - the number one industry in Florida - after pillaging the environment for more subsidized sugar - was nearly destroyed with the Everglades.

Growing up in Miami, I heard plenty via the local Haitian community about the violence and criminality perpetrated on Haiti by Papa Doc Duvalier. So yesterday, Bebe Doc Duvalier (the son) goes home from exile in France - perhaps a worse criminal than his father, if that’s possible. How outrageous. How sad. How wrong that he can just walk back into a vulnerable country to do what? Time will tell. He should be arrested and put before an international tribunal.

I’m so happy that ‘The King’s Speech’ won at the Golden Globes. That bodes well for a very well deserved Oscar. 

Fashion ‘Hits’ included: Anne Hathaway in Georgio Armani Prive, Natalie Portman in Viktor&Rolf, Emma Stone in Calvin Klein Collection, Heather Morris, Kyra Sedgewick in Emilio Pucci, Edie Falco in Valentino, Piper Perabo in Oscar de la Renta, Catherin Zeta-Jones, and Elizabeth Moss in Donna Karan. Geoffery Rush was oh, so dapper. This, folks, is how it’s done.

Fashion ‘Mis-statements’ included: January Jones in Versace, Olivia Wilde in Marchesa and Kelly Osbourne in Zac Posen.  In the WTF Category: Helena Bonham Carter in “Something the cat dragged in”, Julianne Moore in an old bridesmaid dress, and Sandra Bullock - with BANGS FROM HELL - in something really uh, droopey.

Few opt for Zostavax - the Shingles Vaccine? Not us. We’ve got an appointment for Wednesday. It’s amazing, but a report on NPR this morning says that of the 50 million people that should get a dose of the shingles vaccine in America, only 10 percent do.

After Mr. Maven’s experience with it, I wouldn’t even consider NOT getting the vaccine. As one woman interviewed for the NPR piece said, “it’s more painful than childbirth” and goes on for months, even years. It’s now obvious that much of the pain Mr. Maven has suffered with - thinking it was a pinched nerve in his neck - was in reality the after effects of shingles.

“The recommendation is for everybody over the age of 60 to get a shot,” says Dr. Richard Dupee, a geriatric specialist at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. The vaccine’s maker, Merck and Co., has asked the Food and Drug Administration to lower eligibility to age 50.

So, if you have had the chicken pox (and 99.9% of Americans have), and you are over the ago of 60 - or have special risk factors like me (cancer) - then you want to consider getting it. ASAP.

January ‘Thaw’ is upon us. It’s hit all time records here, and folks were out in shorts today. This ‘surprises’ everybody each January. It’s not always this warm, but this isn’t exactly unusual. Winter is still lurking out there, waiting to bite.

Update on Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 04:46 by mavenandmeddler

Oh, just wanted to mention that I’d finally gotten around to revising the search by category and tags - hopefully to enable to mine the content more fully. I’ve got Page by Category appearing on all active pages now, and the Archives have been revamped to break each journal into finer detail for searches.

Give me some feedback here - let me know if it’s better or worse.

-maven

Catching my breath and catching up

It took nearly 18 hours to get home to Reno, Nevada from Ft. Meyers, Florida yesterday … yes, that’s the way it is when you ride on a pass. We finally made it into Reno at 9 p.m. and were completely exhausted.

I’m moderating comments this evening on my blog post about this absurd idea that women under 50 don’t need those silly old mammograms. Too many false positives! Too expensive. Too many unnecessary biopsies!

Here’s a suggestion: quit killing the mammogram messenger, and start talking about new national best practices and a single standard of care that must be adhered to nationwide.

Read the mammogram post just prior to this one for more.

The Denver airport is the lamest modern air terminal I’ve ever been to. Unless you really need to route through there, I would recommend against it.

Florida is still the credit card fraud capital of the world. My step daughter and her fiance couldn’t use their debit cards half the time, for the credit card company putting a block on it because it was being used in Florida. When Mr. Maven and I got home, there were two messages on the phone from Visa wanting to make sure that we were actually using our card down there.

