December 11, 2010 · 10:48 am

Morrison pardon doesn’t change The Doors’ history | Raw Story

I’ve always been fascinated by Jim Morrison and the Doors.  Love their music…Stopped by his grave in Paris…

But, still, can’t politicians find better ways to use their time????

Pardon of Jim Morrison can’t change The Doors’ history or answer a slew of ‘What ifs?’

A hot, frenzied night in Miami changed life for Jim Morrison and The Doors. That’s something the late singer’s pardon on indecent exposure and profanity charges can’t correct.

“It made him realize he was no longer in the graces of the gods, that things could go wrong,” said Ray Manzarek, the band’s keyboard player. “Jim had a great line — in that year we had a great visitation of energy. We had the mandate of heaven. And I think at that moment, he lost the mandate of heaven.”

An arrest warrant was issued for Morrison four days after a March 1, 1969, concert at the Dinner Key Auditorium. He turned himself in, was tried the next year and convicted on two charges. Gov. Charlie Crist and Florida’s Cabinet members pardoned Morrison of those convictions Thursday.

But forgiveness can’t change history. Morrison, worried about prison time, was distracted. Other cities, worried about The Doors, canceled concerts. Morrison ended up dead in a Paris bathtub in 1971 while appealing the convictions. Would he have died if the Miami incident never happened?

 

“It was one of the many things that contributed to his death. I don’t give it any more credence than any of 10 other things,” guitarist Robby Krieger said. “If it had never happened, would he never have died at that time? Maybe not. It didn’t help.”

 

More:   Morrison pardon doesn’t change The Doors’ history | Raw Story.

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December 11, 2010 · 10:32 am

New drafts of Eisenhower’s farewell address : The New Yorker

Fascinating…

From The New Yorker:

One core idea dominates every version: the first draft described “the conjunction of a large and permanent military establishment and a large and permanent arms industry.” Policing it would require “all the organizing genius we possess” to insure “that liberty and security are both well served.” It added, “We must be especially careful to avoid measures which would enable any segment of this vast military-industrial complex to sharpen the focus of its power.” Through scores of revisions, that idea persisted. As delivered, the speech memorably read, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

More:   New drafts of Eisenhower’s farewell address : The New Yorker.

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December 10, 2010 · 10:49 pm

Chapter 45: The Help | My Southern Gothic Life

Yet another new post is up on my other blog.

Here is the beginning and a link to the full post:

I can’t encourage you enough to read the book “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett.  If you haven’t read it, put it on your Christmas Wish List.  If you have read it, give it to your friends.

I’ve never read a truer book about the interaction between black women who worked as Maids in the early 1960′s and their “white ladies.”

Although the book is set in Mississippi, it could very well have been set in Danville, Virginia.  I remember those days too well.

People seem to already be forgetting that the South in those days, from Richmond to Mobile, was like South Africa under Apartheid.  I was in South Africa in 1997 and felt just like I did in Virginia in 1965.

Everyone had a place and stayed in it.  But the times were beginning to change…

In the 1960′s, the bus line ran near our house.  The corner of Brook Drive and Lansbury Drive was a major stop for the Maids.  Six or seven women would get off the bus around 7:30 or 8:00 a.m. and walk back down there to go home around 6:00 or so.  Some of them wore their bedroom shoes to work as their feet were so tired and broken down from standing all day, all they could wear were scuffs.

Most of the White Ladies in Temple Terrace had maids.  They didn’t have jobs, but they had Maids.  I remember our “car pool” for Miss Touchstone’s Kindergarten, our Mothers would throw a London Fog all-weather coat over their pajamas to take us to “school” and only get dressed and made up around 4:30 before our Fathers came home from work.  I don’t know what they did in the meantime…

MORE:   Chapter 45: The Help | My Southern Gothic Life.

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December 9, 2010 · 9:51 pm

Chapter 44: Christmas With the Grannies | My Southern Gothic Life

Another new post is up on my other blog.  I’m rather prolific this week…

All the Christmas Drama and mayhem at our house was off set by the simplicity of Christmas at Granny’s.

By this I mean, my Mother’s Mother, not my Father’s Mother, who was safely packed away to the State Hospital for the Insane in Staunton and, later, Petersburg.

But we did have to go visit my Father’s Mother, Granny Susie, AKA Susan Catherine Rush Michaels,  sometime around Christmas.  This was always an ordeal.

