Aung Sun Sui Kyi Released!

Just two hours ago [it is 8:45 EST- USA] Aung Sun Sui Kyi was released in Rangoon. One joyous step in Myanmar.

I am delighted for this brave and pervailing woman.

I am also remembering other political prisoners including Liu Xioubo the most recent Nobel Peace Prize winner who has been sentenced to 11 years in jail in China. Those are the famous ones. And then there is the Dalai Lama exiled but certainly not imprisoned, although the young Pachen Lama is as much under "house arrest" as was Sui Kyi. Here in our own country Leonard Peltier is one among others in jail unjustly.

The world is just a tiny bit more right tonight.

Saturday Summary

Forget about the old cliche, "all the gold in Fort Knox." America's biggest stash of gold is in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Liberty Street, 2164 ounces of the shiny stuff valued at $93 billion.

From the sublime to the often embarrassing: Some hospital patients will go high fashion and no longer inappropriately exposed. Cleveland Clinic, one of America's most well known cancer hospitals has commissioned designer Diane Von Furstenberg design new hospital gowns for patients.

And good news for all we computer users. When Russian police announced they were investigating a man known as "the spam king" worldwide spam messages dropped by 50 billion a day. I wondered what happened to those ads for Russian-made Viagara.

Speaking of Spam, in this case the trademarked "food" that many think has disappeared -- but it hasn't! When that large cruise ship was disabled because of an engine room fire this week and refrigeration was cut off, helicopters dropped cases of Span so the passengers would have something to eat while they waited to be towed to shore. Not exactly the usual Captain's Table fare.

Seen only by invitation and then under hush-hush conditions, an abandoned subway stop somewhere in NYC [there are quite a few such stations underground] has been turned into a huge art gallery with mosaics covering the walls. Being there is illegal as is "defacing" such city property but it's said to be a very wonderful work of art.

Equally unseen except by those with special abilities, but apparently a real on another dimension, astrology physicists say two vast bubbles of energy have emerged [sometime in the last few billion years] from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. All the physicists are quite sure about is that they are not black holes of dark matter. This energy, we are told, is the equivalent of 100,000 supernova. It will take more than a week of contemplation for me to wrap my imagination around that piece of information.

Since a Supreme Court decision sometime int e 1940s, corporations have had the legal status of "persons" and all the freedoms guaranteed to persons in the Constitution. It was only a small tweek in the definition that resulted in a more recent definition of corporations as "individuals" resulting in their freedom to make political donations anonymously, and that includes making many of those "infomercials" about political candidates that polluted our airways and eardrums up until election day last week. We had no way of knowing who was telling us what to think about who and which proposal. Were you an "informed voter?"

One MInute Writer Weekly Winner

One-Minute Writing of the Week:
Writer: June Calender (Monday's winner)

Prompt: Discovery. Write about a good discovery you've made (big or small!)

The discovery that discoveries never need to cease, especially the small ones that make life sparkle and fill in the unrecognized pockets of ignorance. I live in an ecology that is new to me; I constantly discover new things, especially about the sea. But the most wonderful discovery is that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" is a lot of hooey -- I learn new things on many levels constantly.

The One Minute Writer link is in the list on the right. Anyone interested in spending one minute a day writing should have a look at this site. I've been visiting it for some months, the prompts don't always speak to me but some do, the one about discovery certainly did. I could, of course, write a great deal more about discovery continuing throughout life but I said just about all that's really important in one minute. If you never think you know everything, you'll probably learn more today than you knew yesterday.

Dersu Izala, Kurasawa

It's hard to believe the treasure I've unlocked by becoming involved with the community college and it's continuing ed. I've know for well over a year that there is a free Tuesday afternoon film series. Today was the first time I attended a showing. The film was Kurasawa's 1975 collaboration with Russia filmmakers, Dersu Izula. Set in far eastern Siberia in 1902-07 Based, I read, on an actual native hunter, Dersu who acted as a guide for a group of Russians soldiers mapping a part of Siberia. I've been reading about Siberia for a long time and was eager to see a film shot there. I was not disappointed.