But gee, “the weather is so good”. Sigh. It seems to me that there’s a lot of great weather in a lot of better places.

You must read the November issue of Harpers. It’s quite simply the best magazine out there right now. I read it front to back. The best articles: “The War We Can’t Win” by Andrew Bacevitch and “Wrinkle in Time” by Steve Mills. Bacevitch nails the problem with Afghanistan so elegantly, you’ll ‘get it’ unless you’re unconcious. Mills tells the decline and death of the American newspaper through the lens of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Well, it sounds like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, (D-NV) is really kicking butt and taking names, and becoming the leader that I’d hoped he would. They’re damn close to a cloture motion which would allow for a vote on Saturday (gasp!).

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Greetings from Florida

Ah, the big day is over. Everybody was utterly exhausted this morning. Several had to leave on the ‘oh-dark-hundred’ flight, others hung around until this afternoon, one party didn’t make their Miami flight. There was a Minnesota Vikings game, you see…

It’s not an easy task herding a group this large, in many ways. Logistics, of course, is the number one issue - from cars to hotel rooms to meeting up at what restaurant, at what time. You’ve got kids and grownups going in different directions. Grandkids that want to go have their own fun.

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Your elections have been hacked.

I realize this film isn’t new, but it was new to me tonight.

As we watched, the sickening realization dawned on us … that the eight years of the Bush presidency was almost without doubt illegal and hacked.

Questions still remain.

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Nevada: Just not weird enough?

Just the other night, I was re-reading some vintage columns by one of my favorite writers, Carl Hiaasen of the Miami Herald. Like his hysterically funny novels about Florida, the plots having been caught by trolling his beat as an investigative reporter ( AKA: real journalist ), they poke a lot of fun at the sheer strangeness and crazy stuff that passes for normal in Florida.

I started to wax a bit nostalgic, since I was born and raised in Hialeah - yeah, the home of that iconic racetrack with the Flamingos, but more recently ‘Voodoo-Santeria-goat innards reading’ central. It was hopelessly white, middle class when I grew up there

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Friday Fish Wrap: 27 February, 2009

Updated on Friday, February 27, 2009 at 18:20 by mavenandmeddler

Updated on Friday, February 27, 2009 at 18:38 by mavenandmeddler

Updated on Friday, February 27, 2009 at 18:46 by mavenandmeddler

Updated on Friday, February 27, 2009 at 18:55 by mavenandmeddler

As I sit here composing today’s post, I’m marveling over the piece of new technology that sits in front of me. I’m talking about my new Amazon Kindle2. This is ‘too cool for school’ - as good as the cellphone and ipod wrapped together. And, for anybody who is a serious reader - of anything from bestselling fiction to the latest magazines, to newspapers, to blogs, to documents long and short - it is a ‘must have’ item.

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You'll have to suffice with a bit of amateur alligator wrestling

Well, I’ll be on my way back to Reno tomorrow morning, so I thought I would put this bit of fluff on the blog to keep you entertained until I’m back home. I heard we got some snow the other day, so I’m looking forward to taking further advantage of my season pass at Mt. Rose.

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You can go home again, just don't expect it to be the same

I wish I had a way to put the pictures I took today, while kayaking on the Estero River, on the blog. I’m a bit equipment challenged here. I was able to put in about three hours on the river, alone with my thoughts and memories of growing up down here.

Kayaking today was also a way of putting yesterday behind me and burn off some bad stuff.

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TSA ,airline food, alligators and old people

Leaving Reno is always a surprise. Just how tight is TSA going to lock down those machines and how big of a pain in the ass are they going to be this time.

