The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Here’s Maureen Dowd having a crack at Palin.  

And rightfully so.  Is this pro-life anti-environment hockey mom actually going to fool the Hillary die-hards?  Wasn’t Hil’s biggest selling point to all the swing voters her EXPERIENCE???

What makes Palin worse than Rummy, Cheney, and Bush put together is her bullshit politicking about how she’s breaking through the glass ceiling like king crab fishing boats break through the ice in her home state.  The comparison to Ferraro is offensive, not to mention all that sucking up to Hillary in her Dayton, Ohio speech.  “Determination and grace?”  Give me a break.  What are we talking about here, a debutante winning the badminton tournament?

Worst of all is her advocacy for opening new areas to oil drilling, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

But isn’t it great when woman step back and do what they’re supposed to do: empower men by subverting the equality of their own gender?  Paint themselves in the tradition of our beloved Madonna and the whore? Palin wants us to know that she takes care of her kids and wears go-go boots (but if you look at her wearing her go-go boots you’re a letch for noticing).

Post-Katrina

There is an unparalleled, as far as I have seen, imprint called Voice of Witness to which I call your attention: 

About Voice of Witness

The books in the Voice of Witness series seek to illuminate human rights crises by humanizing the victims. By allowing them to tell their stories, we seek to engender greater understanding. These books will be designed for readers of all levels—from high school and college students to policymakers—interested in a reality-based understanding of ongoing injustices in the United States and around the world.

So far, Voice of Witness has produced three books—Surviving Justice: America’s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath, and Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives. The fourth book in the series, Out of Exile: The Abducted and Displaced People of Sudan will be released this fall.

Right now I’m obviously thinking most about Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath.

Please take a look.

Thank you.

Mandatory Evacuation in New Orleans

From the NY Times, Washington Post, BBC, and Times-Picayune a/k/a Nola.com

Au-ten-ti-co Rockridge Lunch

M. made this and insisted I post about it.  It was truly a Rockridge lunch so I happily obliged.  Read on for what made it so Rockridge.

Lunch was chicken salad on a bed of lettuce with sliced tomatoes and concord grapes.

The chicken salad was made from our previous evening’s roast chicken (Ina Garten’s recipe from Barefoot in Paris-so simple, so easy, so delicious), diced onion, diced shallot, chopped pecans, diced celery, just the tiniest amount of mayonnaise, salt, pepper, and my personal contribution: cumin.  Lettuce is from the garden and all other produce is from Market Hall Produce.

M. made fresh iced tea; a custom blend of English Breakfast and rosehip.  The rosehip makes for that gorgeous color you see here.  She garnished the glass with mint and Meyer lemon.

Plates are Wild Strawberry by Wedgewood.  The glass tumbler and the graphic pillow are both from Target.  The coasters are from Atomic Garden on College Avenue. 

Remainders

They aren’t just for long division people. 

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

I cut too much camelia, had some extra rosehip, and also cut a bunch of lavender from the front thinking that I would include it in my garden rose arrangement.  It turned out that the lavender “broke” the garden rose arrangement, as we say in the business, and I didn’t end up using it.

So I grabbed my new silver-plate tall footed vases and threw the remainders in:

 

Now I’ve previously instructed you not to uses frogs or oases when you’re starting out.  BUT, here’s a secret: my remainder elements weren’t tall enough on their own for this vase.  So I used a common flower trick: crumple up some plastic (I used the old grocery bags that collect under my sink from the times I forget my cloth, waiting for a need that seems to never arise) and push it into the bottom of the vase.  Simply fill with water and arrange as you normally would.  Another view:

The pen and ink drawing is by Vashti Windish, who also runs the incredible Live With Animals Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. The frame is custom from Frame-O-Rama in Berkeley.

Friday Arrangement

After a long week at the office all I want to unwind is an hour or two to do some FABULOUS arranging!  I had such an urge yesterday I cannot even tell you!

This is what I came up with:

As we all know, our country has hit tough economic times.  I challenged myself to make a totally fabulous arrangement that would cost me next to nothing to make (at least for me to produce given my personal horticultural resources).  I would sell this arrangement in Rockridge at Bloomies for $45 (including cost of the container, not including tax).

What’s in it: 1 stem Lemon Leaves, 2 stems Camelia leaves, 2 stems rosehips, 5 garden roses (these retail in Rockridge at $17.50 for 5 stems).  Of this list, only the rosehips were purchased at retail.  The rest is from my garden.  

Another view is at right.

I took this one because I wanted you to be able to see the container, also from my personal collection, a mason jar.  It’s great to use different unexpected containers from around the house.  It can be very charming.

