And a Silver Heart

Two particularly beautiful ones the same day.

A Ruby Heart

Here Comes Rosie!

All the media garbage about Rosie's new book is making me crazy. They are taking soundbites and passages out of context and portraying this book as a mudslinging free-for-all. The point of the book is to share how fame becomes like a drug withdrawing from the spotlight can be like trying to overcome any addiction. Rosie shares her experience of leaving her show and then coming back after several years "off."

There are several cartons of the book in the back room at Barnes and Noble (with the incorrect release date-- there was a problem with the text on the dust cover that had to be re-done, so the new release date is 10/9 insead of 10/2).

Does a Heart Lay in the Woods?

In the woods near my house, found while out for a walk after work.

Exotic Feline Rescue Center

Please visit the website for The Exotic Feline Rescue Center to find out about this amazing sanctuary for abused, abandoned or otherwise displaced "big cats." My Dad went to college with Joe Taft, the man who founded the Center in the early nineties. It's located about an hour outside Indianapolis, and provides up close and personal views of some of the most amazing animals on the planet.

"Marie Osmond is about to Foxtrot"

I was watching the season premier of "Dancing with the Stars" last night (one of my many guilty pleasures) and got downright giddy when Sabrina Bryan-- I'd never heard of her either-- did her hip-hip influenced cha-cha-cha. As soon as she hit the final pose, I literally jumped from my couch applauding. It was SO MUCH FUN TO WATCH! I grabbed my cell phone, desperate to speak to someone that I could share the moment with.

I dialed my great friend Darla. The conversation went something like this:

[ring-ring-ring]

Darla: Hello?
Jonathan: Please, please tell me you have given up your "I don't watch those shows" attitude and are watching Dancing with the Stars right now!
Darla: Sweetie, I'm not watching. I don't watch those shows.
Jonathan: Please watch it. I need to talk to someone abotu it, and I KNOW you'd like it.
Darla: I'm sorry... I---
Jonathan: But Marie Osmond is about to do the Foxtrot! How can you to miss that?!
Darla: And you wonder WHY I don't watch those shows...
Jonathan: [sigh] fine, goodbye.
Darla: Goodbye.

I'm not sure, but I think I have humiliated myself. LOL

I LOVE this show. I admit it. I was a snob the first few years and scoffed at it, but I discovered it the night of the great Emmet Smith v. Mario Lopez finale, and never missed it last season.

I cast my votes for Jenny, Marie, and Sabrina.

My prediction for the season (having only seen the women-- the men are on tonight, including Wayne Newton) is Sabrina to WIN!

Come on people -- Wayne NEWTON! This is good television!

Yikes. One of MY friends did THIS?!

I noticed Stephan's shoe-sock combo while chatting over a coffee. He said,"Yeah, it's PIMP FLY, dontcha think?"

I MUST be getting old...

Keith Olbermann NAILS IT!

Olbermann to Bush: ‘Your hypocrisy is so vast’
A reaction to Thursday’s press conference: the president was the one who interjected Gen. Petraeus into the political dialogue in the first place
SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
Updated: 9:59 p.m. ET Sept 20, 2007

So the President, behaving a little bit more than usual, like we would all
interrupt him while he was watching his favorite cartoons on the DVR, stepped
before the press conference microphone and after side-stepping most of the
substantive issues like the Israeli raid on Syria, in condescending and
infuriating fashion, produced a big political finish that indicates, certainly,
that if it wasn’t already – the annual Republican witch-hunting season is
underway.

“I thought the ad was disgusting. I felt like the ad was an
attack not only on General Petraeus, but on the U.S. Military.”

“And I
was disappointed that not more leaders in the Democrat party spoke out strongly
against that kind of ad.

“And that leads me to come to this conclusion:
that most Democrats are afraid of irritating a left-wing group like Moveon.org
or more afraid of irritating them, than they are of irritating the United States
military.”

“That was a sorry deal.”

First off, it’s
“Democrat-ic” party.

You keep pretending you’re not a politician, so
stop using words your party made up. Show a little respect.

Secondly,
you could say this seriously after the advertising/mugging of Senator Max
Cleland? After the swift-boating of John Kerry?

