I Miss George Carlin

We truly love some of George Carlin's bits (some are a bit too raunchy) and I often have a George Carlin video forwarded to me so I can "laugh till I cry" as Saeed says. I listened to one recently that was so animal-friendly I began to wonder if Carlin was a vegetarian. I don't think he was, but he certainly had animal rights messages pop up in his work from time to time. Here are a few:

"And I think people have a lot of nerve locking up a tiger and charging four dollars to let a few thousand worthless humans shuffle past him every day. What a shi**y thing to do. Humans must easily be the meanest species on Earth. Probably the only reason there are any tigers left is because they don't taste good."

"And yet, in spite of all these examples of creature mayhem, I will not strike a dog, I will not chase and taunt a bull around a ring, and I will not squeeze an animal's testicles just to give the yokels a better show."

"Eating meat is one thing, but this whole beef-rancher-manure-cattle-hamburger side show is a different skillet of sh** altogether. Each year, Americans eat 38 billion hamburgers. It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce one pound of red meat. Cattle consume one half of all the fresh water consumed on Earth. The sixty million people who will starve this year could be adequately fed if Americans reduced their meat intake to just 10 percent."

Yep - he said that. One thing you could count on with George Carlin, he called like he saw it.

Write Your Memoir

Legend has it that someone asked Ernest Hemingway to write a story in six words or less. His response was, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

This lead to the creation of a New York Times bestseller book, Not Quite What I was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Famous Writers and Obscure. Some examples from the book include: “Extremely responsible, secretly longed for spontaneity" and “No future, no past. Not lost.”

What would your six-word memoir be?

I think mine would be Discovers suffering, becomes vegetarian Buddist Baha'i. Not very humorous? How about Loves cats despite constant poop scooping, or Pattooti nurse prepares apple peanutbutter toast? I know, I know... don't quit my day job (as the poop-scooping toast-fixing patooti nurse... hey! that has six words!)

Calvin's Little Buddy

Saeed pointed out to me the other day that Chappu has been following Calvin around. He said she's been sitting outside the coat closet door waiting for Calvin to come out, so I decided to catch her at it. When I came home from work one day last week there she was.

She must have been sleeping there prior to my arrival because she looked pretty sleepy and was too sluggish to get up. I called Calvin's name and before I could count to three...

... he was out of the closet and heading into the livingroom. After a quick stretch and peak into the closet Chappu followed him.

This is Calvin's bed under the stairs inside the closet next to the ironing board and box of gift wrap. If people come over he hides in here.

Chappu followed Calvin into the kitchen to the food bowls for their pre-dinner snack.

Calvin air-boxed Chappu twice in this video; I've never seen him do that to her before. Maybe he wants a bit more space and she's cramping his style. It's tough to be a rock star.

Compassion Is Not A Finite Resource

Someone at work once said, "You tree huggers love trees more than people!" He was sort of angry when he said it and it really took me aback. This was about 12 years ago. I haven't forgotten the emotional reaction I had as I felt verbally attacked even though I'm sure he probably has no memory of having said it to me. I've grown up since then and would do a better job of defending myself today than I did that day. I weakly explained that caring for the environment and animals ultimately improves the health and survivability of humans, but he didn't buy that argument. And if I'm honest that's not why I think animals and the environment should be protected; they have a right to exist and be healthy and safe in their own right.

So why do some think that if you care about animals or the environment you don't care about people? Compassion is not a finite resource. You don't have to represent your compassion with a pie chart and say that this wedge is for animals, this wedge for the environment, so there's only this much left for humans. In my experience, people who feel compassion for animals are also those who feel and do more for people. The flip side can often be true as well; those who don't feel much compassion towards animals and nature often don't feel much towards people either. I believe compassion and the ability to look outside oneself is a trait that some people are just born with, but I also believe that people can be awakened to this capability and over time develop great capacity for compassion. (read here about pediatrician/animal advocate Dr. Allan Kornberg.)

