My Pitas page

Salon
Nerve
The American Prospect
Mother Jones

DEEP
I eat thes frozen entrees frequently. I'm getting tired of them. I would like to make my own food but it's kind of lonely here now so I have no enthusiasm for it.
I generally take one of these dinners and pour them over rice. I am having one tonight with brown rice. Mutter Paneer.
I have discovered more pictures around the house and I am scanning them in and hope to get them up to Shutterfly or Epson. Which? Probably Shutterfly because it works directly with my Adobe Elements Photo Editor.
Highlights and Lowlights.
I had a problem with my home network. Other computers weren't getting on and I noticed an icon that said network disconnected. You know, all I had to do was reset the router?!!! Voila!!!

Siddha Yoga
I won't forget you. I won't forget all you MOTHERFUCKERS in Siddha Yoga.

NO, SIR!

Prem Rawat
Lots of good videos here and you can even begin your trek to receive the Knowledge which excites me.
I had some problem though with getting the software to work. I got a "couldn't connect to the server" comment when I tried to pay with my debit and credit card. I have both and tried both but neither worked. I will have to call on Monday.
There are 2 free videos I watched one short and the other long. The long one is an introduction to the Keys which you have to watch before you buy the first of the Keys.
Maharaji created these keys to introduce people to Knowledge. There are 6 and the 6th gives you actual instructions that, I guess, allow you to awaken the Knowledge.
I had such an experience watching these videos, the 2 that are free. It felt like what Gurumayi had always described as the awakening of the Kundalini.
I hope some of my other friends will check out Maharaji's site which is linked above. There is a great video there.

Hey, there is also some video and reading material, if you are a bright and intellectual person, over at www.adidam.org. I may have mentioned here that I have been at www.ramdass.org and watched some videos there. I had to join there at $9 a month. My credit card was lost, my check card, and I had to change the number on it so they had trouble renewing me. I told them not to bother because I didn't really want to go on subscribing. I had seen the videos I wanted to see and I felt that was all I wanted.
At adidam.org there is video and audio. I have been interested in Adidam and I wanted to get Dawn Horse Testament. There are some selections there at the site from the Dawn Horse, but I ended up getting the latest DVD they have produced. It was made in 2004, a year that seems to keep coming up, and it's called "Untying the Self-Knot of Fear."
Sounded really right on to me since I was with my mom while she was leaving her body just last month. That's a heavy we all have to deal with and Adidam says let's get on with that. Let's undo our bond with this body and find that primordial consciousness which is Truth.
I can dig that. Adidam is right on.
So, anyone who reads my blog, I hope you will look into these things too. Also, don't forget to check out the Urantia Book. I found an interesting quote that I remembered from reading the book back in the 80's and I put it beneath my favorite picture of my mom who was like 86 then. It goes, "You "sow a mortal body" in the grave; you "reap a morontia form" on the mansion worlds.
The Urantia Book, Page 431, (39:2.13) "

Americans United for Change
I just got this letter in my inbox.
It finally occurred to me the hole in that argument how when you raise wages the price of goods goes up. The hole is how they raise the Congress' wages!!!

Dear Eddie,

Enemies of working families will stop at nothing -- and we need to fight back.

Now that the Senate has invoked cloture on the Fair Minimum Wage Act, there will be 30 hours of debate until everything comes to a vote. Our opponents have piled every amendment they can think of onto this simple raise to weaken and poison the measure -- and they plan to add more.

Take a moment and tell your Senators "NO MORE!" We need to pass this legislation without further delay or amendment and give working Americans the raise they deserve.

Call 1-866-699-9243 and ask to be patched through to your Senator's office. If you don't know who both your Senators are, check here:

http://www.americansunitedforchange.org/nomore

For ten years, Congress raised its own paychecks by tens of thousands of dollars -- all while minimum wage workers struggle to get by at $5.15 an hour. And now that the legislation sped through the House with strong bipartisan support, some bull-headed Senators are slowing it down.

NO MORE!

Call your Senator and ask why this is happening. How much more do working families have to suffer before they get a raise?

Even if your Senators are on our side, there is more you can do. Every phone line on Capitol Hill should be lit up right now, and spreading the word to friends and family in other states is a great way to build the pressure. Forward this note to them with this simple intro:

NO MORE!

We'll keep you posted as the situation unfolds.

Jeremy Funk
Americans United for Change

Guestbook
Mom was a GREAT woman!
Last night I found a book she was saving with all of my father's stuff called "The Language of Feelings." It's about getting in touch with our feelings and it's by David Viscott, M.D.
I used to see this book about the house quite often but I never read it. Mom and I never read each other's books for the most part. A lot of the material in the book reminds me of what I learned at Santa Fe. They were called the easy school but I think that was a misunderstanding by many students. It might have even been political subterfuge.
If there was one thing my father was not it was in touch with his feelings.
I'm sorry I didn't know this educated side of my mom so well. She was my support, you know, since I couldn't get a job. It's funny how our intelligence simply is not so pertinent to most people.
And it's funny how people will pretend to be intellligent. My mom read a book on Freud called Passions of the Mind. It was way too much for me, but I saw her with an open book and I believe she really did read it, at least to the point of gaining the gist. Some books, you know, are difficult to read and some are not. It's a subjective thing this reading. She may have just fallen right into it like I did with Michener's Drifters. I ate that book up.
On the other hand my father claimed to be reading Roots in 1977 I think it was and I was fooled in those days that he was reading. I guess I thought anyone that old had to be able to read. Yes, they can read, but what can they read? I don't think for a minute that dad was reading Roots. It was just a hustle. It made him look intelligent and fooled people when they saw him with the open book. It's easy for the illiterate to copy the form and nature of those of us who can read. Perhaps he also had heard of the controversy of Roots origins that I have been hearing of, that a white man was its true source. I really don't see that that has any meaning.
If that was the case it was just a spiteful thing to be reading Roots, and a desire to confuse. Kai sera sera.
If you knew ma, won't you please sign the guestbook linked above. I just added a picture.

The Gainesville Sun
My mom subscribed to the Gainesville Sun. I often wrote the editor about current issues. One issue I wrote about was their Religion section.
I'm an advocate of altenative religion. It was disappointing that as much as the people who attended mom's funeral or did the services liked or loved her, none had anything to say that was not the strict traditionalist line. Things like Christians go to Heaven, non-believers go to Hell. Everyone knew, then, of course that mom was going to Heaven. Nobody considered rebirth or the Urantia Book perspective of going to a world superior to this one, but not Heaven, which the book calls Morontia.
I got the paper this morning and it was so dull, except for a column by Art Buchwald who died and wrote a column before his death to be published after he died, that I considered whether I needed the newspaper. After all I have a lot of friends who don't take the newspaper. I even considered that maybe my habit of reading the news was getting in the way of making friends, enjoying life.
Mom like the paper and I had ambitions of becoming a writer so it always seemed natural to read the news. Maybe it is just that with mom having a stroke and dying that I met so many people and I wish to be with them. Reading the newspaper can be quite a solitary activity.
So, I don't know where I stand on the news. It doesn't really flatter me, but it is better than more conservative papers. I do wish it had more to say about alternative religion since I have spent 20 to 30 or more years of my life involved with the East and alternative views of Christ's teaching.

Salon - Art Buchwald
The funeral is over and mom is buried.
They had to make a DVD for a memorial. They wanted me to bring in old pictures and so forth. I said can I use digital pictures and they thought that was best.
The DVD was a beautiful thing but it wasn't because of the pictures really. Some of you who know my family and I may appreciate some pictures. You may see pictures you had never seen before. The pictures I remember from when I was a kid are all over the place now. Mom and I hardly ever looked at them the past couple or 3 decades, at least not together.
The beautiful thing to me was the song I picked to remember mom by, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."
It creams me! :-(
The funeral director said they had some trouble with that song. Something about the copyright, etc.
Anyone can download it on Itunes. I wonder did he mean something different.
Baba says something in "Does Death Really Exist?" about people dying in groups. He says something like people have karmic associations and it causes them to die at the same time and sometimes the same place. I think that's what he says. You can buy the book or maybe get it at a library if you need to know exactly. On that note, isn't it interesting that Art Buchwald just died? What a wonderful funny man he was. I loved his columns back in the 60's when the war and other hypocrisies were relevant.
God Bless You, Art! Om Namah Shivaya!

ed71 Blog Number 2
I feel schizophrenic with these 2 blogs. Over at the other one I am talking about the passing of my mother.
I've got some pictures there, easier to post than here.
If you read the Blog, or if you know me personally, you most likely know mom suffered a catastrophic stroke in the wee morning hours of December 16, 2006 and she died on January 12, 2007.
I believe death is an inner journey. The death of a spiritual master in India is called mahasamadhi which means great samadhi or liberation.
In the Urantia Book it is explained that one sows a mortal body and reaps a morontia form.
I believe in an afterlife.

Eddie's
I just spent a couple to 3 hours on my web page.
I had a devil of a time with Page2
Hope you'll take a look. Probably doesn't look good in Internet Explorer. That's always a bum!
Whatever browser you use I hope you'll enjoy the new colors, new links, new text and link changes.
Ed3000, under my picture, is a link to DemocraticMatch.com which is where I am trying to meet somebody to love.

Brown Easily Defeats Opponent to Become AG
Did you know Jerry Brown is the new Attorney General in California? I wasn't sure he won, but he did!

Max Lucado, the official site
I started reading a very old book that mom had on one of the endtables next to the couch. It's by Max Lucado. This one is about Christ's second toughest day, the day when John the Baptist died and Jesus was followed up the mountain by thousands.
There is a wonderful little story he tells in the foreword, I think, about a parakeet who got sucked up into a vacuum cleaner. It's owner was cleaning out the cage with a vacuum cleaner and got a phone call. She put the vacuum cleaner hose down on the floor to go get the call and the poor parakeet was sucked in. The owner fetched the poor parakeet out of the vacuum and it was covered with dust and dirt so she cleaned the parakeet under some cold water and when she saw the parakeet silent and shivering she got her hair blower and used it to blow the parakeet dry.
She mentions that it does not sing on its perch anymore but just sort of stares out blankly. Lucado understands that, that it's hard to sing when you've been put through the ringer like that.
It is this point that he's trying to bring home in his book, that Jesus knows what it's like to be mortal, a point that is also made in the Urantia Book. The name of Lucado's book is "The Eye of the Storm."
I have found it gets really hard to visit mom. I am going only once a day now. I am trying to see her twice, but I am so tired right now. She is tired, and I think I have picked this up from her. Of course I have not been through the ordeal she has, still sometimes I feel like it's more her comforting me when I visit than the other way around.
I reflect on mom's independance at those times and of my own experience away from mom. Still it is not the same when your mom suffers a stroke as when you are nineteen and hitching around the country. I miss her being here and I don't mean because the laundry is such a chore or that business affairs confound me. She was a cheerful presence and an enduring support. I hope she makes a full recovery despite the doctor's diagnoses.

Ram Dass Satsang
Alfio Sugaroni at Ram Dass Satsang's Discussion Board in the topic of Growing from Suffering said this:

on a lighter note......
I were just sent this,

" My Wish for You all in 2007

May peace break into your house and may thieves come to steal your debts. May the pockets of your jeans become a magnet for $100 bills. May love stick to your face like Vaseline and may laughter assault your lips! May your clothes smell of success like smoking tires and may happiness slap you across the face and may your tears be that of joy. May the problems you had forget your home address! In simple words ............

May 2007 be the best year of your life!!!"

An Inconvenient Truth
"An Inconvenient Truth" is now on PPV for all those who like to buy them and save them to their TiVo.
I watched about half of it. It's quite a serious situation that we shouldn't ignore.

StrokeFamily.org: Speech - Aphasia Recovery Kits for adults.
I was disappointed today though to hear the case manager say that my mom had made no progress and they were going to release her to me or to another hospital where they deal with more severe cases. Acute Therapy Hospital they call it.

I'm very sad about it.

I have so much to think about. It appears I'm going to have to hire someone to take care of her although I thought I would be her home care and I already live on food stamps thanks to the hospital visits I have made that ran up some big expenses although I was given breaks due to my indigent status. Just can't/couldn't find work. Now, I don't know if I apply to be her home care provider with the SocialSecurity office or if I hire someone and get a job (which I am not able to do from my experience, anyway). I'm so sad.

