A mixed bag

All posts in the A mixed bag category

S.O.S. from homeless

Published January 8, 2023 by Nan Mykel

Go to San Diego Newsbreak

Read all of it… Humans need more than food, water and shelter. Autonomy and a sense of belonging are equally important to survival — and are actually the keys to recovery for people who have had a hard time in life. The impersonal facilities that we’re asked to move into are not designed with this in mind.

But autonomy and belonging are the essence of what camps are about. We camp together because it is essential to our physical and mental survival.

The above was quoted from a much more detailed explanation from a homeless man in California…

WHAT THE HECK!

Published January 7, 2023 by Nan Mykel

It may be old news to you, but it just sank in: Full List of Republicans Who Sat During Zelensky’s Speech:https://www.newsweek.com › …
Dec 22, 2022 — Seven House Republicans “repeatedly remained seated” during standing ovations for President Volodymyr Zelensky. They were:

Representatives Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Andrew Clyde, Diana Harshbarger, Warren Davidson, Michael Cloud and Jim Jordan “repeatedly remaining seated in standing ovations” whilst Zelensky gave his speech, according to Axios Congress reporter Andrew Solender. THEY’RE FOR THE RUSSIANS?! Help me out here. What’s going on? I knew about Roebert, Gaetz and Jordan. Now I know aboout the others.

As a matter of fact, Far-Right Republicans Shunned Ukrainian President Zelensky when he addressed the joint session of Congress on Dec 22, 2022 — Fewer than half of House Republicans bothered to show up, and some of them spent much of the speech on their phones. https://www.vice.com › Home › News

Our elected Representatives are for the Russians?! I guess Biden was right about the local invasion of fascists. I’m open to back talk. Tell me where I’m wrong…This doesn’t seem at all funny or capricious any more.

More Thoughts on Lying…

Published January 7, 2023 by Nan Mykel

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Another possible response to the person who has just lied to me:

“I can’t believe you believe that” or “actually believe that.” A good one, eh? Got that one from Three Quarks Daily.

I have also had the following thoughts since that earlier post:

When someone lies to me I subsequently question all his/her/their further statements, and even their earlier ones, as folks are doing with George Santos today.

When someone lies to me I sense an increased distance from the person: a friend is really less of a friend, a lover less close.

I’m not perfect. I recall one time I lied because I was so embarrassed by a question that I felt unable to respond otherwise. That was years ago but I still regret the incident. Maybe I’ll have to think of something to say to avoid lying….I reckon “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies?” Or better, “That’s hard to say.”

And if we decide not to lie, I reckon we still need to be kind. Suggestions for how to do that in a further post?

Turtle Crossing the Road

Published January 5, 2023 by Nan Mykel

Turtle, do you know that you cause
someone like me to cringe and pause
on my journey to work or play
on a formerly happy day?
In my mirror I cannot spot
if you made it or did you not.
Do you really care if you meet
your end of days while on the street?
Of course he does, I scold myself,
chastened by my timid stealth.
Turn around and go back, I tout,
and help the little feller out.
But no, I go and never know.
Why should I worry myself so?
Down deep I see that he is me,
both risking death if we are free.

Nan Time and Wrinkles, 2015

Two Incidentals

Published January 2, 2023 by Nan Mykel


WORDS
 Spit it up. Gross.
Cough it up. Viruses.
Sing it out. A dirge?
Write it. I’ll try…

Another day older and
deeper in debt…made it
to the new year! A new
chance to remedy old
wrongs? Climate change
and the Supreme Court?
Book banning and Desantis?

Hey hey, Ho ho….Lethal
greed has got to go! Nan 1-1-23

I found the following in an old journal. Hope I never shared it. Trash it if I did and you remember it:

FOR THE HUMORISTS

Is a sense of humor catching

or does it come with the genes?

When did you start laughing,

and did you ever stop?

Do you ever laugh out loud reading

or made a blooming mess?

In secret do you find dark humor funny

or had to leave a meeting due to

giggles ill repressed? Or maybe felt

the laughter healing in the belly,

reassured that you’re onto

a good thing: you!

Do blacks laugh more than whites?

Seems they maybe do–black women, solid

underneath. I remember Georgia, black sitter

for us kids, who laughed and laughed

at Arthur Godfrey and all the little Godfreys.

Warm and cheery, she laughed until

 her husband died, then left, unable to repay

my father’s small loan.

