Well, hi again, folks. We note with both pride and a profound sense of loss, the passing of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics and the younger of the two sisters of Joe, Jr., John, Robert and Ted Kennedy.
She was a feminist long before it was acceptable and the influence she wielded among her brothers was totally in keeping with her intelligence, her compassion, her passion for justice, and her political savvy. It was said that even the Machiavellian Kennedy patriarch, Joe, Sr., considered her a force to be reckoned with.
Her marriage to Sargent Shriver, founder of the Peace Corps., produced a daughter who in many ways embodies what Eunice was and what she sought to bring to the world. After a very successful career as a television journalist, Maria Shriver Schwarzenegger went on to support her Republican husband in his bid for the governorship of California. Eunice, a lifelong Democrat, was right there for both of them, demonstrating perhaps that at least for the Irish, blood is thicker than even politics.
And we certainly hope that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is feeling better now than she did Monday, when at a town hall meeting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she fielded that question about her husband or President Obama, depending on which of several versions of this incident one accepts, by pulling off her translation head phone and snapping, "I will you tell you my opinion, I'm not going to channel my husband."
Understood, Madam Secretary, and good call. But the context begs some. This was an African student and a translator, both from a dominantly male culture, and I don’t think it was WHAT you said that made the press, but rather how you said it. I’m sure by now you’ve had some cause to pause on the difference between those who disagree with you and those who are simply trying to understand you.
That would certainly be in character with the Hillary Clinton I feel I know and whom I am profoundly honoured to have representing America. I don’t think about Bill when I watch you moving out on that international stage. And in my heart of hearts, I don’t think most of us do.
So with all due respect, Lass? Could you just chill a little in this regard? We need you too much for you to be worried about something as inconsequential as your husband having the license to be a good EX-president.
Hillary, I don’t know if you remember during your presidential campaign, one night you were in Minneapolis and at a sports bar when a wee small darkhaired woman with a brogue as thick as green butter introduced herself and said that she was sorry that you were wasting a handshake on someone who couldn’t legally vote for you because she’s not from this country. From her account, your eyes twinkled and you smiled.
“Siobhan, you may not be able to vote for me yourself, but you certainly know people who can.”
In my humble opinion, Madam Secretary, it was a good call then and it’s still a good call. We know the difference between Hillary and Bill. For the sake of this country and some for the world, I hope you’ve really figured it out too.
Well, this is where the critter news gets to happen and there’s more than one this time. And it sure looks to us like they’re taking over the ‘hood as it were and in some ironic places.
Check out this mouse who made a nest of twenty-dollar bills in an ATM machine in a rural town in Oregon. There are lots of places waaaay too tempting to go with that one and I’m sure that no matter how many of them I might go, they won’t nearly do justice to the readership. So have fun with this one, yahoos and yahoo-ettes.
And as if some non-nature types didn’t have enough to worry about with Seattle’s suburbs acclimating to bear and mountain lion, now the bobcats are moving back home.
And this last one (for this week) that I truly love because it’s happening not too far from a place I’ve lived and also because it’s another Canadian point of entry, is that apparently owls are attacking joggers on the Anacortes Community Forest Lands, a site set aside for them and other species in the first place.
What’s weird is that apparently these attacks have been going on from Vashon Island, in the heart of Seattle’s Elliott Bay, to Vancouver, BC, over the last ten years. And now they’re on the increase. And there doesn’t seem to be any scientific explanation for it.
I can think of one line of critter reasoning that MIGHT explain it. “It wasn’t your land to take away from us in the first place. Thanks for correcting for course. Now please stop running through our living room.”
It’s also not lost on me that these attacks are occurring during daylight hours and owls are nocturnal. I guess I’d be kind of grouchy if my sleep was disturbed by a bunch of owls flapping around in my house in the middle of the night. I’m not real happy when Ralph the Raccoon shows up at three a.m. with some buddies in a party mood.
