Motley Kamuka

The above meme is about Lorelei joking after Rory was the cause of a fight at a house party that wrecked things up. Rory is mortified, and Lorelei can joke with her. Lorelei had Rory when she was 16 and Rory strove to be the perfect child to help her mother not be stressed out. Lorelei acts like a friend to her because they are not that far in age. The tension of the show is that Rory likes the rich trappings of her grandparents, and Lorelei identifies more with the workers. It brings the family back together, but that is a challenge to the family that split apart for a reason. I have some nostalgia about protests, my parents supposedly marched in protest with me in a stroller. At Wisconsin I left the library and joined a divest from S. Africa until apartheid is over. My uncle left Madison on the day the building blew up, which is featured in the War At Home, about the protests about Vietnam.   In 2020, the hindsight year, there are protests around the world when George Floyd ...

I come across a lot of Republican memes, that irk me. I'm against guns. I don't want 35 children to die every year because of our infatuation with loose gun laws. I have never made this argument. I see the police as welfare queens who come to crime scenes after a crime and fill out forms and take statistics. OK, I'm exaggerating, I once called the cops when I saw a man hassling a woman and they showed up in 10 minutes, but the guy had gone. So maybe their presence helps keep order, but the couple went away and probably continued to enact their abusive dynamics. My point is that when there's an active shooter in a school, the police aren't there fast enough. The guy usually blows his head off in the end anyway. But sometimes they are brave, and clean up messes. Mostly in NYC they respond to a call about a crazy person who needs to be hospitalized. Or fills out a car accident form so you can take it to your insurance company. They do a lot of things, and I'm n...

OK, so it's a personality type which party you vote for. 47% look at Reagan and like him. The choice November 3rd is between a historical grifter who wrecks up the place and a centrist Democrat. From the left I find it weird that people paint Biden as commie loving. I see him past center into the Republican range, and would criticize him as not being liberal enough. I follow conservative news. It's like like trying gay sex to prove I'm hetrosexual. I'm so grossed out by what they say. I can see much of it is just confirmation bias, story x proves that Liberals are contradictory or secretly communists who want to ruin this country. If they slay strawmen, perhaps I invest time in similar activities. I imagine the same things happen for Liberals, so I somehow wish to transcend. My friend points out that gerrymandering happens on both ends of the political spectrum. I am in fact against all gerrymandering, even if I post an example by conservatives. Is there an analy...

Samantha Power's memoir is amazing in so many ways. Right now I'm reading about her and Obama's response to the Ebola outbreak. Seems quite different than our current president. Anyway, she mentioned FDR's 4 freedoms. I was not familiar with that. Norman Rockwell has 4 famous painting demonstrating those 4 freedoms. I'm learning so much from this book about how government works, and the history of America and the world. Here are some things I like about The Education of an Idealist : A woman breast feeding while doing important things. The fierce desire to preserve human life. The willingness to do whatever: be a journalist, learn a language, go to law school, work on a campaign, move all over the USA, juggle marriage and family, to learn how to talk in a confirmation hearing, learning how to talk to journalists. She discusses the impact of various photos on her image, and how others would skew her image and words to suit their own purposes. She discussed ...

I spent a year reading Shakespeare, which turned into 18 months. I'm struggling through Two Noble Kinsmen, and I haven't read H8th. But the question became, who else could I read through . I thought of Dickens, Balzac and Falkner. Today I was thinking about Dostoevsky.  Flannery O'Connor probably wouldn't take a year. Here is some output: Novels Wise Blood (1952) The Violent Bear It Away (1960) Short Stories A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955) Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) The Complete Stories (1971) Other works Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1961) The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor (1979) The Presence of Grace: and Other Book Reviews (1983) There's a review of documentary in the NY Times today about her. That led me to her latest biography . "Flannery. She liked to drink Coca-Cola mixed with coffee. She gave her mother, Regina, a mule for Mother’s Day." ...

My daughter has taken to building forts during the quarantine for Covid-19. I remember lots of forts throughout my life, but my favorite I called not ironically a "reading fort".  In 3rd grade at Shorewood Elementary School in 1976 . I thought my teacher's name was Leonore Murray, but I can't find anything, so my spelling might be off. I tried a bunch of different spellings in the search. She had what she called a carol. No references to that on google either. It was a wooden fort with lots of little reading nooks for wild minded boys like me who read better enclosed without distractions. Basically it had a bunch of little rooms for little kids to read. I had one to myself. One time I got caught passing messages between room cracks. But it's my favorite fort. A reading fort, that took away all the distractions.

I've been listening to the soundtrack to Hamilton for quite a while. I live in the city where it is being done, but I'm not rich enough to go see it. My son went to see it with his school, and he was really disappointed because inferior actors were playing the parts, compared to the sound track. I'm listening to the audio book of the biography of Hamilton. Of course a Broadway play is more about mythmaking and drama than history, so to compare the two is absurd. The Broadway show will not be historically accurate. Somehow a hip hop Broadway show about a founding father is amazing in the hands of Lin-Manuel Miranda . I'm looking forward to In The Heights too. I haven't mustered the attention to listen to the whole thing, but some like that more than Hamilton. Outside how enjoyable this show is, America loves someone who has become fabulously wealthy. He's become a superstar. What you can do in America. Create perhaps the best Broadway show of all time, and ...

I'm reading The Education of an Idealist  and really enjoying it. I found 2 videos that give a sense of her, and talk about the book. Book TV Amanpour and Company Wikipedia Entry She supported men who were stoical, were never sure an intervention was successful or really helped, and who were humble. I couldn't help but think that when she was proud of herself, she did not have the support of meditation to see the interconnectedness that helps one to be, inter alia, humble. My Serbian friend said about the breakup of Yugoslavia, "Knowing the reality on the ground versus the media-political propaganda machine threw wide open what else we’ve been lied about. Therefore I have no patience in listening to people lying to themselves. Flocking in false virtue and fogs of hysteria. Tribal stupidity of those who espouse atheism while evangelizing in pure zeal with fists and slogans. Gen xers should know better. We should have been taught some history." Quotes fro...