I hope she’s out there somewhere, a laughing

up a storm with humor ever deeper than the tears.

If humor’s a defense, Hail Mary

All my bases are covered.

Nan – reworked a little 1-1-23

DO PEOPLE EVER LIE TO YOU?

Published January 1, 2023 by Nan Mykel

If so, what do you do?

Possible responses:

Ask for identification of everyone present??

Yes, but…What do you do when a tv conglomerate credits you with one cent so they have an open account with you?

Or when an electric conglomerate lets two fly-by-night companies both bill you for the same services, covered beneath their own?

I usually don’t speak up when friends lie, since I can understand their not-always-negative motivation. Tell me, did you ever feel apologetic for taking so long to die? Or not asking questions because it might cause the other embqarawssment (or further lying?)
By the way, the “new system” — either Word Soft or Word Press’s–will tell me “embarassment” is misspelled but won’t offer the correct spelling. I wonder what balliwick that’s under?

I don’t mean to trick you into my gripe session…”Honestly?” Back to being lied to: I encourage your response, if that’s still possible on my site:

When you doubt a statement how do you respond?
a. Ignore your suspicion
b. Laugh and say “That’s hard to believe.”
c. Shrug and say “Surely not!”
d. Shrug and say “You’ve got to be kidding!?”
e. Say nothing but give a skeptical or shocked look
f. Say “Are you a MAGA?”
g. Bite your lip and drop your head
h. Shake your head and say “It doesn’t add up.”
i. Smile grimly and say “I wasn’t born yesterday.”
j. Say. “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, eh?”
k. Shake your head and say, “It’s awful, how Trump has taught us to prevaricate.”
l. Let your disappointment show and say “It feels like I’m too old to be trusted with the truth.” or “It feels likw I’m too young–or distrusted or stupid or crazy–to be trusted with the truth.”
m. Say “Would you mind putting that in writing?”
n. Pull out your cell phone if you know how to work it and say, “Would you repeat that again…please?”
o. Say nothing but disrespect the other more.
p. Say nothing but know that your relationship is superficial at best.
p. Say nothing but make a note not to trust what the other person says.
q. Say nothing but give a disbelieving stare.
r. Say nothing but swallow her or his distancing statement between you two.
s. Look at your fingernails, maybe paint them.
t. Say “Liar, liar! Pants on Fire!”
u. Smile sadly and say, “Do you mind if I fact-check that?”
v. Turn on the gas and see who dies first.
w. Just get depressed and withdraw.
x. Cry in frustration.
y. Question further or start to argue.
z. Go write a post on a mysteriously changing website.
aa. Get out and read once again my copy of YOUR PERFECT RIGHT
bb. Let yourself look disbelieving and say “You’re kidding!”
ccc. Say, “Are you on their payroll?”
ddd. [Oh, there’s my dark key!] Avoid eye contact and give a little smirk
eee. Build on the lie, making it even more grotesque. Make a space for you in hell. (SEE? I’ve gotten angry, no longer depressed?!?)

SEE HOW MUCH PRACTICE i’VE HAD?

HEY, maybe that’s something we can do in response to the hump man: be a shining stickler for the truth with crossed t’s and dotted I’s!

Shame Shame Shame

Published December 26, 2022 by Nan Mykel

Do you now have to be white and “regular” to be treated like a free American?

Readings from today’s news tells us that Across the country, Republican state lawmakers have focused attention on transgender people and other L.G.B.T.Q. issues by introducing bills that aim to limit what doctors call gender-affirming care, restrict what students are taught in the classroom about gender and sexuality, bar some transgender students from participating in school sports and require students to use restrooms for the gender listed on their original birth certificates.

The Human Rights Campaign said that 344 such bills were introduced across 23 states in 2022. More than 25 of those bills, a majority of which targeted transgender people, became law in 13 states. According to a national survey of nearly 34,000 L.G.B.T.Q. youth conducted in late 2021 by the Trevor Project, a crisis intervention organization, nearly one in five transgender and nonbinary people between the ages of 13 and 24 had attempted suicide in the previous year.”

MY COMPUTER DOES NOT SEEM TO LET ME BOLD-FACE WORDS ANY MORE. HAS CLASSIC EDITOR CHANGED? PLEASE TELL ME, SOMEONE! AND I CANNOT ADD MY MEDIA LIBRARY PICTURES! P>S> I CANNOT ADD MEDIA LIBRARY IMAGES ANY MORE.

what happened to me

Published December 23, 2022 by Nan Mykel

Microsoft.  Microsoft happened to me.