This is a 140 minute film in which nothing happens except that we see man and nature and a man who lives in harmony with nature who teaches those much more literate than he survival in wilderness, against the elements. Dersu was played by a Chinese actor perfectly, the Russian Captain was also a stereotype. Nothing mattered really except the setting, the elements and Dersu's harmony and simplicity. The photography was magnificent. I heard people complain that it was "long" as they left -- Siberia is bigger than merely "long" -- eight time zones! A movie that cannot be forgotten, not because of story but because of simplicity. I never saw the Kurasawa epics, somehow I just didn't get to the showings. What a wonderful introduction!

Real Cheesy

Upper right headline in today's NYTimes" While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese Sales Agriculture Department plays Conflicting Roles as Marketer and Nutrition Adviser I think the wording of this headline gives us a clue where my favorite paper stands on the situation. While Michelle Obama is on a campaign to help Americans becomes less obese, and health officials everywhere tell us that obesity is the costliest preventable health risk, the government itself in the form of an organization called Dairy Management has funded Domino's pizza's latest ad for a cheesier pizza [one slice has 2/3s a daily maximum recommended fat content and they seem to be shy about telling us the calorie count. Is there something askew with this pictures?

Yes, dairy farmers need to sell their products but somehow I doubt they are the ones profiting from pushing Domino's [or any other] pizza, it seems there are too many grabby hands of middlemen in between. With people the world over starving every day, and a portion of them actually in the U.S., why is the government helping those who buy pizza contribute to their weight, their likelihood of having diabetes, their potentially clogged arteries? Is this how government is supposed to help the people it serves? We rave about the cost of healthcare while making people sicker and sicker.
No doubt those pizzas taste great, I'm feeling a little mouth-water-y thinking about them. But ...

New York Marathon

This is New York Marathon weekend. Rather than random facts, one fact that amazes me: Edison Pena, a Chilean minor who was trapped underground for over a month will be running in the Marathon -- although most people in the race will have spent months running miles a day in preparation, Edison ran what he could in the confinement of the mine. He is amazing, as are all the other survivors of that ordeal that is to me unimaginably terrible [I'm claustrophic about underground places, I do admit]

Here is a poem I wrote about the marathon a couple of years ago.

Marathon

They run
By the thousands
Through the canyons
Over the bridges,
Through the park.
News cameras look down from helicopters.
People look out tall windows
Lean over high balconies
Line the crowded streets.

They run
Like once the bison ran over the Badlands
The wildebeast still run through the savannahs
Fabled lemmings run over cliffs into the sea,
Heroes ran the mountains in ancient Attica.

As they run
Many thousand feet pound softly
Their breathing is a mass sigh in a city
Accustomed to sirens’ screams.
The crowds’ cheers drift softly to the sky.
Newscasters’ chatter circles the globe.

They have been running
Alone, or in packs of two or three or a few
For months, years. They leave
Behind home, wife, husband, children.
Silence is enough for many,
Some search for “the zone.”

They run
To win, or beat a record, or follow heroes,
To prove something, “because it’s there,”
“To do it once.”
To be, this one day, lost in the herd,
Part of something big and beautiful,
Massive and magnificent
Independent individuals
Who trained and paid and stayed the course.

Election Day

Always chilly and usually gray, or so it seems I remember many days in November over the years when I walked to a voting place, muttering to myself about winter coming on. And many times, not unlike today, I've thought that American politics, like the weather most election days, is a dreary matter.

Once I was young and idealistic and ignorant ... but not for long. As a college freshman I declared a major in political science. After a course that year called Introduction of Indiana Politics, or some such name, I lost both idealism and ignorance and changed my major to English lit. Time itself took care of the business of being young. I am pessimistic this evening and dread listening to the results tomorrow morning [I have no TV and will only listen to the classical music radio station which does not do news -- blessings on their Mozart addled brains!] They are a respite and a refuge. I could pick nits about their programming but not in terms of their lack of news. After today, glory hallelujah!, the paid political ads will no longer foul the minutes between segments of symphonies.

I recently found this quote; “We'd all like t'vote for th' best man, but he's never a candidate.” - Kin Hubbard. That about sums up what I have to say tonight except I might sometimes change "he" to "she."