note to self

song in my head

Wednesday Flashback

10 things I didn't know last week

1. Ndamukong Suh is from here, Portland Oregon.
2. Another woman would come out of the woodwork, this time-not to accuse Herman Cain of sexual
     harassment but of actually having a 13 year affair with him that ended 8 months ago.
3. Ndamukong means "House of Spears."
4. That I received enough birthday gift cards to get a Motorola Xoom 4G LTE on Black Friday and not
     pay a penny for it.
5. In a poll of fellow players conducted by the Sporting News, NdamukongSuh was named “the dirtiest
    player in the NFL".
6. The Oregon Ducks would beat the Oregon State Beavers so badly.
7. As of November 2011, Ndamukong Suh  had been flagged for nine personal fouls in his first two
     years, the most of any player in the league in that time frame.
8. The NBA lockout will end by Christmas. YAYYYY
9.  Dr Conrad Murray would get the maximum 4 yr sentence for the involuntary manslaughter of
     Michael Jackson.
10.3 men who are Wealth Portforlio Managers with the firm Belpoint Capital in Greenwich  
     Connecticut, who don't need the money (one of them is the CEO of the firm) supposedly won
     the $254 million Powerball Jackpot (proving for once, that life isn't fair).
11.The head Ndamukong Suh stomped on was a    Evan Dietrich-Smith, an offensive lineman for my
     home team,  the Green Bay Packers, which made me more angry.

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
                          --Antoine de Saint-Exupery


This is a repost.  I found a picture that I liked better; this quote was more fitting for this picture than other quotes I could find.

then came you

Great sign

My Black Friday

I saw this on Bossip.Com and I had to borrow it...  this is my idea of a Black Friday as well.

Friday Flashback

what some people forget /ignore

During an interview on  Today in 2003, with the author of a book urging families to learn more about the history of Thanksgiving and to appreciate being American, NBC's Ann Curry countered: "You know there are some American Indians who feel that Thanksgiving should be a day of mourning not a day of celebration because of what happened to their people. So how do you want us to think about them?"

Edward Bleier , the author, responded, saying: "I wrote the history very carefully. It acknowledged the pilgrim's gratitude toward the American Indians, without whom there would have been no Thanksgiving.."

Pat Robertson Asks Black Co-Host: Is Mac And Cheese For Thanksgiving ‘A Black Thing?’

Pat Robertson isn’t sure what the deal is with eating macaroni and cheese on Thanksgiving. You know, the cheesy pasta dish delicious enough for the nation’s kids yet soft and supple enough for its geriatrics.

700 Club co-host Kristi Watts on Wednesday showed a clip of her interview with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who said her favorite Thanksgiving dish is mac and cheese. Watts agrees. Who wouldn’t?
Pat Robertson. That’s who. “What is this ‘mac and cheese,’ is that a black thing,” Robertson asked.
“It is a black thing, Pat,” Watts said, to her credit, being a good spirit about it. “It trips me out that you don’t” eat it, Watts told Robertson.
“I don’t, and I have never,” he said.
Happy holidays, or something. Watch the video:



He doesn't get out of the ivory tower much.

listening to...

if there's one thing i love

In addition to God,



If there’s one thing I love, it’s my mom.


If there’s one thing I love, it’s my entire family.


If there’s one thing I love, it’s my biological mother, even if I don't know who she is


If there’s one thing I love, it’s my biological siblings, even if I don't know who they are.


If there’s one thing I love, it’s my father, even though he didn't love me.


If there’s one thing I love, it’s my God Daughter and her entire family


If there’s one thing I love,it’s my God son and his entire family


If there’s one thing I love, it’s my best friend and his family


If there’s one thing I love, it’s poetry.


If there’s one thing I love,it’s cooking and baking for family and friends

If there’s one thing I love, it’s when people can’t believe I’m over 35


If there’s one thing I love, it’s when I bring a cake to work or parties and people can’t believe I baked it


If there’s one thing I love, it’s when a friend asked me to write a poem to be read at her wedding


If there’s one thing I love, it’s having a job that I love


If there’s one thing I love, it’s The Boondocks


If there’s one thing I love, it’s sarcasm


If there’s one thing I love, it’s when people are lying to me and they don’t know that I know they’re lying.


If there’s one thing I love, it’s when my accent becomes a conversation peace (people always ask what Caribbean Island I am from)


If there’s one thing I love, it’s seeing a mother, father, and kids, playing, laughing and smiling.


If there’s one thing I love, it’s feeling my grandfather's presence when I'm cooking.
If there’s one thing I love, it’s that God is good.


