tevgammaray

8 Random Things about TeVGammaRay

I have been tagged by RandiePie

Here are the rules:

1) Only list 8 facts.
2) You must then list 8 TAGS at the end of the post. This means you must name 8 people on Buzznet who now must do the same blog.
3) Go comment on their profile and tell them to come read yours! Mark demand participation.

HERE GOES:


1.  I spent the first 10 years of my life in West Virginia.  I tell people I am from Virginia, which is true (as I was born in Virginia).  However we didn't  "live" in Virginia until I was 10. 

2.  I spent 11 years in college/university.

3.  When I was a kid, my sister and I used to try to ride our bike next to each other like Ponch and Jon Baker did on "CHIPS."

4.  I went to a high school that was named after a Confederate Civil War General.  Students were excused on the first day of hunting season if they had a hunting license. 

5.  On my first car I had an "oakley thermonuclear protection" widow sticker.

6.  When I was in high school I went cruising with my friends along the strip.  The strip in Harrionsburg consisted of driving between the hardees parking lot and route 33.  In Luray this consisted of driving between the 7-11 parking lot and the parking lot at "Bo's Belly Barn."  In my home town of New Market (which probably didn't have enough traffic to count as a strip) it consisted of driving from the "High's" parking lot to the 7-11 Parking lot.

7.  When I was a kid (under the age of 10) I used to help my dad bury people.  My part of the job was to jump into the grave, after the coffin had been lowered into the vault, and wiggle the straps out from under the coffin.

8.  When I was in college I drove home on several occasions because I was too drunk to walk home.  The logic in my college town was that if the police saw a college aged person walking down the street after midnight they would be harassed and possible arrested for being "drunk in public." However, my college town did not do traffic stops.  So, if you were sober enough to drive straight, you could make it home without being arrested.  Seems pretty stupid in retrospect.  

                                                                                                                                                            Lets see, I will tag:
 sunflowers14, exbirthdaygirl, ghostgirl, vianne, freakpowertix, savagehenrietta, rachelhduncan        

okay it is only seven, but that is enough.       

Today Cosmo and I went to the Washington DC Zoo.  If you have never been it is quite interesting and most of the animal habitats seem pretty nice.  Particularly nice are the Small Mammal and the Invertebrate exhibits.   

The first animals we saw when we got to the zoo were the Cheetahs.   For the most part they seemed rather board.  One was sleeping and one was walking slowly around the edge of the habitat.   The third one was the most interesting.  From his position he could see cars coming into the parking lot.  He sat there like a cat watching dogs run by (just following them with his head as they went past).  At one point a motorcycle went by.  This must have triggered some playful/predatory urge, because he took off running down the edge of the fence chasing after the motorcycle.  This should serve as a warning to motorcyclists around the world.  Watch out for predators.   

Later in the day we went to see the Gorilla exhibit.  This was the one I really wanted to see.  I left feeling very depressed.  Gorillas are depressing.  The one Gorilla that was in view just sat next to a window in his indoor habitat and stared blackly out into nothing.  People walked up to him and stared back at him.  Separated by just an inch of glass, the Gorilla seemed to have no response whatsoever.  The whole experience was sad.  

All in all it was a good day with a lot of walking and lot of kids.  For whatever reason, the Zoo people seem to have some aversion to food and shade in the same area.  There are plenty of places to eat, but none of them seem to have a shaded area to sit in. 

Others things learned, Pandas are animals that seem to sleep all the time.  Sea Lions always seem to have fun even when they aren't doing anything.  Lobsters have lots of parts and can live up to a 100 years; seems wrong to eat something that is 100 years old.

Raymond Staley Myers
(August 11, 1923 - April 15, 2007)

Raymond Staley Myers, 83, of Halltown, WV passed away on Sunday, April 15, 2007 at Jefferson Memorial Hospital.

He was born on August 11, 1923 at Kabletown, WV and was the son of the late John Franklin Myers and Helen Moler Myers.

He was a self-employed businessman in Jefferson County.

He was a member of Zion Episcopal Church in Charles Town, and an active member of the Shenandoah Junction Ruritan Club.

