I love you Dolly!

Too funny not to share:

Dolly Parton's fans wanted her to run for the white house and she quipped with ... "there were already too many boobs in the white house." (paraphrasing) but damned funny.

you go girl, you rock!

Iguana Piss in South Florida

So I guess after the recent posts, it is time for a lighter, airier note. Iguana Piss and all of the other things that do "nature" in the back yard. I have not been living here since June of 1988. To be specific, 2 days after graduating high school. Not really my scene, though I grew up in South Beach before the models took over and right at the point where it was a great place to dance to your freedom. We moved here when I was 11 - sometime in the summer of 1981. Big changes and bigtime culture shock. But that is not this story.

I just moved back to Fort Lauderdale in March (2008). I have not **really** experienced this place as an adult. I had many interesting **adult - like** experiences here but not as really as an independent being. So now I am working here, still thinking I am not an adult and I have a dog.

So the dog, Zoe, is now into chasing lizards. She even points. Just for the record, she is white lab going on 9 years in March 09 and by all breeding rights should be a bird dog. She will amusingly look at the wild parrots as they fly overhead but she POINTS at lizards. She would stare by the hour given half a chance. So this rambling brings me to the point of this blog. I like to believe I am a nature girl. Grew up in the woods in South Jersey (so far south, I do not have an exit - Cape May county). So I know woods. Would spend as much time in those woods as allowed and I never liked wearing shoes. But HERE I have discovered a few creatures that have really fucked me up.

(1) Crabs: yep. Crabs. Bluish ones. Ones that are in my back yard. After Trop Storm Faye, there was one in the back yard. I thought... hmmm "did it get blown in? washed in? dropped in? What the hell was it doing here and why my backyard??". I do live near a canal that drops into the ocean but still. I am kinda in the subs - urban subs but still, the subs. I thought it was random. Well it turns out, no, not random. I have encountered 5 more.

(2) Freakishly hairy caterpillar. As bright a green as my Honda Element. I stuck the back of my hand right on it and it freakin' HURT. For days. In fact, 3 weeks later I still have 2 little spots where its little vicious venomous hairs are. It musta moved in when I brought in the plants for trop storm Ike that brushed past. It seemed to be at home on the corner of the table I had at the front door. Of course after I hit it, I thought I sliced my hand open on the corner of the table until I turned on the light and found that thing. Probably laughing.

(3) Palmetto bugs - these I remember, I hate em' and I will not give them any more power over me by writing too much about them. Suffice it to say they make me scream, curse and flee.

(4) yep, more shit.... Slug. Got no idea what to say here cos I do not know much about them other than they are a dark Payne's gray color, long and thick (about 5 1/2" tall x 1" wide). If they do something with the mosquitoes, they can stay.

(5) Last but most certainly not least. The Pissing Iguana. Those fuckers are everywhere and they are hurting the indigenous lizard population - which is a sad aside and a result of the stupid people here that love exotic pets and then let them go for whatever reason. This afternoon I was sitting quietly reading outside - trying for a little of the vitamin D I have been missing because work has been crazy and sucky lately - and all of a sudden I thought someone through a glass/bucket of water over the fence. Yeah, no, you guessed it. I looked up and there s/he was. Pissing like a cow on a rock. Only this was no rock, it was my plants and I was dumbfounded on how much PRESSURE that thing had. I mean they are bigger than you would think since they are in the wild here but still!!! It was loud! I wasn't sure what to do but I was sure glad that it didn't piss on me. So I did the only thing I have the capacity to do in that situation. I calmly got up, came inside and sat down at the computer to look up iguana piss to see if it harmful to dogs. Salmonella is on their skin, so who knows, right?? Anyway, the next thing I knew to do was...to blog about it cos I just don't know.... what else to do with this new experience.

As I said, I think of myself as a nature girl but oddly my response to narrowly being pissed on by a rogue Iguana in my backyard was to come in and blog about it.

PS - one night there was some kind of Egret thing or something I saw on my walk with Zoe. I thought at first it was a badger, but since I was nowhere near a computer I couldn't look up whether badgers were part of Florida. Everything else is so why not??? If it could happen, it would be here.

Over and Out until the next thing rocks my world around here.

Civil Disobedience

All, now is the time:

Civil disobedience is the active refusal to obey certain laws, demands and commands of a government, or of an occupying power, without resorting to physical violence. It is one of the primary tactics of nonviolent resistance. In its most nonviolent form (known as ahimsa or satyagraha) it could be said that it is compassion in the form of respectful disagreement.