I think the reason I am more vocal in my fight to protect animals and the environment is that they are innocent. They are powerless. They are at the mercy of the species that has taken over the planet. Humans have developed the ability to reason, evaluate, make choices. For those to whom power is given much is expected... (I wrote that and then thought, where have I heard that before? John F. Kennedy often quoted Luke 12:48,“For of those to whom much is given, much is required.”) We may not have the power to prevent hurricanes from giving us a good thrashing but we certainly don't seem to blink an eye when we cut down thousands of acres of rain forest that can never be replaced, or eat a chicken that had an abominable existence before it was brutally slaughtered, or accept being entertained by an elephant who was beaten and electrocuted during training.

Don't I care that humans are being harmed? Yes! But even then I worry more about the children, the elderly, and those powerless to protect themselves. I see most adult humans as having some measure of capacity to change their situation; they can at least reach out for help if they find the strength within themselves to do so.

“I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.”
—Abraham Lincoln

The Story That Will Have To Wait

I'm having some trouble with my desktop and need Gabriel to come wave his magic wand over it but till then I am using my wonderful little laptop. Unfortunately all my photos and video are stored on my desktop, so even though I have a cute little story to tell about Chappu and Calvin the pics and video are in my desktop. I can't keep my computer connected long enough (actually this problem may require Saeed's wand, the keeper of the wireless connection magic) to upload the video to You Tube, so the story will have to keep. I will try again today, but I doubt I will be any more successful.

Ride The Subway...

... I wish I could. Just last night I complained to Saeed that in my efforts to reduce my impact on the planet using public transport will continue to be problem for me (we have none.)

This video is artistic, awesome, more than clever, and makes me wistful:



I hope it wins an award.

Shohreh Aghdashloo

Anahita sent me this video and wrote: "I could just listen to her and watch her beautiful face for hours. She is so calming and captivating." Agreed. For anyone who doesn't know her, Aghdashloo just won the Emmy award for best supporting actress in a miniseries or a movie for “House of Saddam”, a four-part miniseries that chronicles the rise and fall of Saddam Hussein. She is from Tehran, Iran. I saw her in "House of Sand and Fog" with Ben Kingsley; she is a wonderful actress.

John O'Donohue

One of the programs I like to listen to while doing tedious chores is Speaking Of Faith on NPR. Although it would seem by that title it would be exclusively about religion, many of the pieces are about meaning, ethics, and ideas. Today I listened to the program in which the show host interviewed John O'Donohue, an Irish poet and philosopher, months before his unexpected death. He spoke about how the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible worlds intertwine in human experience. Deep stuff, beautiful stuff. Stuff that helps me recenter when the news of our day makes for depressing thoughts.

I cannot adequately summarize his thoughts in this post, so I hope you click on the link above and listen to his beautiful Gaelic-accented words of wisdom for yourself. One of the ideas about which he speaks is the need in human life for beauty: music, poetry, nature, friendship, love. For this reason the title given this interview is "The Inner Landscape Of Beauty." He writes his own material and poetry but he also quotes others such as the French writer Blaise Pascal:

In difficult times you should always carry

something of the beautiful in your mind.

What follows is the poem he wrote for his mother after the passing of his father:

Beannacht
("Blessing")

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

~ John O'Donohue ~

(Echoes of Memory)

Ellen, if you read this post, that poem is for you.

Aack!

Sounds a lot like my 9/12 post, "Argh!"

I have 117 emails in my inbox, new messages. Yesterday I wrote my sister that I had 92 and I was going to work on reading and cleaning out my inbox, but I ran out of time. Cleaning out my junk mail is easy with a simple 'delete all' (because it has things like "Russian women are still waiting to meet you!" in it) but my inbox has so much good stuff in it that I really want to read and answer.

Reading my book for book club, Border Passage, took up all my recent free time. I enjoyed the book a lot so it was worth it, but this weekend I'm going to have to clean up my cyber clutter. Wish me luck.

A Life Of Crime Is Too Tiring...

... for me. Around midnight we both woke up saying, "What is that noise?" It sounded like our neighbor was using an industrial sized lawnmower under our bedroom window, except that the sound stayed steady for over half an hour. Finally it was too bizarre and we got up to see what was going on 'out there'.

