Tag: ABC Wednesday

Bloggers: please consider joining ABC Wednesday

I remember my first post for ABC Wednesday, K is for the Keating Five.

If you’ve followed my blog at all, you know that, for the past four years or so, I’ve been participating in something called ABC Wednesday, in which people, literally from around the world, post an item – pictures, poems, essays that in someway describe each letter of the alphabet, in turn.

It was started about six years ago by one Denise Nesbitt from England. Initially, she was doing it all – writing the weekly introductions, visiting all the folks who came to the site, making sure they were abiding by the rules. At some point, she recruited a team of her followers to do some of the intro writing and visiting, which eventually included me.

Then a couple of rounds ago, she was wondering if she should give it up because she was getting a little burned out. So I became the administrator, assigning who reads which posts, making sure somebody is writing the introductions (and writing them myself, when necessary), and inserting the link that allows everyone to participate. Also having to play bad cop when someone grossly violates the simple rules.

I remember my first post, K is for the Keating Five. It was somewhat political, I suppose, and unlike what other people were writing, so I wasn’t sure how well it would be accepted; I guess it was fine.

The Netiquette for the site is this:

1. Post something on your non-commercial blog/webpage having something to do with the letter of the week. Use your imagination. Put a link to ABC Wednesday in your post and/or put up the logo.

2. Come to the ABC Wednesday site and link the SPECIFIC link to the Linky thing. It’ll be available around 4 p.m., Greenwich Mean Time each Tuesday, which is 11 a.m. or noon in the Eastern part of the United States.

3. Try and visit at least 5 other participants…and comment on their posts. The more sites you do visit, the more comments you will probably get.

Bloggers, consider giving it a try if this sounds interesting. We’ll be starting with A again in a couple of weeks.

X is for eXit

The nearest eXit may not be the most obvious.

When my daughter was three and four, she used to watch this video called – well, actually I don’t remember. What I do recall is there was this cartoon dog character giving suggestions on how to get out of the house in case of fire. It had some good advice on knowing where all the available eXits are, making sure there is no clutter on the stairs that could hinder escape, checking to see if the door is warm to find out whether an eXit might be blocked, staying low when there is smoke because the air’s better closer to the ground, and identifying a meeting place to gather when everyone has gotten out.

Recently, she was required at school to go through this drill put on by the local fire department, which involved climbing out a window. She NOW wants us to practice the drill I had been showing her on TV five or six years earlier.

I’m supposed to be in charge of our department’s eXit strategy at work in case of fire or other emergency. The current building owners are not very helpful with feedback, but I do know: the nearest eXit may not be the most obvious, and to take the stairs instead of the elevator.

One of the most distracting part of flying is that pitch about the best way to get OUT of the plane, should one need to do so. Certainly, it is not what I most like to think about, but when the flight attendant says, “Know where your nearest exit is, making note that it may be behind you,” I ALWAYS look for it, whereas, it appears, most people keep reading their magazines.
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Gary David Goldberg, ‘Family Ties’ and ‘Spin City’ creator, dies at 68, My favorite of his credits was the short-lived TV series Brooklyn Bridge.

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

W is for Water worries

The calculus is whether the short-term economic gain is worth the long-term ecological loss.

“In December 2010, the United Nations General Assembly declared 2013 as the United Nations International Year of Water Cooperation (Resolution A/RES/65/154). In reflection of this declaration, the 2013 World Water Day, which will take place on 22 March 2013, also will be dedicated to water cooperation. Therefore, UN-Water has called upon UNESCO to lead the 2013 United Nations International Year on Water Cooperation…”

For years, I’ve been hearing that the wars of the 21st Century will be fought, not over oil or precious metals, but over H2O. I was distressed to hear from the Nestle CEO that water is not a human right and should be privatized, which is already happening in Canada. This has energized the forces calling for a boycott of Nestle products.

As the UN reports note, climate change and other human activities are messing up the planet’s “hydrological cycle,” leading to more droughts in some parts of the earth, and devastating flooding in others. The only year in the last five that the Red River did NOT flood near Fargo, ND was when there was a drought in the region; talk about all or nothing.

My concern over a process called hydrofracking, which, according to many opponents, “uses significantly more water than conventional drilling, as well as a ‘slick water’ mixture that is pumped into the shale to fracture the rock and release the [natural] gas,” is largely based on the use and potential abuse of precious water supplies. “There is an increased potential for toxicity and its long-term impacts, [as well as] the environmental impacts of the drilling: surface and subterranean damage including forestland loss… [and] groundwater and surface water contamination…” Where will the toxic fluids go is a large and seemingly unresolved question.

