It’s been several months since I’ve had time to post anything here, but I kept jotting things down as they occurred to me.  I thought I’d divide them up in monthly chunks so the pages wouldn’t be so long to slog through.  This is copy and paste stuff, so we’ll see what happens.

Tues. 4.16.13

Maybe after all the ugliness and horror of yesterday’s bombing of the Boston Marathon it’s time to look at something very beautiful to balance the soul.

There was a link to a video of Sasha Cohen doing the rite of Spring, which doesn’t seem to be there anymore.

Found it!

Thurs 4.18.13

It’s time for voters to take control from Republicans who only listen to special interests with lies and gobs of cash!  The woman who shouted “Shame!” in the Senate yesterday was right.  Many Republicans say they support a “right to life”, but yet they also support those who promote the use of firearms that take that right away.  Are they setting up their targets for the future?  How many of those unwanted babies whom they say they want to protect will end up as victims of shootings as an adult?

Controversy over gory photos published after the Boston bombing leaves me a bit stunned.  Americans have been inflicting that kind of mayhem in various places around the world for 12 years.  (And on many other occasions as well)  We should know what the consequences are; see it in all its gory detail.  Then maybe we’ll think more carefully the next time the rabble rousers urge us on to a lethal assault somewhere in the world.  Maybe if we live it and see it and realize that it’s not a game or a far away thing from which we’re excepted, safe, cocooned in our continental vastness, we’ll be less hasty to inflict on others that which we’re not prepared to suffer ourselves.  The photos I’ve seen from Baghdad have been far worse than worse has been shown so far about Boston.

Tues. 4.23 13

I read the transcript in the Globe of Tsarnayev’s hearing in the prison hospital.  (Unfortunately, I no longer have the link to the Globe, but you can read it here.)  It gave me a weird feeling.  I imagine him lying there, tubes coming out of all sorts of places, perhaps a bit groggy from pain medicine, with the doctor, agents, lawyers, judge and clerk crowding around , yet being adjudged lucid, alert and able to answer questions.  “I find that the defendant is alert, mentally competent and lucid. He is aware of the nature of the proceedings.” The description doesn’t seem to fit what they have said about his wounds to the face, neck, legs and hand.  I don’t see how this can be a fair hearing.  At least he was Mirandized.

The accounts of the brothers in the Globe seem to mix the brothers up sometimes, and now they want to tie them to another horrible murder in 2011?  They seem to lose track of who was radicalized, the older Tamerlan or the younger Dzhokhar.  Most accounts indicate that it was Temerlan who became devout, grew a beard, and became more radicalized, but sometimes in the writing it’s not clear at all which brother is being talked about.

A question I saw posted in the Twitter feed on Sunday that perhaps Tamerlan had been hit in the head too many times in boxing which could have caused a personality change.  I went to look for it yesterday, but came up empty.  It was a comment from one of the women reporters in the Globe Twitter feed.  No one else seems to have picked it up, and I have not seen it mentioned anywhere I’ve looked.  It could make some sense though.