One for our side

I hope Lynne Stewart rots in hell.  Traitor!

Sympathy for Al Gore

Yes, you heard me right.  I'm downright sorry for the man.  He buys a house for 8 million and change and can't even light a fire in his fireplaces!  What is this country coming to!  What's the use of being rich?

I don't know when the house was built but for a long time now you need a special permit for wood burning fireplaces and most of the houses built for the last 20 years are gas operated with faux wood for show.  I'm not saying that is what they have, but wouldn't be surprised if that were the case.

Another commenter chimes in:

Not only the difference in fireplaces built recently, but there are also restrictions on fireplace usage in CA.

My parents have a woodburning fireplace, and due to air quality restrictions, they aren't allowed to use it whenever they want.

My Grandfather was not covered by the restrictions, but that was because his fireplace was the main heating source for his ancient house.

Now picture this:  Gore is sitting in front of his cozy fireplace, toasting his toes, perhaps contemplating a restful massage, and the Fireplace Police drop in and give him a ticket,  ruining his pleasant evening.  Maybe they even haul him off to jail, poor soul, simply for using his own property in a way that he sees fit.

Our family used to drive down to Florida, sometimes using country roads.  A common sight was a large lot with a couple of derelict cars parked in front of a house that hadn't seen a coat of paint in a good long while.  Of course this was unsightly.  But I'd prefer having the neighbors park their cars in their front yards than have someone tell me what materials I can use to build  my house and what color it must be painted--as happens in California!  Really and truly!  It happened to someone I know.

Of course, around here they have laws against parking trucks in the street, but at least they are not watching the chimney or the electric meter to see if I am improperly heating or cooling my house.

Maybe that's next?

Al Gore's new humble little shack

A friend who lives in California sent me this comment on Al Gore's new house:

I don't know when the house was built but for a long time now you need a special permit for wood burning fireplaces and most of the houses built for the last 20 years are gas operated with faux wood for show.  I'm not saying that is what they have, but wouldn't be surprised if that were the case.

Kenneth Gladney

I can't find the exact link, but maybe someone can e-mail it to me.

O'Reilly had some pompous windbag on his show yesterday, discussing the NAACP generally and the Kenneth Gladney beating specifically.

The pompous windbag, who I will call Windbag for short, said Gladney was selling hate literature, specifically buttons with Obama's picture in whiteface, and the word "Dope" rather than "Hope,"  implying that Gladney deserved the beating given him by SEIU thugs, a beating which sent him to the hospital.

O'Reilly more or less agreed that the buttons Gladney was selling were improper.

It leads me to despair to hear O'Reilly agree with Mr Windbag that Gladney should not be exercising his First Amendment right to free speech.  Where are the first principles our republic is based on?  Have we forgotten free speech so quickly?

Founding Fathers to O'Reilly:  Free speech is protected by the First Amendment.  You blew it,. 

A link to the interview.

Brandywine Zoo

The offices of the Brandywine Zoo have been decorated with fabulous murals, showing all kinds of animal habitats.  I tried to find more information about the artist from the Zoo's website, but could not find the information.  Anyway, he did a great job.  The kids who attend camp and educational programs there will love it.

More about the running of the bulls

If anyone cares:

I've lived in Spain for over 20 years and have never been to Los San Fermines. Having spent the first 30+ years of my life in New York City, surviving ****ing  Saint Patrick's Day drunks, I've never felt the need to add livestock to the mix. Have fun, y'all.  

My sentiments exactly.  Only one St Patrick's Day did it for me.

.

It's Mahler's 150th birthday

A wonderful appreciation of the composer.

Read the whole thing, including the comments.  So many people love Mahler's music.

Running of the bull***

My wish when I see news of this sort is I hope the bulls win.  I'm sorry to be so unPC, but the bulls did not ask for this fight.  How can Spain, which claims to be so multiculti and loves every liberal cause that comes up, justify this brutal sport?

You know that in a bullfight, the bull will not win.  No way.

I first was made aware of this delightful sport when I read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises when I was 16.  Their visit to Spain to attend the bullfights sounded fab, except for the bullfight.  The life of young expats in Paris sounded like fun, too.  How I would have liked living as an expatriate in Paris, meeting all the happening people, hanging out in bars, soaking up the sunshine in Spain.  The fleeting thought crossed my mind that these folks must have received monthly checks from home, but I banished the thought quickly, my 16-year-old self enchanted by the glamor of the whole thing.  As a sour old lady, however, I am immune to Hemingway's charms.

I am with the bulls, all the way.

People don't mind paying more for education?

A survey has shown that Americans do not want to pay more for public employees, but make an exception for education.

Why?  because they don't know the education swindle as I do.  I've seen it up close and personal.  Large amounts of education money go for administration.  Forget the teachers' salaries, how hard-working they are, bringing work home, and other pieties.  Teachers at least have quanitfiable duties.  A teacher will teach a class of 20 fourth-graders, or teach art to 75 students.  There are many, many people working in the public school system who either do nothing or do something that could be dispensed with:  assistant principals, board secretaries, assistants to assistant principals, secretaries to board secretaries; lather, rinse, repeat.  No business could survive with such a collection of slackers and people whose main duties are to take something out of an inbox and put it in an outbox.  Their lack of productivity is astounding.