But this is, after all, the Puget Sound, where earthquakes, volcanoes, Boeing, Microsoft, rain and hot summers are just another day in the life of, along with the critter invasion and eight different microclimates within the city limits. There’s something to be said for a place where all you’ve got to do to escape the hottest day on record is to go for a short walk and then go swimming. And nude if you want to. (Judah, please do not EVEN go there with this, “If you don’t put a bathing suit on your pets and stuff.” Understood, Lass)
And for the technologically enthusiastic among us, here’s an electric car that thinks for itself? Admittedly, it’s not built for speed but for surviving gridlock which is to say this little pup will, according the ABC New Technology and Science reporters Ki Mae Heussner, Liam Berkowitz and Dean Praetorius, “not only help navigate through traffic, but will also let passengers surf the Internet from the road.”
Why do I have a problem with this vision of all these people cell phoning, twittering, doing family stuff, running a home business and making all the decisions that are made online from a STATIONARY position, being made on a freeway in a rainstorm with several thousand other people depending on a car and a computer not to crash into one another? Good luck with that one. If I need to do that, someone else drives. Smiling. For more on this one, check out their homepage.
And under a final economic note and with special significance to America’s relationship with her neighbour to the (true) north, Canada just signed a deal with Boeing for 15 Chinook helicopters and at a price tag of $1.5 billion.
Despite the fact that this deal won’t produce any jobs here in the Puget Sound, it does strongly suggest to me that economic recovery is not just about one’s home. These jobs are going to the Rust Belt and maybe it’s just me, but I figure that what helps one American find work during these hard times helps all of us over the long haul.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Just FYI, this blog now reaches some 400 of you, by mailing list, in the States, Canada, the UK and France. Your emails, your IMs, the links and photos you send, it’s an impressive interaction for an enterprise as modest as ours. Perhaps even more impressive is the spirit you’re demonstrating.
You’re showing pretty good out there, folks, and we here at Northstar are honoured by your society. I wish I’d had a few more of you on a couple of teams in a long ago war. A few more of us would have made it back and in better shape. Thank you for being here now, for us and for one another.
Thanks again for the ear then. Take care, stay well and God Bless. Until next week, have a good one and keep the faith.
Rusty
FROM YOU GUYS:
Hi Rusty,
There are a few things you have to know about goats. These are the following;
1. They eat all day and they poop all day and very non selective. The will eat you if you let them.
their poop is circular and spreads like raisins dropped by a helicopter. It is a vegetarian poop so it does not stink much. lol
2. If you wear a green skirt you better run. It is a skirt chaser, lol
3. It has horns for a reason so don’t even stop them from grass munching.
4. If you imitate the sound of a baby goat you will give new meaning to Mother and baby goat opera.
5. If you have decided you have enough of goats...you can eat them but cooking
might take awhile and the meat does not smell like beef. lol
6. Finally, if you decided to pass the experience to a friend, goats usually just have one or two or three goats at a time. If you really love your friends see goat virtues above. lol
Maya (MRUHlOl3@aol.com)
Maya, I imagine Judah’s reading this even as we speak. Do I expect it to deter her in these regards? Ummmmm, nope. As a kid, she used to leap over dollhouses and race electric trains. IF she decides to get the goats, she’ll have them all over Las Vegas within a year and within a year after that, she’ll have one on the City Seal. She is nothing if not ambitious. Rusty
NORTHSTAR RECOMMENDS
Other Blogs
The Tomatoman Times – a life commentary blog with the blended stylings of John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Jack London and Will Rogers. Poignant, at times rancorous but very contemporary and ultimate celebration.
Lords and Ladies of Leisure is sooooo misnamed and it’s an example of the humour with which a Seattle high tech victim deals with the wonderful world of unemployment. Kerri Marshall’s admittedly offbeat sense of humour spices up a blog also rich in practical advice. The comments from her readers are almost as entertaining of she is. If you’ve got a few minutes and want a little perspective on your own hard times, I highly recommend this one.
