Friday, October 31, 2008

Photograph for Friday, October 31 I think this flower must work together with the spider in Wednesday’s photograph. It gives off an odor that attracts flies. The spider strung its web nearby. I don’t know the name of the plant that produces the flower. This one has a traceable history, like a family tree. The plant in our yard grew from a cutting of a plant in Margaret’s sister’s yard which grew from a cutting taken at least thirty years ago from a plant which Margaret’s mother had on her porch, where it had lived happily for many years.

Margaret’s mother was one of the gentlest, sweetest persons I’ve ever known. She absolutely refused to say bad things about anybody. She didn’t gossip. She refused to participate when people tried to get a gossip session going. She wasn’t unkind about it. She just kept quiet when invited to be snide or otherwise unkind. It is appropriate that this strange plant thrived on her porch. The flower isn’t exactly pretty. It’s lumpy. It’s petals aren’t delicate, and it smells bad (if you get your nose right down close to it). She liked it anyway; so I have also liked it for a long time. I often think of Mrs. Martin when I walk past this grand daughter plant on our porch, and I sometimes wonder what I might do to be more like her.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

PHOTOGRAPH FOR THURSDAY, OCTOBER 30Michael in Great Form Today in a Race at Mission Bay

THE PHOTOGRAPHS BELOW WERE ALSO TAKEN TODAY WHEN I WAS ON A BIKE RIDE (INCLUDING A FERRY RIDE FROM SAN DIEGO TO CORONADO) AROUND SAN DIEGO BAY.
SAN DIEGO BAY'S SALT WORKS SOUTH OF CHULA VISTA

It's easy to imagine being in Antarctica
...or below Mt. Fuji in Japan

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29

I don’t think this is Charlotte, and I don’t think it knows about Mr. Arable’s sow or the litter of pigs. This spider seems to be concerned only with catching flies. It apparently eats them right away. I saw one caught in the web in the morning and by this afternoon it was gone.

I’ve always liked Charlotte and little Fern and Wilbur. Wilbur is hyperactive, always exploring new things, and I can relate to that. Fern is compassionate. And Charlotte is probably the only reason I have ever felt kindly toward spiders. Since I first read Charlotte’s Web, I’ve been unable to squish one.

I have the distinct feeling that if spiders could vote, this one would vote NO ON PROPOSITION 8 (rhymes with hate)

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Along with all the other offers (FREE if I just buy...) that I have never invited to my electronic mailbox (To-Dye-For eye liner and replacement windows) the “electronic Holy Bible” advertisement came this morning. I'm guessing It came on Monday instead of Sunday because the folks selling the product probably don’t want to appear to work on Sunday.

Well, that’s simple enough.
Reconnect with God. Get a Franklin pocket electronic Holy Bible.
Problem solved!
Spread the word (electronic Word... Should electronic be capitalized?)

...reassurance in these tough economic times that capitalism is alive and well.

I wonder what Franklin will offer to folks in other religions.THIS BUDDHA IS ONE OF THE WORKS IN SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART'S ASIAN COLLECTION. I WENT THERE THIS AFTERNOON WITH JEREMY.

Monday, October 27, 2008

THE POINT LOMA LIGHTHOUSE HAS NEVER LOOKED MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN IT DID THIS MORNING AS THE FOG ALTERNATELY OBSCURED IT AND REVEALED IT.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

ONE THING I KNOW FOR SURE...I CAN TELL BEAUTY AND INTELLIGENCE WHEN I SEE IT. IT'S NOT JUST THE WAY I SEE IT.. ANYONE CAN SEE THAT PAITYN IS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

BIRD OF PARADISE
A Poem in Twelve Images


The orange shout of the outrageous flower
we call bird of paradise calls me
to lean in and see
the deep blue labial folds
and the purest white near a center
so intricately designed that my need
for miracles is completely satisfied.

Friday, October 24, 2008

WHY DIDN'T I JUST SAY NO...
... AND LISTEN?

While I was having blood drawn for a cholesterol check, the lovely young woman who had successfully and painlessly found an appropriate vein asked me where she could get one of the Obama buttons I was wearing. She also wanted to talk about the NO on PROPOSITION 8 message I had stuck on my shirt alongside the Obama button. The young woman and I agreed that no couple should be denied the civil right to marry.

Another employee of the medical department, a lady wearing a lab coat, stepped around a partition to interrupt our conversation by saying, “You know they are going to be teaching it in the schools if Proposition 8 doesn’t pass.”

I asked who “they” are and what “it” is. She said, “You know they are already getting it ready to include in textbooks. They’re already doing it in San Francisco and Massachusetts.”

I asked again, “Who are they and what is it?”