This was before there was an Interstate Highway to Staunton, so we had to travel along winding mountain roads to get there.  With not many restaurants or gas stations to stop.

A few times, my Great Aunts wanted to go along.  Aunt Lily and Little Mary were her sisters and her brother Joe’s wife, Big Mary, usually went along, too.  The one trip I remember was when we still had the station wagon- before Daddy flipped it coming home in an ice storm from Earl’s Bar and Grill.  They were all lined up in the back seat in their black wool coats, hats and white gloves.  Aunt Lily would always pack her lunch and refuse to share it.  When I was about 5 or 6, I asked once and she told me I should have planned better.

Link to full Post:   Chapter 44: Christmas With the Grannies | My Southern Gothic Life.

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December 8, 2010 · 11:23 pm

Remembering John Lennon

I  can’t believe it’s been 30 years ago today since John Lennon was killed.

I still remember being at college at Washington and Lee.  I was on the phone with my friend Van at Randolph-Macon Women’s College when her roommate came rushing in to tell us he had been assassinated.

I can’t say I was a big Lennon fan, but I did – and still do- love “Imagine” and a lot of what John Lennon stood for….

But, I still can’t stand Yoko Ono’s “music”….

Here is a little tribute to John Lennon.

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December 8, 2010 · 9:55 pm

My Southern Gothic Life | Trying to Stay Sane in a Crazy Southern World…

New post up on my other blog:

 

When I was growing up in Danville, Virginia, decorating for Christmas was always a very big deal.

My Mother’s goal in life, for several years, was to win the Temple Terrace Women’s Club Home Decorating Contest.   Even though she was President of the Club, for several years, she still never won.  And she was not above “putting in the fix” if she could have figured out how to do so.

I was never quite sure what the Temple Terrace Woman’s Club did.  All I know is my Mother was inordinately proud of the fact that they once voted on something by placing their ballots in one of her bronze trash cans and everyone commented on how clean it was.  Thanks to the maid, I might add.

They also had a dish towel sale one year.  I don’t know what it was supposed to benefit, but we had several cases of dish towels in our basement for several years.  Some are still there even after 45 years…

Anyway, the whole production always began with her moving the previously mentioned cardboard fireplace into it’s place of honor in the basement.  After she meaningfully told my Father that she hoped one day she would have a real fireplace, she would make him haul out all the other stuff.

MORE:   My Southern Gothic Life | Trying to Stay Sane in a Crazy Southern World….

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December 7, 2010 · 11:28 pm

Elizabeth Edwards, Rest in Peace

Great Tribute from a reporter, Melinda Henneberger, who traveled with Elizabeth on the campaigns.

 

The most disarming, beloved and beleaguered woman in the American political arena died of cancer Tuesday, at age 61, at the Chapel Hill estate that Mary Elizabeth Anania Edwards once told me she’d built in part to compensate for the succession of modest homes she’d lived in as a Navy brat.

“From years of living in military housing, I like a big room,” the wife of then-presidential hopeful John Edwards said in an interview in front of her hotel lobby-sized Christmas tree three years ago. Because some of the bedrooms she’d had as a kid were so dinky you couldn’t fit the bed in and still close the door, “my dream was to turn in circles if you wanted to.” The 28,000-square-foot result was just one of the ambitions Elizabeth willed to life, brick by brick, along with a few heartfelt myths and the clear understanding that she did not want to be remembered as anybody’s cuckold, or some modern-day female Job.

Before their 16-year-old son Wade’s Jeep was blown off the road in a freak storm in 1996, John and Elizabeth “had the storybook life and the storybook marriage,” his former law partner David Kirby told me as Edwards was preparing for his second presidential run. But like most pre-Disney fairy tales, it also included some dark and confusing turns in the woods. On the campaign trail, Edwards’ favorite fallback phrase was “It’s not complicated!” — but the years they lived in public certainly were. For most of us, her story really only began on the worst day of her life, when the state troopers came to the door to say Wade had been killed and she promised herself that if her husband ever had to hear bad news again, it wouldn’t be from her. I’ve often wondered if any of what followed — his political career, the birth of their two younger children, her breast cancer, which was advanced even when she discovered an egg-sized lump six years ago, and his affair with Rielle Hunter, who bore him a daughter — would ever have happened if Wade had stopped for a Coke instead of being where he was, when he was.

Link to complete Article:  Elizabeth Edwards, Rest in Peace.