Fracking is a highly charged issue in New York State because the financially depressed Southern Tier region (Jamestown to Elmira to my hometown of Binghamton) is sitting on top of part of the Marcellus basin deposit which could be a boon to the area. The calculus is whether the short-term economic gain is worth the long-term ecological loss.

On a planet of about seven billion people, more than one billion are suffering from lack of ANY clean, potable water, and twice that cannot get to “any type of improved sanitation facility. About 2 million people die every year due to diarrhoeal diseases, most of them are children less than 5 years of age.”

Read more about water policy HERE.

One does NOT want to be quoting Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

V is for Vanessa L. Williams

The discussion from some nattering nabobs of negativism, though, was that she won only because she was a light-skinned, green-eyed black woman.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then “our ideal,” as Bert Parks used to sing at the Miss America pageant, the event about which he crooned, was, let’s say, limited in hue. In fact, until the early 1970s, “non-white women were barred from competing, a restriction that was codified in the pageant’s ‘Rule number seven’, which stated that ‘contestants must be of good health and of the white race.'”

Some of the more prominent winners were Bess Myerson (NY-1945, the only Jewish winner), Lee Meriwether (CA-1955), Mary Ann Mobley (MS-1959), and Phyllis George (TX-1971).

The result of this overt racism was the institution of the Miss Black America pageant in 1968.

Then in 1984, the first black Miss America, Vanessa Williams of New York was crowned. The discussion from some nattering nabobs of negativism, though, was that she won only because she was a light-skinned, green-eyed black woman, that she was not “black enough.” Then the terrible news that she was compelled to resign because of some pictures she had taken a few years earlier had found their way into Penthouse magazine. The mortification among many black people I spoke with at the time was quite great. Interestingly, the last seven weeks of that term were completed by Suzette Charles of New Jersey, yet another black woman.

One might have thought that the scandal would have snuffed out the career of Vanessa Lynn Williams before it started; it did not. She has reached stardom as both as a singer (her debut album in 1988 was The Right Stuff) and actress (Into the Woods, on Broadway; Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives, on TV), thus earning her “multiple Grammy, Emmy, and Tony Award nominations. She is arguably the most successful Miss America winner in the field of entertainment.”

My favorite song of hers – yes, it’s out of season – is What Child Is This [LISTEN].

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

D-Day, as in discovery

Finding myself agreeing with Scalia: “Make no mistake about it. Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”

There’s a blogger called Altonian, who is writing a lot about The War Years in England, most recently: “Alton received its fair share of evacuees during the war, most of which came from London.” With my life proceeding as it has, I had not sought to follow any more bloggers. But I saw him comment on the blogs of both Berowne AND Sharp Little Pencil; both of them I met on ABC Wednesday, which, BTW, you can join too.

Berowne, BTW, generally takes a movie or play, changes it up, and sees if you can recognize it. For his current entry, I must admit, I didn’t recognize the movie until he gave a vital hint. Only then was it obvious to me. (I never saw the movie, having fallen asleep watching it on video.)

Amy at Sharp Little Pencil has been writing a string of great poems: a political rant -I don’t rant nearly so well; her manic depression, which she has dealt with; surviving sexual abuse, which she has also dealt with; and a celebration, all in this calendar month.

Appreciated LoveSong: SamuraiFrog and Rainy Days and Mondays on Splotchy’s site. Even without his obsession for Paul Williams, I got to the same place with the song.

Re: ABC Wednesday, I had to deal with a load of spam on the site, all fairly recent. It was a pain; yet its removal felt very cleansing, not as irritating as you would think.

I was struck when Melanie wrote: “It isn’t easy to be still- even when you are sick and can’t move much! That’s because stillness is also a quality of soul.”

I realized, as much as anything, the recent Supreme Court ruling, which states that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime, operates the efficiency over justice model. Finding myself agreeing with Antonin Scalia: “Make no mistake about it. Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason. But the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would not have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.” Faster – when it tramples on the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure – is not better.
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Some recent passings:

Frank Lautenberg, the Last of the New Deal Liberals. The New Jersey Democrat was the last WWII soldier left in Congress. Interesting that Governor Christie has called a special election in October, rather than saving the taxpayer dollars money, by holding it in November. Interesting political calculation.

There would be no ALL IN THE FAMILY without Jean Stapleton.

I used to love to read the syndicated column of Andrew M. Greeley: Priest, Author, Scholar, Scold.

David “Deacon” Jones was the original sackmaster of the National Football League. When I think of the original Fearsome Foursome on the LA Rams, I recall Jones, who the Hall of Fame defensive end who later had his own foundation to help kids; the late Merlin Olsen, who eventually showed up on Little House on the Prairie and other programs; and the still living Rosey Grier, who also played for the NY Giants, and liked to knit. Always seemed to forget the late Lamar Lundy, for some reason.

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