She looked baffled. I then did what I should not have done. I didn’t even give her a chance to answer. I regret that I launched a verbal attack on her. It probably only hardened her already firmly set determination to believe that she and California and perhaps all of America are under threat of siege by dangerous, subversive forces, an army led by Satan. I asked her if she knew what “bearing false witness” means. I said I was sure she knew well that bearing false witness is lying because it must be one of the things mentioned in sermons and Sunday School lessons in her church. I didn’t wait for her to say anything but went on with my attack. I said I could guess that she is a member of a fundamentalist church, either evangelical or Roman Catholic, and that she has been told lies which she is repeating. Of course, I pulled myself up to my full six-foot-plus height and towered over this little woman, who, by the way, didn’t back away. I said that I had seen the same television ads she has seen and that those ads are blatantly false; that they are outright, deliberate lies designed to deceive and scare people.

I was right about the ads, but I was wrong in my approach. Later I wished I had asked her to explain why she believed as she did. I wished I had listened to her story. I wished I had not mentioned her church. I wished that I had not cut off discussion by insisting that she is wrong and that I am right. I wished that I had not assumed a bullying male posture. I hope I won’t make the same mistake again by using a hostile response but that I will find a way to empathize in a sympathetic, kind way the invalidity of the misleading television ads designed to support proposition eight. I blew my chance to talk with her.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

MESSAGE ON THE SIDEWALK ON KANSAS STREET IN NORTH PARK

I have no idea what the message is, but it's obviously meant to communicate specific information. My frame of mind lately has focused my attention on words and symbols and their meanings. Perhaps that's why this arrow and bull's eye got my attention. After I took the picture, and as I rode away on my bicycle, I started to think about election rhetoric and symbolic language and how myths and rumors and outright lies can be made to seem valid and true.

Margaret and I spent some time in Germany earlier this month, and we visited some of the places that were important to Hitler and his Nazi Party. I read again some of his rhetoric and saw again the swastika and the other symbols he used to persuade people to follow him in a truly evil cause. And like sheep, the majority of the people did follow to their ruin and to the death and ruin of millions of innocent people, particularly Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals. I was reminded that good people and good symbols can be put to evil use. The swastika had previously been known as a good luck symbol and was used by various religious groups. Hitler made the Nazi swastika unique to his party by reversing the normal direction of the symbol so that it appeared to spin clockwise. Today, it is widely used, in various incarnations, by neo-nazis, racist skinheads and other white supremacist groups. We saw some of the symbols incorporated in graffiti all over Germany, so Hitler's impact on that country hasn't yet been completely neutralized, and we've all seen the symbols in graffiti splashed across walls and bridges in America. Racism is alive and well in the world in 2008.

Twenty-first century television and the internet are easy, ready tools for use by people who are intent on persuading voters to support a cause that inflicts pain and suffering on classes of people. Sometimes language and symbols are so cleverly incorporated into everyday speech that outright lies are made to seem to be true. Sadly, some Americans, like those Germans hooked into Hitler's dream, are basically good people. I've watched with dismay the television ads that use children to try to persuade people to vote to change the Constitution of California. The ads present blatantly false "information" to instill fear and incite loathing. What can they be thinking (and feeling), those people who are intent on denying civil rights to citizens who are in some way not like them.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

What got my attention about this old bulletin board is that it's message is not clear. ONE OF THE THINGS I LIKE ABOUT OBAMA IS THAT HE ISN'T UNCERTAIN ABOUT HIS MESSAGE. HE OBVIOUSLY KNOWS THAT BECOMING PRESIDENT IN 2009 WILL BE DAUNTING. I LIKE THAT HE ISN'T TRYING TO SCARE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE INTO VOTING FOR HIM. I LIKE THAT HE IS CLEAR ABOUT HIS BELIEF IN THE INCLUSION OF EVERYBODY IN HIS VISION OF CIVIL RIGHTS FOR ALL AMERICANS.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

THE WAY I SEE IT...

I am compelled to write about my hope for America, my hope that people who read the BLOG will understand why I feel strongly that Barack Obama is the best choice to be the next president of the United States. I believe Obama sees the world, not just the United States, the way a president of our great country should see it.

George Bush’s biggest liability as president, the personal failing that led to his failure as president, is his lack of curiosity about what the world looks like. (Pardon the preposition at the end of that last sentence, but another more correctly written one didn’t have the force of “looks like” and doesn’t fit as well into an essay titled “The Way I See It.” My guess is that as George Bush was growing up, he opened his eyes and crawled out of bed every morning into a world he did not care to know about or to explore. Until he was well into middle age and was the governor of the state of Texas, he showed no interest in visiting, in seeing for himself, in knowing about the towns and cities along the Danube, the Main, and Rhine Rivers that I have recently visited and will be writing about in subsequent postings on this BLOG. In fact, his world was Texas and the insular, secure place he enjoyed in one of America’s wealthiest, most aristocratic families. He was wealthy enough to afford to do anything he wanted to do, but he wasn’t interested enough in the world to go out and see it. In many ways he was like Sarah Palen, who has so little curiosity about the world outside America that she got her first passport in 2007 at the age of forty-four.