Ask Barbie, Advice Columnist. -- a blog that delivers the amiable maternalism of Ms. Landers, the slightly off-centre humour of Erma Bombeck and the ingenuousness of an unreconstructed romantic with no axes to grind.
Media
Vinyl Cafe with Stuart McLean – Live from the smallest record store in North America. Canadian humor, entertainment, and commentary at its maple leaf best. Popular on National Public Radio in the States.
Sightline Daily (formerly Tidepool) – The “United Press International/Reuters of the American West/ Updated and informative news shorts with links to the source. Its editors draw from a coverage area which includes Alaska, British Columbia, California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. Update and informative collected news shorts from those sources. They also put out an excellent weekly environmental edition.
U Got Style is a monthly ezine dedicated to independent films. Fully illustrated, it features hard news, interviews, reviews and a wide variety of other information. It’s also fun to read.
The Vancouver Sun, outstanding source for Canadian and world news.
Online Tools for the Kit
Free People Search – This is an American online White Pages that I found really simple, quick and user friendly. I looked for myself under the several versions of my name and it found them all. It’s also free and doesn’t involve anything to download.
Talent For Hire
Rusty Miller, Freelance Photojournalist -- Yep, a little self-promotion here to help pay for the blog. Take a look at the services offered menu on my writer-for-hire homepage and samples of my digital lens work on my photography website. If you see something you like, email me and we’ll get together on it.
Are you a travel editor looking for colour shots of Seattle? Are you an art dealer looking for new work to carry on consignment? You might enjoy checking out a gallery of my work for sale.
COMING ATTRACTIONS
In the weeks to come, we’re going to create ~ in addition to Northstar Recommends ~ a Northstar General Store in which you, the readers, will have an opportunity to market your own goods and services and, as well, to shop here. We’re going to get real creative with this and whenever possible, we’ll have tried what we’re carrying on the shelves, as it were. We’ll be taking a straight ten percent for this, via Paypal. We’ll also consider barter and trade.
If you’ve got any recommendations of your own and are interested in the General Store, email me and we’ll talk.
She was a feminist long before it was acceptable and the influence she wielded among her brothers was totally in keeping with her intelligence, her compassion, her passion for justice, and her political savvy. It was said that even the Machiavellian Kennedy patriarch, Joe, Sr., considered her a force to be reckoned with.
Her marriage to Sargent Shriver, founder of the Peace Corps., produced a daughter who in many ways embodies what Eunice was and what she sought to bring to the world. After a very successful career as a television journalist, Maria Shriver Schwarzenegger went on to support her Republican husband in his bid for the governorship of California. Eunice, a lifelong Democrat, was right there for both of them, demonstrating perhaps that at least for the Irish, blood is thicker than even politics.
And we certainly hope that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is feeling better now than she did Monday, when at a town hall meeting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she fielded that question about her husband or President Obama, depending on which of several versions of this incident one accepts, by pulling off her translation head phone and snapping, "I will you tell you my opinion, I'm not going to channel my husband."
Understood, Madam Secretary, and good call. But the context begs some. This was an African student and a translator, both from a dominantly male culture, and I don’t think it was WHAT you said that made the press, but rather how you said it. I’m sure by now you’ve had some cause to pause on the difference between those who disagree with you and those who are simply trying to understand you.
That would certainly be in character with the Hillary Clinton I feel I know and whom I am profoundly honoured to have representing America. I don’t think about Bill when I watch you moving out on that international stage. And in my heart of hearts, I don’t think most of us do.
So with all due respect, Lass? Could you just chill a little in this regard? We need you too much for you to be worried about something as inconsequential as your husband having the license to be a good EX-president.
Hillary, I don’t know if you remember during your presidential campaign, one night you were in Minneapolis and at a sports bar when a wee small darkhaired woman with a brogue as thick as green butter introduced herself and said that she was sorry that you were wasting a handshake on someone who couldn’t legally vote for you because she’s not from this country. From her account, your eyes twinkled and you smiled.
