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Our Daily Thread 3-26-13

Good Morning!

On this day in 1885 the Eastman Kodak Co. (Eastman Dry Plate and Film Co.) produced the first commercial motion picture film in Rochester, NY.

In 1945 the battle of Iwo Jima ended.

In 1953 Dr. Jonas Salk announced a new vaccine that would prevent poliomyelitis.

And in 1989 the first free elections took place in the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin was elected.

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Quote of the Day

“The  strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of  power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the  dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in  their own domination.”

Robert Frost

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And since it’s Diana Ross’ birthday……..

I always liked her best with the Supremes.

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Who has a QoD for us?

51 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 3-26-13”

  1. Alarm Dog went off early. He is sly about it. First it is a heavy sign, then he walks around a bit, then another heavy sign, then he brings out the big gun and starts scratching so that his name tag jingles on his collar. Another sign and a little whine and you are awake. He then escorts you to the back door. He gives you just enough time to take care of your own necessities and start the coffee before he barks to be let back in and whoa unto you if he stops at his bowl and there is nothing there. He gives you either the most pitiful or disdainful look, something along the lines of “seriously, are you that stupi?”.
    It is ever so much better than a screeching alarm clock.

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  4. My pet just lets me sleep in. 😆
    The man on the Weather Channel mispronounces “Appalachian” as most who are not from around here do. (Also newcomers)
    You don’t pronounce ht “h” in appalachian. The middle (third) “a” gets the sound.

    Twenty eight degrees here.
    Rick, did your mother get to Biltmore Estates?
    I’m sorry we don’t have nice spring weather.
    But as I’ve said, the apple growers love it.

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  7. Elvera’s brother was in the Iwo Jima battle. We lost lots of men there, but more lives ob B-29 crews were saved than we lost in the battle. Iwo Jima was an important battle, Okinawa wasn’t. We didn’t need to go there.

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  9. Chas, I believe so, but no pictures have been posted yet. Mother is now with her great grandsons, so everything else must wait. She established a great relationship with those boys while their Dad was in Afghanistan.

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  10. Down here we have a town called “Arab”. Of course, outsiders want to pronounce it like the word for a person from the middle-east. but it is actually pronounced A-rab.

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  11. kBells, In Baltimore, street vendors with horse-drawn carts were always called A-rabs. I’m not sure where that came from. This, from Wikipedia: “An arabber (or a-rab) is a street merchant who sells fruits and vegetables from a colorful, horse-drawn cart. Once a common sight in American East Coast cities, only a handful of arabbers still walk the streets of Baltimore.”

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  13. Animal mornings are the same at my place, except it’s typically the cat who’s the agent who comes into the bedroom, jumps on my bed meowing at 5 a.m. I get up, open the doggie door and go back to bed. They know they don’t get fed until after I get up at 7 and have had my shower.

    My dogs are actually pretty polite, they sleep on their dog beds in the living room (sometimes Cowboy sleeps on the dog bed next to my bed. But on occasion when they have to go out in the middle of the night, Tess will come in and jump on my bed, which I know is the signal that they’re having an unexpected need to go to the bathroom off schedule.

    I ignored it once and was sorry the next morning. 😉

    Animals are basically alarm clocks that need to be fed. And yeah, a whole lot better than a horrible alarm clock, even when the cat gets impatient and starts pawing my face or attacking my feet under the covers.

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  14. In Arizona we always knew when a TV or radio announcer was new to the area when they pronounced Canyon de Chelly the way it’s spelled. It’s supposed to be more like d’Shay. And Fort Huachuca is pronounced a bit like a sneeze (wah-chu-ca). But I still think my favorite was seeing people try to pronounce saguaro (or sahuaro) if they’d never seen the word before. Most people probably know it today, but when I was growing up I frequently saw people stumble over it if they were new to the Southwest. (It pretty much only grows in Arizona in the U.S. Also in Mexico and just over the border into California.)

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  16. That was in ref to the pets waking folk. As to pronunciation, we find for the correct pronunciation of Kamiah and the correct spelling of Nezperce.

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  17. I fed Misten breakfast at 10 a.m.–specifically so that I can sleep in if I want to. And she has an amazing bladder. One time when I was taking her outside instead of just letting her go out (we had a nest of bunnies in the backyard), I discovered that she typically lasted 24 hours before emptying her bladder; once at bedtime she’d gone 36 hours and she didn’t go when given the chance, so I put her on a leash and walked her. (I knew she’d make it through the night without an accident, but I walked her for my own peace of mind!) So I simply don’t worry about her control, but just put her out three or four times a day. Sometimes she asks and sometimes I just put her out. There have been times that she hasn’t been outside for the first time until noon or 1:00 and times when I offer to let her out at bedtime when she hasn’t been out since 3:00 or so, and she obviously isn’t interested, so I don’t worry about it. She’s eight and a half now, so I imagine at some point that will probably change.

    A couple of times in this house I have heard her pacing nonstop at bedtime (we have wood floors), and I’ve gotten up to put her outside one more time. But she never wakes me up early in the morning so she can eat or go out; she waits for me to get up, and then seems happy to see me.