He was a WWII veteran having served in the US Navy, Asiatic-Pacific, Landing Craft Infantry. Raymond was present at the raising of our flag at Iwojima.

He is survived by three daughters, Julie Myers Prosser, and husband, Peter, of Australia, Debbie Whitmore, and husband, Scott, of Rohrersville, MD, and Linda Raye Myers, of Halltown, WV; five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

He was preceded in death by his wife of 49 years, Mary Susan “Susie” Hanshew Myers.

Services will be held on Thursday, April 19, 2007, at 1 p.m. at Zion Episcopal Church, 300 East Congress Street, Charles Town, with the Reverend Melanie McCarley officiating. Interment will be in Pleasant View Memory Gardens at Martinsburg.

The family will receive friends on Wednesday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. at the Eackles-Spencer & Norton Funeral Home, US 340 at Halltown Road, Charles Town/Harpers Ferry, WV.

Memorial contributions may be made to the Shenandoah Junction Ruritan Club, c/o Treasurer, P. O. Box 136, Shenandoah Junction, WV 25442 or to Zion Episcopal Church, (office) 221 East Washington Street, Charles Town, WV, 25414.

Condolences to the family may be made at his obituary at www.eackles-spencerfuneralhome.com

On the evening of February 14^th 1997 I went to a party that my James Dean wanabe German friend was having.  By the standards of modern physics, his parties were usually very good.  Upon arrival I immediately noticed this beautiful women sitting in the living room and I was smitten.  In addition to this I was impressed that she was wearing all black on Valentines Day.  Clearly this indicated that she was of similar mind to me in regards to Valentines Day.  At this point Meg introduced me to the women in black.  This is when I met Christina.   I was immediately taken by her and we started to talk.  

As the evening progressed I was trying to be as clever and as charming as possible.  At one point I even called her the beer wench.  My romantic plans seemed to be working until another German showed up wearing leather pants.  Christina seemed to be intrigued by his pants but he was quickly emasculated by his ignorance of 80s pop culture (I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid).  Not being able to interact, as I steered the conversation towards Battlestar Galactica and the Dukes of Hazard, he left.  However, as Christina kept talking about his leather pants, I left the party thinking that I wouldn’t get to see the beautiful woman in black again.  

A short while later Christina (the sexy lady in black) called me in my Cedar Point Condo and asked me if I wanted to go out.  Exactly two weeks after we met (28 February 1997) Christina and I went out for dinner at Chili’s.  Our intention was to go to the Tower after dinner but Christina informed me that she was miserable and wanted me to take her home.  I took her home and I didn’t think that she was interested in me.  After all, you can’t keep talking about the Duke boys for very long.  I was feeling down because I didn’t think that I would get to see her anymore.   My impressions of Christina were good.  I liked her and I knew that I could really like her.  I wanted to get to know her (not just in the biblical sense).  I didn’t think that she would be interested in me.  After all, I know I can be charming for a bit, but at the end of the day I am kind of a geek.  Furthermore she didn’t seem impressed with my Cedar Point Condo or my green Escort Station Wagon.  Not to mention the fact that you told me you were dating someone else.

A few days later I called her but she told me not to call her when Xena Warrior Princess was on.  I called her back and, much to my surprise, we set up our second date.  This date consisted of going downtown to Broadway to see Lost Highway.  I tried to hold her hand at one point but I guess I missed.  Years later she told me that she knew I tried to get her hand.  She didn’t tell me why I “missed” but she just smiled.  After the movie we went back to her house and I met her two cousins Kelly and Dee.  They were watching the Usual Suspects.  You shouldn’t talk when that movie is on.  After a while we went down to her room and I finally got to kiss her for the first time (much to my surprise).  After a while I went home and I was feeling better than I had felt in a very long time.  

After our third date which consisted of watching Hackers at Meg’s apartment, I felt that we were really dating.  From then on we spent more and more time together.  Over the next few months I fell in love with Christina and I never looked back.  We spent the next year and a half in Salt Lake and then moved to Santa Fe (which sucks a whole lot more than one would suspect).  During that summer on Alto Street in the downtown portion of Santa Fe we decided to get married in the spring of the next year.  