“Siobhan, you may not be able to vote for me yourself, but you certainly know people who can.”
In my humble opinion, Madam Secretary, it was a good call then and it’s still a good call. We know the difference between Hillary and Bill. For the sake of this country and some for the world, I hope you’ve really figured it out too.
Well, this is where the critter news gets to happen and there’s more than one this time. And it sure looks to us like they’re taking over the ‘hood as it were and in some ironic places.
Check out this mouse who made a nest of twenty-dollar bills in an ATM machine in a rural town in Oregon. There are lots of places waaaay too tempting to go with that one and I’m sure that no matter how many of them I might go, they won’t nearly do justice to the readership. So have fun with this one, yahoos and yahoo-ettes.
And as if some non-nature types didn’t have enough to worry about with Seattle’s suburbs acclimating to bear and mountain lion, now the bobcats are moving back home.
And this last one (for this week) that I truly love because it’s happening not too far from a place I’ve lived and also because it’s another Canadian point of entry, is that apparently owls are attacking joggers on the Anacortes Community Forest Lands, a site set aside for them and other species in the first place.
What’s weird is that apparently these attacks have been going on from Vashon Island, in the heart of Seattle’s Elliott Bay, to Vancouver, BC, over the last ten years. And now they’re on the increase. And there doesn’t seem to be any scientific explanation for it.
I can think of one line of critter reasoning that MIGHT explain it. “It wasn’t your land to take away from us in the first place. Thanks for correcting for course. Now please stop running through our living room.”
It’s also not lost on me that these attacks are occurring during daylight hours and owls are nocturnal. I guess I’d be kind of grouchy if my sleep was disturbed by a bunch of owls flapping around in my house in the middle of the night. I’m not real happy when Ralph the Raccoon shows up at three a.m. with some buddies in a party mood.
But this is, after all, the Puget Sound, where earthquakes, volcanoes, Boeing, Microsoft, rain and hot summers are just another day in the life of, along with the critter invasion and eight different microclimates within the city limits. There’s something to be said for a place where all you’ve got to do to escape the hottest day on record is to go for a short walk and then go swimming. And nude if you want to. (Judah, please do not EVEN go there with this, “If you don’t put a bathing suit on your pets and stuff.” Understood, Lass)
And for the technologically enthusiastic among us, here’s an electric car that thinks for itself? Admittedly, it’s not built for speed but for surviving gridlock which is to say this little pup will, according the ABC New Technology and Science reporters Ki Mae Heussner, Liam Berkowitz and Dean Praetorius, “not only help navigate through traffic, but will also let passengers surf the Internet from the road.”
Why do I have a problem with this vision of all these people cell phoning, twittering, doing family stuff, running a home business and making all the decisions that are made online from a STATIONARY position, being made on a freeway in a rainstorm with several thousand other people depending on a car and a computer not to crash into one another? Good luck with that one. If I need to do that, someone else drives. Smiling. For more on this one, check out their homepage.
And under a final economic note and with special significance to America’s relationship with her neighbour to the (true) north, Canada just signed a deal with Boeing for 15 Chinook helicopters and at a price tag of $1.5 billion.
Despite the fact that this deal won’t produce any jobs here in the Puget Sound, it does strongly suggest to me that economic recovery is not just about one’s home. These jobs are going to the Rust Belt and maybe it’s just me, but I figure that what helps one American find work during these hard times helps all of us over the long haul.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Just FYI, this blog now reaches some 400 of you, by mailing list, in the States, Canada, the UK and France. Your emails, your IMs, the links and photos you send, it’s an impressive interaction for an enterprise as modest as ours. Perhaps even more impressive is the spirit you’re demonstrating.
You’re showing pretty good out there, folks, and we here at Northstar are honoured by your society. I wish I’d had a few more of you on a couple of teams in a long ago war. A few more of us would have made it back and in better shape. Thank you for being here now, for us and for one another.
