Why I Would Never Vote Republican

Last week my father and I faced a horde of arch Republicans at a family barbeque, and had to defend President Obama and our Democratic and 'liberal' views. I said to the women we were debating that I would never vote Republican. One woman responded that I was narrow-minded, and not open to debate. Well, in 1980 I voted for Ronald Reagan, and I voted for Governor Weld in Massachusetts. In the past, I have voted Republican, but times have changed. Today, I see no choice.

1. The Republican Party platform is one of exclusion. The Republican Party seeks to exclude minorities, gays, women, and immigrants by legislating restrictions on these people. 

2. As a gay woman, I wouldn't vote Republican because the current folks running for office are against my basic civil rights. 

3. The Republican Party is pro-military and pro-war, and we already spend millions and millions on the military and war. 

4. I find it hypocritical to stand against 'big government' running our lives, and then expect legislation to force women to make choices about their own bodies, and healthcare decisions. I can't think how a government can be any more intrusive.

5. The Republican Party today is dangerously close to mixing religion with government. The separation of church and state is crucial to American principles. Christianity is one religion in this country, not the religion. Freedom of religion means no domination or supremacy of one religion over others.

6. When the Republicans talk about 'big government,' they're talking about reducing or cutting varied social services. While I agree in reform and fiscal responsibility, eliminating social service programs ultimately hurts people. College loans, access to healthcare, pre-school programs, social security, and community clinics help people. I can't believe the richest country in the world can't provide basic services to its citizens.

The World From a Cat's Perspective

No problem for a feline like me!

Get out of my way, pooch!

Meow! Come here often?

Recently researchers from the University of Georgia and National Geographic teamed up to study domestic cats and their effect on the environment. Using a 'kitty cam' the researchers followed sixty outdoor cats in the Athens, Georgia area for a week. The researchers found that 44% of the cats hunted while they were out roaming, and 30% were successful. Cats also took many risks like crossing streets and entering storm drains. Surprisingly, cats caught lizards and earthworms, and although they stalked birds, they did not catch them as frequently as humans would imagine. Some cats also 'two timed' their owners, entering other homes for food and affection. When cats caught prey, 23% percent of them would drag home the carcass for display. Experts think cats do this to show off their prowess, and perhaps to teach humans to hunt. 

The researchers advocate keeping domestic cats indoors, as it is safer for the cat. Felines are also clearly responsible for a great deal of murder and mayhem in the neighborhood.  Some of the 'kitty cam' footage was graphic.

The Good Old Days

It's been 67 years this month since the end of WWII. Saturday night I was sitting around with my Dad, Mom, Aunt, and an 85 year old neighbor of my cousin's. My Dad is old enough to remember the end of the war. He was ten and my aunt was 11. He remembers my grandmother running out onto Allston Street in East Cambridge and banging pots and shouting with all the other ladies. The end of the war meant their sons (and daughters perhaps) were coming home. At least some were.

My mom doesn't remember the actual day, but she remembers other wartime realities like rationed butter. My Mom said the butter was white, and there was a little dot of yellow something on the top you'd mix in to turn it yellow. She also remembers raid drills and climbing under her desk at school. My Dad recalls getting into the movies with a handful of metal scrap. The neighbor, who is a little older than my parents, said she was in NYC at the end of the war. She recalls a parade going down 5th avenue. She said she saw Eisenhower and Truman go by in an open convertible.

Of course here is one of the most famous pictures of the end of WWII, taken in Times Square. Greta Friedman, a nurse at the time, and George Mendonsa, are the subjects of the photograph. (Many people over the years have tried to claim this photograph, but it has finally been established it is Greta and George). Here are Greta and George reunited today. When George grabbed and kissed Greta on that evening in 1945, he did not know her. In fact he married another woman he was on a date with that night....

My 100 Most Controversial Books

Once again Library Thing offers a fun meme to explore. Here are the 100 most controversial books in my library. Of course not all the books I own are listed on Library Thing. I'm sure there are others that would make the list, like "Uncle Tom's Cabin," by Harriet Beecher Stowe. What is surprising to me is how many of my Buddhist titles make the list.

This page shows your 100 most controversial books, as measured by the standard deviation of members star ratings. To be included, a book must have been rated at least 20 times. 