If there’s one thing I love, it’s when an attractive woman that I don't know smiles at me and says hi


If there’s one thing I love, it’s that I get to live during a time when a black man is president of the United States


If there’s one thing I love, it’s the idea of love itself

Wednesday Flashback

Still in the mood

my Facebook entry, yesterday morning

Seems straight out of a Kafka novel- an elderly gentleman seated in front of me on the Max train talking on the phone, saying : " he doesn't speak German so speak German. Oh he does? Then speak French . He speaks French too? Then speak Scottish. No one can understand the Scottish. If he understands then take the battery out the phone and call me back.I have a parachute." 

and as he said the word parachute, his phone ring.

20-year-old Obama Black history commercial uncovered

Did you hear what Rick Santorum said?

Santorum is an also-ran in the 2012 GOP presidential race, but it's worth paying some attention to him because he still speaks for a significant Republican constituency, specifically the theocratic evangelical Christianist right, and because he often says explicitly what passes for dogma in the GOP but what many other Republicans realize is politically dangerous to say.

For example, during a town hall meeting in Ottumwa, Iowa Friday afternoon, Rick Santorum argued that Americans receive too many government benefits and ought to "suffer" in the Christian tradition. If "you're lower income, you can qualify for Medicaid, you can qualify for food stamps, you can qualify for housing assistance," Santorum complained, before adding, "suffering is part of life and it's not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life."

Generally, what we hear from Republicans at this time of economic difficulty -- when they're not just attacking Obama and grossly misrepresenting his views -- is that taxes should be lowered (especially for the wealthy "job creators"), that government spending needs to be cut drastically (specifically spending on entitlement programs or other social programs that Republicans object to ideologically, not spending on the military or other things they like), and that the unregulated free market (with the likes of Paul Ryan channeling Ayn Rand) is the key to eternal prosperity.

Behind all this is a sense that Republicans actually want the economy to tank for partisan reasons and are sabotaging recovery efforts, not to mention a sense that Republicans really don't care about the poor at all, or even the middle class, and are focused mostly on expanding the wealth of the super-wealthy, individual and corporate alike -- but of course Republicans rarely admit any of this openly.

Enter Rick Santorum, who welcomes suffering because, apparently, it's Christian to suffer at the hands of an economic and political system that rewards the wealthy and punishes everyone else.

Feel better, all you people having difficulty putting food on the table, paying your bills, and taking care of your children? Just keep suffering. Santorum and the GOP won't be there to help you one bit.

Credit Santorum for being honest, I suppose. This is what many Republicans believe, based on their "Christian" faith. But of course he's just giving explicit voice to the assholish, don't-give-a-shit conservatism that dominates the Party of Cruelty and Brutality that is today's GOP.

I don't know what his Bible says about the poor, but mine says:

‘Because of the oppression of the weak and the groaning of the needy, I will now arise,’ says the LORD. I will protect them from those who malign them."  Psalm 12:5 

and,

  “I know that the LORD secures justice for the poor and upholds the cause of the needy.” Psalm 140:12

and,

“The poor and needy search for water, but there is none; tongues are parched with thirst. But I the LORD will answer them; I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.”Isaiah 41:17

and,

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours in the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.” Luke 6:20-21

and,

 “He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.” Luke 1:52-53.

not the last.  

God says so much more about the poor.    To prove that God is a champion of the poor-God is the King of Kings. He could have made His son Jesus' entry to this world in the most upper class of homes/ rooms of the day but He made sure He was born in a cold damp cave, and a manger instead of a cradle with straw for a mattress in order than He might suffer for us. See, God doesn't want us to suffer. Now, thats the understanding I get from my Bible. 

Rick Santorum has no problem with the poor suffering.  

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

          — E.M. Forster (A Room With a View)

Since pizza is a vegetable, where can I buy the seeds so I can plant some in my backyard, and can I grow them year round?

How Pizza Became A Vegetable Through The Magic Of Influence-Peddling

On Tuesday, Congress decided that pizza is a vegetable. I have to imagine that this news instilled confusion in many Americans, as many Americans are (a) familiar with pizza, (b) familiar with vegetables and (c) sane.
But, to provide specifics that will in no way dispel your lingering thoughts that we are governed by morons but at least allow you some anthropological insight into how a group of morons who have been given permission to sit in a fancy room in Washington, D.C., and grunt at each other actually think, here is their thinking: Pizza is a vegetable for the purposes of determining what goes into public school lunches by virtue of the fact that pizza traditionally includes a schmear of tomato paste. (Botanically speaking, tomatoes are actually fruit, but we're going to have to just let that slide.)
At any rate, you may still be wondering how it came to pass that Congress arrived at the conclusion that pizza could count as a serving of vegetables. Wonder no more! Congress was guided along this path by lobbyists. And lobbyists can do all sorts of things, by magic! (Except provide nutritious lunches for children.)
From the Associated Press:

The final version of a spending bill released late Monday would unravel school lunch standards the Agriculture Department proposed earlier this year. These include limiting the use of potatoes on the lunch line, putting new restrictions on sodium and boosting the use of whole grains. The legislation would block or delay all of those efforts.
The bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. USDA had wanted to only count a half-cup of tomato paste or more as a vegetable, and a serving of pizza has less than that.
Nutritionists say the whole effort is reminiscent of the Reagan administration's much-ridiculed attempt 30 years ago to classify ketchup as a vegetable to cut costs. This time around, food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools, the salt industry and potato growers requested the changes and lobbied Congress.
"School meals that are subsidized by the federal government must include a certain amount of vegetables," the AP reports, "and USDA's proposal could have pushed pizza-makers and potato growers out of the school lunch business." It would have pushed vegetable growers into the business, but their lobbyists aren't as powerful, it seems.
In addition to this, the move to classify pizza as a vegetable gained traction because of popular, reality-transforming political philosophies on the role of government.
Piling on to the companies' opposition, some conservatives argue that the federal government shouldn't tell children what to eat. In a summary of the bill, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee said the changes would "prevent overly burdensome and costly regulations and ... provide greater flexibility for local school districts to improve the nutritional quality of meals."
This sort of makes it sound like local school districts would be serving heirloom tomatoes and quinoa if the federal government just got out of the way. At any rate, I'd recommend that you remember this the next time you hear someone say that the government should get out of the business of "picking winners and losers." (Winner: salt! Loser: fighting obesity!)
Here's a fun fact! If a child incorrectly identifies "pizza" as a "vegetable" on a standardized test, there's an entirely different group of lobbyists who will argue that public school teachers have failed America's children.
--courtesy huffingtonpost.com

Friday Flashback

note to self-

                          You are the only shadow standing in your own sunshine.
                — Fabio Viviani (Top Chef)

If the answer is yes

Don't shoot!

I saw this poster and I had to share it.  It says it all.

America Will Never Be Destroyed From The Outside. If We Falter And Lose Our Freedoms, It Will Be Because We Destroyed Ourselves.
                        --Abraham Lincoln

On Adversity- Note to self

Which one are you?

Listening to...

On Adversity- Note to self

                                                   A wounded deer leaps the highest.

                                                           --Emily Dickenson


                                         

on adversity-Note to self

                            

                                                     Trouble is only opportunity in work clothes
                                                              
                                                                       --Henry J. Kaiser

On Adversity- Note to self

                   Opportunities do not come Gift Wrapped, They Come in Storms.
                                                       --author unknown

Happy Veterans Day

Armistice Day (also known as Remembrance Day) is on 11 November and commemorates the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front, which took effect at eleven o'clock in the morning—the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" of 1918. While this official date to mark the end of the war reflects the cease fire on the Western Front, hostilities continued in other regions, especially across the former Russian Empire and in parts of the old Ottoman Empire.

The date was declared a national holiday in many allied nations, to commemorate those members of the armed forces who were killed during war. An exception is Italy, where the end of the war is commemorated on 4 November, the day of the Armistice of Villa Giusti.
After World War II, the name of the holiday was changed to Veterans Day in the United States and to Remembrance Day in countries of the British Commonwealth of Nations. Armistice Day remains an official holiday in France and Belgium, known also as the Day of Peace in the Flanders Fields.
In many parts of the world, people take a two-minute moment of silence at 11:00 a.m. local time as a sign of respect for the roughly 60 million people who died in the war. This gesture of respect was suggested by Edward George Honey in a letter to a British newspaper.

11.11.11

In January of this year I had planned on sitting at an outdoor cafe drinking espresso, in Paris, eating whatever the french eat for breakfast on 11/11/11, but  there's a saying about what happens while you're busy making plans. Life happens.  Anyway, plans were changed, and I'm spending it with my best friend in Berkeley California.
There's always next year, God-willing.

Today, I am 49 years old.  I thank God for letting me see this day. I only allow myself 5 minutes to feel old. Then I think of friends that died before they reached 35, and that point I feel grateful for seeing this age.
God has been really good to me.

I was told to make a wish today, at 11:11, and I'll do that. I'll wish the same things for which I pray about 5x a day or more. Guess what they are?

