Why not? I'll do it too.

I saw these on Nettl's and Steph's blogs, so I thought I'd join in. Italics means I've done it.

1. Started your own blog (duh)
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sang a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea (I wasn't at sea, but the storm was)
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitch hiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse (lots of partials)
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise (just a little one)
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community.
36. Taught yourself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo's David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance (more times than I can count)
47. Had your portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater (I've kissed in the rain at a drive-in theater)
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check (more times than I want to think about)
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten Caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had your picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House (just drove by the outside and gave W the finger)
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a lawsuit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee
100. Read an entire book in one day
101. Seen more than 5 movies in one day
102. Spent a night in jail
103. Ridden a unicycle
104. Slept on the floor
105. Passed out drunk
106. Cheated a railway company
107. Lied about my age
108. Been South of the Equator
109. Been baptized
110. Been to Japan

I'm Changing My Name to Fannie Mae

I found this on Tom Paxton's site (there's an mp3 you can listen to on the page):

I AM CHANGING MY NAME TO FANNIE MAE
By Tom Paxton

Everybody and his uncle is in debt,
And the bankers and the brokers are upset.
Goldman Sachs’s, Merrill Lynch’s
Saw themselves as lead-pipe cinches,
Now they’ve landed in the biggest screw-up yet.
Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns and all their kind
Have turned out to be the blind leading the blind.
They are clearly the nit-wittest
In survival of the fittest––
Let me modestly say what I have in mind

Chorus:
I am changing my name to Fannie Mae;
I am changing it to AIG.
On this bail-out I am betting;
Just a piece of what they’re getting,
Would be perfectly acceptable to me.
I am changing my name to Freddie Mac;
I am leaving for that great receiving line.
I’ll be waiting when they hand out
Seven hundred million grand out––
That’s when I’ll get mine.

Since the first amphibian crawled out of the slime,
We’ve been struggling in an unrelenting climb.
We were hardly up and walking
Before money started talking
And it said that failure was the only crime.
If you really screwed things up, then you were through;
Now––surprise!––there is a different point of view.
All that crazy rooty-tootin’
And that golden parachutin’
Means that someone’s making millions––just not you! (to chorus)

A really great blog entry

I have just been made aware of a blog entry made by someone back in September. I know I have a very limited readership and I'm pretty sure everybody who does read my blog will appreciate this:

Jesus Christ quits Christianity after viewing Republican platform

I really wish I could write like this.

For HorusJ

I saw this picture and thought of my good friend HorusJ.

Poppies

Ever since I heard this song, it is what comes to mind when Veterans Day is mentioned. If you haven't heard it before, get a hankie handy.



No Man's Land (The Green Fields of France)
by Eric Bogle

Well how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside
And rest for a while 'neath the warm summer sun
I've been walkin; all day and I'm nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
When you joined the great fallen in nineteen-sixteen.
I hope you died well and I hope you died clean
Or young Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene.

Chorus :
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly,
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down.
Did the band play the Last Post and chorus,
Did the pipes play the 'Flowers o' the Forest'.

Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined
Although you died back in nineteen-sixteen
In that faithful heart are you ever nineteen
Or are you a stranger without even a name
Enclosed in forever behind the glass pane
In a old photograph, torn and battered and stained
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame.

The sun now it shines on the green fields of France
There's warm summer breeze that makes the red poppies dance
And look how the sun shines from under the clouds
There's no gas, no barbed wire, there's no guns firing now
But here in this graveyard it's still no-man's land
The countless white crosses stand mute in the sand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man
To a whole generation that were butchered and damned.

Now young Willie McBride I can't help wonderin' why
Do those who lie here know why they did die
And did they believe when they answered the call
Did they really believe that this war would end wars
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying were all done in vain
For young Willie McBride it all happened again
And again, and again, and again, and again

Peoples are the craziest monkeys

(The title of this post is one of my mother-in-law's favorite sayings.)

Monks brawl at Christian holy site in Jerusalem

JERUSALEM – Israeli police rushed into one of Christianity's holiest churches Sunday and arrested two clergyman after an argument between monks erupted into a brawl next to the site of Jesus' tomb.

The clash between Armenian and Greek Orthodox monks broke out in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, revered as the site of Jesus' crucifixion, burial and resurrection.

The brawling began during a procession of Armenian clergymen commemorating the 4th-century discovery of the cross believed to have been used to crucify Jesus.

The Greeks objected to the march without one of their monks present, fearing that otherwise, the procession would subvert their own claim to the Edicule — the ancient structure built on what is believed to be the tomb of Jesus — and give the Armenians a claim to the site.

The Armenians refused, and when they tried to march the Greek Orthodox monks blocked their way, sparking the brawl.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said police were forced to intervene after fighting was reported. They arrested two monks, one from each side, he said.

A bearded Armenian monk in a red-and-pink robe and a black-clad Greek Orthodox monk with a bloody gash on his forehead were both taken away in handcuffs after scuffling with dozens of riot police.

Six Christian sects divide control of the ancient church. They regularly fight over turf and influence, and Israeli police are occasionally forced to intervene.

"We were keeping resistance so that the procession could not pass through ... and establish a right that they don't have," said a young Greek Orthodox monk with a cut next to his left eye.

The monk, who gave his name as Serafim, said he sustained the wound when an Armenian punched him from behind and broke his glasses.