I sat at our open second floor window and looked up into the sky to see what could only be a helicopter hovering over our neighborhood and the subdivision next to us. All I could see were its two red lights but because it didn't fly away it had to be a helicopter or perhaps an alien spaceship and I don't believe in alien spaceships... not that there's anything wrong with that (Seinfeld reference.) It was clearly something out of the ordinary, but I couldn't quite wrap my mind around it. The flying creature just hung there in the sky and freaked me out with its loud buzzing like an angry wasp the size of a bison.

Then I saw police cars driving slowly through the neighborhood with their bright search lights trained on the yards on both sides of the street. After the cars made three passes around our block I saw a line of about eight flashlights walking single file through the yards. I was quite sure now that it was a search party... but why? At this point I saw one of the police cars make a U turn on our street and speed down our street while the helicopter moved slowly over our neighborhood to the subdivision on the other side of our neighborhood. Once there, I finally saw a search light beam down towards the ground. About 15 minutes later the angry wasp sound began to fade away and I knew the episode was over... but what happened?

The rest of the night I was wakeful. Normally I'm a pretty good sleeper but any noise I heard or if a kitty suddenly looked up, I was awake. I felt pretty wasted at work today.

I heard nothing on the news this morning nor did I find anything in our local paper online, but when I got home from work I looked again and it had to be this story. The single file flashlights must have been the guys in the canine unit. Canine unit?... that means the dogs were following the guy's scent which means he went straight through our neighborhood. Yikes.

So, from now on if you want to kidnap someone and run away, PLEASE don't do it while I'm trying to sleep. And thank you for not hiding in our crawl space.

More Videos

Cyrus does a GREAT monkey sound!


Even a king needs help getting to the top of the hill:


Shirin was trying to rest but the schmoozles were worth it:


We did leave Shirin alone again to close her eyes for a while so I just sort of followed Cyrus around while he watched other children and scuffed the wood chips with his cute little vegan shoes. Do you think that one day it will be Cyrus yelling, "I am a robot, I am a robot, I am a robot"?:


A short segment of finger grabbing again:


Saeed hadn't woken up yet so we were trying to play quiet soccer, not quite soccer.


This game consists mainly of Cyrus waiting behind a door to be discovered... boring until you see that cute little smiling face!


I believe that's all the videos. I'm on my laptop now and need to check my desktop, the afflicted one, on which all the videos are saved to see if I got them all onto You Tube.

Argh!

For some reason my videos still won't upload onto You Tube as usual. It took all night for these to upload and the others didn't upload at all, so I'll have to try again. Not sure what the problem is. My computer needs an overhaul so it may be that.

I have tried to upload these videos so many times that I couldn't remember exactly what was in them! I titled this 'concentration' because of the photo I took of Cyrus appearing with concentration lines on his forehead in my previous post, but clearly he is just enjoying being read to:


If Cyrus could tell us what he wants it would be so much easier! (notice when he gets off the blue whale and investigates its eye he calls it a doggie and his new "dupp a dupp a dupp" sound that he makes by the pole)


I remember a time not so long ago that this game with Grandpa would have scared him:


Well, he may not be able to say much more than doggie or ball but he can still tease and interact like a pro. He knows we don't want him to put things in his mouth so what better way to get a rise out of his Grandma?


I'm checking back on the 'bulk upload' page and it looks like the other videos are still queued up. Lord have mercy. Check back tomorrow if you want to see if it was successful.

Our Weekend In Athens...

... should really be titled, "It's All About Cyrus." Since we hadn't seen him for many weeks my camera only pointed toward him. I was hoping to have my videos uploaded to go along with this post but all but a couple could not be uploaded, not sure why, so I'll put them up on the blog whenever I can.

Cyrus is now sitting at the kitchen table on a stool. At first glance it makes you worry that he'll fall off, but his physical development has advanced so much that he's a pro at it.

He also can feed himself anything that is in pieces.

Here he is offering me some of his breakfast 'sausage.'