Wachovia - Personal Finance and Business Financial Services
When mom had her stroke she fell off the bed whose surface is a full 28 inches from the floor. Until a few days ago no one realized mom had dislocated her shoulder.
They have her arm in a sling at the Therapy Hospital. It does affect her progress some. I guess it is a little fortunate that it is her right shoulder since she can't use most of what's on her right side. The hospital is calling this "weakness" on her right side.
She can't see, can't chew can't walk, can't write with that right side. I think maybe she can't hear either.
All of her food has been pureed and her drinks thickened as there is a difficulty with her swallowing. Today for the first time she had something resembling normal food in a bowl of clam chowder. I don't know if she didn't eat all of it on principle, you know she is a vegetarian, but she did eat some which was good enough for me. I have often seen her eat some chicken and some fish. We have occassionally had real beef hot dogs together so I didn't see much harm in the clam chowder. It is a terribly boring diet they have her on. Any of you who have been in the hospital know what uncreative dining you can experience there.
I push mom's chair a lot since I've been going in the morning and trying to get in on the therapy sessions. I am working hard on the "transfers" where I must get mom out of her chair to another sitting place or from that sitting place to her chair.
There has been a lot of enthusiasm about her ability to stand but then others say that she is not standing. They are trying but it really exhausts mom to get up on her feet - and stand up straight. Sitting up straight without a back support is also difficult. One therapist said that one victim of a strok who had recovered said she had never been so exhausted in all her life and she said "just think, you have all of that weight to drag around." Yeah, and so many things to learn to do another way.
There are some real perky little nurses around there and they all seem to love mom. There seems to be no end to the word sweet when it comes to mom. They love her berets and expressions on her face. One therapist is realizing that when mom says "Oh, boy," it is because she is scared. Mom is always saying it when mom is being transferred to the right where mom cannot see a thing, nor of course use any of her body.
The Case Manager is talking about me being prepared to take care of mom and I have some trouble with that. Mom needs to be dressed and bathed and have her toilet habits taken care of for her at this point. I was watching a video of Ram Dass and Dr. Wayne Dyer at RamDass.org and I understand that Ram Dass did this for his parents. It was something spiritual Ram Dass said. Dr. Dyer said it was being like God. We know so little about either of these terms to paraphrase the Forward of the Urantia Book.
Yes, so the getting out time is up in the air. Mom could go to another place beyond this called Acute Therapy. I know it would be trying for her, but her Medicare would pay for it up to 100 days. How long she stays there depends though on how much progress she makes. All of her therapists at this hospital say she is making progress. I know however how difficult it is to stay at a hospital. I had a heart attack in 2004 and just this year I was in the hospital for 2 weeks when I had pneumonia with pleurisy. It was tough staying in the hospital and I always wanted to get out before the doctors let me, but a stroke is something different and mom has had a "huge" stroke as one therapist put it.

Last Exit to Brooklyn
Has anybody ever seen Last Exit to Brooklyn? There is a gay character, actually a couple if you include the union guy who is sleeping with a boy, and he is beaten to death by his own brother.
It really makes you think.
What rights do other family members have over you?

Ed71 Blog Number 2
I have a nice new picture of my mom at my 360 Blog which I've linked above.

Eddie's
I've been sitting here thinking about mom. She was very frugal. Being married to whom she was married forced her to be that way. I am now taking care of the bills since mom is in Therapy Hospital with a "brain attack," which I have read is what many authorities are calling a strok these days.
As I was considering cutting back on some expenses it came to mind how mom spent money on me when I was young. The food was no question, I could have whatever food I wanted, or had ever heard about, and I was taken to the city often and to The World's Fair when it occurred on Long Island. Mom often took me to work with her and I enjoyed that. But, I think the biggest disappointment must have been in the toy department. Toys were something like clothes. I didn't know much about clothes and I wanted to look like the movie stars and rock singers. Still, eating whatever I liked it was hard for me to pull off an Elvis Presley look. The problem with toys were sometimes they didn't work right and mom just didn't have the time to take them back or get them fixed. I had a BB gun that was impossible to cock and a train set whose trains couldn't get through the tunnel. I had a big Schwinn Ten Speed that I just barely reached the peddles of. She was good with baseball gloves, though. She brought me to the store and let me pick them out. Yes, I often picked out the presents but they often just weren't the thing.

Above, you see my friend Rod Ecker on the bike and me holding it up. Rod couldn't reach the peddles.

I remember when I wanted a guitar. An electric guitar. I had to take lessons and when I got so far the school had guitars for me to buy. Well, when I began the lessons I was a go getter. In the first week I practiced more than an hour every day and when the guitar instructor asked how long did I study last week I said "an hour." The teacher flew into a rage and said students had to practice longer than that. I never got to correct him and I never practiced very hard on the guitar anymore. I used to lie to the guitar teacher about how much I practiced because they had these little sculptures of the great composers beginning with Brahms and escalating to Beethoven and Mozart. My lies bought me the Brahms, but I never got to learn the guitar very well. I found the strings very hard on my finger tips and was always conscious of the teacher's serious warning about the bridge. I could ruin the whole $365 guitar by messing with that bridge.
Isn't it something how people's dreams can be taken advantage of? I wanted to be a rock star and all mom could find was an italian orchestra leader.
Well, my father had a serious drinking problem and many health issues. He was a foreman in the railroad. Mom worked in the railroad too, but on the inside. She was a kind of clerk. One of her last jobs was as a dispatcher in the engine house. She kept track of which trains came in and which went out. At one time she handled payroll, but I think that was long before dispatch.

Ram Dass Online
My mom had a stroke on Saturday. This struck me as especially strange because I had just joined Ram Dass Online and became a registered user.
You know of course that Ram Dass had a stroke and continues to recover today in Maui.
Here is a quote from the Discussion Board in a topic called "suffering".

12/15/2006 4:05 AM
Hello Everyone

This is a huge topic. I am very interested in it because I work with suffering everyday. I remember Ram Dass saying many times "When one of us suffers we all suffer." This is so true. I am a psychotherapist and treat mainly people who have been traumatized, either in the past or present. Although I have had my personal share of suffering, mostly emotional, and have grown from so much from it......the suffering of others has opened my heart to deeper levels of compassion and awareness. I have been learning how to let go of my attachment to their healing....but at the same time give them everything I have to help them heal. I have to continually remind myself that each person has their own soulpath and I am not in charge of it. It is hard because I remember Ram Dass saying often "When one of us suffers, we all suffer"...and I really don't want to see anyone suffer.....this is where I am still attached. I feel like my heart breaks every single day. Ram Dass also has said "Learn how to balance compassion and dispassion". These have been tall orders, but very valuable in helping me do this kind of work. Keeping my heart open to the suffering and at the same time being "awareness" in the midst of the suffering is a challenge. But when I am able to be in that place, something else takes over and we are both enveloped in Maharajii's love. I know that the more that I can "be" with suffering (my own or others...it is all the same) the more I expand and therefore the more I open to the love that is ever present I move beyond being the doer and everything is done.

Namaste,

Mary Jo

Freeloaders shouldn't get our tax money!
Letters like the one in the link above really drive me crazy.
Here is the letter I sent the Sun in response.

By they way there is something new at my Yahoo!360 blog. The Yahoo blog is a really great thing but I've gotten used to my Pitas so I do most of my blogging here. If you want a blogging page that's easy to use go to Yahoo!360

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-zZa.OdM0f6R58W0FrotIn7Un;_ylt=AnujU5EClD1sY837ldBYvZW0AOJ3

You can copy and paste the link above or you just click on a link further down this page for Ed71 Blog Number 2.

Editor, Sun; After reading Ray Jordan's letter in Voice of the People I reread a column by Barbara Ehrenreich in "The Progressive" called "Shaming the Victims."
Ms. Ehrenreich, who wrote a popular book called "Nickeled and Dimed," mentions that something similar to a woman who brings charges of rape and is punished for adultery “goes on in the case of the laid off and unemployed, thanks to the prevailing Calvinist form of Protestantism, according to which productivity and employment are the source of one's identity as well as one's income."
She mentions a whole industry has sprung up to reinforce the shame of those who are unemployed, including "career coaches, self-help books, motivational speakers, and business gurus who preach that whatever happens to you must be a result of your wrong attitude."
After graduating Santa Fe Community College I found practically no employment. I was forced to live with my parents and received the help of The Alachua County Mental Health Clinic and Vocational Rehabilitation. I was still young but I needed those things because I was unwilling to conform to the short haired, tie wearing spirit businesses told me I had to. Almost twenty years later I found myself going back to school to gain a working skill that Mr. Jordan seems to be so sure leads to a job. I completed a Certificate in Business Data Processing and for a while, as part of my financial aid I had a job. But after I resigned from that position there was no more work. I have applied, but the work simply is not there.
I got sick recently and because I couldn't pay my bills I got food stamps. I am a person in need, Mr. Jordan, not a freeloader.

Go Beg for a Club, Whitey!
Of course the name of that link isn't go beg for a club, but I am having a problem with the fitness center I belong to.
It was just a few months ago that I began to reap the financial benefits of their V.I.P. membership. For 2 years I paid a little over $50 a month to belong and last August it became a trifle over $30.
I don't do much at the club but workout. I do the line and the treadmills and the bikes and I like the aquatic center. I also like to shoot a few baskets, they have a court. I don't go to classes like pilates or yoga or whatever they have there. I find them a bit uppercrust and without much of a sense of humor about the shape we are in. I found them to push, push, push. I don't like that but I thought I had found santuary in the open all night on weekdays option of this Gym. In the overnight there are no fit young men and women who wish to get you through the line quickly and give you advice, or is it orders on how you should use the equipment. I don't have to bark out how many "reps" I've done after each machine and get more advice about how much weight I should put on that machine.
I am there because I had a heart attack in 2004. I had been meaning to get to a gym sooner but the heart thing got me first. (The Heart thing, that's another story). The girl who signed me up there thought I could do 3 days a week, but I was never able to. You see they have a try out session for 21 days where you pay nothing and try the gym. If you don't like it you don't have to pay. I don't know if that's free or if you pay and get a refund. I forgot. It was over 2 years ago.
I have met all kinds of people since I have been there. You may have read in this BLOG! about Larry who appears to weigh about 500 lbs and uses just the Aquatic Center mostly. He is a "good ol' boy," born and raised in the south and he can bore you with stories about Elvis and so on. He really bends your ear and some others there who have made his acquaintance will tell you the same. I do try to avoid Larry. There are many people there but one currently is really bothering me. She checks us in at night on weeknights. She doesn't wear a name tag so I don't know her name, but recently she mentioned mine. She is somewhere between Condoleeza Rice and Bobby Seale. Yes, she is black,,, and apparently proud and not very friendly. She seems to have a problem with white people.
This black woman, the Desk Girl, you might think of them as receptionists but of course they are not taking phone calls etc., but just checking people in and being cordial when they come and go. There have been others at this position, very nice folks and there have been those who are just filling in because it's not really there position. But this girl seems to aim when I come through the door. She doesn't play that game of "smile" for the customer and she seems to have something against me personally. Of course she is onlly the desk girl but when a song like "She's a Man Eater" comes out over the loudspeaker I would have to think of her because she is really eating me.
The girl before her, Mandy, was a young girl, maybe 21 and very sweet. There have been a lot of young girls and I have had my unvirtuos thoughts about them. And before Mandy there was a fellow name Jean. Tall and black, Jean was a cordial person to check you in.
Well, the last night I was there this woman, she is about my age, called me by my name when I came in. Gee, I thought to myself, is she softening up, becoming nice? So when I left at night I was saying the common have a good night and she just wasn't there for it. It seemed to bother her that this was part of her work description. I say it's the work description because everyone who has worked the desk has always wanted to catch me going out and give it the Good Day! kind of thing. What this woman said to me kind of played with my mind. Not really so much what she said because you can play with the meanings of words but how she said it. She wasn't happy to have to give me the smile and wave and was in no position to do it. She doesn't seem to care to do it, but she said in a kind of nasty disinterested way BYE!
Have you seen that movie "Crash?" It won the Academy Award last year and there is a character in the movie called Shawtiqua or something like that. She couldn't give Matt Dillon's father the money he needed for a possible prostate operation. She was in insurance. She had a very nasty tone. There is that, and then there is also a touch of BISEXUAL!
I've encountered a lot of black people who really hate Gays, Bisexuals and Lesbians and I got all of that from this "woman." It was like she was letting me know that she knew I was bisexual.
WHAT GOD DAMNED BUSINESS IS THAT OF HERS?!!!
So now I am not going to the club at night because I don't need this confrontation. I am thinking of changing clubs too because I have emailed GHFC and they have not responded to me in 2 days.
Meanwhile I am just fuming in my bed over black attitudes.