It told me I had to change my pin, but it didn’t seem to know I was me, since my password was stored on my computer (unavaila ble).  The ONLY sway I could prove I was me was through my phone number.  They would communicate with me through my phone.  Only I had a new phonde so I  couldn’t tell them, and there was no alternative way to prove who I was.

Somehow  I waas told to communicate  with them through  another hookup (not their term), so I called my daughter in Atlanta long distance to see….   To make a loooong story short, somehow I finally got on, temporarily, but I had to leave it on, which I was  glad to do.  But the next morning there seemed to have been a power bfrake and it was lost again.  I still can’t use my computer (someone said I would have another change the beginning of he New Year, but miraculously my daughte and granddaughter came up for Chr.,istmas and got me  connected via a desktop.

So I may have more than two weeks of e-mails to read and then  hopefully I can get back to this blog again.  (My re-writing my transgender novel was also wiped out, revision-wise.)

ELEPHANTS

Published December 13, 2022 by Nan Mykel

The only thing wrong with elephants is…well, you get my meaning.

The elephant animals themselves, however, are somewhat miraculous creatures.  I quote from Stephen Pinker’s The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language:

The elephant’s trunk is six feet long and one foot thick and contains sixty thousand muscles.  Elephants can use their trunks to uproot trees, stack timber, or carefully place huge logs inj position  when recruited to build bridges.  An elephant can curl its trunk around a pencil and draw characters on letter-size paper.  With the two muscular extensions on the tip, it can remove a thorn, pick up a pin or a dime, uncork a bottle,  slide a bolt off a  cage door and hide it on a ledge, or grip a cup so firmly , without breaking it,  that only another elephant can pull it away.  The tip is sensitive enough for a blindfolded elephant to ascertain the shape and texture of .  In the wild, elephants use their trunks to pull up clumps of grass and tap them against their knees to knock off the drt, to shake coconuts out of palm trees, and to powder their body with dust.  They use their trunks to probe the ground as they walk, avoiding pit traps, and to  dig wells and siphon water from them. Elephants can walk under water on the beds of deep rivers or swim like submarines for miles, using their trunks as snorkels.  They communicate through their trunks by trumpeting, humming, roaring, piping, purring, rumbling, and making a crumpling metal-sound by rapping the trunk against the ground.  The trunk is lined with chemoreceptors that allow the elephant to smell a python hidden in the grass or smell food a mile away….HarperPerennial 1994.

Which brings us to another question:  How did the Democrats get to be a donkey and the other…you know… We can turn to Google for the answer:

 

Money and Power Versus Armageddon

Published December 12, 2022 by Nan Mykel

Gelles is writing a series of articles about groups working to promote fossil fuels and block climate action.

“No one is saying banks need to stop funding cement production, or shipping, or aviation, right? Those are necessary industries that have a credible [transition] path,” said Cushing of the Sierra Club.

But “fossil fuel producers, whose core business is pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground and burning them, don’t have a credible pathway to do that,” he added. “That’s the hard truth that a lot of financial institutions don’t want to admit out loud.”

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2021. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.     By SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

HERE’S THE MIND BLOWER:

_____________________

Texas’ Climate Threats – States at Risk

https://statesatrisk.org › texas › Texas currently faces the worst threat from widespread summer drought among the lower 48 states. By 2050, the state is projected to see an increase in severity.  Yet, gambling for their last dollar, Texas is in a state of denial:

From <https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1SQJL_enUS879US879&sxsrf=ALiCzsaazeE-DibgH6pte10R-:1670849329772&q=What+is+Texas+doing+about+climate+change&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwifsJjmjvT7AhU1lIkEHfqsDAUQ1QJ6BAgzEAE&biw=1600&bih=749&dprAihXT63Cw=1>

Jason Isaac, director of the Life:Powered initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation: “Today, I’m thankful to live a high-carbon lifestyle and wish the rest of the world could too,” he tweeted on Thanksgiving.Credit...Montinique Monroe for The New York Times
Nan says: I still haven’t been able to retrieve the info re some state officials punishing banks that support climate change.  Not  enough time these days.  Share if you have the source?
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