A congresswoman in Arizona, movie-goers in Colorado, Sikhs in Wisconsin, mall shoppers in California and Washington. Unfortunately, I could go on. Sons and daughters in Afghanistan.
“These were BABIES. There’s just no comparison,” a friend said of last Friday’s mass shooting in a Newport, CT, school. Continue reading “Wall to wall, throughout the day”
“In early spring 2008, two young bison bulls jumped a sagging three-string barbed wire fence separating Chihuahua, Mexico, from New Mexico in the United States. On both sides of the international line lay an unbroken grassland valley scoured almost bare by a prolonged drought, which announced itself meanly on the dusty hides stretched taught [sic] over bison bones. … Here is a landscape that has seen the birth of jaguars, the death of Spanish missionaries, the budding of Saguaro cactus, the persecution and dogged endurance of native peoples, and the footsteps of a million migrants recorded in the smoldering sands of the Devil’s Road.”
One of the principles I have offered my children and grandchildren has been that books have the power to take us places we might otherwise never visit. One such book is Krista Schlyer’s new one titled “Continental Divide.” In words and pictures gathered over several years, Schlyer, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental photographer and writer, takes us to this nation’s border with Mexico and the fence intended to block illegal humans, but instead blocks the necessary migration of the area’s wildlife. Continue reading Continental Divide: Wildlife, People, and the Border Wall
Our children are getting entirely too used to living in a police state.
I remember when Officer Friendly graced children’s book. He often was a bit portly in his double-breasted overcoat with the shiny brass buttons. He carried a shillelagh, often in both hands, behind his back. He smiled at children, joked with them, and helped them out of minor childhood troubles while encouraging them to avoid more serious transgressions.
What brought that to mind was an article in TechNews Daily about a new program that will allow teachers to look over their students’ shoulders – even when they’re not in school.
Each year about this time, I take a few minutes to remind myself of the sorts of things for which I’m thankful. On the simple end are toys such as DVDs and telephones we carry in our pockets that can, if their owners wish, play movies or simply, in the case of my grandkids, affirm connections to friends with whom they have not spoken in four or five minutes.
When I was 12, I had thousands of acres of woods in which to roam, and streams and a big lake in which to swim and slake my thirst. All of it was not ours, but property boundaries were not strictly enforced in those days. The 513-acre pond was home to three pair of loons, a couple beaver families, a family of moose and several species of fish.
The grass covered Oklahoma prairie was new to most citizens of the recently reunited United States of America in the days following the turn of the 20th Century. Buffalo grass covered the ground, its roots woven through an area a foot below the surface, slaking the grassy thirst and stitching the ground in place during dry spells. But the soil was fertile, and wheat commanded a profitable price.
World War I started, and the federal government wanted the land farmed, and offered generous assistance to farmers willing to till the land. And profits would be even higher if the yield could be increased. Initially, farmers used plows that sliced the soil, leaving most of the grassy cover in place while opening furrows into which they could drop seed. A new kind of plow shredded the soil, turning it over to bury grass and expose the no longer moisture-holding soil.
Soil, everyone thought, was the one resource that could not be exhausted, …
One of the things that has bothered me during the past few election cycles is the way the challenging party always promises to take the country back – back from the precipice of dictatorship, collapsed economy, and moral decay.
And through it all, a certain group of industrialists loudly proclaim the need to protect Taxpayers from Government.
During my tenure on the planet, I have witnessed numerous outcries directed toward those who would have a national identification card. Such an affront was OK for the less civilized and freedom-loving of fellow nations, but we would not be subjected to such insult.
Opponents of Pennsylvania’s Voter ID law say about 10 percent of the state’s voters will be disenfranchised (and) more likely to be Democrats. But throwing the 2012 presidential election to the Republican ticket isn’t the only goal.
Google recently spent $12.5 billion dollars acquiring Motorola. Monday, the company known primarily as an Internet search engine announced it would be closing about one third of the 90 former Motorola facilities, and fire about 4,000 workers. That’s business.
What Google really wanted was the nearly 20,000 patents Motorola owned – heavy weaponry in the field of mobile communications, in which it seems everyone is suing everyone else – Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and others – over who actually invented the latest piece of technology, or even the way a switch moves up or down to select a function.
Someone said the other day, “American women kick (you know what)!”
It was a guy who said it, but the conversation that led to it was started by a woman. And both were right. Women had taken the majority of the U.S. gold medals – 24 of 34 at that point, I believe.
Yes, American woman do kick (you know what).
And so do American men. Continue reading American women kick …
When I stopped counting, there were 12 dead and 58 wounded in the audience that had, earlier in the evening, looked forward to a peaceful midnight opening of “The Dark Knight Rises” – third in a series of Batman movies.
Shortly after the shooting in Aurora, CO, authorities had arrested 24-year-old James Eagan Holmes …
Joe Paterno guided his football teams to some pretty impressive performances. Football, we all know, is seasonal preoccupation – except in upper New England where winter isn’t just a word surrounding Christmas, and where basketball is the main focus, primarily, I suspect, because it’s not necessary to plow two feet of snow off the area between the hoops.