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  18. Chas,

    I believe Reading, PA is pronounced the same as Reading, MA which is Redding. (Only here in California have I heard of a town with this name actually spelled the way it sounds.) AJ is talking about Reading, PA, I assume?

    I grew up in a town bordering Reading, MA. One time my older sister, who loved to read in the car when she was about 5 or 6, saw a highway sign for North Reading (which also borders Reading, to the north, of course) which was written as No. Reading. Alarmed, she asks my mother, “Why is there no reading allowed here?”

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  19. Here in California, we have lots of towns with Spanish names in which it’s the norm to Anglicize the pronunciation, the most famous, of course, being Los Angeles. Even after a semester of college Spanish, it never even occurred to me that there was any other way to pronounce it until I heard the name pronounced by a native Peruvian international student who’d only been in the country about 3 days.

    Offhand I can think of Los Gatos (generally pronounced Loss Gatuss) and San Rafael, which is generally pronounced San Rafell.

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  20. Mrs L sent this as an email. Has anyone else heard of the National Organization for Marriage’s boycott of Starbucks?

    Breaking News: Starbucks moves even farther left and tells traditional marriage supporters we don’t want your business.

    Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz just said at their annual meeting that If you support traditional marriage, we don’t want your business. He told a shareholder to sell his shares if he supported traditional marriage and didn’t like Starbucks stance against it. So let’s get this straight. If you support the 5000 year old tradition that marriage is between one man and one woman, you can’t buy shares in his far left radical company that sells designer $7.00 Grande Decaf Lattes? Done! I’ll take a Chick Fil-A and their 99 cent coffee instead.

    i don’t go to Starbucks because of the overpriced coffee, not because of its politics.

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  22. Peter, Christians have a really bad reputation for jumping on old wives’ tales and boycotting companies. Proctor and Gamble got rather tired of the one that says they support Satan worship, and the last time I saw that old petition to send to Congress because Madelyn Murry O’Hair was supporting a bill to make prayer illegal, the lady had already met her Maker.

    Those things are nearly always false, and I ignore them. I do sometimes have preferred and less-preferred companies (I avoided AT&T when I had a choice, for example, but they ended up buying both my landline company and my cell-phone company), but I don’t participate in actual boycotts. Well, I don’t buy Girl Scout cookies and I don’t give to the United Way or March of Dimes, but all of those are because I choose not to support abortion or lesbian advocacy–that’s more about being discerning with my donation dollars than about “boycotting.”

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  25. I’m with Cheryl. I don’t boycott. Sometimes I choose not to make donations and support certain groups but I don’t boycott.

    Place names….I am from the land of Bayou La Batre (Bolla Bat TREE) and Bon Secour (bonsecure) Ecor Rouge (EkkerRue-Ga) and Pushmataha (Push Matty Ha) and Mobile (Moe-bEEL) occassionally they will throw in an easy to pronounce name like Burnt Corn but don’t count on it.

    Currently I am finding humor in those who refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the ‘ocean”. It’s just the Gulf.

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  27. I don’t boycott (Kim).

    I am more likely to “girlcott, but with a wife, daughter, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter who considers it perfectly normal to have two mommies in Seattle and two daddies in Chicago, I suspect I would be cutting myself off at — well, wherever guys cut themselves off at.

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  28. Kim, I read the letter but I don’t think self-esteem is the issue. The issue is that no one except maybe a doctor, nurse or the parent who does the laundry should be reading or even seeing a girl that youngs’s underwear,

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  29. The best way to fight the “advertisements on underwear” trend is to leave them with a stock of unsold items. If people buy them, they will sell them and there’s nothing you can do.
    Then, according to the Overton window principle, the next step is the lettering in un-appropriate places in outerwear.

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  30. I don’t go there either. Not because of a boycott, but because I can buy a whole can of decent coffee for the same price, sans the girlie foam and what not, the way it should be. No thanks.

    Even during the power outage last year I wouldn’t go there for free internet. But my protest is over price, not politics.

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  32. Fun stuff from my part of the world: the crocuses are up! I got one of those “classic” photos: purple crocuses poking up through snow.

    Also, a couple of years ago God answered my prayer for a car in an unusual string of circumstances. I couldn’t afford one, but needed a newer one. I kept driving the old one until I could afford another, and that didn’t seem to be happening. Then a drunk driver hit me, and the insurance payout was a little more than enough to pay to but my late sister-in-law’s car from my brother.

    Well, I’ve never particularly liked the car, and now I rarely drive it. (It’s our household’s third car, and we’d like to trade in #2 and #3 for a Toyota.) Lo and behold, the same brother who sold it to me wants to buy it back because of his own family’s changed circumstances (the need for a car for his teenage stepson). So we’ll get to spend the day with him and his wife Friday (first time to see them since our wedding), and he’ll get a car he needs and we’ll get rid of one we don’t, and everyone should be happy. I’ll also get to introduce his “newish” wife to one of our family recipes.