Christina, our life together has been wonderful.  We have been through a lot and we will continue to work together to get through the rough parts of life.  I can’t imagine my life without you.  I love you with all my heart and I need you with me everyday.  I know the sometimes we fight and that sometimes I don’t seem to care but I do care for you more than anything.  You told me that it was a huge deal for you to call me.  I am glad you did.  Despite what many think, I am shy.  If you hadn’t called me I think that we wouldn’t be together.  After all, you kept talking about leather pants.  I have loved you now for 10 years and I always will.   

 

Yours always and forever,

 

Rob

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- Best-selling author and columnist Molly Ivins, the sharp-witted liberal who skewered the political establishment and referred to President Bush as "Shrub," died Wednesday after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 62.

Ivins died at her home while in hospice care, said David Pasztor, managing editor of the Texas Observer, where Ivins was co-editor.

Ivins made a living poking fun at politicians, whether they were in her home state of Texas or the White House. She revealed in early 2006 that she was being treated for breast cancer for the third time.

More than 400 news organizations, including CNN.com, subscribed to her nationally syndicated column, which combined strong liberal views and populist humor. Ivins' illness did not seem to hurt her ability to deliver biting one-liners.

"I'm sorry to say [cancer] can kill you, but it doesn't make you a better person," she said in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News in September, the same month cancer claimed her friend, former Gov. Ann Richards.

To Ivins, "liberal" wasn't an insult. "Even I felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left; there's nothing you can do about being born liberal -- fish gotta swim and hearts gotta bleed," she wrote in a column included in her 1998 collection, "You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You."

In a column in mid-January, Ivins urged readers to stand up against Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq.

"We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war," Ivins wrote in the January 11 column. "We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!"' (Read the column)

Ivins' best-selling books included those she co-authored with Lou Dubose about Bush. One was titled "Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush" and another was "BUSHWHACKED: Life in George W. Bush's America."

Ivins' jolting satire was directed at people in positions of power.

"The trouble with blaming powerless people is that although it's not nearly as scary as blaming the powerful, it does miss the point," she wrote in a 1997 column. "Poor people do not shut down factories ... Poor people didn't decide to use 'contract employees' because they cost less and don't get any benefits."

Praise from Bill Clinton

In an Austin speech last year, former President Clinton described Ivins as someone who was "good when she praised me and who was painfully good when she criticized me."

Ivins loved to write about politics and called the Texas Legislature the best free entertainment in Austin.

"Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair's-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?" she wrote in a 2002 column about a California political race.

Born Mary Tyler Ivins in California, she grew up in Houston. She graduated from Smith College in 1966 and attended Columbia University's journalism school. She also studied for a year at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris.

Her first newspaper job was in the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. She worked her way up at the Chronicle, then went on to the Minneapolis Tribune, becoming the first woman police reporter in the city.

Ivins counted among her highest honors the Minneapolis police force's decision to name its mascot pig after her and her banishment from the campus of Texas A&M University, according to a biography on the Creators Syndicate Web site.

In the late 1960s, according to the syndicate, she was assigned to a beat called "Movements for Social Change" and wrote about "angry blacks, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers."

Ivins later became co-editor of The Texas Observer, a liberal Austin-based biweekly publication of politics and literature.

Bare feet too much for New York Times

She joined The New York Times in 1976, working first as a political reporter in New York and later as Rocky Mountain bureau chief.

But Ivins' use of salty language and her habit of going barefoot in the office were too much for the Times, said longtime friend Ben Sargent, editorial cartoonist with the Austin American-Statesman.

"She was just like a force of nature," Sargent said. "She was just always on and sharp and witty and funny and was one of a kind."

Ivins returned to Texas as a columnist for the Dallas Times-Herald in 1982, and after it closed she spent nine years with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In 2001, she went independent and wrote her column for Creators Syndicate.

"She was magical in her writing," said Mike Blackman, a former Star-Telegram executive editor who hired Ivins in 1992. "She could turn a phrase in such a way that a pretty hard-hitting point didn't hurt so bad."

In 1995, conservative humorist Florence King accused Ivins in "American Enterprise" magazine of plagiarism for failing to properly credit King for several passages from a 1988 article in "Mother Jones." Ivins apologized, saying the omissions were unintentional and pointing out that she credited King elsewhere in the piece.