This hangs on the wall by the kitchen table. Since one of Cyrus' most frequently said words is "doggie" he turned around during breakfast about 20 times to point to it and say, "doggie."

After Shirin came back from the hosital she was in big demand. Cyrus is going through a very strong 'mommy' phase right now, and no one but she could read him books once she came through the door.

This is a close up of the above picture. Look at the concentration lines on his forehead... just like his Grandpa's.

Cyrus hands his mom the next book before she even finishes the first!

We went to the Athens Farmer's Market. It's very similar to the one we go to in Matthews but somewhat bigger. Here Shirin is buying Cyrus an empanada.

Apparently Cyrus normally runs around the market, picking up "balls" (farmer's tomatoes and apples) so Shirin wrapped him in her moby wrap. Poor guy couldn't cause any trouble!

The day was absolutely beautiful if you were in the shade. Here Cyrus eats the empanada at a picnic table outside the market fence.

I seem to take lots of pictures of Cyrus eating. Now we're back from the market (and the empanada eating) and he's eating lunch. I think he runs around so much Shirin has to feed him almost as much as you would feed an adult. Just wait till he's a teenager.

On our way to the park the neighbor's kitty came out to greet Cyrus. He knew to crouch down in a non-threatening posture, but then they're old friends.

Off to the park. This is a different park from where we went last time. Again, a Geogia Bulldog statue uniquely painted. Cyrus got to ride on the "doggie."

What kid doesn't like to sit in a tunnel?

Cyrus can now slide down by himself.

Smart kid. Why walk up all those stairs if your Grandma can walk you back up the slide? (No I don't have a tumor on my left hip; my camera case is in my left pocket.) I got four compliments that day on my T-shirt which said, "Jon Stewart- President '08".

This is Cyrus' Paul Bunyan stance.

Shirin and her little Bubsy.

Cyrus had to stop playing to talk to one of his peeps.

I don't know if you can tell how tired Shirin is. Her rotations and motherhood and housewifehood have kept her so busy that she is very sleep deprived. After I saw that exhausted look on her face she went to lie down on a park bench...

... and Cyrus and I went off on our own. A few yards away grew some fantastic bushes that attracted beautiful butterflies.

Here's a close up. I was amazed at how content Cyrus was to sit in my arms as I pointed out every butterfly that flew by.

Gorgeous.

I haven't seen a monarch butterfly in years. I'm glad they're not totally extinct.

The bumblebees were everywhere too.

This flexible rubber bridge held Cyrus' fascination for a long time. It wasn't the bridge itself, but the hole in it through which he and I played 'grab the finger.'

He also knows that we don't want him to put things in his mouth. So here he is pretending to put a piece of wood in his mouth so I'll scream. He loved it. You'll see in the video (whenever I can get it to upload) how he does it about ten times!

I'm teasing my Grandma.

What a little imp.

I kept taking pictures because one shot...

...was cuter than the next!

Eventually Shirin got up from her park bench to rejoin us. Behind her you see a covered picnic area. Someone was having a birthday party there and Cyrus kept wanting to go over and get one of their "balls" (balloons.)

Back home he 'reads' his book and finds a ball to point at.

All cleaned up and ready to go to dinner. While waiting for his Grandma and Grandpa to get ready Cyrus played with cookie monster.

I would have kept this video going longer but my camera chip ran out of memory. I had to delete some pictures so that I could take the rest you see below.


We went to Jason's Deli which had a great salad bar. Usually we avoid places with the word "deli" in the title, but I really like this place.

Cyrus is wearing the cute shirt his Khaleh Tita sent him.

The next day we had lunch at Panera Bread. They didn't have booster seats so Shirin tried to feed him first in a high chair, then on her lap...

... and when Cyrus felt too much like a big boy for that, slid down...

... and opted for an adult chair. He did quite well in it!

Cyrus LOVED being King Cup.

King Cup got a kiss from his fair maiden mommy.

Cyrus is just too darn cute, but next time I'll try to remember to take pictures of all of the rest of us too. It's just that none of us are as interesting, I mean, how many of the adults are willing to pretend to eat wood and wear cups on their heads?