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  33. Good afternoon! I must admit to loving Starbucks, but I don’t go there very often just because it’s so expensive. Sometimes, I do give in and get a grande cafe Americano when I’m desperate for a pick-me-up around 2:00pm.

    Daughter has Cotillion tonight. I just got back from picking up her dress from the tailor’s. She wears a size 0, so even a small has to be taken in. Oh, to have that problem!

    Cheryl: It sounds like you will have fun with your brother and SIL. Glad things worked out so well for everyone!

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  34. Regarding mispronunciations, there is a street in Houston named San Felipe. But, all the locals pronounce it San Phillipi. I think it sounds weird, even though I’ve lived here most of my life.

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  36. annms- You realize that there is a street in New York named Houston, but is pronounced as “HOW-ston” or something like that.

    And as Cheryl says, newcomers to Arizona are obvious by how they say some of the names. I remember people saying the name of my hometown as “tu-SAHN” (Tucson). Natives say “TU-sahn”. The Spanish speakers say “tuk-SON”. That is closest to the Native American word from which it is derived: “chuk-son” (not sure which syllable is stressed).

    So, Cheryl, have you ever seen a “sa-GWAR-o” (said with the English short a sound) in bloom? (Should be pronounced “sah-WAH-ro”, for those who don’t know).

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  37. Peter, if my gravatar loads correctly, you’ll see the answer. Many years went into getting this photo (this is the top, since these photos need to be cropped into a square and this is a vertical photo)–I even climbed a palo verde once, to get high enough to get close to saguaro blossoms. (Not recommended. I didn’t get a good photo, and I did get well scratched on my way out of the tree!) But then I finally found this one in full bloom when I was out for a day trip with my mom, on a visit back to Arizona after I’d moved away. But having lived there the first 22 years of my life, yes, I’ve seen all of it in bloom.

    Right now it’s still showing Misten with a snowy nose as my gravatar photo, but from previous experience I think it will probably succeed in being updated within a few minutes.

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  39. I want to know what kind of decent coffee AJ is purchasing in a can…. 🙂
    I don’t go to Starbucks much…I do love their chai latte’s and like ann, I sometimes need a “fix” in the afternoon if I am shopping at the grocery (we have a nice Starbucks at King Soopers)

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  42. Question for those who have young adult children and actually notice slang: Is “lame” a word used by today’s college-age kids? (As in “That was lame, Mom”)

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  43. Great photo, Cheryl. I, too, left Arizona at the age of 22. I never saw a saguaro blossom unitil 6 years ago on a visit to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson. Beautiful flowers. Odd that the state flower is one of the hardest to find, since they only bloom for a few days in June, and that if the eweather has been just right.

    Now the palo verde trees- They have brilliantly yellow flowers in April and May. Much more common.

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  44. We were in Tucson a few years ago in April and one saguaro was blooming so we got a few pictures of it. I guess we were blessed to be able to see it. I love the Sonoran Desert.

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  48. Computer difficulties dictate short time on here lately.

    A 23 year old guy in my family likes books and cds. A Kindle might be nice, too. A gift card to a coffee shop or for the movies would be used. A travel mug and t-shirt from a college is another possibility.

    Chas, I remember you said your church does some mission work in Clarkston, GA. The new issue of World has a cover story on the refugees in Clarkeston. Just thought you might want to see it and share it with those at church who are involved.

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  49. My oldest is 21. He used to be difficult to purchase for, until I realized that he only likes certain things, and will only use what he likes. 😉

    So, leather-bound books; books by old church Fathers, or old philosophers; (better yet, if one can combine the first two — as in leather bound books by Church Fathers or by Old Philosophers); clothing (but only of a particular type, which is hard); quill and ink sets; and old-looking leather journals.

    He used to be into fine collectibles as well: old hand fans, crystal critters, polished rocks/things made from polished rocks, etc. I think he still would be, but just has no place to enjoy them right now as he is usually away at college.

    Honestly, my kid is not typical. Think of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien at Oxford, and you probably have an idea of what he likes. He would have made an excellent renaissance scholar/philosopher/theologian/mathematician/scientist, but we don’t really value those kinds of scholars anymore. 😦

    His dream would be to be a philosophy/theology professor at an old, conservative university, where he would have a huge personal library filled with old, leather books, and comfortable leather chairs, and where he could spend hours reading and researching. Not a typical 21 year old at all.

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  50. Janice, I will be getting World, and several people in our church will too.
    Cheryl, “lame” is soooooooooooo last century.

    Janice:
    We had a guy from the NAMB (North American Mission Board) speak to us Sunday night. He’s from Pakistan. He pointed out that our church has adopted the Pashtune people (Muslims in Afghanistan & Pakistan) for our mission emphasis. He pointed out there were many thousands of Pashtune in America. If we can’t win them, how will we reach those in Pakistan? Good point.
    I went on some of those mission trips with our church in Virginia. I”m just not up to it anymore. I don’t even march with the Lions in the parades anymore.
    But I still cut the grass here.

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