As a somewhat experienced world traveler and airline type, I’m prepared for the gauntlet - I enter the maw of the beast with a confident, purposeful stride. I have the lanyard with all the ID, the ziplok baggie with the suspicious 3 oz bottles of shampoo, hair product and makeup, the easy off shoes and jewelry safely stowed in a baggie in my messenger bag/purse. It doesn’t matter. I may as well be an 86-year-old grandma from Lower Cornhole, Iowa on her first airplane ride. They hand searched both bags and then ran them through the xray machine twice in search of the bottles of liquid they were absolutely sure were hiding somewhere.

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Hurricane Season: It ain't over until the windblown lady sighs

I’m originally from Florida. Born in Coral Gables, in 1953, I was raised in that nice town, Hialeah,  that features a famous racetrack and today is sort of Santeria Central for folks to cut up goats and have crazy voodoo ceremonies. Needless to say perhaps, but the price of real estate in Hialeah has gone down a bit. Last time I drove through there, I was afraid to stop and when I finally did pull up in front of my childhood home I didn’t dare roll down the window or unlock the doors.

The thought of leaving the car to go knock on the door of my old house and meet the current owners wasn’t quite as appealing as a private tete a tete with Charles Manson.

I digress. On September 11, 1960, just after school had started, Hurricane Donna roared through South Florida. A full on Category 4 storm. BAM! And that wasn’t Emeril Lagasses’ seasonings flying through the air, it was things like 2X4s with the killing power of a surface to air missile.

Donna was, at that time, the only hurrican of record to produce hurricane-force winds in Florida, the Mid-Atlantic states, and New England. Sombrero Key, Florida reported 128 mph sustained winds with gusts ro 150 mph. The storm surge was no slacker either.  The great wall of seawater rose up like an angry Mother Nature past 13 feet in the Florida Keys and 11 feet along the southwest coast of Florida. Depending on just where you were, the rainfall was measured from around 6 inches to over 12 inches and the landfall low pressure was 27.46 inches of mercury, making Donna (at that time) the fifth strongest hurrican of record to hit the United States.

Hurricane Donna was utimately responsible for 50 deaths in the United States.

But what I want to convey here, today, is how native Floridians prepared and coped with such a massive and dangerous beast of a storm. We went to the movies.

That’s right. Hey, our parents busied themselves screwing sheets of plywood over the windows of the house and our family business, and sent us kids to the movies to get us out from underfoot. That was the first time we’d ever been the only people in the theatre. Just before the movie ended, my dad came walking down the darkened aisle and said we had to leave “now.” We didn’t argue, but nobody who knew my Dad argued with him. This was a guy who never even raised his voice. His eyes always told you that you could be messing with seriously bigger trouble if you didn’t jump when he whispered. If my girlfriend, Rosemary, reads this ( she lives in Portland, Oregon now and I just saw her about 3 months ago) she would tell you that I understate the effect my Dad had on people.

Even still after we got home, the parents were still busy with preparations, so we got our skateboards and grabbed some pillowcases from Rosemary’s moms stash. They made most excellent sails for a kid on a skateboard.

Then the wind really started to pick up and here came the annoyed and tired parents looking for us, their voices unable to outscream the howls of natures’ blunt force trauma. Into our respective houses we went.

Believe it or not, television didn’t go 24 hours in those days. I don’t remember there being anything but a test pattern on the tube by this point. We listened to the progress of the storm on the radio. Ooooohh. We were in for it now. Great blasts of wind would almost seem to move the not yet darkened house. We still had electricity. But then, as my Dad allowed us all to peek out the front jalousie windows that were somewhat protected by the front porch, we could see the eerily colored explosions of electric transformers on the power poles around the neighborhood. The lights went out and there we sat huddled in the dark, listening to debris hit the roof and sides of the house.

At some point we had some sandwiches that my Mother had made earlier and I was told to go to my room and go to bed. I was a seriously passive little girl then. I’m the other way, more often than not, now. So off I went with a flashlight into my darkened bed which was just under a rather large window covered only by a closed awning. “Sleep? You people have got to be kidding!” We didn’t say bad words in those days. Gee, we didn’t even think them, so you’ll see my childhood reminescences are rather vanilla.