Conversations with God
Reading about Jim Davis and his 2000 presidential election vote, I began to think about Charlie Crist and his religious associations. You know one evangelical has been accused of paying a gay man for sex. He admits to buying methamphetamine from the man and has resigned from the church, but denies the sex.
If you google Crist's religion you'll get an article about Crist's support among evangelicals, or right wing christians. Calling Charlie a social moderate, they say he still has great support among conservative christians. Sounds something like that book I've been hearing of where the Bush White House laughs at these ideologues privately while publicly putting on the show.
I don't believe Crist is any social moderate. In fact I think his only appeal is to the radically right christians now trying to appear moderate as Bush's numbers go down and the war becomes more obviously the fiasco that it is. This is no time to tell people how you tried to "save" Terry Schiavo or "reform" social security. Crist lies about his role in the Schiavo ordeal.
Now they talk about Jim Davis's vote. Clearly there is some computer hacking going on if you can't find the vote of a congressman in 2000 who actually campaigned with the Democratic nominee. It may be of some note to some of you that HBO is showing a film called "Hacking Democracy" about the goings on in Ohio in 2004. Diebold is suing to get them to not show the show. Mom and I saw a bit of it this afternoon.
Nothing is being said in the Gainesville Sun about Crist being divorced.
This is such an issue to me because my mom suffered a difficult divorce and I think it swore her off of the thing for life. As badly as we all thought of dad, mom would never divorce him. My Aunt Sally, though, divorced dad's brother in the 70's. It was a shocking thing to me. I wondered if people (in the family) were watching me for some reaction as my disagreement with my father was quite renown.
My father was divorced too and no doubt that had something to do with their relationship in the first place. He had a son by his first marriage and mom had a son (and a daughter). But mom was catholic and dad was a mason (a freemason, an order that does not admit catholics due to its historical difficulties with the catholic church). The catholic church which still does not condone abortion, nor the pill and at the time of mom's divorce, did not condone it. The penalty for divorce by the Holy and Apostolic Catholic Church was excommunication. I don't know where the church is on this issue now, but I do know of divorce's reputation as the most woeful and difficult of all periods in a human beings life, be they male or female. Just listen to that hideous country song D-I-V-O-R-C-E. I even wonder if the Bohemian idea of living together without the benefit of marriage was more to avoid the woeful reality of divorce than of marriage.

Dr. Nice Vs. Mean Jean
I'm hoping to wave a sign in Melrose, Monday and Tuesday, maybe Sunday for Jim Davis and the Democrats.
If you would like to wave a sign too you can contact me at eddiebryan@alltel.net or Michelle Ott at cmeeott@netscape.net
Hope you will find the article on a campaign in Ohio interesting.

St. Petersburgh Times
I found the link above when I was trying to find the quote from Charlie Crist at the debate when he answered a sensitive question on gay marriage. Included in Crist's reply was a mention of his divorce so I googled Crist's Divorce and the above article is what I got.
If you read it you will find out that the question of Crist's sexual orientation occurred back in primary season when Crist was battling Tom Gallagher among others for the Republican nomination.
Crist gay?!!! That was before all the shit about Rep. Mark Foley, R-FL. As you know Foley was in charge of investigating the perverts on the Internet who sought out children to fulfill their sexual fantasies. As I am sure you also know, it was known for quite a while that Foley was exploiting young folks himself, albeit not children as at least one of them was on the precipice of young adulthood at 17. Still for a man in his forties, I think, and another male, it is quite a scandal and Foley had to resign his seat. The thing is he "appeared" to be a paragon of virtue for so long.
Could this be the truth about Charlie?
And then there was the Governor of New Jersey who had to step down stating that he was Gay Identified. He was married, unlike Crist, who was married for 7 months in 1979 before becoming divorced according to the article linked.
Of course Charlie has a lot of things wrong with him besides the fact that he may be gay and not know it. Even Jeb Bush rejects his tax plan. You might find out more about his plan at the addresses I've linked in previous posts, namely, http://www.jimdavis2006.com/. I hope you will study that closely because it's very important.
And just imagine the killing you could make on Hurricane Insurance in Florida. Hurricanes are common down here and they seem to be getting worse. Charlie Crist supported a bill that passed the Republican state legislature (and denies it now) that would allow Insurers to raise rates indiscriminately.
I didn't see either of the two debates the candidates had, but I read about them at Davis' website. There was a link to a St. Petersburgh Times story on it and they pointed out the comment by Crist about his divorce. I didn't know Crist was divorced until then. That is, it didn't hit home.
He is also not a homeowner.
My mom has been complaining about the property tax for quite a few years now. Boy, she has it in for Von Frasor, our tax assessor, but she really should have it in for the trickery of little brother Jeb. He has taken the burden off of the big and put it on the little. Local communities have to pay for unfunded projects which raises your property tax. These projects aren't funded because of little brother Jeb Bush's tax cuts.
Please vote for Jim Davis by, or on Nov. 7.

The War Room
Saw this at Mother Jones.

The Republican National Committee's porn problem

There's a moment in the Republican National Committee's Harold Ford Jr. attack ad -- it comes smack-dab in the middle of the two bimbo eruptions -- when a sleazy-looking fellow eyes the camera from behind his sunglasses and says, "So he took money from porn movie producers. I mean, who hasn't?"

Who hasn't? Well, it turns out that the RNC has. As Josh Marshall reports, the RNC has accepted a number of campaign contributions from Nicholas T. Boyias, whom Marshall describes as the owner and CEO of one of the largest producers and distributors of gay porn in the United States.

Now, surely there must be a difference between the porn money Ford took and the porn money the RNC is taking, right? There is: Ford gave his back.

The line in the RNC's anti-Ford ad is apparently based on the fact that Ford's campaign took $3,600 in contributions from executives at five "adult entertainment broadcast companies." The Ford campaign returned the contributions as soon as Gannett News Service brought the nature of them to the campaign's attention, saying that taking the money "doesn't meet our standards and is not in tune with Tennessee values."

So far as we can tell, the RNC hasn't returned the contributions that it received from Boyias, which leads us to this question: Will Bob Corker now say about the RNC what he once said about Ford --- that porn contributions are "further proof" of the dangers of taking money from people "outside of Tennessee who don't share our values"?

-- Tim Grieve

Jim Davis for Governor, Florida
Here we go. A week from today!
Boy! I got an e-mail from Rosemarie Clouston in Gainesville about the campaign. I told her I helped in 2004 in the Kerry campaign and before that in the McBride campaign against Jeb Bush. I have seen a little of the campaigning. I told her I didn't really want to do canvassing or phone banking and she was real nice about it, but I don't know where the headquarters are. I've e-mailed her several times but she has been unable to get back to me. I guess it is really busy there.
Here is her e-mail.
Eddie,

Thank you very much for your offer to help. Here in Gainesville we are focusing on making phone calls to Democrats and reminding them to vote. We do that every night of the week and pretty much all day Sat., Nov. 4 - Tues., Nov. 7. However, I understand that if you do not want to make phone calls, we also need people to enter data in the evenings if you are available in the late evenings (8 p.m. - 10 p.m. or so), wave signs at heavy commute times (7-9 a.m., 11:30 a.m. , and others to help donate food for our volunteers close to the election (any day between Sat., Nov. 4 and Tues., Nov. 7).

Please let me know if any of these things interest you and what your time availability is. Thanks for your support and interest.

--
Rosemarie Clouston
Jim Davis for Governor
(773) 807-3152
rclouston@jimdavis2006.com
www.jimdavis2006.com

Letter to the Editor on milk.
I got so upset when I read this letter. You see I like organic low fat milk and cheese, too.
I was very upset not that I was impressed with the Sun's article, but because I have read organic milk put down by the Union of Concerned Scientists and this after reading all the shit about the Center for Science in the Public Interest suing Quorn concerning the packaging of their product which is mycoprotein. CSPI says Quorn claims the mycoprotein is mushrooms. Well, it doesn't. Quorn states on its packages that mycoprotein is a fungi. It further states that shrooms are a fungi in case you didn't know what fungi is and offers some additional, to my recollection examples of fungi.
CSPI says it is "very sensitive" about these products that "people", it doesn't state outright "vegetarians" use to replace meat. If you are looking for a vegetarian health newsletter don't look to CSPI's Nutrition and Health Newsletter because they are big on chicken and lean meats and fish.
I've also been upset with the slamming of John Kerry at Salon.com. Apparently there is a good slam going around that Kerry should give some of the money from his presidential campaign to help the democrats win here in 2006. I don't think they remember how hard it was for Kerry to raise that money. They don't, or maybe they do, really do, remember the campaign that Gov. Dean ran and how he gave up matching funds and so Kerry gave up matching funds. I do remember how Kerry had to mortgage his home and I feel by convention time instead of helping Kerry with his idea that he shouldn't accept the nomination until August when Bush was nominated and so adding to his treasure chest they just laid back in front of their TV sets and looked at the Kerry win and said oh "what a fuck!" They hated hime then and they hate him now. He's to blame for the damn war, him and his vote, but Howard Dean wasn't in the senate to cast a vote so it's easy for him to say what he would have done at the time.

Jim Davis for Governor
I got an interesting e-mail from the Davis campaign. It had three questions on it and they suggested you give to the campaign if you could answer one question, give the same amount again if you could answer a second question and give again if you could ask the third and final question.

First question was, "Do you know who represents you?"
Why of course, I said, but the Davis campaign wanted you to know that Charlie Crist claimed that Jim Davis was his representative. They happened to know the district that Crist lived in and a fellow named Bill Young was the representative for that district and had been since 1970, before Crist was old enough to vote.
I gave the campaign $10 for that.
Next question, and I'm not sure this was the order of the questions but just the ones that astonish me most, was "Do you know when the FCATs are given?"
The said Charlie Crist was commissioner of education and yet in August of this year he was asked this question and he said he didn't know. Honestly, I didn't know either although I am against the importance the tests have in giving our schools money. I think the tests also have something to do with students advancement and I am against that, too. I was plagued with some tests in New York called the State Regents. I never passed a one of them even though all my classes were, like these FCATs, designed to help me pass them. I was told I would not get into college unless I did.
So I saved $10 there, but the next one was about the Homestead Exemption and I was supposed to give another $10 if I just knew what it was. I knew that my mother received it on her property tax, but I don't know exactly why. Her house is valued at a certain value and then the Homestead Exemption kicks in and it is taxed at a percentage less than its value which saves ordinary homeowners a bit of money on their property tax. Property taxes help pay school bonds and library needs, as well as som e other things I recall like law enforcement.
But they were taking Charles Crist to task for not knowing that his condominium owner could not take homestead exemption on 2 properties, but only the one he lived in. Charlie Crist was Attorney General and they expected him to know something like that, but he had to ask a reporter if that was true, that his landlord couldn't take advantage of the Homestead Exemption on his second property.
I figured since I didn't know the detail of Homestead Exemption and didn't actually pay the tax myself, my mom pays it, I should only give $5 for that.
So, I gave the Davis for Governor campaign $15. What did you give?

Maytag
Well, the Yankees lost and mom is really sad about that. She's especially sad about the toodo surrounding Arod. I know it's the nature of the beast though. Anything to beat the other guy!!!

Do you remember the old commercial about the Maytag appliances that needed no repair. Remember the Lonely Maytag guy? Well, yes, I know he died, but I have 2 Maytag appliances that have been a problem, actually, for a few years now, the Range and the Dishwasher.
The fellow who sold us the things is a nice fellow but he suffering from a serious illness that has caused him to retire from regular business. He helps mom sometimes because his father and dad used to share notes on their glaucoma. He is one of the Chiappinis from the corner gas station Chiappinis, but it doesn't matter.
The range only has 2 burners that work and one of them only works on high. It no longer cleans itself and there is no oven light. The timer and bell no longer work, although the light for the pre-heat seems to function. Luckily we have a Microwave/Convection oven that does a lot of the work.
The diswasher is newer, but there is a leak in the door and we have to put paper towels down when we run it. I guess merely replacing the door could make it what it used to be. It doesn't get the dishes very clean anymore. The glasses and silver ware often look pretty dingy.
My house is starting to remind me of old student housing. The students I knew rented the cheaper house. I don't know any students anymore which is another thing.
Well, very glad the Gators won even if the Yankees lost. I hope they'll win 'em all, of course and they just might. But don't get overconfident. That's what happened to the Yankees I think. They could have used Wang on the last day, and I didn't think they needed those guys who had been injured all year. Those guys should have been strictly pinch hitters like old Rubin Sierra used to be. Although Rubin was criticized for asking if winning was everything, I thought he was a good guy and that his question was only related to the pressure.