Father Pakrat of the Armenian Patriarchate said the Greek demand was "against the status quo arrangement and against the internal arrangement of the Holy Sepulcher." He said the Greeks attacked first.

Archbishop Aristarchos, the chief secretary of the Greek Orthodox patriarchate, denied his monks initiated the violence.

After the brawl, the church was crowded with Israeli riot police holding assault rifles, standing beside Golgotha, where Jesus is believed to have been crucified, and the long smooth stone marking the place where tradition holds his body was laid out.

The feud is only one of a bewildering array of rivalries among churchmen in the Holy Sepulcher.

The Israeli government has long wanted to build a fire exit in the church, which regularly fills with thousands of pilgrims and has only one main door, but the sects cannot agree where the exit will be built.

A ladder placed on a ledge over the entrance sometime in the 19th century has remained there ever since because of a dispute over who has the authority to take it down.

More recently, a spat between Ethiopian and Coptic Christians is delaying badly needed renovations to a rooftop monastery that engineers say could collapse.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081109/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_brawling_monks

video on the original page

A case against gay marriage

Don't get me wrong. I'm completely in favor of everyone being allowed to marry whoever they choose, so long as both parties are consenting adults. But I came across a quote that made me think about the other side. This is from someone who is on a politics mailing list that I've been a member of, off and on, for a decade.

Sorry you don't like it. But the fact is, homosexuality is a mindset that would destroy the human race, if left unchecked. And the dislike of it, is the only force that has checked it... until now.

Another member of the list has this as one of his random quotes that appear at the end of his posts, so I don't have any more information about what this person was saying. Still, it caused me to think a bit about why anyone would feel that way.

The only reason that I can come up with is that there is an assumption that men don't like women. The only reason men marry women is that homosexuality is "disliked" and they have to have somewhere to stick their penises. Since they can't have their preferred partners because of social stigma, they settle for the lesser vessel. They're jealous of those who have the audacity to not care about social stigma and can have the kind of sex that all men secretly desire.

Women, of course, don't really matter in all this, but when men all start sleeping with other men, the only people for women to sleep with will be other women. And then there will be no more people. I have actually read claims that the "liberal agenda" is to eliminate the human race altogether.

Does any of this seem to coincide with the underlying motivation that anyone else has seen?

Deni's Dream House

I was going to do the meme that Steph did yesterday, but in thinking about it, I found that the "Furniture Shop" part ended up very long and more than what is appropriate for the meme. So I thought I'd just post it on its own.


If I had unlimited funds and good health, I would love to have a house built to my specifications. I would start with one of the George Barber houses, which were made in the late 19th century as mail-order kits. People would buy the lumber and other materials pre-cut and it was sent to them on a railroad car to be built on-site. There are quite a few variations of style and I'd have to look closely at them all to make my decision as to which one to start with.

But it would be more than just an historic exterior and floorplan. I would work with a designer who has expertise in historical interior decoration, to start with an accurate design for the time that the house was first built. This design would be completely on paper.

Once the first design was finished, I would work with the designer and an architect to show how the house evolved over the years. What things would change in the decoration? What gifts would be given to the family and what mementos would be added? What modern conveniences would be added? Every five to ten years of the history, there would be another decorating makeover, with treasured pieces being kept, without worrying about any anachronisms. I figure we'd work it through the mid-30s, with the most recent redecoration being in art deco style.

Once the 1930s structure and design was set, we'd work on adding as many 21st century conveniences as possible, while trying to maintain as much of the integrity of the design as possible. (There's no way I'm living without a microwave!)

It's not going to happen, but just thinking about it is fun.

Small town values

As sad as I was over the passing of Proposition 8 in California, this made me smile.

Some random thoughts on the election

First ... YAY!!!

That said, I'm trying to temper my enthusiasm. The last time I felt anything like this (June, 1968), things didn't go so well. I don't think it'll happen again, but, well, once burned....

At least it's a decisive win. With more than 2/3 of the electoral votes, there won't be court challenges. They would have to bring so many suits and win them all in order to affect the outcome, that it wouldn't be worth it. Which is something in favor of the electoral college. It might be possible to challenge 4 million popular votes, but not that many electoral votes.

I hope that those around the world who have assumed that all (or even most) Americans were racists have changed their opinions of us at least a little bit.

As I said to Jim this morning before he went to work, "That Mr. Obama is pretty good at speechifying. You know, he might have a future in politics."

In other election news, it looks like South Dakota won't take away a woman's right to choose, which is also a YAY!! California is teetering with their anti-gay-marriage proposition, but I still hold out hope. I haven't followed other propositions closely, so I don't know about them.

Here in Washington, the most important proposition was the Death With Dignity law, which is very similar to Oregon's law. It was very contentious with those opposed to it even hiring Martin Sheen to try to scare people into believing that it would mean that poor and disabled people could be legally murdered. It passed.

Almost all of the things and people I voted for went the way I voted. The ones that didn't were ones that I had no passion about, so I'm considering the whole election to be a win for me. :-)

I have some thoughts about McCain and his campaign, but I'll wait to express them. I know there some McCain supporters out there and I think it would be unnecessarily unkind to rub salt in the wounds at this point. I think he did make a nice concession speech.

Lots of work to do. They were just saying that Obama is heading back to the Senate to try to pass some more legislation to help the economy, even before he is inaugurated. No time like the present.

I say again... YAY!!!