October 2007 archive

According to the LiveScience.com story picked up by Yahoo!News,  the website BetUS.com is taking bets as to who will win the Nobel Peace Prize.  (LiveScience.com is a great website which I wholly recommend; BetUS.com is a subscription site I’ve never participated with.)

Al Gore is currently the favorite at 5:2.

Long shots paying at 100:1 right now include George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, and Tony Blair.

AP:

English writer Doris Lessing, who ended her formal schooling at age 13 and went on to write novels that explored relationships between women and society and interracial dynamics, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday. Lessing, who turns 88 in just over a week, was born to British parents who were living in what at the time was Persia. The family later moved to what is now Zimbabwe, where she spent her childhood and adolescent years.

She made her debut with “The Grass Is Singing” in 1950. Her other works include the semiautobiographical “Children Of Violence” series, set in Africa and England. . . .

Her breakthrough was “The Golden Notebook,” in 1962, the Swedish Academy said.

“The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that inform the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship,” the academy said in its citation announcing the prize.

Outrage Alert!
Today’s distraction of the day is brought to you by, wait for it, republicans in Congress. Imagine that, a distraction from a republican. This time it combines many of their favorite topics, godless Democrats, the flag and how religious folks are persecuted.

Many of you may wonder why I have been so dogged with my “Quotes for Discussion” posts over the last year.  I usually offer them up without context or commentary, and they are tangential to the point of the sites where I post them at best.  Further, few people, including few of you, bother to read them or discuss them.  And even more, sometimes the quotes, and my purpose in posting them, is very hard to gather.  So, I’ll tell you why.

It is my belief that most political programs and ideas fail because they are not conceived or implemented with people in mind.  Take, for example, Marxism. Marx knew a lot about economics, about philosophy, and about politics.  But every single society based on Marxism, from the Soviet Union to each commune and kibbutz has eventually failed, and failed badly.  The reason for that is simple: Marx understood people, individual people, very poorly.

This is the root of my politics: that it has to be about people, and how they really live.  I don’t support legalization of heroin and marijuana, prostitution and gambling, property rights and gun rights, because I think any of those things are so great in and of themselves.  People will abuse drugs beyond their capacity to manage, cheat on their spouses and lose their paychecks, believe in the ownership of their property and seek to defend themselves with violence, whether I condone it or not.  Policies meant to attack these things will inevitably fail and cause great injustice.

I don’t really like swimming very much though I’ve done a lot of it.  I find it difficult to enjoy myself in the water because there’s always this sense that I should be doing something.

When I was in Swim Team we’d do 3 to 5 miles a day and it is the most boring, grinding, isolated kind of exercise you can imagine.  No view except the feet of the person in front of you.  Nothing to hear except an occasional whistle when you breathe.  Endless circles of aching effort regulated by 15 or 30 second breaks before it is time to push off again.  I’d sing symphonies in my head (I was into long haired music- Mozart, Bach, and Brahms) to alleviate the endless counting.  Stroke, stroke, stoke, stroke, stroke, stoke… 25.  Stroke, stroke, stoke, stroke, stroke, stoke… 50.

Everything about me stank of chlorine all the time.  My hair turned green.  I’d tell you my fingers and toes turned permanently pruney but that’s not quite true, they usually recover after a couple of hours.

Monday through Friday 6 to 8 and if you were on the elite squad there were the mandatory practices from 6 to 7 in the morning.  In the winter your hair would freeze and in the summer?

Ah… nothing like an outdoor pool in the early morning after it’s had all night to cool off.

I’ve had my head burnt to near Emergency Room levels when someone flushed the toilet while I was in the shower (actually I should probably have gone, it was that bad).  I’ve swum in pools so green you couldn’t see the bottom and had to feel for the wall (no flip turns, Team safety orders).

You get to a point where you can tell by feel fast water where you’ll get good times and personal bests from slow water.  But it’s slow for everybody as coach would say.

Anyway, now that I’m no longer a professional Life Guard and have to do my 400 yards every day, I rarely swim except to get somewhere and it should be somewhere fun.  A rock you can jump off.  A boat you can sail.  I will take a dip to cool off, but I hardly call it swimming, in and out.  I watch kids play in pools and I think- how are they having fun?