I wonder why it is Joe Torre stops running in the post season. Way back when he had Soriano he could have run a whole lot more. The Yankees didn't steal a single base against Detroit, although when they played during the regular season they showed Ivan Rodriguez wasn't what he used to be by stealing on him. The stealing and hit and running are what gave the Yankees the best record in the American League. Why did Mr. Torre, as Derek Jeter likes to call him, stop running?

Shrimad Bhagavatam Online
I just had to go here today, to this Krsna Consciousness inspired site because of the pro-war column of David Brooks of the NY Times.
I didn't even read the column. I tried. The title spoke volumns. Well actually the link that led to the column. It said "Withdrawal Folly." So you knew. More blood, more guts and more money!
You know, we got into this war over lies about Saddam Hussein's developing a nuclear weapon and now we are continuing it with lies about our love of the Iraqi people. I assume it's love when you sacrifice nearly 3,000 of the armed service people. And I have to laugh. I don't love Iraq. If there is a country I could say I have been loving it would be India. India, where Gurumayi and Baba come from. India, where Krishna lived and performed his pastimes. India, where so many religions come together. India, where Ram Dass went as an acid freak and came back as a spiritual philosopher.
What a bunch of bullshit that we love this Muslim nation. Do you see many Muslims here in America. How many famous Muslims do you know? I did know Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, but then his religion Sufism would not be what our corporate news would be so happy to introduce to you, to teach you about, because its vegetarian I guess, and it believes in reincarnation.

A Sovereign Iraq
Strange thing I read at "The Nation," a politically inspired magazine.
Why not let Iraqis vote on our presence in Iraq?
According to recent polls most Iraqis think we are more hindrance than help there.

Lost or Found Cats and Dogs

by starman217
This is a picture of my cat who was left at my property a few years ago.
She bites and scratches so if your at my house and you think you want to pet "Cat", think twice.

The Progressive Magazine
Speaking of hot weather here are some photos from Hawaii over at Webshots. Download them free!


by penners2000

The American Prospect
I lost a little weight last weekend by cutting off the air conditioning. By Monday mom needed it to be put back on, but I weighed myself at the gym and I had lost 4 lbs. doing the little things around the house like watering the lawn and vacuuming the carpet.
I had been concerned about my weight since I had gone up to 240 lbs., actually 239.6 according to the scale at GHFC. But after my weekend of no AC, I was down to 234.
I often take a sauna or a steambath at the gym, but no AC accomplished 2 tasks, letting me lose a few pounds and lowering my electic bill. Mom could appreciate the fact that we were lowering our electric bill, but she just couldn't take it after a few days. It was odd because usually mom doesn't like the air conditioning. I guess it's a question of extremes. Too hot, too cold.

A new American Prospect is out and I invite you to take a gander by clicking on the link above. It hasn't arrived in my mailbox yet, but I am able to read it online. There is a very funny article there about homework. There is some question about the importance of homework in the learning process.I guess they include those god damned projects and term papers we often had to do among homework assignment. Nothing like remembering the paper(s) your supposed to write while the family celebrates Christmas and New Years, or during Thanksgiving and Easter. The most stressful time for me was when a teacher wanted homework or an answer that involved the homework assignment we were supposed to do. The common thing was to pretend you were thinking while the teacher waited in angry anticipation. I like to blame pressure from above for the unfortunate dispositions of our teachers at times. Their freedom is limited.

Keith Ohberman's Countdown
I really enjoyed Keith Ohberman's comments on 9/11 and he has a clip you can download and watch if you have all the software. That would include Firefox 1.5.0.7, Flash Macromedia and now apparently I.E. 7.0.
Well, Countdown is on "MS" (Microsoft) NBC after all, isn't it?
If you can scroll down to the videos and see if you can open up "The Hole in the Ground." It's about Ground Zero and the monument that is still not built there.
Keith writes eloquently and passionately about the monument that is still not built there and that the Governor of New York has said will not be free to visit, despite the vote of the New York State Legislature to have it otherwise.
Good Night and Good Luck!

ed 71 Blog Number 2
Hey, I got a picture for you over at the Yahoo! Blog.
Picture and a story about a knife! Nothing creative, just gabbing about the days' goings ons.
I wrote a letter to the Sun about Rep. Clifford Stearns, a staunch supporter of everything Bush including the war and stopping stem cell research. I urged people to vote for the Democratic Candidat Dave Bruderly whose page you will find at http://www.bruderly.com. He has an enlightened view of the kind of legislation we need to stop these oil companies from running the world. I have found his site an interesting read. You know I don't usually read such things, but I am starting to believe that people need to wake up and not go to the polls in a sleep walk. We have decided we want to get off of these fossil fuels and our dependance on the Middle East so lets go to the polls and elect representatives who will vote for alternative energy fuels.
There is no shame in that! No one is going to call you a coward or a traitor for voting for Dave. So, I wrote a few letters and I posted to Salon's Discussion Board in Politics to tell people about this contest in North Central Florida. Stearns is trying to fly under the radar here. He has gotten support from the Gainesville Sun in the past and I wrote the paper about that. Isn't it time the Sun, a renown liberal newspaper support someone who will fight for alternative energy. Why just recently I saw an ad for a movie called "Who Killed the Electric Car?" Oh, yeah, that's right, it was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. A liberal newspaper supporting a Bush rubber stamp has to be among those who get some blame for the death of that car.
That's all for now folks. I hope you will go over to my Yahoo! Blog, that's ed71 Blog Number 2 and take a look at the knife that caused me and mom so much distress. Just click the link above! Oh, yeah, you know.
You can also check out the Stearns record of votes at http://www.house.gov/stearns/

Harlem Angel
Check out the sweet girl posing at Nerve currently. She is called a country girl in Harlem. A lot of the country girls here where I live are Afro-American too.

I've been getting a magazine called The Progressive and you might want to get it too. They have an online site that will probably want you to subscribe to the paper version. I have visited online much, but in this month's there is a story about cuts in Medicaid called Losing Medicaid, that you really ought to check out.
There is also a beautiful flash program made by TruthBook at http://www.truthbook.com/flash/YoullNeverWalkAlone/Youll_Never_Walk_Alone.html
I've sent the page to some friends and at least one was really impressed by it. I sent him a message today about some reading I did this morning refreshing me on some of the book. I read Jeremiah the Fearless and The Lucifer Rebellion. You can look them up with TruthBook's search engine pretty easily, but I recommend getting a book and Clyde Bedell's Concordance to the Urantia Book.

Ivory Snow, the name you trust
Mom is fond of Ivory Snow for Gentle Fabrics. I think it is just fine for some of my shirts and a pair of chi pants I have, but I don't think it was intended to be used on everything.
She disagrees.
I checked out the price per ounce at the supermarket when I was buying it. I do most of the shopping, you know, which I was thankful for at first because I could buy all kinds of things I wanted, but now I see mom has almost completely dropped out of going to the market. She doesn't even drive and when she does go she goes with this old conservative man and they buy all kinds of meat products that jam up the freezer. Without a job shopping seemed like a neat thing at first, but now it has become a chore especially since I see the things I like aren't mom's cup of tea.
Mom actually acts like a crazy old woman a lot of the time and I try to get out of the house when I can't stand it anymore. She makes hateful remarks about Bush, but it isn't that she's criticizing Bush so much as that it isn't very good criticism. She has never written a letter to a congressman or woman in her life and yet she sits in front of the TV and yells at it. I actually feel like she is mocking ME. It just doesn't sound like she doing anything but trying to impress me with her anti-Bushism.
So, Ivory Snow for Gentle Fabrics for everything.
Nobody has ever taught me how to wash my own clothes. I guess SOCIETY just wanted me to be dependant on women for that.

Web Shots
Last Saturday was my mom's birthday. She was 89.
Camilla, her oldest grand daughter, sent some Gladiolas and Chris, the other grand daughter, sent pictures of her babies.
Barbara, my big sister, called on Sunday.

Crash
I saw Crash night before last on SHOWTIME.
Very good movie. I liked the way it moved. I liked the way the director saw everything from the end to the beginning.
Not all of it, but of course some of it was very, very painful.
If you haven't seen it, you should.

gamer's experimentation
Have you heard about the president having gay sex in 1984?
It's not that people of his type can't do it. I've seen them at the bars, bragging about this and that.
I don't blame them; they love sex - but they are country!

OUT magazine
I wrote some things for BiCafe a few years ago and someone saw them and wishes he could read them again. Alas, they are lost somewhere, perhaps on a disk although I usually just keep programs and photos on those.
Especially intriguing to this person was the story of Marvin, a gay ballet teacher at the community college that cohabited the same city as our great 4 year university. Marvin was a slightly older man, black, tall and well built though not muscular. He was graceful wearing tight pants and a tee that was one of those that had no sleeves at all. I remember my daddy wore them on the hot summer days up north while he consumed Fleischman's Whiskey and cans of Ballantine Ale watching television and getting all the shut eye he could. He worked hard during the week and the weekends were special. But, I also remember these undershirts from the girl who stole my innocence. I know that's a terrible phrase but the one most often used to describe men's first sexual encounters. "Lost your cherry" just doesn't describe what happens to men.
Marvin was sitting at a bar on 13th Street, now known as Martin Luther King Avenue. This was one of the bars that served the drinks at their cheapest. In those days a drink was 50 cents. I sat next to Marvin being one who was proud that southern schools were desegregated and that black people were being given more and more of a break to succeed in a white world. Marvin was sitting with a friend and they were discussing what nowadays is called a business matter. Marvin had some pills, Valium, and he was sharing them with his friend. He offered me one and I took it.
I don't know how it came about but Marvin was going to a party that night and he didn't have a ride. I naturally offered to give him one and we both took off, late in the night down the road Tom Petty calls 441 to make it to the hot, hot party that Marvin was to go to. On the way there Marvin thought to give me a blow job.
It was right down 13th just getting past Norman Hall and about to take that right turn into Archer Road that Marvin unzipped my pants, a pair of baggy cuffs, I think, like Bowie introduced in '72 pulled my cock out and gave head.
It was great. I was up, but I never came and we arrived at the party at the Gator Apartments on Archer Road, a place I had never heard of whose name I made have wrong.
As we went up a fellow took our picture. I see this fellow around every now and then. I think he was very serious about photography. Marvin questioned whether I wanted my picture taken. He thought maybe I would like to hide this episode from the world, but I would have missed it for the world. This was like really Bowie and I had been listening to him for about 2 years by that time and wondering where all this hot action was. Tonigh, I thought I was going to see it.
The party started out all right. The girls, in their early twenties were really hot. Men too, had a mature appearance, undisturbed by the moralist and uninformed straight world who thought what they did was immoral and dangerous. Every one was smoking dope, a common occurrence in those days at parties and rock and roll music was playing although I don't remember the exact performers. I could tell that men had a bit of an attraction for each other and women, too. One spoke to me as I recall checking out how I was handling the whole thing. Usually drugs were on hand at apartment parties. I recognized the atmosphere as similar to some freshman and sophomore parties I had attended where ludes were handed out or there may be something else, like sex.
I had seldom had sex at the big drug parties at the college, but still I had high hopes to be party of a large bisexual orgy. I was a little innocent, a bit naive.
Marvin danced with a very attractive woman, a woman I would have delightedly gone to bed with. I wondered later on if I had made a mistake telling him I would take him home because I think he really had his eyes on this woman. He made some remark about going home with the one that brung you, not that southern but quite as moral as that and I didn't like it, but I brought him home anyway. Couldn't dump him out on the streets could I?
Where Marvin lived I'll keep a secret, but when we arrived at his place I was happy to see we would be alone.

Tomorrow, Chapter Two. The Night with Marvin

GrandmaBetty.com
Congratulations to Jonas and Christine. Happy Birth Day!
ON June 7th Chris gave birth to a 7 lb baby boy. They have named him Jasper Corcoran.

