School Girl Crushes

Ditto what this post says about Obama- Not a crush exactly -- great admiration.... although I did have that one dream a couple of years ago and made the mistake of telling C about it and now everytime we're watching TV together and Senator Obama comes on, he says "there's your man" ;~)

And then yesterday I read about another HUGE crush almost endorsing him:

"In the current presidential race, "there are two really good Democratic candidates for president. I admire and respect them both enough to wait and see what happens." But while he won't endorse Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama yet, he specifically praises the latter, who cited Springsteen as the person he would most like to meet in a recent interview with People. ( I KNEW IT - HE HAS GREAT TASTE!! -we have so much in common ;~)

"I always look at my work as trying to measure the distance between American promise and American reality," Springsteen says. "And I think (Obama's) inspired a lot of people with that idea: How do you make that distance shorter? How do we create a more humane society? We've lived through such ugly times that people want to have a romance with the idea of America again, and I think they need to.

"The hard realities and how things get done are important, too, but if you can effectively convince people that it's possible to make things better, they get excited."

Just as an aside... Speaking of crushes... Here's my current movie star crush ... James McAvoy. I just saw Atonement and loved it... I just wanted the whole movie to be about him. (I still love the book WAY more than the movie, even though they did a pretty good job translating it to film). That said, the Library scene was absolutely fantastic!!

I highly recommend "Last King of Scotland" -great performances and Mr. McAvoy's was outstanding- the character. I've also seen him in the "Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", but I want to see more. He's got a shoot-'em-up movie with Angelina Jolie coming out soon. I hope it doesn't ruin him for me. I'll probably see it anyway. ALso there was an article by Maureen Ryan in the Trib about a UK TV series that he was in, "State of Play" so I'm going to see if that's on Netflix.

(pic by Lee Bromfield from here)

Art--> Voice for Tortured Detainees

Artist Daniel Heyman "Abu Ghraib Detainee Interview Project" -showing at DePaul Art Museum thru' May 4th

from here to here to here to here

" When asked, I'll sometimes say I'm writing about torture, but I've found that when I say the word torture, many go glassy-eyed, as if I had just dropped a stone into a deep, deep well. When asked, I'll sometimes say I'm writing about the way photographs are a type of dream, or I'll say that I'm writing a memoir of bewilderment, and leave it at that, but what I mean is the bewilderment of what it is to wake up in an America that has legalized torture. (p.3)" Nick Flynn, Esquire- Feb 08

The Barber of Seville

C's sister gave us tickets to see the Barber of Seville at the Lyric. We saw the opening night performance. This was my very first opera and I enjoyed it very much.

History & Totalitarianism

Very interesting article in WIRED (h/t Instapundit) about a project to find out what was written on all the East German Stasi reports on their people- alot of them were ripped up or shredded and now they are trying to piece them all back together with technology. This caught my attention for 2 reasons. (1) I finished reading "1984" by George Orwell a couple of weeks ago. It was certainly THE most depressing book I've ever read - (... well, OK "Sophie's Choice" is a close second). But I'm really glad I read it because its so relevant to our times,... issues about privacy, terrorism, torture, PRESERVING HISTORY. I'm still absorbing it. It certainly inspires me to NOT take any government actions for granted, benign or otherwise. (2) I loved the movie referenced, "The Lives of Others"! Its a foreign film I rented on Netflix last summer and its one of those that also really sticks with you long after you watch it, Highly Recommended!

" Requests dipped in the late 1990s, but the Oscar-winning 2006 film The Lives of Others, about a Stasi agent who monitors a dissident playwright, seems to have prompted a surge of new applications; 2007 marked a five-year high. "Every month, 6,000 to 8,000 people decide to read their files for the first time," Bormann says. These days, the Stasi Records Office spends $175 million a year and employs 2,000 people.

This being Germany, there's even a special word for it: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or "coming to terms with the past." It's not self-evident — you could imagine a country deciding, communally, to recover from a totalitarian past by simply gathering all the documents and destroying them. In fact, in 1990 the German press and citizen committees were wracked by debate over whether to do just that. Many people, however, suspected that former Stasi agents and ex-informants were behind the push to forgive and forget.

By preserving and reconstructing the Stasi archives, BStU staffers say they hope to keep history from repeating itself. In November, the first children born after the fall of the wall turned 18. Evidence suggests many of them have serious gaps in their knowledge of the past. In a survey of Berlin high school students, only half agreed that the GDR was a dictatorship. Two-thirds didn't know who built the Berlin Wall."

it was good for me, YES it was!

Oooh Andrew linked to a good one today - a poem! I'm not a big poetry reader but I like them. Credit to Sharon Brogan
http://www.sbpoet.com/2008/01/i-have-this-to.html

READ IT!

This hits at so many levels... its an inside wink and a nod to both the duplicity of women at hiding things from men, but also how its just so cool that women will vote their own conscience when push comes to shove, or push comes to pulling the lever on a voting machine or pulling the curtain in the voting booth to be in the privacy of their own opinions and vote for what they think is best for the country, state, county, town, school district etc etc.

It was good for me! ;~)

Let's say a prayer or a toast to the suffragettes who paved the way!