Frank McCourt Is Said to be Near Death - Frank McCourt - Gawker

This is sad news. I must take this moment to recommend once again the film adapted from his book ANGELA'S ASHES. I thought it was great. Besides the fantastic story of Frank and his family in Ireland, the cinematography was so good. It rains a lot in Ireland, hence all the green grass, and the cinematography is so realistic you feel the need to towel off from time to time.

EL DORADO
Edgar Allan Poe
(a poem about a lifetime quest for self-contentment)

gaily bedight, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow, Had journeyed long, Singing a song, In search of Eldorado. But he grew old, This knight so bold, And o'er his heart a shadow Fell as he found No spot of ground That looked like Eldorado. And, as his strength Failed him at length, He met a pilgrim shadow; "Shadow," said he, "Where can it be, This land of Eldorado?" "Over the mountains Of the moon, Down the valley of the shadow, Ride, boldly ride," The shade replied,-- "If you seek for Eldorado!"

Levi Still Talking: 'I Wouldn't Vote for Palin' - Gossip News Briefs | Newser

Levi Still Talking: 'I Wouldn't Vote for Palin' - Gossip News Briefs | Newser

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Wonkette : Pat Buchanan’s Shocking Hate Speech Against Sweet Levi Johnston

Wonkette : Pat Buchanan’s Shocking Hate Speech Against Sweet Levi Johnston

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Monday Morning's Meanderings...

Today starts the confirmation hearings for the supreme court opening. I might check in on that occasionally on CSPAN...

Fell into the strange story regarding the Washington Post, RIP. Is this a true story? If so, what is it all about? Read about it here.

The major league baseball season has reached the half way mark, and my favorite team has reached the stage where a chef would stick in the fork and scream, "throw it out, it can't be saved."

I've got to mow the grass today, or call in Farmer MacDonald and have him bale it...

Recent purchase of a laptop computer has turned out to be more fun than a volkswagon full of clowns....

The wife cooked hamburgers and hot dogs on the charcoal grill the other day for the first time this year. Oh, so good. We used to do this all the time but times change and......

Brought a DVD home from the library, PEOPLE WILL TALK with Cary Grant, Hume Cronyn, Walter Slezak and others, a really good movie...

After you reach a certain age, articles like this start appealing to you a lot. How many times recently have I moaned to my long suffering wife that I am going to get rid of all the grass, lay down some asphalt, and paint it green. This is maybe the answer and I can save on further trips to the paint store.

Stop mowing with the natural no-lawn solution

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In 1934 Franklin Roosevelt started the New Deal for Artists. He told them only to make paintings about America as they saw it. The program lasted for only six months.

To see more of the paintings created under this program, click here.






The painting above is: Third Avenue
The latter painting is: Northern Minnesota Mine

The reason I picked Third Avenue as an example is because my grandparents who immigrated to Ohio from Austria-Hungry lived all their lives in America on another Third Avenue, (not the Third Avenue of the painting.) My guess is that the Third Avenue of the picture is in New York.

In 1941 FDR in his state of the Union address said these words which have never been forgotten. At the end of this year on December 7, Roosevelt would not have to remind the country what freedoms they were going to fight for, they knew.

Who was groping David Brooks?

I saw this on Ed Gormans blog first and backtracked to the Wall Street Journal for the entire piece written by Peggy Noonan. I read it twice and thought it explained Sarah Palin better than most. For those that regularily read the Public Reader and are interested in politics, I think this may almost be required reading.

• JULY 11, 2009

A Farewell to Harms

Palin was bad for the Republicans—and the republic.

• By PEGGY NOONAN

Sarah Palin's resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her plain—to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits, and let go of her drama. It is an opportunity they should take. They mean to rebuild a great party. They need to do it on solid ground.

AP

Her history does not need to be rehearsed at any length. Ten months ago she was embraced with friendliness by her party. The left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children. The party rallied round, as a party should. She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.

McCain-Palin lost. Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths.

To wit, "I love her because she's so working-class." This is a favorite of some party intellectuals. She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they're working class "tropes." Because, you know, that's what they teach in "Ways of the Working Class" at Yale and Dartmouth.

What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits.

"She's not Ivy League, that's why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don't have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism." This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it's included in U.S. News & World Report's top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named "Abe," and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!

America doesn't need Sarah Palin to prove it was, and is, a nation of unprecedented fluidity. Her rise and seeming fall do nothing to prove or refute this.

"The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.

"She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.

"She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes." She shows your cynicism.

"Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues." Mrs. Palin's supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think "not thoughtful" is a working-class trope!

"The media did her in." Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it's arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect in every way. It's yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

"Turning to others means the media won!" No, it means they lose. What the mainstream media wants is not to kill her but to keep her story going forever. She hurts, as they say, the Republican brand, with her mess and her rhetorical jabberwocky and her careless causing of division. Really, she is the most careless sower of discord since George W. Bush, who fractured the party and the movement that made him. Why wouldn't the media want to keep that going?

Here's why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think.

Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate.

The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. And so the Republican Party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do.

It's not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less reign in our future. It won't be that way.

We are going to need the best.

At the Dali museum in St. Petersburg Florida.

YIKES, GADZOOKS!! How did I miss this one.

The time has come. Maybe. For months now rumors have been circulating that the financially strapped New York Times was considering charging for content in some form or other. Now it looks like they may be ready to make it a reality. Is all the news that is fit to print worth $5 to you?

This is typical of many leads in many articles on the internet this week. I, myself taking a purely personal view of the matter of course, do not wish to pay even five dollars a month for the privilege of reading the paper. Please do not take this to mean I don't think it's worth it, I do. If there is any site I would pay for it is the New York Times. I read it every day conceding that it is the best, but if I pay for the Times, what will be next?

By this act does the Times concede that our economic plight is going to last forever? It won't. When the economy is again strong, will they give their subscribers a thank you and a well done in their time of need in today's economic uncertainty and revert back to a free New York Times.

The answer is, of course, no. By being the premier newspaper in the USA, it is perhaps not the best example of a newspaper in trouble. Certainly it has the best paid talent available, with the highest circulation for sure. It is not outwardly an example of a newspaper in great need looking for handouts and government assistance. It is perhaps the best paper in the land, and maybe that is why it is very unseemly for them to be whining how they need $5 a month from all of us to keep afloat. No, I for one think that this is nothing more than a try to establish another revenue stream. I hope it fails for them and as a precursor of more of the same from other internet providers to cash in on economic uncertainties of the day.

Like they say, it's almost like losing a family member, although I never thought about Oscar being a real person. From Time magazine with a jingle we never forget.

He Had a First Name. It Was O-S-C-A-R.

A leftover from the days of W.

I really do like watching movies. That is as soon as I can get them on my computer or on DVD from the library. This is an interesting YouTube about the early Hollywood.

Microsoft is challenged by Google. Tech news that caught my eye. Read all about it. Competition between Microsoft and Google has got to be good for us in the long run.