Thanks again for the ear then. Take care, stay well and God Bless. Until next week, have a good one and keep the faith.
Rusty
FROM YOU GUYS:
Hi Rusty,
There are a few things you have to know about goats. These are the following;
1. They eat all day and they poop all day and very non selective. The will eat you if you let them.
their poop is circular and spreads like raisins dropped by a helicopter. It is a vegetarian poop so it does not stink much. lol
2. If you wear a green skirt you better run. It is a skirt chaser, lol
3. It has horns for a reason so don’t even stop them from grass munching.
4. If you imitate the sound of a baby goat you will give new meaning to Mother and baby goat opera.
5. If you have decided you have enough of goats...you can eat them but cooking
might take awhile and the meat does not smell like beef. lol
6. Finally, if you decided to pass the experience to a friend, goats usually just have one or two or three goats at a time. If you really love your friends see goat virtues above. lol
Maya (MRUHlOl3@aol.com)
Maya, I imagine Judah’s reading this even as we speak. Do I expect it to deter her in these regards? Ummmmm, nope. As a kid, she used to leap over dollhouses and race electric trains. IF she decides to get the goats, she’ll have them all over Las Vegas within a year and within a year after that, she’ll have one on the City Seal. She is nothing if not ambitious. Rusty
NORTHSTAR RECOMMENDS
Other Blogs
The Tomatoman Times – a life commentary blog with the blended stylings of John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Jack London and Will Rogers. Poignant, at times rancorous but very contemporary and ultimate celebration.
Lords and Ladies of Leisure is sooooo misnamed and it’s an example of the humour with which a Seattle high tech victim deals with the wonderful world of unemployment. Kerri Marshall’s admittedly offbeat sense of humour spices up a blog also rich in practical advice. The comments from her readers are almost as entertaining of she is. If you’ve got a few minutes and want a little perspective on your own hard times, I highly recommend this one.
Ask Barbie, Advice Columnist. -- a blog that delivers the amiable maternalism of Ms. Landers, the slightly off-centre humour of Erma Bombeck and the ingenuousness of an unreconstructed romantic with no axes to grind.
Media
Vinyl Cafe with Stuart McLean – Live from the smallest record store in North America. Canadian humor, entertainment, and commentary at its maple leaf best. Popular on National Public Radio in the States.
Sightline Daily (formerly Tidepool) – The “United Press International/Reuters of the American West/ Updated and informative news shorts with links to the source. Its editors draw from a coverage area which includes Alaska, British Columbia, California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. Update and informative collected news shorts from those sources. They also put out an excellent weekly environmental edition.
U Got Style is a monthly ezine dedicated to independent films. Fully illustrated, it features hard news, interviews, reviews and a wide variety of other information. It’s also fun to read.
The Vancouver Sun, outstanding source for Canadian and world news.
Online Tools for the Kit
Free People Search – This is an American online White Pages that I found really simple, quick and user friendly. I looked for myself under the several versions of my name and it found them all. It’s also free and doesn’t involve anything to download.
Talent For Hire
Rusty Miller, Freelance Photojournalist -- Yep, a little self-promotion here to help pay for the blog. Take a look at the services offered menu on my writer-for-hire homepage and samples of my digital lens work on my photography website. If you see something you like, email me and we’ll get together on it.
Are you a travel editor looking for colour shots of Seattle? Are you an art dealer looking for new work to carry on consignment? You might enjoy checking out a gallery of my work for sale.
COMING ATTRACTIONS
In the weeks to come, we’re going to create ~ in addition to Northstar Recommends ~ a Northstar General Store in which you, the readers, will have an opportunity to market your own goods and services and, as well, to shop here. We’re going to get real creative with this and whenever possible, we’ll have tried what we’re carrying on the shelves, as it were. We’ll be taking a straight ten percent for this, via Paypal. We’ll also consider barter and trade.
If you’ve got any recommendations of your own and are interested in the General Store, email me and we’ll talk.
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