Shands at AGH appreciated
Since I wrote the letter in the URL above it is unlikely that my newspaper will print the one I just wrote in response to a Jake Fuller political cartoon so I will copy and paste it for you here.
Editor, Sun; Does Jake Fuller have difficulty with big words? He speaks of a democratic party with a psychotic hatred for George W. Bush, but does he know the meaning of psychotic? I remember President Kennedy. When I visited Florida while he was president I met many people with a psychotic hatred for him. The president had no problem with a car accident that resulted in a young woman’s fatality.
I find many people in this area have a problem with words. The most difficult words are like Muktananda or Om Namah Shivaya. They don’t know how to pronounce those words. You can instruct them and years later they will appear before you with the same learning difficulty. I suspect it isn’t a learning problem but a prejudice against India and perhaps against dark skinned people. I am neither Indian nor dark skinned but I feel the effects of their hatred. So when Jake Fuller says the democratic party has a psychotic hatred toward anybody, I naturally think of the hatred that people around here apparently feel for a person like Baba Muktananda whose only message to the world has been that God lives within you as you for you. They believe he doesn’t know God, not the God they know and apparently they are great knowers of God!
I’m sure Mr. Fuller doesn’t feel one way of the other about this fellow Baba Muktananda, whoever he is. Baba Muktananda came to America in 1975. He spoke at Raiford Prison I am told and I trust those who tell me this. He has spoken and written volumes about meditation and the experience of God and yet he is an unknown. Well, I know he isn’t an unknown and he is existence is only denied in order to cheat an argument and cheating an argument is what President Bush does in many subjects. So I suggest when Jake Fuller attempts to remove a speck from his brother’s eye he instead remove the log that is in his own.

Historical Home of Kerista Commune
Just found the little site above. If you have ever heard of Kerista Commune you may want to look into it.
I was feeling a little victimized by language this morning. Many women like to be called women, not girls, in any situation. Mom is different. Maybe being elderly has something to do with it.
And I am very familiar with the male attitude. They don't want to be called boys. I am more familiar now, at 53, what it means to be called a boy. They want you to go fetch. They expect obedience. But this problem of saying woman instead of girl was upsetting to me because it is a backwards thing, a very unfeminist thing, where "woman" is an object, a possession. My woman instead of my girl just comes accross as being really rude.
I reflected on this a while this afternoon while the Yankees were losing a game to the Indians. Naturally, I considered the opposite. I like to be fair and I wondered about calling a male person a man. The first thing that I thought of was "a mane." A southern accent always affects things. But, now think of saying a man friend. It isn't common. It adds a touch of the whore to the speech.
What's the problem? Maybe it's something psychological more than sociopolitical. I don't know.
Another passing thought this afternoon had to do with apartment living, that is getting an apartment as a youth. This was a big thing to me and something that eluded me. While I sometimes lived away from home it often didn't last very long and I had to return. My longest sojourn away from mom was probably when I travelled the country with my girl friend, who liked to be called a woman not a girl, during the summer of 1975. I had sort of lived with her in the spring before that summer. I was thinking this afternoon that maybe I had gotten confused over these apartments. Maybe I had confused these boys and girls over in Gainesville and my own friends from Hawthorne with my oldest brother, Billy, who lived in an apartment in Brooklyn in the 60's. Bill was in his late 20's then. Quite a difference from an 18 year old.
I have thought about the boys in the apartments before. I think I had even become jealous of them. There was a lot of talk about being on their own then. I didn't like that but thinking back I have to ask myself what was the big deal about having half a room. Really, the boys (and I assume the girls who lived in apartments (most often, instead of dorms) also), rented a bed, a kitchen and a bath, often sharing the latter two with others in their overpriced "luxury" apartments that took advantage of the fact that a large university attracted 20,000 students (in them days).
I really shouldn't have given so much weight to it. I had tried, sharing a room with my best friend Jack in the summer of '71, but I valued my privacy so much I found it difficult sharing a bedroom with another fellow. The wild partying going on didn't help much. I took plenty of drugs but I didn't get laid. I desperately made a girl friend of a 15 year old who lived in my parents neighborhood, Roxanne, but it was not a situation where I could have brought her to bed although I tried. Finally, it was the expense, about which my father would moan, that caused me to give up.
Living on my own could have changed me into a responsible conservative instead of the raving liberal/lefty I am today. Ain't that a shame? Think of all the money I would have now!

The Randi Rhodes Show Live
Well, I quit my Playboy subscription. The content is too contentless and I couldn't watch it with mom. Also, I missed all the premium movie channels I unsubscribed to in order to subscribe to PBTV.
You know, it's a graphic thing and you can only stand so much of that. There is little of it elsewhere, except in your mind.
They show phalluses and vaginas, close up, but without much art involved. Thing is, in a decadent Hollywood movie of our decadent age (according to right wing christians and political conservatives) you won't see those even in a bed scene. I think that's strange because when you do it you see it, if only for that brief period before coitus. Of course they make a big deal of it in pornography.
Bill Cosby once mentioned we have never seen an erect penis in a Hollywood movie. But we see it in pornography where all sentiment and intellectual depth are lost.
Mom and I last month viewed Brokeback Mountain and Good Night and Good Luck. We saw The Constant Gardener the month before that. She's been following The Sopranos too. I have Democracy NOW! The war and peace report, scheduled to record every day on the TiVo and she watches a lot of them. Also, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Mom's a big fan of Jon's and I think she wants to watch the Colbert Report but I don't like it so I don't record it. Colbert reminds me too much of the real thing.
Bush is real proud of assasinating (which no news show has called it) Al-Zarqawi, but you don't hear much about Haditha from him, do you? You know what he would say, something like there's an ongoing investigation. Wait til he bribes somebody to fix that and then he'll talk to you.
No indictment of Rove. Heard about that? Jon told me and of course I'm disappointed. Jon did some great work on Ken Mehlman of the Repbublican National Committee last night. I really enjoyed it.
And did you hear about the killing of a pregnant woman and her mother in-law? They were supposedly in a prohibited zone, but people there say there were no signs saying it was a prohibited zone until after the shooting. They had the husband on Democracy Now!
I'm having great fun with this coconut oil. I bought some virgin coconut oil from my friend Dave at Health Living (www.iam4healthyliving.com) and I've been frying Veat with it, nuggets and bites. I sprinkly a little black and red pepper on them and they are tasty. Also, I used a tablespoon of the virgin coconut oil with my bhasmati rice. I pour the tablespoon on to the bottom of the pot then I add the rice and stir it around until every grain has a little oil on it. This keeps the rice from sticking together. I've done it frequently with olive oil. The virgin cocunut oil has the cocunut taste to it that ordinary organic cocunut oil does not.
Gurumayi's birthday is on June 24th. Although I don't go to the meditation center very much I still use the mantra and have a lot of pictures. I just bought a DVD and a mala from the SYDA Bookstore. The DVD is called Wherever You Are, Attain the Self. Mom watched it with me. It's very good. Mom kept asking if that was Gurumayi in the video. The translator, yes, mom, the translator is Gurumayi. She was known as Malti then, 1981. God lives within you, as you. It's a great message. I would love to hear some of the liberal thinkers I read and listen to comment on it. I'm sure it's blashphemy to many. Muslims say God is in the Koran. I'm sure many chrisitians feel that way about the Bible. And so on and so forth, almost always in a book, not in us.

OmegaNutrition Coconut Oil
Hey, you fatties, have you heard about coconut oil?
It's the onlly saturated fat that doesn't clog your arteries, and it doesn't make you gain weight. In fact it gives you energy and helps you lose weight.
Read about it at my doctor's office, bought a 32 oz. jar of organic coconut oil at one of my favorite health food stores and I think I feel the difference.
You have to watch out though, in the beginning for softening of the stool. I've noticed that already. It's not as runny as I had feared, though.
So, just a little tip for you!

Urantia Book Search Page
They are discussing Gay marriage in the congress today. I don't know if it is the House of the Senate, but Randi Rhodes on Air America Radio played a number of clips of President Bush blaming the marriage situation in America on activist judges. Of course many things are to blame for the high rate of divorce these days.
Bush had a number of things to say about the blessing of marriage so I looked it up in the Urantia Book. You can go to the page listed above and after you click that you would like to read it in english (if you would), then you can type marriage in the search box and look up the Urantia Book entries on marriage.
I haven't read much of what I found but I did find this, under Marriage as a Societal Institution.
83:1.1 Marriage is society's mechanism designed to regulate and control those many human relations which arise out of the physical fact of bisexuality. As such an institution, marriage functions in two directions:
1. In the regulation of personal sex relations.
2. In the regulation of descent, inheritance, succession, and social order, this being its older and original function.
83:1.2 The family, which grows out of marriage, is itself a stabilizer of the marriage institution together with the property mores. Other potent factors in marriage stability are pride, vanity, chivalry, duty, and religious convictions. But while marriages may be approved or disapproved on high, they are hardly made in heaven. The human family is a distinctly human institution, an evolutionary development. Marriage is an institution of society, not a department of the church. True, religion should mightily influence it but should not undertake exclusively to control and regulate it.
83:1.3 Primitive marriage was primarily industrial; and even in modern times it is often a social or business affair. Through the influence of the mixture of the Andite stock and as a result of the mores of advancing civilization, marriage is slowly becoming mutual, romantic, parental, poetical, affectionate, ethical, and even idealistic. Selection and so-called romantic love, however, were at a minimum in primitive mating. During early times husband and wife were not much together; they did not even eat together very often. But among the ancients, personal affection was not strongly linked to sex attraction; they became fond of one another largely because of living and working together.
It's in Paper 83 if you have a book and want to read it.

UMC.org: The official online ministry of The United Methodist Church
When I was in the hospital I was visited by the Methodist Pastor from my mother's church. It's part of the Methodist ministry to visit the sick among their congregation.
There was a question among some of the forms I had to fill out for Shands at AGH about my religious beliefs. It's a difficult question because Siddha Yoga and many other yogic paths say they are the source of religion or religious beliefs, not a religion themselvs. However Krishna Consciousness has always called itself a religion (though this may have something to do with their being labeled a "cult" by right wing religious fanatics and the need to establish themselves as such in American courts) and lately in Siddha Yoga has called itself a religion.
Considering this, I called my religion, or religious beliefs, Siddha Yoga.
When my mother finally was able to visit, after my being switched around from several rooms, she was brought by the conservative advocate I mentioned in an earlier post. He had been involved in the hospital ministry before so this was nothing new to him. He was a great help, but he seldom agreed with me about anything. I guess that's why kids move out, they find little agreement within their home. Mom and dad don't read the same books or vote for the same politicians, don't listen to the same music, or any music at all in many cases and so there is little between them except the money and the good fortunes of each.
I am in a situation like that. Mom really has no use for Baba and Gurumayi and neither does anyone else. No use for a Urantia Book, no use for Krishna, no use for Alice A. Bailey, no use for books on Buddhism.
I always described my mom as "the good one," but her opponent was my dad so what did she have to work against? Well, I am still alive and capable of many good deeds. A voter for the democrats and one who can purchase the latest sankirtan, so I have her to thank for that. But she is a difficult conversation and she hangs out with far right conservatives.
But this post wasn't to be about mom. It was about visting those in need. Cassandra Hodgin who was involved with Siddha Yoga for a while at the same time I was, had a seva I guess, to visit some fellow who was in a coma in a hospital in Ocala. Gurumayi was telling us to make a friend of Death but in my mind I think he already was a pervasive influence. I had wanted my father to die. I had been waiting for him to die for many years. The why and the wherefore we don't need to go into here. They are complicated, but Death was everywhere in a sense for me. No job, no school, no companions as our supercillious adults would say. I had only recently quit eating meat, again I must say, because I was effectively vegetarian in my early 20's, that would be the 70's, and this idea of visiting hospitals didn't turn me on. My father had been in the hospital a few times before he died. He wanted to die at home. And he did. While Cass may have been helping those in need by visiting a man in a coma, she wasn't doing much for me. I was eating toast and grits to be veggie and fighting with the center over how we had to dress to chant and meditate.
And I had no friends. It's funny how social starvation is someting we Americans seem to be totally ignorant about. Unless we think this kind of "shunning" as the liberal Pope John Paul II enjoyed putting it, is a necessary punishment someone might deserve. I don't think I did.
Anyway, I thought wouldn't that be nice to have someone who chanted and meditate come and visit one who chanted and meditated at the hospital when they had to go there.
Wouldn't that be nice?

