Things I have seen # 1

Number one in my new series of " Things I have seen " The Vatican.

Some of the pleasant memories that remain after many trips to Britain
are that of Pub visits. Although it has been a few years since my last trip
I have recently come up with a way to simulate that experience
For a number of years I have been a member of CAMRA . This is a
consumer group (100,000 strong) that is in essence a watch dog
that tries to maintain the integrity of the brewing business and the
institution of the British Pub(Public House) Of the many activities of the group
one is to publish the Good Beer Guide with descriptions of thousands of Pubs
In the Country.
Over the past few months I have discovered that sitting down and reading the
descriptions while having a beer is a substitute for not being there in person.
It may not be perfect but It is as close as I get until I return. Cheers!

Freefall

The way it feels sometimes

Coltrane Fix for today

# 58

From Esquire magazines Feature 79 things we can all agree on .
# 58 Most people really shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a handgun.

British County/Town/ Pub name #8

Well. the reading vacation is over . Now that I have finished the most enjoyable Travels with Charley I am returning to my usual fare. This time a world History book so large I had to return to weight training so I could lift it. I don't know why I torture myself like this. Hopefully I can finish this (probably sometime next year at my speed) before I forget where It began. If not , remind later that it was it was Mesopotamia .

The joy of good writing

I went into a state of flight ,running to get away from the
unearthly landscape. And then the late afternoon changed everything. As the sun angled,the buttes and coulees,the cliffs and sculptured hills and ravines lost there burned and dreadful look and glowed
with yellow and rich browns and a hundred variations of red and silver gray, all picked out by streaks of coal black.

Reforestation continues

Even though I haven't mentioned it in a while our reforestation project continues. Many years of
weeding, planting ,pruning, replacing etc, etc are slowly progressing. I suppose because it is a living thing it is never really done. Here is a view of the latest segment we are working on. The area to the left is cleared and the right is not completed.

To make my reading time more complicated (making things more complicated is my strong point)
I try to keep up with these 8 magazine subscriptions. Good thing some of them are quarterly publications or I would surely fail miserably.

Book report

Coltrane required listing = Better World

So True!

7th British County/Town/ Pub names

7 down and only 76 left! Keep thinking I should expand this to include more info but I am lucky to have gotten this far with these basic elements!. Probably shouldn't press it any farther!

Groucho!

The way time seems to speed by these days I am reminded of a theory I heard many years ago. As you get older time seems to speed up. This appears to happen because each year added to your life becomes less of a percentage of a total life experience. One year is one half of a two year old child's life. By the time they reach 20 one year is reduced to 1/20th of the experience making it appear to go faster.
This has always made sense to me!

As it was recently Friday the 13th I thought about my dad. He loved that day. He was always telling me that 13 was his lucky number. This is probably because he was born in 1913. Although he did not seem to have much luck in the last few years of his life ( he died 27 years ago) Hopefully there was lots of it in previous years, none the less. If you are lucky enough to have parents among the living give them a hug.
Because you fight and think you can't get along, then they are gone and you miss them!

explains a lot!

Without ethics, politics has no limits. America broke the rules of living systems, and lost its balance. All the oxygen flowed to a smaller and smaller section of the body politic. The history is brief and unquestionable: close to toppling, the society momentarily pulled itself upright, and then became even less ethical, less balanced, more endangered than ever as a lawless financial system came back from death, and like a foolish patient after a heart bypass operation, continued in its old ways. With no ethical component to national politics, President Obama could deliver his 2011 State of the Union speech without ever mentioning the word “poverty,” although one in every five American children lived in poverty. Without a commitment to Hutcheson’s idea of the greatest good, which is at the core of the original American philosophy in Jefferson’s drafting of the Declaration of Independence, this may no longer be the brilliant experiment. If happiness is for the few and it produces unemployment approaching that of the Great Depression, then the shadow of evening is here.

- Earl Shorris

Excerpted from “American Vespers: The Ebbing of the Body Politic”, by Earl Shorris, as appeared in Harper’s Magazine, December 2011

Walkies anyone?