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December 7, 2010 · 9:11 pm

Elizabeth Edwards Op Ed – Bowling 1, Health Care 0 – NYTimes.com

Just to remember a phenomenal woman, I wanted to post this excerpt from an op ed Elizabeth Edwards wrote for the New York Times back in 2008.

She not only was the classier, more honest one in her marriage to John Edwards, I think she was the smartest one.

We were enriched to have her voice as part of the public debate.  She will be missed.

I’ll let her words speak again…

Here is the excerpt with a link to the full article at the bottom:

 

Well, the rancor of the campaign was covered. The amount of money spent was covered. But in Pennsylvania, as in the rest of the country this political season, the information about the candidates’ priorities, policies and principles — information that voters will need to choose the next president — too often did not make the cut. After having spent more than a year on the campaign trail with my husband, John Edwards, I’m not surprised.

Why? Here’s my guess: The vigorous press that was deemed an essential part of democracy at our country’s inception is now consigned to smaller venues, to the Internet and, in the mainstream media, to occasional articles. I am not suggesting that every journalist for a mainstream media outlet is neglecting his or her duties to the public. And I know that serious newspapers and magazines run analytical articles, and public television broadcasts longer, more probing segments.

But I am saying that every analysis that is shortened, every corner that is cut, moves us further away from the truth until what is left is the Cliffs Notes of the news, or what I call strobe-light journalism, in which the outlines are accurate enough but we cannot really see the whole picture.

It is not a new phenomenon. In 1954, the Army-McCarthy hearings — an important if painful part of our history — were televised, but by only one network, ABC. NBC and CBS covered a few minutes, snippets on the evening news, but continued to broadcast soap operas in order, I suspect, not to invite complaints from those whose days centered on the drama of “The Guiding Light.”

The problem today unfortunately is that voters who take their responsibility to be informed seriously enough to search out information about the candidates are finding it harder and harder to do so, particularly if they do not have access to the Internet.

Did you, for example, ever know a single fact about Joe Biden’s health care plan? Anything at all? But let me guess, you know Barack Obama’s bowling score. We are choosing a president, the next leader of the free world. We are not buying soap, and we are not choosing a court clerk with primarily administrative duties.

via Op-Ed Contributor – Bowling 1, Health Care 0 – NYTimes.com.

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December 6, 2010 · 10:04 pm

Which Kind of Booze Is Best for the Planet? | Mother Jones

For all our environmentally concerned drinking friends….

Murder in Detroit, overworked immigration judges, bruisers-for-hire on Indian reservations: If you’ve been reading Mother Jones lately, you’re probably ready for a stiff drink. Not so fast! In terms of greenhouse-gas emissions, US booze manufacturers release the annual equivalent of 1.9 million households. How’s that for a buzzkill? The good news is that you have choices. Here are a few tips for drowning your sorrows sustainably.

WINE: Fruity bouquet? Tastes like pencil shavings? Environmentally speaking, none of that matters: According to a 2007 study (PDF) commissioned by the American Association of Wine Economists, the majority of wine’s carbon footprint comes from shipping. You can minimize your wine miles by using the handy map below. In short, New Yorkers should buy French, while Iowans are better off drinking California wines. If you’re concerned about water use, go for bubbly wines made with early-harvested grapes. TRY: French Rabbit wines. They come in recyclable Tetra Paks, which reduce packaging weight by 90 percent over bottles. For reasonably priced organic wines, try Frey Vineyards—if the map allows.

MORE:   Which Kind of Booze Is Best for the Planet? | Mother Jones.

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December 6, 2010 · 9:29 pm

Elizabeth Edwards gravely ill with cancer

Sad news….

WASHINGTON — Elizabeth Edwards is gravely ill and doctors have told her she only has weeks to live, according to a family friend who is among those who have gathered with Edwards at her North Carolina home.

The family issued a statement Monday that said doctors have told her that further treatment for her cancer would be unproductive, and the family friend further described Edwards’ condition to The Associated Press.

The friend said Edwards was briefly hospitalized last week and received treatment, but doctors have now told her that she may only have up to a couple months of life left. The friend spoke on condition of anonymity because of the personal details divulged.

Edwards’ estranged husband, former presidential candidate John Edwards, and their three children were at her side at the Chapel Hill home, the friend reported. Her sister, brother, nieces, nephews, former campaign advisers and other friends were also there. The friend said Elizabeth Edwards is not in pain and in good spirits despite the seriousness of her condition.

via Elizabeth Edwards gravely ill with cancer.

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