She was initially diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999, and she had a recurrence in 2003. Her latest diagnosis came around Thanksgiving 2005.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Congress Tells Auditor in Iraq to Close Office

bright marigold towers over the garden
shining brightly on the insects below
short shadows fall around them
a brown wind blows
why do they fear the marigold?
it's a mighty and terrible flower
bright flames blossom from the petals
short shadows become white shadows
muffled screams fill the air
another of Robert's baby's is born
burning, falling
profound quiet fills the air
George's monument falls to the ground
no one's left to hear the sound.

I have found myself of late spending a great deal of time thinking about the war in Iraq.  I must confess that I am having a difficult time understanding what course of action should be taken at this point.  I would like to hear people’s thoughts on the subject.  Should we withdraw from Iraq now, later, much later, or never and what do you think the consequences of withdrawing will be?  I look forward to hearing from all of you.

I heard a really interesting article on NPRs “On Point”

You can download the audio at

http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2006/09/20060904_a_main.asp

Inequality in America  

Aired: Monday, September 04, 2006 10-11AM ET

By host Tom Ashbrook:

This summer, we launched a special series on inequality in America. The response from you, our listeners, was tremendous. So, this hour, we're bringing you highlights from the series.

For four days we looked at inequality in this country -- the skyrocketing fortunes of a small percentage of Americans at the top, the flat fortunes of nearly everyone else, and what the resulting gap means for the country.

Americans are not against wealth, and we're not either. But the income gap between America's top tier earners and the rest has now grown so large that even Alan Greenspan warned recently it could pose a threat to capitalist democratic society.

Hear from many voices -- from the super rich, to the working poor and Nobel Prize-winning economists on inequality in America.

 

Guests:

•           Robert Rubin, former Secretary of the Treasury from 1995-1999 under President Clinton and former director and chairman of the executive committee at Citigroup

•           Larry Bean, editor in chief of the Robb Report

•           Gil Lamphere is a private equity fund manager. His net worth is over a hundred million dollars.

•           Roger Bailey works as an Operations Director at a television and audio production company. He is 49, makes about $70,000 a year, and has not had a raise in 6 years.

•           Danielle Axon is a Certified Nursing Assistant at a nursing home. She earns $14.67 an hour.

•           James Heckman, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Economics and distinguished professor of Economics at the University of Chicago

•           Robert Shiller, professor of economics at Yale University, author of "Irrational Exuberance" and "The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century"

•           Jack Beatty, On Point News Analyst and Senior Editor of The Atlantic Monthly

•           Anna Burger, Secretary-Treasurer of the Service Employees International Union

From "A River Runs Through It"

For some time, though, he struggled for more to hold on to. “Are you sure you have told me everything you know about his death?” he asked. I said, “Everything.” "It’s not much, is it?” “No,” I replied, “but you can love completely without complete understanding.” “That I have known and preached,” my father said.

Once my father came back with another question. “Do you think I could have helped him?” he asked. Even if I might have thought longer, I would have made the same answer. “Do you think I could have helped him?” I answered. We stood waiting in deference to each other. How can a question be answered that asks a lifetime of questions?

After a long time he came with something he must have wanted to ask from the first. “Do you think it was just a stick-up and foolishly he tried to fight his way out? You know what I mean–that it wasn’t connected with anything in his past.”

“The police don’t know,” I said.
“But do you?” he asked, and I felt the implication.
“I’ve said I’ve told you all I know. If you push me far enough, all I really know is that he was a fine fisherman.”
“You know more than that,” my father said. “He was beautiful.”
“Yes,” I said, “he was beautiful. He should have been–you taught him.”

My father looked at me for a long time–he just looked at me. So this was the last he and I ever said to each other about Paul’s death.

Indirectly, though, he was present in many of our conversations. Once, for instance, my father asked me a series of questions that suddenly made me wonder whether I understood even my father whom I felt closer to than any man I have ever known. “You like to tell true stories, don’t you?” he asked, and I answered, “Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.”

Then he asked, “After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don’t you make up a story and the people to go with it?
“Only then will you understand what happened and why.
“It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.” Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W.B. Yeats