When that infamous eye of the storm came over, we all left the house to see what had happened so far. Houses were built much sturdier in those days. There were building codes that were actually followed, and not subject to the whim of graft and payoffs that created a lot of the grief following Hurricane Andrew in 1992. We had lost the TV antenna and a few of the white tiles off the roof. You could actually see blue sky. The wind had calmed. Dad looked worried, since this meant that the next act of the show might be worse.

But here was the bad news: our prized Key Lime tree had blown over with the roots torn brutally, like a virgins knickers, from the ground and just laid there pathetically. My Dad panicked. This was the living source of his daily tonic of Florida Tom Collins. Something had to done, now!

Dad looked frantically around for something to use to raise the tree but everything had been battened down or stored. Later, after the storm we used my swingset and a block and tackle with all the neighbors to raise the honored tree upright and tamp down the roots. It survived to provide drinking pleasure for many more years.

The wall cloud on the other side of the eye hit like an out of control freight train gone off the tracks on a downgrade. This was the only time I’d seen my Dad frightened, and he’d been in some of the battles of WWII and then Korea in the Navy. Mom didn’t say much. The cat was really hard to find after it had worn itself out bouncing off the walls in fright. The dog huddled at our feet. At least I didn’t have to go back to my gosh darn room and be alone. Mom did put a stop to that.

And then by the next morning it was over.

Most houses in the neighborhood had survived reasonably well. A few had lost windows due to rapid pressure changes and some had once stately palm trees inelegantly, crudely implanted horizontally through the middle of the house. Like I said, this is when building codes were enforced by that nasty old guvmint that just cain’t do anything right, ya know.

The children were set to work picking of the mountains of leafy debris, broken branches and just crap that had been blown in from who knew where.

Honest - I saw sticks of wood that had gone right through trees. No shit. We all reflected on what if it had gone through us. Ugh. Gross. (Oops, bad language!)

We were without electricity for the better part of a week. That meant that we had to immediately relieve the freezer section of ice cream and sit on webbed lawn chairs in a rather untidy backyard and force ourselves to consume it in great quantities. I was a skinny little kid - then.

We then went into town, toward my Grandparents place in Coral Gables and our family business on Coral Way. Thier house had survived fine, with just a lot of damage to the towering avocado trees. One of the bigger banana trees was a lost cause, but my Grandmother, Ruth, was a natural born green thumb type. The exotic jungle that was her yard came back more verdant and lush than ever in time. If the State of Florida really wants to know where a lot of those invasive alien plants came from, look no further. This woman was illegally importing stuff and poking into dirt down there for nearly 50 years. We all lost a lot of the hundreds of orchids that had been tacked up in the trees.

The big steel shutters that had been put into place along the front of the plate glass windows of Tropical Pet and Garden Supply on Coral Way were turned into a mess of twisted metal and the windows were gone. There was a lot of sweeping and mopping to be done there. It was going to be a few weeks before new glass was installed and business truly got back to normal.

With nothing much else to do a couple of days later we drove down to the Florida Keys … or what was left of them. That was scary to see pilings in water where a favorite restaurant, The Blueberry Inn, had been. My Mom wondered what had happened to the piano they had in the dining room. She used to play piano quite well. Dad said that it was probably washing around in pieces in Florida Bay. We went as far as we could, but lack of electricity had disabled some of the drawbridges that still existed in those days, and it was obvious that it just got worse so we turned around and came home.

As for the Miami area, life slowly came back to what passes for normal down there. The lights came on and several days later us poor kids were forced to go back to school. It took the Keys a lot longer to come even close to normal, but they’re really used to ‘big blows’ like that down there and the Conch Nation seems to take such events in stride and keep on trucking.

Anyway, when I see 24/7 news coverage of the next big hurricane, a little chill runs up and down my spine. I know just how frightened people can be, and just how damn dangerous hurricanes are.

Update on Sunday, September 7, 2008 at 23:03 by mavenandmeddler

Thanks, E. J.