But most importantly,
making that the last question?

So that there was no chance at a
follow-up?

So nobody could point out, as Chris Matthews so incisively
did, a week ago tonight, that you were the one who inappropriately interjected
General Petraeus into the political dialogue of this nation in the first place!

Deliberately, premeditatedly, and virtually without precedent, you
shanghaied a military man as your personal spokesman and now you’re complaining
about the outcome, and then running away from the microphone?

Eleven
months ago the President’s own party, the Republican National Committee,
introduced this very different kind of advertisement, just nineteen days before
the mid-term elections.

Bin Laden.

Al-Zawahiri’s rumored quote
of six years ago about having bought “suitcase bombs.”



All set
against a ticking clock, and finally a blinding explosion and the dire
announcement:

“These are the stakes - vote, November 7th.”

That
one was ok, Mr. Bush?

Terrorizing your own people in hopes of getting
them to vote for your own party has never brought as much as a public comment
from you?

The Republican Hamstringing of Captain Max Cleland and lying
about Lieutenant John Kerry met with your approval?

But a shot at
General Petraeus, about whom you conveniently ignore it, was you who reduced him
from four-star hero to a political hack, merits this pissy juvenile blast at the
Democrats on national television?

Your hypocrisy is so vast that if we
could somehow use it to fill the ranks in Iraq you could realize your dream and
keep us fighting there until the year 3000.

The line between the
military and the civilian government is not to be crossed.


When
Douglas MacArthur attempted to make policy for the United States in Korea half a
century ago, President Truman moved quickly to fire him, even though Truman knew
it meant his own political suicide, and the deification of a General who history
suggests had begun to lose his mind.

When George McClellan tried to make
policy for the Union in the Civil War, President Lincoln finally fired his chief
General, even though he knew McClellan could galvanize political opposition
which he did when McClellan ran as Lincoln’s presidential opponent in 1864,
nearly defeating our greatest president.

Even when the conduit flowed
the other way and Senator Joseph McCarthy tried to smear the Army because it
wouldn’t defer the service of one of McCarthy’s staff aides, the entire civilian
and Defense Department structures, after four years of fearful servitude, rose
up against McCarthy and said “enough” and buried him.

The list is not
endless but it is instructive.

Air Force General LeMay—who broke with
Kennedy over the Cuban Missile Crisis and was retired.

Army General
Edwin Anderson Walker—who started passing out John Birch Society leaflets to his
soldiers.

Marine General Smedley Butler—who revealed to Congress the
makings of a plot to remove FDR as President and for merely being approached by
the plotters, was phased out of the military hierarchy.

These careers
were ended because the line between the military and the civilian is not to be
crossed!

Mr. Bush, you had no right to order General Petraeus to become
your front man.

And he obviously should have refused that order and
resigned rather than ruin his military career.

The upshot is and
contrary it is, to the MoveOn advertisement he betrayed himself more than he did
us.


But there has been in his actions a sort of reflexive courage,
some twisted vision of duty at a time of crisis. That the man doesn’t understand
that serving officers cannot double as serving political ops, is not so much his
fault as it is your good, exploitable, fortune.

But Mr. Bush, you have
hidden behind the General’s skirts, and today you have hidden behind the skirts
of ‘the planted last question’ at a news conference, to indicate once again that
your presidency has been about the tilted playing field, about no rules for your
party in terms of character assassination and changing the fabric of our nation,
and no right for your opponents or critics to as much as respond.

That
is not only un-American but it is dictatorial.

And in pimping General
David Petraeus and in the violation of everything this country has been
assiduously and vigilantly against for 220 years, you have tried to blur the
gleaming radioactive demarcation between the military and the political, and to
portray your party as the one associated with the military, and your opponents
as the ones somehow antithetical to it.

You did it again today and you
need to know how history will judge the line you just crossed.

It is a
line thankfully only the first of a series that makes the military political,
and the political, military.

It is a line which history shows is always
the first one crossed when a democratic government in some other country has
started down the long, slippery, suicidal slope towards a Military Junta.

Get back behind that line, Mr. Bush, before some of your supporters
mistake your dangerous transgression, for a call to further politicize our
military.

© 2007 MSNBC Interactive
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20896378/

It's the little things...