Air America Radio
My mother has a speaker phone. I hear every conversation she ever has.
She often speaks with a right wing conservative at her church who is very friendly but also very right wing. It's hard to figure the rightness of that, isn't it? It's like that reformer who is trying to save you, you know. No matter how much you say you don't believe he keeps on coming on.
His name is Vern. He's on the phone now.
I guess I shouldn't use real names, but Bill Clinton whom he hates, has a real name, and Hillary and Ted Kennedy. What kind of comfort can this be to my mom? She voted for Kerry.
Vern is like another man I know from my own spiritual center. His name is Herman. He doesn't care for christianity. He's "half jewish." I put that in quotes because I have a hard time believing it. Swedish. Blonde turned white, Swedish and a scientist. I can imagine him arguing against nuclear power or in favor some drug like marijuana or even cocaine, I guess, but he's older and whatever he says, since he's got enough education to hang out where he does, is hard for yours truly to argue against. Oh, these old folks will be mean. Believe me.

Young America, Minnesota Community Profile
I met a nice man at Walgreens the other night. He was the clerk and he wasn't feeling well. I was buying some Diet Ginseng Green Tea, the Arizona brand.
He wasn't feeling very well, but he spoke to me. He said he had gotten an A.S. from Santa Fe's Information Technology Services school and I had to laugh because I got my Certificate in Business Data Processing there. I told him I had the Associate of the Arts and the Certificate. I took him to be a Florida graduate which I think he kept a secret. So many clerks and cashiers in Gainesville are graduates. The B.A., whether it is from the University of Florida or elsewhere seems to be no big thing around here. I wonder if it was living at home with my parents that made me think it was.
Anyway, this conversation was very nice this night. I had been to Albertson's to and there was a nice woman there who cashiered me out. She noticed something I bought at CVS that you put on your key chain to keep your pills. She had one too. She had asthma pills. I have my aspirin and choleserol pill in ig in case it gets late. I guess it was this conversation that led me to go to Walgreens to get something to drink. I thought I would take my aspirin and then I could take my cholesterol pill when I got home. My cholesterol pill is Niaspan and I take it an hour after the aspirin to reduce flushing.
I never got his name but he had a nice brush like moustache. I have been attracted to men with moustaches. There was one in The University Club some years ago. He was drinking coffee and told me he was a paramedic. I told him I was in computers and was having trouble installing WinXP. He said he didn't want any XP. He said he ran 98 and it was great.
But he was a hot guy in a hot club, the University Club, http://www.ucclub.com/
The link above is to Young America, Minnesota. An attractive young woman lives up there. She is over at Nerve! Her handle is Kelly_2006. Look into her. And look into me, my handle is Francois881.

Krishna Diksha
It's funny. Last night I put on the Playboy Channel for the first time in a very long time and today I'm reading Krishna Bhakti.
It's interesting what is said here about diksha. In Siddha Yoga you see a lot of pictures of Baba touching people's eyes with his fingers and this is supposed to give them Shaktipat.
Never happened to me.

It's interesting that I also started subscribing to Consumer Reports, http://www.consumerreports.org/. There is nothing about Gurus or transcendance there, just "best products."
And here many of us wonder about which is the better path, Krishna, Siddha, Adidam.
Is anyone stepping on anyone else's toes? Maybe a Mother Jones or something could cover that, but no magazine convering such issues is sustainable.
Remember "Inner Paths?" That was a magazine that really spoke to the seeker in me. It was authoritative, as the Krishna Devotees say and full of a harmonizing attitude toward East and West.

Eddie's
I've been working hard past couple of days getting my web page right!
Darn Thing! Pictures not showing up and all that trash, but today, rather tonight (it's 5 in the mornng) I got it right!
Hope you'll go have a look. I have a new photo of myself and a sort of different order to things.
Make sure you visit the Siddha Yoga Galleries. OK?
I still have a problem with the background. I think you have to set your background first thing otherwise you get trouble.
You know must of that page is just a couple of tables. I had to adjust the tables properties and that helped a whole lot.
It also helps to be open to trying something entirely different, in the words of John Cleese of Monty Python's Flying Circus.
I wonder what kind of page he has.

Welcome to Olivia's World
I visited the Siddha Meditation Center in Gainesville last Wednesday. I had a delightful time. They played a tape about singing the name. I think I remember it from one of the last Events I attended.
Gurumayi had a lot to say about time as I remember. She said we didn't have the time these days for the really beautiful and imortant things, like watching the sun rise or the moon rise, sitting around and listening to older people talk.
I've been lately struck by the intellectual genius of Siddha Yoga. I guess that's because I was in the hospital and they are some really smart people there. I didn't know what was wrong with me, but they did.
Before my visit to the center Wednesday I had been reading quite a bit. I guess I impressed myself with this reading and I expected others to be impressed as well. It's been difficult to read since Wednesday. I did get some important "doctor's bills" things done, though. There is no lack of Shakti as they say in Siddha Yoga.
I was quite full of thoughts as I headed to the Wednesday evening "satsang," but those thoughts subsided to the sounds of Gurumayi singing her songs on "To My Guru." The center hosts were quite surprised to see me. Although I had encountered 2 other Siddha students at an eatery on Easter Sunday, there was no guarantee I would have a merciful outlook on the center.
It was very nice at the center. Very clean and well appointed. Pictures of Mayi and Baba large and sparkling. The center had changed so much since I had been there.
In the meditation hall there was a beautiful flower arrangement, roses of many colors, long and beautiful were at each side of Gurumayi's dais. And a rose at the sandals, silver and shining, caught my eyes as I made my seat in the hall. An orange rose. Isn't that amazing. My father used to grow roses but I never held that against those beautiful flowers.
I had been worried that the center would be crowded or that it would be busy or that people with whom I had had arguments would be there. As I drove up the road inside the Gainesville North Industrial Park where the center has a suite, there was emptiness. It appeared no one would be there. There was a peeled orange tossed out into the middle of the road, an auspicious omen I thought, just before I needed to make my turn into the parking lot for the group of suites where the center was in GNIP. Yes, I had forgotten that. It was really a bright and happy sign to me. I thought perhaps that pernicious opponent of mine, that Bubsy, had tossed it out the window.
Do you know about that theory of Adidam Samraj's, the former Da Free John, or Avatar Da that God is the Unknown. I heard it offered as a bit of Kirkegaard on the Colbert Report not long ago. I don't watch the Colbert Report very often, and I took this in the way I would take a serious right wing show (you know Colbert is a satire). It was a poke at the Divine, at the gifted Da or at all of us who have a different view of God than Billy Graham's and the Pope's. Kirkegaard apparently thought of God as the Unknown long before Adi Da did although I know there is a saying in Siddha Yoga that the Knower is God but the Knower cannot be known.
I think of Bubsy as this Unknown often because I do know him. I recognize him from community college and yet he defies recognition. You think he's liberal, you think he's nice but then he can be so mean. You want to get along with him, but you just can't.
I wonder if he has categories for being kind and cruel, like, I'll be kind about letting people but I'll be cruel in some of the remarks I make. If it's not that conscious then what's going on?
There was a fellow who seemed to be a lot more powerful and influential in whether you stayed or went at the Gainesville Siddha Meditation Center. His name was Alan, now Nimai. He used to throw people out because they were not appropriately dressed. People came in jeans and cutoffs. That was no good. They had to leave. Boy, that used to steam me!!! He was a blonde man, just like Bubsy used to be. Bubsy's hair is white now!
I'm thinking now the orange wasn't tossed by Bubsy. He wasn't even there last Wednesday, but maybe it was thrown by a beautiful woman who was at the center Wednesday night, Miranda. It gave me a bit of joy to be introduced to her on Wednesday night.
I wonder if I'll ever get back to reading that wonderful book I bought, Shiva, The Wild God of Power and Ecstasy. Well, at least I have found it now amidst the morass that is my library at home.

Yahoo Blog, ed71 blog number 2
I'm trying out another blog page!
It's over at Yahoo! I can use pictures there.
Address is above and if you're my friend you can post comments.
Sounds good, doesn't it? I hope it doesn't get complicated.

Nerve
I got a nice e-mail from a 25 year old girl in Young America, Minnesota at Nerve. Nerve is my singles matching, meet-up thing.
She had pictures and she was real cute. Her handle is Kelly2006. She's the latest.
Some other interested women were reputablelove who lives in Dakar and wanted to come to America. I think she said her dad was in high office there but was thrown out by some scoundrels and now she was in tough shape. I told her I couldn't help her come to America and she eventually stopped messaging me. She was a very sexy looking woman though.
And there was an interesting woman from down in Tampa. Her name was Connie4Kerry08. She was seriously damaged by the loss in '04. Maybe it was telling her I liked Hillary that made her stop responding. Maybe it was something else.
She was a teacher and loved kids and I could see why she wouldn't be interested since I have no job and I couldn't afford to go down to Tampa, a risky adventure anyway.
I hope these girls don't mind me talking about them. I should think they would enjoy it since the world is so anti-social these days. It'll cost you credits at Nerve.com to e-mail them, but I hope you'll be nice to them especially if you mention me, francois881.

Siddha Glossary
This thing about Tom Cruise is something.
My mom loves to hate Cruise now, as do so many. And it's all about his religion.
Religion is not an important thing in Siddha Yoga. Others follow suit saying as the Siddhas do that one may remain in one's religion and follow this path.
I am not one of the darling young girls who fell for Tom from the start. For many years I didn't know who the hell he was, but I have been impressed with some of his films. Of course it is incorrect to say the actors own the films much as it is to say that singers own the songs. Songs belong to the writers and films to the directors, but I have been impressed by The Firm, A Few Good Men and Born on the Fourth of July. They were compelling pictures and so I resent the kind of mockery that is going on now.
I suppose we mock what we don't understand.
When I read the sacred chants of Siddha Yoga I stumble accross words. I cannot pronounce them correctly and I don't know what the words mean. I've experienced this before and shared in the humorous mocking of the Bhagavad-gita and the vers Iksvaku-uvaca. Yes, uvaca means said. Said comes up again in the Siddhas Guru Gita. Suta uvaca, Parvati uvaca, Mahadev uvaca. Lately I've realized these words are difficult for me because I am surrounded by people who don't want to know, I live in a nation that has no interest in super states of consciousness, indeed who sneer when the subject is brought up. So, it's better that I don't understand what the hell I am doing when I chant or when I meditate. It's better for the rich and the powerful that way! And they are who we serve. They are the true Guru.
The other day as I chanted the Guru Gita it occurred to me that America would be the Guru. Strange idea. In the Gita it says the Guru is your mother, your father, your sister and brother, but it is not said it is your country. But men are willing to go die for this. And if you are willing to die for something then I say that thing is God and God's most important tool on this earth is the Guru.

Archives for MY BLOG!
The Archives of MY BLOG! can often be found by scrolling to the bottom of each page and clicking on the last link there, but one link, "Where the Blog used to be" is about 4 or 5 links up from the bottom.
I also have a page that lists all the pages full of entries since MY BLOG! began. It's under the old blog site name dbombxy. I lost the password for that or something and I had to start a new one under ed71.
That page I'll post above when I'm done here.

Gainesville Health and Fitness
I joined the Gainesville Health and Fitness Act about 2 years ago, 2 years ago this August and I've been growing frustrated with them because I don't like the attitude of the trainers or floor managers who adjust the machines and act like they know it all about fitness and health.
GHFC is open all night on weekdays and that is an appealing attribute. It's also got a pool, a sauna, a steambath and a whirlpool, a basketball court, a free weights area and some other areas I have never explored. On the other hand it flies a aircraft carrier style flag over itself and advertises boot camp style workouts.
It's the military style logic to fitness that I don't enjoy.
If you are familiar with it, there was/is Kripalu Yoga, whose founder Amrit Desai who discovered and developed the science of Kripalu Yoga used to visit the Ocala National Forest and Daytona Beach. I met him in Daytona when I went to a free talk he gave there. It was in 1978.
The Kripalu Yoga Ashram was for years established in Pennsylvania but moved to Boston and then some big smear about Amrit and sex with his associates occurred and Amrit removed himself from Kripalu Yoga, if it's possible for a founder and discoverer of a science to do. When it was in PA was when I used to follow the goings on through a little magazine the published.
Seemed to me they were hell bent on exercise. Lots of the yoga they do, but also lots of running and getting out into the fresh air. They also wore relaxed easy fitting clothes. Of course you know the kind of things the yogis wear, loose fitting, informal, I think, kind of clothing, not shirts and ties.
GHFC isn't much like Kripalu Ashram in PA in the 80's was like. It isn't relaxed. It's BOSSY, or even PUSHY. Great place of NEOCONS and other war nuts.
You can go at night though and avoid a lot of that. That's what I do.
j Maybe I won't get pneumonia with the weather warming up if I use the pool and take a shower before I go out at 5 in the morning.
Have I told you about my pneumonia with plurisy that put me in the hospital for 12 days? When I went back to the gym it didn't seem like anyone had missed me.
I kind of feel like I see this attitude all about these days. Impersonal, take the money and run.