Civil disobedience is one of the many ways people have rebelled against unfair laws. It has been used in many well-documented nonviolent resistance movements in India (Gandhi's social welfare campaigns and campaigns for independence from the British Empire), in South Africa in the fight against apartheid, in the American Civil Rights Movement, Jehovah's Witnesses' stand against the Nazis (1929-1945), and in peace movements worldwide. One of its earliest massive implementations was by Egyptians against the British occupation in the nonviolent 1919 Revolution.

The American author Henry David Thoreau pioneered the modern theory behind this practice in his 1849 essay Civil Disobedience, originally titled "Resistance to Civil Government". The driving idea behind the essay was that of self-reliance, and how one is in morally good standing as long as one can "get off another man's back"; so one does not have to physically fight the government, but one must not support it or have it support one (if one is against it). This essay has had a wide influence on many later practitioners of civil disobedience. In the essay, Thoreau explained his reasons for having refused to pay taxes as an act of protest against slavery and against the Mexican-American War

New level of low

Highlight: The Bush administration had sought a narrow interpretation of the act to allow for fewer materials to be preserved by the National Archives.

Cheney must keep records, judge orders (from CNN)
Vice President Dick Cheney must preserve a broad range of records from his time in office, a federal judge ordered Saturday, ruling in favor of a private watchdog group.

Dick Cheney and the Bush administration were sued to ensure that presidential records are not destroyed.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found that the records are not excluded from preservation under Presidential Records Act, which gives the national archivist responsibility over the custody of and access to the records at the end of a president's final term.

The Bush administration had sought a narrow interpretation of the act to allow for fewer materials to be preserved by the National Archives.

"Defendants were only willing to agree to a preservation order that tracked their narrowed interpretation of the PRA's statutory language," Kollar-Kotelly said in her order. This position "heightens the Court's concern" that some records will not be preserved without an injunction.

Cheney chief of staff David Addington has told Congress that the vice president belongs to neither the executive nor legislative branch of government, AP reported. Instead, he said, the office is attached by the Constitution to Congress. The vice president presides over the Senate.

Give me an Effing break

Apparently a stain on a ceiling in a weight loss center looks like Jesus. How soon will the pilgrimage start??? I mean come on, it is a stain and it has recognizable stain-parts but it is not Jesus. I have no doubt there is a lot of praying going on there but I suspect this will not be part of the prayer.

Ghost of Tom Joad

"Kathy I'm lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping. I'm empty and aching and I don't know why... Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, they've all gone to look for America..." from America, Simon and Garfunkel and it sums up my mood lately. I am empty and I am lost and I look to the future and I have have hope in Obama and I want to believe he will be our Tom Joad because the opposite is bleak. Our place in this world is so diminished by our current leaders. We have lost our connectivity. We build up the Lohans and we tear down the Obamas.

Wherever there is someone struggling to be free look in their eyes and you'll see me. ...The Ghost of Old Tom Joad is a fav Springsteen song of mine but right now I am not seeing hope and it is really getting to me. I need my Tom Joad but I am living in a Steinbeck world and I am hoping that Obama is the future. I would like to see the peace and not the war.
In the meantime, this video is amazing and it creates an energy: Springsteen and Rage Against the Machine

Kengo Kuma: Just sit with this

21 Grams or Blue Pearl

For the record, I have no clue about this ... but what if the meditation "blue pearl" of energy and the 21 grams of the "soul" was the same? What if we are energy? And we return to energy. As I draw my "buddhist art" aka seriously anal detailed drawing and I recreate buddhist symbolism in my work, I had this thought. I am a bit ADD to ever get to the blue pearl of meditation (hence the blog) but it is an interesting concept. There are experiments where they hooked up a buddhist monk to visualize his brain waves during meditation and the image was a bluish pearl/circle. Coincidence? I ran across the concept in the book "Eat, Pray, Love" and have kept it in my brain - contemplating its meaning. So as I sit and draw my buddhist symbols, and as they evolve into a series of connecting circles, I had to wonder about the connection of soul to energy and the two concepts: the blue pearl in meditation and the 21 grams that the body looses in death, attributed by some as the soul. (PS: I am not capitalizing buddhist or any other religious title. my blog, my rules, my affectation.)

… the Blue Pearl [is] the subtlest covering of the individual soul....

When we see this tiny blue light in meditation,
we should understand that we are seeing the form of the inner Self.
To experience this is the goal of human life.

[The Blue Pearl] is tiny, but it contains all the different planes of existence.

- Swami Muktananda