شاد سالروز تولد

    There was a star danced, and under that was I born.
                    - William Shakespeare

      Happy birthday,
     

               me

the best is yet to come

"grow old with me, the best is yet to come." 

--robert browning

           

                         yes it's scary to go through pain, but the alternative is a wasted life.

                                      -- --Rabbi Keleman

on being thankful

The bad things in life open your eyes to the good things you weren't paying attention to before.

      --from the movie "Good Will Hunting"

This just in...Heavy D is dead

Heavy D (born Dwight Arrington Meyers - May 24, 1967 - November 8, 2011)

TMZ is reporting that a 911 call was placed from Heavy D’s Beverly Hills home around 11:25 AM to report an unconscious male on the walkway .
When help arrived, we’re told Heavy D was conscious and speaking — and was transported to a nearby hospital.
He died a short time later.

Police are investigating the death — and so far, there are no obvious signs of foul play.
Here’s what we reported earlier …
*TMZ is reporting that rapper/actor Heavy D, whose real name was Dwight Meyers, has died.
We don’t have all the details, but he was rushed to an L.A. hospital around noon today and was pronounced dead at the hospital at 1 PM.
He was 44 years old.

Heavy also wrote and performed the theme song for “In Living Color” … and has appeared over the years as an actor in several films including “Life.”
Heavy recently performed at the BET Awards in Octobe. He also performed at the Michael Jackson Tribute Concert in Wales on October 8. He sang “Jam” with La Toya Jackson.
Read his bio on his Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_D

Developing …

Courtesy, eurweb.com

Hard Times (it's gonna be alright)

The difficulties in life are intended to make us better but not bitter.
    --Anonymous

Everybody thinks of changing humanity. Nobody thinks of changing himself.
  --Leo Tolstoy

Note to self

Don't try to be a great person, just try to be a good person. And if you can succeed at being a good person, then you have found greatness.
--Don Heitkamp

"After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one."

--Cato the Elder, Roman orator & politician (234 BC - 149 BC)

This is a great quote!  In ancient times like these there were so many powerful, but wicked people getting honored with monuments.  Cato points out that greatness didn't come by placing monuments of yourself everywhere, rather the monuments came from your greatness.

On Today, November 2,

1983,

President Ronald Reagan signs law designating the third Monday in January Martin Luther King Jr Day

in 1954,

Charles C. Diggs Jr. of Detroit elected Michigan's first Black congressman.

in 1893,

Daniel Alexander Payne died. The sixth bishop of the American Methodist Episcopal Church, Payne was the first African American ordained by the Lutheran Church in 1837. In 1856, he founded Wilberforce University, where he became the first Black president of a college in America. Payne was born February 24, 1811, in Charleston, South Carolina.

in 1976,

Jimmy Carter, former governor of Georgia, elected president with strong support from Black voters.

-love

HUMP DAY!

Virginia GOP Committee Sends Out Mass E-Mail With Bullet-Ridden Obama Picture For Halloween

A Virginia county GOP committee found itself in hot water after using an image of President Obama with a bullet through his head to make a Halloween joke.

An email sent by the Loudoun County GOP that included an image of Obama as a zombie has been widely criticized by Democrats and Republicans alike. The image also includes a picture of a disfigured Nancy Pelosi. “We are going to vanquish the zombies with clear thinking conservative principles and a truckload of Republican candy,” says the email, which served as an invitation to a Halloween parade.
The image of the President was created from a copyrighted AP photo of Obama in 2006, when he was still serving in the Senate, according to The Associated Press.
“The disgusting image used today on a mass e-mail has no place in our politics. Ever,” Pat Mullins, chairman of the state’s GOP party, told the Washington Post website. “The Republican Party of Virginia condemns the image and its use in the strongest possible terms.”
“This is a disgusting and violent portrayal of the president of the United States,” Democratic Party of Virginia spokesman Brian Coy told The AP. The Republican governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, called for an apology.
After the fact, this statement of “apology” was issued:
“The Loudoun County Republican Committee yesterday sent an email to its members that represented a light-hearted attempt to inject satire humor into the Halloween holiday,” Sell says in a statement. “Apparently, some individuals have interpreted an image of Barack Obama that appeared within the email as intending to portray the president as a victim of a violent crime. Nothing could be further from the truth, and we deeply and sincerely apologize to the president and anyone who viewed the image if that was the impression that was left. The LCRC deplores any effort to display, suggest or promote violence against the president or any other political figure.”

courtesy - bossip.com


Just when I thought that they couldn't get any lower, they prove me wrong. This really upsets me. I am disgusted. We have got to keep The President and his family in our prayers.