Siddha Yoga
I've been chanting past couple of days.
I think I'm learning the Kundalini Stavah .
It's been a very difficult text for me but now I think I'm breaking through.
Today, I chanted it and Mahalakshmi Stotram.
Yesterday, I sat on my patio and sang (if that's what you can call it) Shri Guru Gita.
It's been hard for me because mom really doesn't get into all this Indian Voodoo. I think that's what she thinks of it.
Meeting Analise and Suzanne on Easter at the Bagel Factory has apparently done something for me. I had chanted the Mahalakshmi Stotram one day in the living room even though mom was present doing little things in the kitchen, but still quite visible.
Sometimes I think mom, or somebody, would like to sit by and listen to me sing the Gita or some other text, but I don't see many people here at the house.
I wonder why people don't want to come out to my house. Is mom such a problem to them? I used to blame it on the old man, but he died in '92 and still nobody comes out to little Melrose to see their friend Ed.
I have a very large yard out here. The house is not so big, just a three bedroom brick ranch, no attic, no cellar.
I used to visit my friend Jack Collins at his house in Hawthorne when I was a blooming teenager, 17, 18, 19. And another friend Tommy Ellis. It wasn't difficult to avoid their parents. Parents are happy to get out of the way.
For some of us, it's hard to realize how small our properties or houses are. That has been dawning on me lately.
I've also been reading a bit of old Siddha Yoga books, like Meditation Revolution and From the Infinite to the Infinite. Before those I had scanned a bit of the Spanda Karikas and today I read Tukaram while I strolled into a CVS in Keystone Heights. Tukaram says he pants after God's form like a fish our of water. It seemed a really odd analogy to me. I recalled what fish look like when they are pulled away from their natural living place, the water, and left to die, suffocatinig really, on the land.
Brings to mind that Ocean of Bliss, doesn't it? Who wants to pulled from there, our own spiritual home, and be thrown upon the shores of this material world to suffer.

Elvis People Website
I loved Elvis being introduced to him at 5 by my brother 13 years older than me.
My brother plastered his walls with Elvis' record covers. It wasn't too great for the records but it made the room look good.
My brother Bill was also fond of cars and he had a singles record player in one which was succeeded by a tape player in the next. And lots of Elvis played in those cars, which were usually red convertibles, and played very loud!!!
I resisted the Beatles until they became psychedelic and transcendental and all that. I did have a weakness for Bob Dylan though, his genius and his sense of social justice. Elvis didn't really give way in me until the early 70's when I was in college, had long hair and protested war.
Even then it kind of hurt me when other kids said they hated Elvis.

CSI: Miami
I'm watching CSI: Miami and thinking how progressive and hip the the stars are and everything, and yet I think there is a conservative spin to it.
I ask myself, how do I see that?
I love Caruso but there is something in that co-star, the blonde who does the lab analysis that really says NIXON to me.
Do you remember President Nixon? What a supremely popular president he was. It seems like all presidents are. Look at LBJ. You couldn't put a dent in his argument against the Vietnam War. Of course I was only a kid then and I didn't have access to the college material and bohemian perspectives about what the president and the rest of America was saying.
It may have been that people opposed the war back in '65, but as a 12 year old I knew nothing about it. My science project was the biggest worry I had although I did have a big brother in the Air Force who may have been sent to defend the American way of life in Vietnam.
The American Way of Life. Thinking about that I must mention I am applying for Food Stamps. I would like to apply for Medicaid but having been turned down before I am not doing it unless encouraged. It's the dark side of the American Way that I may not get a subsidy to pay my medical bills. They say I might not get the Food Stamps either which I must apply for to receive prescriptions help. I've already gotten the help for the first month but to continue I had to apply for Stamps (which are not stamps anymore as I understand it, but a card you present to the retailer).
Food Stamps would be great I guess, but from what I am hearning about work and the benefits that can be part of it, I think I would rather have a job. Although I am computer literate there seems to be little hope of that.
So, back to NIXON. Everybody thought he was groovy. We forget who they were. The good teachers and neighbors who thought Nixon was a regular guy who got a bum deal from the press now have re-formed around first Regan and now Bush. Reagan didn't do much to us but cut education and welfare and lose a hundred marines in Lebanon. He went out with a bang, the president who made the Berlin Wall come down. Nothing was owed to detente or the peace movement that probably caused detente, but who cares about historical truth? The wall came down, Reagan was there at the end. It took 50 years to make happen. All the credit is Reagan's, especially in an election year.
Oh, yeah, about the bright side of the American Way. The hospital bill was a tax write off for the hospital, Shands at AGH in Gainesville, FL, so I don't have to burden that $50,000 bill. Also, on near $1000 bill has a charity program for thos who are umemployed. We are what they called INDIGENT. I only mention it because of the problem with calling the victims of Katrina REFUGEES.
I have a couple of thousand dollar bills that are from AGH and I'm wondering whether I'm obliged to pay them as I have been described by that same place as INDIGENT and needing of charity
Lastly, there is one more bill from the pulmonary specialist that I must attend to on Monday. Light a candle for me. Maybe he has a charity program as well.

Jerry Brown gets married!
Check this out! Former Governor Brown now Mayor of Oakland and candidate for Attorney General in California, has gotten married.
It's a nice thing to hear.

TAP
I was lucky to get a form to apply for charity to day from the Pathology Group to pay a bill for $894.
I hope more will go like that.
As for my little girl in love with statins, she never looked at a blood test, she saw that I had gotten my medicine changed, by my cardiologist I told her, from Tricor to Niaspan. She insisted I needed a statin to lower my cholesterol. Tricor was chosen originally by my cardiologist because he wanted to lower my triglycerides, which I guess was something Lipitor wouldn't do.
If you read about Niaspan in Good Pills, Worst Pills you will notice this is exactly what Niaspan claims to do.
Had Niaspan not been working I would have liked to have heard this at the hospital or from my cardiologist who sent me to Shands for blood tests in October. He said he was going to have the findings copied to my doctor's office, but it seems no one there knew anything of the tests.
At the hospital I had been re-diagnosed with diabetes. They said I really needed twice the glipizide I was taking. I took twice the dose when I got home and I got light in the head, I had low blood sugar at night while I was sleeping. I had to get up and have something sweet, some Chocolate Silk, and so I told the Physician's Assistant, with whom me and mom and my sister, whomever the assistant seems to be, have had bad luck, mom being overdosed and Barbara, my sister, and I being insulted about (1) her weight and (2) my unemplyment, that I wanted my glipizide raised from 10 mg to 15 mg.
Don't you take it hard when the first person to tell you that a cheaper and safer according to some way of dealing with your health, or whatever, is a complete failure without even seeing any numbers and/or the physician caring that this meant somethng to you. Worst Pills.org is part of Public Citizen, one of the progressive political websites, and they contend the FDA is being bouught off by the drug companies. Doesn't that mean something to you?!!! It means something to me, that the FDA has become corrupt, but my Physician's Assistant knew nothing about it. She was, by the way a very attractive woman which added a great deal of disappointment to this disagreement. Of course I never thought she would go out with me, being so successful, that is, of a higher station.

Worst Pills
I hate Doctors and I hate Doctors Assistants.
This morning an Assistant called Worst Pills.Org quackery.
She doesn't believe there is any evidence that Tricor leads to cancer (tests have proven there are other possibilities such as pancreatitis).
She pretends to be a hip young cool medical person but she has never heard of Worst Pills.Org. Apparently she never heard of the Vioxx controversy either.
The bitch didn't care to discuss it in a sensitive way. She just wanted me to take a statin instead of my Niaspan which Worst Pills says is a good alternative to Tricor.
According to what I have read Tricor is prescribed to those in whom they wish to lower the triglycerides. Niaspan is equally effective at lowering the triglycerides.
But this woman this morning spoke as if my cholesterol had gone up and the big problem was my Niaspan. She said I must be put on Tricor or Lipitor. I said no Tricor.
I don't know if Lipitor lowers the triglycerides, but apparently Niaspan wasn't so dangerous that my cardiologist would not allow me to have it.
I hate my doctor now! I started going to her because she was my mother's doctor and a woman. Now I only experience INSENSITIVITY at her clinic.
I suppose soon the LIPITOR will be called into CVS and I will have to take it without so much as an explanation.
You know it's like telling a black person you never heard of Jackie Robinson!
This isn't really what I call alternative medicine but if it was shouldn't they have been SENSITIVE to it? I don't appreciate being treated as if I was stupic and irresponsible.
I HATE THEM!

Nerve
I'm sorry I ever met Craig and Rolan because eventually I met Mark and Carol.
My friend Jack introduced me to Craig and Rolan. They were a couple of classmates who invited him to smoke dope with them and eventually to become their roomate.
Mark was a friend of Craig's younger brother. He made it with an attractive art student at Florida. They made a commitment to live with each other until college ended.

The Gainesville Sun
Just as the NCAA Tournament began, I did see the opening game against South Alabama, I contracted pneumonia with pleurosy.
I was sent to the emergency room by the Urgent Care Center in Gainesville. I could not lie down on my side nor on my back.
I thought it was a strained muscle, but the Doctor told me it was because of the lung filling with fluid.
It was very painful and ultimately I needed surgery to get the fluid out of the lung.
There is a program to help with the expenses at Shands at AGH, but I am still worried about it. I need to apply for Food Stamps to qualify for a prescirption relief program offered through Alachua County Social Services.
Although I often reesented what nurses told me, for instance, "eat your food," they were on the whole very nice people to me, both the men and women.
I dreaded that my doctor had lied to me when he said I was going home. As it turned out he hadn't lied and I thank him from the bottom of my heart for not deceiving me.
I think we can all relate to the value of honesty considering what's going on in Washington and Iraq.
What a shame that your children die because your president lies.

GatorZone
Yahoo!!! The Gators won the SEC Tournament!!!
I confess, I was jumping up and down with my statue of Krishna in the final minute.
Maybe the Gators were doing that too, inside themselves, because it gave the energy we just weren't showing.
GOD! Points and then a big block at the end by NOAH!!!
THAT WAS SOMETHING!!! THAT WAS REALLY SOMETHING!!!
When USC missed foul shots I was praying to the Blue God!
I confess, I think Krishna won the game! And I hope he wins some more!

Maytag
Maytag prides itself on its products needing little repair, but just about every one of our Maytag products is in need of repair.
The stove only has one or two burners that work. One only burns on high. There's a third one but you have to always adjust it, reinsert the burner, you know.
Then the refrigerator leaks, the dishwasher leaks and now the washing machine leaks.
You would love to buy all new, but you can't. YOU KNOW?!!!
And then it would be nice to have more memory for the computers.

Siddha Yoga
I need a job.

Media Matters
Bush's handling of the National Security Agency (NSA) only proves once again that Bush has a tendency to cheat as the Krsna devotees say!!!