You also get a little peek into the interior architecture of Rockridge.

In spite of a fear of redundancy, I just can’t HELP myself from including the second picture at right too, which is only ever so slightly different from above.  But aren’t the roses just too gorgeois? I just want to EAT them!

The roses are from my favorite bush I have.  It’s been in the front yard forever probably, at least long before we bought the house. In terms of blooms she just produces and produces.  She’s like a good Catholic woman; she just keeps popping them out!

Below is the gorgeous afternoon light coming in through the window in my front door.  I just couldn’t resist!!!

(And in the picture below hat amazing pink bud in the front is a Lemon blossom…smells soooooo good!)

 

 

Stay tuned!

Omg.  Labor Day Weekend and I literally have a backlog of at least 20 amazing posts that need to be written.  Really good Rockridge living coming up soon!  Updates being generated.  Check back around 3:30PST.xoxo

For a Laugh

I. just sent me this to make me laugh.  I’m not sure what’s going on here, but it’s fun.  My favorite part is the pony ride at the end.

Today I’ve clicked on:

http://artlog.com/

Launched in January 2008, Artlog is a free, open platform for artists, art professionals, art enthusiasts and regular folks. The platform combines social networking, directory services and user-generated content. The site is publicly accessible (you can sign up for an account post artworks and do about a billion other things), but definitely still in ‘beta’ and development continues; we are constantly making things better and moving quickly toward launching major parts of the site.

http://parents.berkeley.edu/

This web site contains thousands of pages of recommendations and advice contributed by members of the Berkeley Parents Network, a parent-to-parent email network for the community of parents in the Berkeley, California area. Formerly called “UCB Parents”, this network is run by a group of volunteer parents in their “spare” time. We send out 10-12 email newsletters each week to 22,382 local parents. We’ve been doing it since 1993. Many busy parents have taken the time to enlighten and inform us with their suggestions, their wisdom, and their experience, archived here for all who need it. Please help yourself and use it in the spirit of sharing!   

http://thefanzine.com/

FANZINE is an online general culture magazine that was launched in August 2005 at the CMYK Independent Magazine Festival in Barcelona, Spain. I was invited to this event to my surprise based on some hand made print zines I had done that were very limited edition, unlike many of the glossy magazines at the festival. I had to inform the curator that I simply didn’t have any zines left to bring or give out, but had this other idea, which was FANZINE. With the hard work of programmer Ernesto Gonzales, and designer Douglas Savage, and general editing input from Mike Louie, then still back in San Francisco, we managed to get the site up by festival end.

And now two years running our aim remains to provide a venue on the Internet for longform writing, both fiction and non, that is at once intelligent, engaging, witty, informative, and fun. Not to disparage the blog format (we intend to start a blog here soon as well), but we think what makes FANZINE special is that it is a unique place where professional writers can stretch out and write pieces that are substantive, that can stand the test of time. Therefore we keep almost all of our articles archived, and try to present them in as clean a fashion as we can design. We expect that our work will not be scanned, but rather read and reread years down the road.

Our contributors are journalists, novelists, and practicing artists. We believe that over the past two years we have developed a community wherein the art of writing is respected and where writers are proud to showcase their works.

We also cover local events (music, art, film, theater, dance, readings, etc) here in New York and in various cities internationally. We intend to expand this coverage in the coming months.

Finally, please note that we had originally intended to be a non-profit organization and while we will still accept donations, we are working hard behind the scenes to update the site to allow for advertising. If you would like more info on how to advertise on our site you can peruse our media kit. Please be patient as it will take a minute or two to download the PDF of the media kit here.

And to keep updated with Fanzine articles as they come out please bookmark the RSS feed here.

Sincerely,
Casey McKinney
Fanzine’s Founding Editor

http://www.discriminations.us/

who? Discriminations was originally the joint production of John and Jessie Rosenberg, but Jessie has adopted Honorary Founding Blogger status. A 19 year old second year graduate student in applied physics at Caltech, she doesn’t have time to sleep, much less blog. John, who has retired from real life, does have time. He is one of the world’s older grad students, now completing a 30-year overdue dissertation at Stanford on discrimination.

what? John’s focus, not surprisingly, is the theory and practice of discrimination, and how it is reported and analyzed. 

Jessie’s, if she ever has time, will be discriminating thoughts on … whatever catches her fancy or attracts her attention. 

why? Why not?

[Not] Rough Design

Here is an illustration my mother did to be printed onto t-shirts for one of arockridgelife’s favorites, Inara George. 

Hear the song:

Rough Design