 

	Rating	Title
	3.54	Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
	3.18	Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony by Lee G. Miller
	3.97	Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
	3.67	The Pure and the Impure by Colette
	4.03	The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
	3.79	Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia
	3.68	Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule
	3.65	Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
	4.02	The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
	4.01	Turning the Mind Into an Ally by Sakyong Mipham
	4.41	The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
	3.86	Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
	3.79	Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer
	3.56	Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
	3.72	The Lover by Marguerite Duras
	3.85	The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
	3.6	Women and Madness by Phyllis Chesler
	3.54	Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather
	3.95	The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
	3.56	Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
	3.97	Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
	3.72	Black Spring by Henry Miller
	3.87	Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
	4.11	Kristin Lavransdatter I: The Wreath (Penguin Classics) by Sigrid Undset
	4.18	The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
	3.63	Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present by Lillian Faderman
	3.74	My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor
	3.93	Plexus by Henry Miller
	4.07	The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality by Dalai Lama
	4.09	Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
	4.09	The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert
	4.05	Light in August by William Faulkner
	4.05	Lust for Life by Irving Stone
	4.06	The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright
	4.17	Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
	3.74	Henry and June: From A Journal of Love: the Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin (1931-1932) by Anaïs Nin
	3.68	A History of the Vikings by Gwyn Jones
	3.61	Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf
	4.11	The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
	4.07	The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1: 1915-1919 by Virginia Woolf
	3.92	Herland, The Yellow Wall-Paper, and Selected Writings (Penguin Classics) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
	3.9	O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
	3.78	Claudine's House by Colette
	4	Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
	3.78	The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America (Penguin Classics) by Anonymous
	4.05	Renascense and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay
	4.01	Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
	3.86	Gods and Generals by Jeff Shaara
	4.07	A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
	3.85	Genes, Peoples, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
	4.05	Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
	4.21	Three by Flannery O'Connor: The Violent Bear It Away, Everything That Rises Must Converge, and Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
	4.17	Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
	3.8	Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors by Stephen E. Ambrose
	4.25	Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
	4.08	Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
	4.01	The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
	3.82	Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom by Joseph Goldstein
	3.85	Right Hand, Left Hand by Chris McManus
	3.75	Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
	3.45	Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation by Cokie Roberts
	4.23	The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn
	4.13	The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
	4.08	Lincoln by Gore Vidal
	4.15	Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley
	3.7	The First Salute by Barbara W. Tuchman
	3.97	The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks
	4.16	The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
	4.21	Anne Frank Remembered by Miep Gies
	3.97	The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin
	4.23	Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
	4.25	The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
	3.9	Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis
	4.15	The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
	3.86	The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings (Modern Library Classics) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
	3.86	Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick
	4.24	Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
	4.1	D Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II by Stephen E. Ambrose
	3.74	Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island by Thor Heyerdahl
	3.74	The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language by Christine Kenneally
	4.13	A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman
	4.24	The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt
	4.05	Virginia Woolf: A Biography by Quentin Bell
	4.12	Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
	4.01	The Last Full Measure by Jeff Shaara
	3.98	Awakening the Buddha within: eight steps to enlightenment by Lama Surya Das
	4.29	The Captured by Scott Zesch
	4.09	Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning
	4.19	The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Alison Weir
	4.41	The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
	4.04	The Peculiar Institution by Kenneth M. Stampp
	4.39	The Gilded Bat by Edward Gorey
	3.68	Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams by Lynne Withey
	3.95	The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser
	4.21	Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade
	4.1	With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln by Stephen B. Oates
	4.02	All for the Union: The Civil War Diary & Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes by Elisha Hunt Rhodes
	3.63	Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project by Spencer Wells
	4.26	Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (Shambhala Classics) by Pema Chödrön
	4.52	Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 by Taylor Branch

Barn Bash 2012

The weather was beautiful on Saturday. My friends Stacey, Eve, Ellyn and I rode up to Windham Maine for the annual Barn Bash. It was their virginal experience. Jonathan met us there, driving over from Berwick. My family was there, parents, sisters, brother-in-laws Marty and Dave, nephews, niece, and aunt. The music was stellar and the atmosphere perfectly relaxed and easygoing. It was really a fantastic time.

Here's a clip of the Hanson sisters, friends of my brother-in-law's nephew Sam. They did some cover songs of the Indigo Girls, Bonnie Raitt, and Linda Ronstadt. I know it sounds corny to say it was magical to be there-- but it was!

Perfection