Football, in much of the nation, means money, and JoePa’s boys certainly made certain a healthy serving of it landed beneath the home goal posts in State College, Pa. – enough so that his final contract was $5.5 million and, one hoped, worth every penny.
JoePa’s fall from grace threatens to take the team down with him. It shouldn’t.
When I was young, Eighth Grade graduation marked the limit of many students’ academic career. I was raised in rural Maine, where young people helped their families on the farm, and the school calendar was written around planting and harvest schedules, and the fall agricultural fair.
The engineer who designs wind turbines can benefit from advanced education in physics. The primary requirements to operate a crane or read a torque wrench are ability to read and follow directions, and good hand-eye coordination.
Granddaughter Kass graduated this month from Eighth Grade. It was a warmup for what will happen in four years; she and her classmates were introduced at the end of the ceremonies as the Class of 2016.
It was a warmup for the show slated four years hence – a warning round over Mom’s pocketbook.
“She’s gonna go get her beauty on,” said Mom, as mother and daughter prepared to head out.
“I am,” she said. “I’m getting curls, and then I need to get my eyebrows done.”
And she just turned 14.
I graduated Eighth Grade in ceremonies held at the local Grange hall, next to the town fire station, at the other end of Church Street, where the town’s only church stood.
It was in the two-room school house, and on the way home from it, I learned about bullying, … Continue reading…
I was in Florida a couple weeks ago, and purchased a SunPass – like an EZ-Pass to most of the rest of the East Coast states, except EZ-Pass doesn’t work in Florida. They have their own thing going down there, and they’re not sharing.
Of course, one can drive the Florida Turnpike without a SunPass. The state also has Photo Billing, with which it has replaced humans in toll booths. Gone is the toll-taker with whom you could have a slow-down and human contact on a long trip via interstate highway. Instead, you go speeding through (no need to slow down in Florida) beneath an array of cameras and have your picture taken.
And if your car does not have a working SunPass, the registered owner of your license plate will get a bill from the state – plus a couple bucks “administration fee.”
We have become inured to cameras following us around. Banks have them, as do most retail stores. They’re in casinos, … Continue reading …
A fellow columnist wrote last week thanking other kids’ parents for buying their eight-year-olds cell phones. He thought a cell phone to be far down on the list of things an eight-year-old should have to keep track of.
“But dad,” his offspring moaned, “Everybody’s got one.”
My daughter used that line on me once or twice, to which I replied, “I doubt that a lot.”
Sometime after the last time, Daughter was overheard in conversation with a friend who wanted her company going someplace.
“Everyone’s going,” the friend said. Continue reading …
“This planet has – or rather, had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
In 1985, I retired from the Navy and moved to Maine, next to Mom, where I’d been raised. That was the year Halley’s comet passed by, a treat I enjoyed on my way home for nearly a week of November evenings.
It hung there, as though, had I hiked up the power line to the top of the hill over which it seemed parked, I could have reached out and touched it. News reports excitedly proclaimed it to have come SO CLOSE – only about 93 million miles. A chunk of ice, rock and dust about 6 miles in diameter, with a tail some hundred million miles long, looking, from where I stopped each night to watch, like a baseball hit for a home run into deep center field, leaving a three-foot trail of dust.
Chinese astronomers first recorded its passage in 240 B.C., Continue reading …
Gov. Tom Corbett’s seems to believe that putting money into things like education, so that future jobs might find young Pennsylvanians qualified to take them, is unnecessary, wasteful spending. Investment, on the other hand, means continued tax breaks to gas and coal companies so they can have profits now, some of which they may later contribute to his re-election campaign.
Case in point: A report published in December revealed the state gives about $2.9 billion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. Continue reading …
The state Department of Environmental Protection announced last week it had fined Chesapeake Appalachia LLC “$565,000 for multiple violations” in its Marcellus operations. Chesapeake Appalachia is a subsidiary of Chesapeake Energy Corporation, an Oklahoma City, Okla.-based company which claims to be the nation’s second largest producer of natural gas.
In Potter County, the company was found to have insufficient erosion and sedimentation controls. The deficiency was discovered when heavy rains washed dirt off a road and a nearby well pad, into the Right Branch of Wetmore Run, am environmentally high-quality stream.
“High-quality streams receive some of the highest levels of protection in the state,” DEP Secretary Mike Krancer said in a prepared statement, “and (natural gas drilling) operators are expected to ensure their work does not negatively affect them.
The sediment carried by the stream also “impacted” Galeton Borough Authority’s water treatment filters, which, to be fair, Chesapeake paid to repair. Continue reading Fines, remediation & campaign contributions: all “a cost of doing business”
Ah, ‘tis the season.
A friend was informed by her husband that Thanksgiving is over and it’s time to put up the tree.
Another chimed in that her tree is up already.