Money oozes from every orifice of the public education system.  It doesn't help that the states impose unfunded mandates that cost school districts money, without reimbursing them.  The superintendent of a school system which shall be nameless told me that he was compelled to transport a retarded child several miles and pay an arm and a leg to have a minimum wage flunkey, under the auspices of a State facility for the retarded, baby-sit him.

And so it goes.   Anyone who wants to can pick up the rock which conceals public school spending and see what is underneath.  It's not a pretty picture.

Trifecta

The perfect storm of climate tsuris


An SUV (1)  crashes into an eco-friendly  bus 2) which crashes into a greenhouse (3).

It doesn't get much better than that. 

Longwood Gardens photos taken July 1, 2010

To see more Longwood pictures, visit my other blog at miriamswilmingtondephotos.

Maybe they could qualify for one of those "payday" loans

or maybe not.

These people we elect--do they know what they are doing?  I used to think they did.  Yes, they were crooks, but they were competent crooks.

Wrong.

From Instapundit.

Mother and dad, out of the frame

This is enhanced to the severe limits of my photo-editing skills.

From the shelves of the Good Will store

vaguely (but not quite) obscene object of no utility

Other stuff anyone could easily live without

Candleholder and son, possiblly another candleholder

Another view of weird candleholder

Your money or your life?

I wrote this some time ago:

I used to drive a small car. I laughed when I passed a gas station (well, it was more like a quiet chuckle). Then my small car, going about 5 mph, was hit by a mid-size Lexus. Score: Lexus 1, Miriam 0.

They practically had to vacuum my car off the road, it was in so many pieces.

I escaped without a scratch, miraculously.

But I'm not driving a really small car, unless it is up-armored.


An intelligent comment:

Nobody in the USA will "clamor" about fuel efficient cars. People can always buy what they want ... at least, up to now.

They will simply decide on the compromise they are willing to make between the well documented lethality of tiny cars and the cost of gas.

The cost of gas vs. the value of your life.  

 Choose one.

The guy has a point.

Another good reason to hate Mel Gibson

As if I needed one.

He's just another one of those Christians who love their fellow man.

Christopher Hitchens has cancer

It's a shame.  I hope he's one of the lucky five percent who survive.  May he have the best of care, he deserves it.

I just finished Hitch's book, which I enjoyed very much.  He seems like a generous-hearted man and a good friend, a guy you wouldn't mind going out drinking with.  His aversions are as strong as his likes, and as vehemently held.   Most people espouse a party line and don't think for themselves if they can help it.  So it's kind of refreshing to find someone who has it in for Mother Theresa.

Hitch has had an enviable life, so far, and I hope will continue to do so.  He  appears to know everyone I've ever heard of, or at least everyone whose books I have ever read, including--and this impressed me--Redmond O'Hanlon.  I thought i had discovered Redmond O'Hanlon all by myself, there in the travel sectiion of the library, and here Hitchens knew him right along.

Some religious persons have suggested that this cancer is God's punishment for Hitchens' vigorous atheism.  Whatever religion these people profess, I want none of it.  I am dubious about belief, and dubious about prayer, but I still will send a few thoughts of Christopher Hitchens, who has given me so much pleasure, winging heavenwards.  God can then do exactly as He likes, if he exists.  And if he doesn't, no harm done.

Supreme Court nominee hearing

Senate snoozes.

Kagan is going to be confirmed.  It's all about the numbers.  Kagan is a nonentity, unlike Justice Scalia, who is really brilliant.  She is one of the better Obama candidates, in that she never made bombs in the basement or gave speeches praising Mao's little red book. Yet.

We have 300,000 million people in this country, and lots of them are boring Harvard graduates.  They learned the Harvard game--the admissions game, I mean--in middle school, and were careful to do what it took to get into Harvard:  raise money for cerebral palsy, run half-marathons, volunteer for the school paper, play the cello, and visit old ladies in nursing homes twice a week, while getting good grades and kissing up to the teachers.

I can't imagine she has ever held an opinion that would differ in any respect from that of the faculty and administration at Harvard, Mayor Bloomberg, Mario Cuomo, Mayor Daley (the son, not the father) or Obama himself.

His nominees, except for the lunatic fringe ones who want to give carrots and rutabagas the vote or emulate Cuban health care, are ticket punchers.  They look different, but at heart they resemble Chiclets.  So she's fifty.  Another thirty or forty years on the Supreme Court bench and she'll retire and leave an opening for another just like herself.

Happy Independence Day

My younger daughter sitting on a cannon at Fort Ticonderoga, where we beat the British in 1775.

Rev Wright uses bad grammar

even though he knows better.

"White folk done took this country," Wright said. "You're in their home, and they're gonna let you know it."

He had a good education.  His father was a clergyman and his mother a school principal.  I bet they didn't talk like that around the family dinner table.