Molly's Column
When I read in Yahoo! News that Molly Ivins would not support Hillary Clinton for President I got pissed off!
Who the hell was she anyway?
Didn't she run Howard Dean, Howard Dean, Howard Dean every day of 2003 only for him to get his ass beaten in the primaries?
Is this a recurring nightmare, I had to wonder. After all it is 3 years until the next presidential election and the midterm elections are coming in November.
I was trying to feel good about them even though a lot of people don't seem to support the same people I do. That's okay! I don't seem to like people anymore!!!
Wasn't it them who thought I was a party animal and sent me home to my parents? Wasn't it them that didn't want to sleep with me, who thought I should sleep with men because I defended Gay Rights and spoke about a bisexual encounter I had and might have again? Wasn't it them that didn't want no GODDAM GURU, like me, who thought a Guru was all about giving up every GODDAM thing that they lived for,( like sex and drugs, especially drugs ... , and maybe MONEY)?
So why do I get upset about Molly and her criticism of the Democratic Party?
It's because I have a bumper sticker that says Hillary in '08 and as I have said on this BLOG I encounter NEOCONS through my mother's church who call Ted Kennedy a murderer and try to buy me off with a sharp looking leather coat they call a CHRISTMAS present.
I imagine it's hard to fight people like the one's I know when your in Congress. I just read today how FDR, Truman and LBJ made racist compromises with the South to a lot of their legislation passed. Legislation like Social Security, which in its beginning didn't apply to farm and house labor done by so many black citizens back in the 30's and 40's.
You have to make deals in politics. I know that's true.
Molly Ivins praises Gene McCarthy for his courage. But what courage did he have to stay in the race after Robert Kennedy entered it? Could his withdrawal have saved "Bobby's" life?
The shrewd answer to that is to call me vulgar for suggesting such a thing. And I think Molly is shrewd. She shows that. You could call her a political animal if you like and I'm sure FOX and the rest of the Republican Noise Machine I am reading about this week will put that opinion over as well as they can.
But we all know that. Isn't that the heritage of the political movement we call "The Left?" Shrewd political thinking with little or no scruples? Isn't that what communism is all about?
Yes, it's not about people trying to change their own little lives but about a shrewd lust for power. That's what the FOX's and the Heritage's and the rest have to say. They have been saying it since Masters of Deceit by J. Edgar Hoover.
That's a book they have to read here in Florida for a class called AVC (Americanism vs. Communism) a required class in Florida. I hope Jim Davis who is running for Governor on the Democratic ticket will have something to say about that. He wants to be more personally involved in our schools. It's not the standardized tests that matter to him , but families, parents and children and that's fine to say, but if he is serious maybe he will see the meaninglessness of AVC whic is just a propaganda toy for right wing political teachers.
So, Hillary is running to get re-elected in the state of N.Y. which I guess the news is going to tell you is some kind of liberal paradise because it voted for Gore and Kerry in the last 2 presidential elections. But it also elected a Republican Governor and I remember not only did FDR come from N.Y. but so did Thomas Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller and Kenneth Keating who held the senate seat until Sen. Robert F. Kennedy took it away from him.
There are a lot of Republicans in N.Y.
Can Molly change their votes? She mentions the polls but I know I have seen polls change.

The American Prospect
Down here in Florida you can make a right turn when you come to a red light, after stopping.
Up north, in New York, you couldn't do that.
Leads one to day, "down here you got rights, up there you got none."
It's an odd thought given what you can read in The American Prospect about Affirmative Action for Whites under Roosevelt and Truman.
It's part of a review of some books about the Republican advantage in the southern states.
You may read it here: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=10835

Media Matters - Abramoff's Money
So, like I was telling you this guy gets on the phone to my mom. He was on the phone again today.
There's a fellow in the hospital who I think they are afraid may have prostate cancer. When I hear the phone calls, which I must because mom won't pick up the phone, it's about the color of the blood. I already know it has something to do with the prostate.
This man with the Nazi Right Wing politics is named Vernon an otherwise he seems nice enough but I just can't handle right wingers in the first place and in this instance a verbose and outspoken conservative zealot.
What nerve to speak to people he knows voted and campaigned for Kerry, lifelong Democrats, about Ted Kennedy being a MURDERER.
I mentioned he said our friend Hillary took money from Abramoff. Up above is a link to Media Matters on an incident where a woman called into O'Reilly and said NO DEMOCRATS had taken money from Abramoff.
Vern was on the phone all day today. In the beginning I just played my television loudly hoping someone would take the hint, but finally I was driven out of my house. I took off for Gainesville not really knowing what I was going to do there. I had some coffee and french fries at Rafferty's. I took my medicine there.

My Diary
Mom used to call my father's speaking "diahrrea of the mouth."
It appears she has met someone at the church who fits that description.
Oh, he's quite the endearing type. Gave me his used motorcycle jacket or something (was it a car coat, it was leather) for Xmas. However after hearing some of what he has to say to mom, which I can hear over her speakerphone I don't have much respect for him.
He's quite party line, claiming Hillary took money from Abramoff just like (and this he didn't say) a whole lot of republicans including Bush.
Hillary got money from the Indian Tribes for whom Abramoff was presumably lobbying. She gave the money to charity because it was somehow related to Abramoff.
It's just Limbaugh bullshit, you know. I recognize it.
Got some books today at the library by someone who knows all about it, David Brock. I got "Blinded By the Right" and "The Republican Noise Machine" at the library and I happened to notice a book by Douglas Brinkley who did that book on Kerry's service in Vietnam. Apparently Brinkley took his class on a Stephan Gaskin style caravan around the country and wrote a book about it. I had never heard mention of it before. Maybe I was distracted or maybe the media largely ignored it.
So, did you know Brock wrote a scathing narrative on Anita Hill which he later found out wasn't the truth and later he wrote a book on Hillary, "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham" which right wingers didn't find critical enough. Brock was called every kind of devil for his failure to damn Hillary.
I've just begun Blinded by the Right and apparently Brock started turning right in Berkeley where he was a journalism student who thought the liberal student body was too extreme in protesting a visit by U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick.
She was the ambassador under Reagan and I recall a documentary on the Free Speech Movement in which Reagan said the protesters sitting in at Berkeley were too young to know what their vulgar epithets meant. In other words they were too young to know what "fuck" meant.
I would resent Kirkpatrick's appearance too. In fact I resent the fact that Bush could appear at the University and campaign, which he did just before election day 2004. I was with Stephen Stills and Betty Castor downtown.
It's just the first chapter in the book called, "The Making of a Conservative." I hope maybe the gift giver who is taking mom to the hospital to see their friend Ed Carter someday goes through the conscience searching that Mr. David Brock did.

Bush wishes to try detainee by Military Tribunal
No war has been declared by congress. I think that's the important thing to remember about these detainees and President Bush's suspension of their rights.
Let President Bush go to the congress and ask for a declaration of war on Al Qaeda and any other groups he plans to attack and then we can talk about military tribunals.

New York Times columnist David Brooks
David Brooks makes a lot of liberal portrayal of ethnic whites. He says working class ethnic whites were portrayed as bigots in the media. I liked that. The ethnic whites in my family were from the south and eastern Europe, Irish, Polish, German. They were nothing like Robert Young in Father’s Knows Best or Bob Cummings in Love That Bob! Neither were the women like My Little Margie or Ann Sothern. White ethnics were portrayed much more realistically in shows like All in the Family.
Growing up in the sixties during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations there was no end to the people I loved using expressions like Nigger and Spic. I suppose even Guinea would be a good example of moral impurity in my family. They were from Brooklyn, they drove cabs and worked for the railroad. The constant defamation of other races was a chink in the armor of those I thought were my white knights growing up in the state of New York.
David Brooks has a black and white mentality. Liberals bad, conservatives good. He speaks of the mores of the white ethnics when Alito was growing up, but many of those we now know as conservatives were wildly liberal when the judge was growing up. Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, defied the mores with sexuality and intoxication. You can’t blame the Beatles and the Stones for everything.
Brooks speaks of thuggish cops. My own brother broke into tears in 1962 when one of his friends was beaten by a cop because the boy refused to accept the officer’s authority. If the police are thuggish and they happen to be white Polish or Italians or Irish, is it wrong to portray them as such in the media? I’ve seen many freaky, hippie types portrayed in the media not as the geniuses and revolutionaries they wish they were but as idiots. Yogis are said to contemplate the navel. I had to look that up I heard it so often and indeed there is such a thing as contemplating the navel in Indian yoga, but there is also quite a lot more, more than is fascinating, illuminating and joy producing.
A lot of time has been taken on the issue of abortion at the Alito confirmation hearings and I have heard it intoned that abortion is the taking of the life of another human being, but only from inference have I understood that abortion is the saving of women’s lives. Are we really willing to recreate an age where women seek out abortions illegally and obtain quack doctors who plumb their wombs with coat hangers?
That’s the flip side of the abortion discussion.

Salon
Judge Alito reminds me of a prostitute who does tricks for her clients, because he worked for Reagan he adjusted his views to promote the Reagan agenda, now in the Bush era he will sing their song.

This Modern World
This guy, Tom Tomorrow, who writes This Modern World, is terrific.
Every left of center voter should read Salon, and Tom Tomorrow's "This Modern World."
It also appears in The American Prospect (www.theprospect.org), another must read.

Doonesbury not Jake
I wrote this letter to the editor critical of the constant conservative viewpoint expressed in the political cartoon.
They seem to think it is just Jake but the fellow Ramirez is called a conservative on one of my favorite DTV shows, Democracy Now!
Looking back at some of his cartoons you can see he is plainly pro-Iraq and I recall one cartoon in which he jibed PETA.
Why doesn't he jibe a Norquist or a Rove?
Today's cartoon if you had to look at it, I try to aver my eyes, puts congress in the lassoo of the special interests. Although it is the republican congress that takes the most money from special interests the democrats had to take a beating too. That sounds slanted to the right to me.
Sounds like they don't want to face the fact that the republican party is most beholden to special interests. And I know much media has blurred the fact that it is republicans who are being found out for criminal activity, not just "politicians."
If you haven't you might like to check out Media Matters at www.mediamatters.com and see how media is twisting the truth.
By the way, I said liberals have been without a political cartoon for "decades," not for "years," but the Sun changed my words.

Krishna Dot Com
Sadgurunath Maharaj ki jay!
Om Gum Ganapatayi Namah!
Yoga Journal offered this mantra for the holiday season, but the Gainesville Sun, our local newspaper … oh, what the hell, they ran a speaking out column declaring a conspiracy to secularize Christmas.
Is it humanistic secularism or secular humanism. The devotees in Krsna Consciousness declared this to be a grave danger in the pages of Back to Godhead magazine years ago. I find it a great pity that this sect that doesn’t believe yoga is these stretching exercises many of us find difficult to perform, whose concept of God is as a paramour, and who revel about singing, dancing and feasting find so much support in conservative views like the ones offered in today’s paper.
Secular humanism, abortion and sexual liberation are all on the hit list of this so-called alternative religion.
Although they deny it, it seems to me that the joy of Krsna Consciousness cannot be yours unless you are a right wingnut.
During the previous Bush administration the organic farm here in nearby Alachua, wrote to the president to thank him for actions he had taken to stop women’s right to abortion. ISKCON doesn’t care how many women die because they seek illegal abortions from pseudo medical professionals. That’s just their karma.
I often think of how unfairly ISKCON is treated. They were oppressed in the Soviet Union. They grow their food organically and yet you won’t find a devotee on the faculty of the College of Agriculture at the University of Florida. They obviously are learned in Indian Philosophy but you will find none of them teaching it for a living. And I have to wonder if it is not because of their support for these extreme right wing views. It seems they believe in capital punishment and war but not in eating eggs or drinking tea.

Yahoo! News
Every time Bush defends this war he fails to speak to charges that he intended this war since his innauguration.
This is the charge according to former Secretary of the Treasury Paul H.O'Neill under G.W. Bush and former counsel on terrorism under G.W. Bush Richard Clarke.
He tries to make you forget the cabal of neo-cons in the White House who wanted this war long before 9/11 or even his presidency.
It seems to me that President Bush has ignored the real war on terror in favor of his own agenda which he took into the White House in 2000.
Why hasn't all this money been spent on getting Osama Bin Laden?
An argument can be stated for the overthrow of any despotic leader and indeed there have been, are, and will be enough of them to suck every dollar and drop of blood out of our country. This world is backward it says in my Urantia Book and in such a world that crucifies the Creator Son, you will find despots and tyrants. Stand guard that they do not gain more power in the U.S. We have had a tradition of being friends with them, i.e. Roosevelt and Stalin, detente, and what to speak of the numerous fascist regimes that we have been friends with and propped up, i.e. Marcos, Pinochet, and sometimes that was because we couldn't afford more blood being spilled on foreign soil or because we feared nuclear holocaust. What was so important about Hussein? He was in the Middle East, I guess. Could have been Qaddafi. He is another despot, tyrant according to the American news shows. Certainly, he is no Anwar Sadat. But the Bushes have a history with Iraq, you know.
Remember ths song by Stevie Wonder back in the 70's? It was on Inner Visions I believe. For some reason at the end of the track he is saying Iraq, Iran. I think it was some big ego thing where he was lying about how rich and influential he was. Stevie's funny that way.
So, there's my rant for today.
Does this nation, Iraq, mean that much to you?
It's in the press daily. I guess that why it seems to be important.

previous entries
In case you wondered where my page went you can visit it at the address above.
You may also want to visit http://web.pitas.com/dbombxy/archive.html which is where more archives exist.

The New York Yankees
Air America Radio
Siddha Yoga