I like the idea that throughout his life Barack Obama has been seeing the world from many different points of view. That vision, coupled with raw intelligence, reassures me that he knows something about the world from actual personal experience. His information about the world has come not just from geography lessons in school and National Geographic specials on television. He knows, for instance, how a little boy sees the world when he is growing up in a home with a single parent struggling to make ends meet. He knows what the world looks like to a child who doesn’t even know his own father. He had a good reason to want to know something about Africa because the father he didn’t know was African. He knows what it’s like to see a world changed for him by his mother’s marriage to an Indonesian man who took him away from the familiar, comfortable classrooms of the United States and enrolled him in an elementary school in Asia where language and religion were different from his own. I could make a long list of experiences that Barack Obama has had that will make him a good president of our wounded country. Governor Palen and Senator McCain continue to say that Amerians don’t know enough about him to trust him. Americans who read and think know know much more of his experience than the few things I have mentioned. We know his experience and interest in the world and his academic record, including his brilliance as a Harvard Law scholar and his work as a “community organizer,” which Governor Palen and Senator McCain continue to deride. His life experiences have given him the background that will make him a great president. We know his experience in his state’s legislature and in our Senate. In his desperation to be elected to a job for which is not suited by age, temperament, or experience, Senator McCain sadly has resorted to blatant distortions of the truth about Barack Obama’s accomplishments.

I like Barack Obama’s vision. I like the fact that he understands that Americans are citizens of the world as well as citizens of our own special country, and that he sees problems of the world more clearly than his political opponents see them. I respect Senator McCain for what he experienced as a prisoner of war, and I owe him thanks for what he suffered in the service of my country. I do not owe him my vote. For him to be president of the United States would be a mistake. Most Americans know his life experiences, and they can be sure the way he has seen the world from his childhood to old age is very, very different from the way Barack Obama has seen it. A child whose father and grandfather were admirals in the powerful, United States Navy and who himself, following family tradition, went through the United States Naval Academy (near the bottom of his class) sees the world in a certain way. Of course, his horrific experiences of deprivation as a prisoner of war locked away from the world have shaped his way of seeing the world. I appreciate and honor him as a war hero, but his being confined and isolated during the terrible years of his imprisonment didn’t provide education and insight he would need to be president. His personal experiences as father and husband in a failed marriage are tragic. I am sad for him, but I do not think his experiences in that failure have prepared him to see the world the way I want my president to see it.

And Governor Palen as President Palen: Unthinkable!
Julian, CaliforniaCUAMACA MOUNTAIN HIGH

The message in Julian is clear, especially the Comfort/Music part. Even though the gold rush lasted only one year (1869), the little town didn't fold itself up and disappear. It still sits surrounded by (mostly mythical) apple trees perched in the mountains an hour's drive from San Diego.

Monday, October 20, 2008

MONDAY, OCTOBER 10ED at Mission Beach

Sunday, October 19, 2008

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 19

Banana Leaves

Friday, October 17, 2008

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17
THE SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART

I biked over to Balboa Park this morning to see if the scaffolding had come down from the William Templeton Johnson building that houses the San Diego Museum of Art. Wow! It may not date back to the Renaissance, but it ranks in beauty right up there with some European buildings that do. Built in 1926, the edifice had lost some of its luster so a renovation was undertaken a couple of years ago. What we see here is well worth the cost and the inconvenience of going into the museum through a side door.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16

It seems to me this butterfly is hanging around too long. There aren't any others in the yard at my house, and I think I remember that these Monarchs fly off to somewhere in the Mexican Highlands for the winter.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Wednesday, October 15: Glass Building in Mission Valley
Tuesday, October 14: Sassy Mission Valley Bird of Paradise
ON TO BUDAPEST and a European riverboat experience.Flying from San Diego to San Francisco and then to Frankfurt doesn't feel like a "zooming" experience, but stepping onto the moving walkway between the international section and the national section at this very busy airport was almost surreal. I couldn't resist trying to get an image that would capture that feeling. This is the result.Nothing says BUDAPEST more clearly than the extraordinary Parliament Building on the banks of the Danube. Nothing expresses the horror of the Holocoust more jarringly than the Shoes on the Danube Pomenade, created by Gyula Pauer and Can Togay. The stark memorial reminder of that awful time in human history is located not far from the Parliament Building. Check it out online: (www.flixya.com/video/339066/Budapest_Jewish_holocaust_memorial)

After we were properly reminded of that very bad period in our past, and after we were cautioned that it could happen again, we went on to discover a lively, energetic city. Budapest is not a morbid place. There are reminders everywhere, however, of the cold war pressures on Hungary, none more dramatic than in the park not from the shoe monument. I was shooed away from where I was trying to take a picture of the American Embassy. Ironically I was standing not far from the only Russian monument left in the city.