I went from this...
To this...

All by myself... I even used tools.

(Note the rotted out pieces of the pipe in the top photo that were leading to a profuse leak in ym bathroom sink. After attempting to plug the leak with chewing gum (kidding) and silicone sealant (NOT kidding) I gave in and journeyed to Home Depot. It took two trips and a spat with the Depot Dude that wouldn't help when I told him my pipe was too big and needed help making it smaller, but in the end I was sucessful in the do-it-yourself home repair arena. :)

Little things can make your weekend.

Peeking Hearts

Random discovery at my BN counter. It is an item we sell, but clearly out of place at my work-station. It still made me smile, so I'm "counting" it. :)

Hearts are Falling From the Sky

This one was kind of interesting... I passing by a pile of empty boxes and this one fell from the top and landed i front of me...

9/11 Anniversary

Cartoon by Jeff Parker, Florida Today

On September 11, 2001, I left my apartment in Brooklyn at the usual time of about 8:00am to start my daily commute to work in Port Washington (Long Island). My route put me on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway directly across from the southern tip of Manhattan, with the World Trade Center prominent in my sightline, and then north, driving parallel to the NYC skyline to the Long island Expressway. Even after having done the commute to Long Island for well over a year, the City-view with the early morning sunlight ALWAYS made me take note. That particular morning was perfectly clear-- no clouds at all.

For some reason I was listening to a CD that morning instead of my usual ritual of NPR. About 45 minutes later, I arrived to a state of confusion at the office as people were trying to make sense of the jumbled news reports that there was an explosion at the World Trade Center. I had just passed by there on my way in, but clearly had just missed it. We had no television, and the portable radio was inadequate, so I called Dad to see if he was watching the Today Show and could tell me what was going on. I relayed the information from him to my co-workers that there were rumors that a small plane had crashed downtown. Then the confusion was compounded when dad said "A plane just hit the the World Trade Center." I said that we had already heard that, and he said, "No-- another plane just hit the second tower!"

Now, it is certainly a testament to just how naive I was that my first reaction was that something was somehow malfunctioning with the airplanes and air traffic navigation systems at the NYC airports causing planes to crash. I truly believed that for a brief moment, until Dad said, "No-- this is terrorism." In unison with the rest of the civilized world, as has been proclaimed ad nauseum in the media since tht day, I/we lost our collective innocence on that day. We were suddenly living in the "after" version of our world, and we hadn't even begun to realize how deeply it had just been rocked.

The confusion became utter disorientation when I looked out the window of my office looking over Manhasset Bay and the Long Island Sound and could see two distinct billowing streams of dark smoke rising up from behind the hills off in the distance. I knew intellectually that I was seeing the smoke from the WTC. However, until that moment, I had always thought that the window of my office faced north. I tried to rationalize that the smoke must be from something else since (in my skewed geographical view of the world) my window faced north. When I managed to "get rational" again about the directions, I was shocked by the distance. All those hours and hours of sitting in my car driving back and forth to Long Island, and I was just over the hill from the City, and I was actually watching the smoke from the WTC rise into the sky in front of me-- not on television, but right before my eyes. When I thought back on that later, it was mind boggling how fixated I had become on the direction and distance to Manhattan.

Everyone has their own story of where they were and what they were doing that day, and it really seems to me that, at least among New Yorkers, we all share a deep understanding of the craziness we all experienced that day as we waited to hear news of unaccounted for friends and colleagues. The hastily crafted "Missing" flyers that appeared on lamp posts and blanketed the sides of buildings by the thousands became their own lasting reminder of the frantic desperation that so many felt. I can remember passing one of the walls and realizing that people were actually stopping and reading them in detail. I saw one face that seemed strangely familiar, although I couldn't place where I knew her. I finally realized that I had seen her sister holding up a copy of the flyer for a news camera and pleading for anyone with any information to call her.

For hours, even days, we watched the television, waiting for the talking heads to add something new from their last live report, but instead seeing more and more people with their printed flyers as hope gradually began to fade. The image of these "Missing" flyers has cemented itself in the American psyche.

This cartoon is brilliant. The message is conveys is disturbing.

On the Streets of NYC