green

YIPPEEEE!!!!!!!!!!! This is wonderful news, grrl. :)

Do you have any pics of him with his wife that you could email him? Maybe with a little note along the lines of "oh, your recent email reminded me that I had just came across these photographs and was thinking that I would share them with you." It's a naughty suggestion on my part, I know.:heh:

Hahaha. I live in Toronto and we do talk fast. What I hate is when someone local leaves me a phone message with a phone number in it because they will actually speed up when it comes to leaving the number! :phanvan As to out-sourcing phone calls, we have so many immigrants I can never tell. The only time I can tell is when the call is being sent to another part of Canada or off to the U.S.; those are the only accents I don't hear locally. :biggrin1: And the folks are generally nicer and much more helpful.:phanvan

Thanks for correcting me on this, Gadget.:confused: I didn't know that.

Well, this is certainly an odious document, isn't it? I see smear. And the usual irritating literary style that marks these documents. I think I will focus in on the final paragraph. When this bonehead asks "how many more Muslim's are we going to elect?" he has made two errors: the first is that the plural of a noun is never indicated by an apostrophe before the s; and the second is that no Muslims (plural, eh) have been elected to date. I find the statement American will be no more highly amusing.

Yah, we had no religious tradition in my family, either, although my parents did have us baptised and my mother would try to go to the local Episcopalian church every Sunday. I don't think her heart was in it, though, for she would be leaving the rest of her family sitting around the breakfast table still in their pajamas chatting about this and that. My father was born Jewish but was an atheist. The reason my mother made some efforts was because this was during the 1950s and society back then required that all individuals had a religion. On every form you had to fill out, including job applications, there it was: religion. We were baptised in the Anglican (Episcopalian) church as it was was considered to be always in good taste! We lived in a big city and my father was self-employed. He could get away with having no church affiliation. My mother did, however, have to occasionally haul her brats off to church with her. I was the oldest and so I got church duty more often than my little brothers. Later, when I was 10, I was sent off to boarding school. This was run by Anglo-Catholic nuns and I briefly became very devout.

Ugh, my husband went through a brief spell of drinking Colt 45 malt liquor. It is soooooooooooo disgusting! blehhhhh!

Thanks, folks.

Cusano, please don't leave on this note for it only tempts me to say, whatever........ (You might wish to reread and amend your farewell address, eh.)

Thanks for posting this. It is an interesting poem.

Yep, it is a complicated and sad issue. My MIL now has a very, very pleasant young man living with her. It appears that my FIL may need to be in a home, however, and my MIL is anxious to be a good host to her new live-in home care worker. This is stressing her out still further. Both my husband and my MIL are in a state of grief. And of course my FIL is not doing well. He is in sad shape physically speaking and he has suffered some loss of his intellectual and emotional faculties but not enough that he is anywhere near being unaware of his current status. This family is in a state of crisis. This is not unusual for our times.

We have the same problems with the nursing home industry up here in Canada. Some are pretty good and some are not. A few years back there was a family who suspected that their relative was being abused by his facility. Though the old man was bed-ridden and had advanced senile dementia he also had an array of inexplicable bruises. They installed a nanny-cam in his room and caught instances of terrible physical abuse on video tape. This made the news of course and people were charged with criminal offenses. My own father was kind of lucky. He was able to spend his last months while he was dying in an institution which also served as a rehab centre. This meant that the environment was a not altogether joyless place for either the help or for the visitors. My mum was able to find much emotional relief during her long sad vigils at my father's bedside through chatting with the rehab gang. My cousin's wife, who is a nurse, said that my family was lucky. She commented that we should all be saving up our money to ensure that we get good care in our final years. With respect to my mother, arrangements had been made for her to go to a very pleasant retirement facility. My two brothers and I had been anxious to see her in such an environment for the truth was that although the woman had a fine set of intellectual marbles she was becoming physically more delicate and we were concerned about this. We didn't like to see her living on her own. She did not want to live with us and a retirement facility would allow her to have her own private crib. We all, including my mother, liked the idea that there would be Stuff To Do in the way intellectual stimulation and friendships to be made. It was unfortunate that my kid brother died almost immediately after my mum decided to move. Less than two months later, only short weeks after my mum had moved into this splendid facility, she seemingly inexplicably shifted from being okay and with us - indeed she was the linch pin of our family - to crashing into a health crisis and then dying not long after. The details of my mother's death are too complicated to go into here. Certainly the events took the entire family off guard. We were left puzzled and bereft. My brother who is a doctor did comment that it was better that she died quickly than survive and be consigned to months in a nursing home. And now Green is engaged in another elder crisis. Her FIL has been having health issues for quite awhile now. He had his first heart attack when he was in his late 50s. He was a teacher and because teachers are a unionized and well-protected profession up here in the frozen north he was able to retire with a generous and fully indexed pension + health benefits. His problem was that as he became older the meds that he required for one of his physical issues had the side effect of creating other problems which in turn needed meds. In his 70s he ended up with a pharmaceutical induced Parkinson's disease. He is now in his late 70s and although he has been in need of some physical assistance for some time now, his younger and very strong wife has been able to deal with this - even though this has been stressful for her and for their children. Since Christmas there has been a sudden decline in my MIL's health. He has had for awhile now the tendency to trip but it seems that he is falling over far too often for his wife to handle. She is a powerful woman but she is in her early 70s. And so the question is, what to do? A lot of people don't like to spend money. My own mum didn't. When my MIL suggested that she wanted to have certain handicap-friendly facilities - the tall toilet, the safety bars, a walker, canes, etc - installed in their house, the old man freaked. And when her doctor suggested a live-in old man(ny) nanny, one from off-shore, and proposed a young fellow from the Philippines whom she knew about and who was looking for work, the MIL was resistant. He didn't want to be looked after by a man! Too humiliating, eh. Indeed, this old man is suffering and so is his wife; there are issues of money and humiliation at play here. These are complex issues for these people, my in-laws, are actually worth a lot of money but they are land rich, income restricted. These are also individuals who were marked by the the recession and the Second World War. Their psycho-socio-emotional connection to money is quite different to that of the following generations. This is not a profligate generation; they are uncomfortable about easy spending, even when it is on themselves. (This is why it took Green and her brothers such a long, long time to convince their mum to move into a retirement facility.) It may also be argued that this was a generation which did not believe in victimology. They were, and here I will use sound bites, folks who believe that you make your own luck, not folks that believe that shit happens. They were more pro-active, and self-responsible. They were embued with the spirit of their era. (Now, as to the ultimate value of this, well, the debate belongs to a different thread, I think.) Thus these individuals, our old folk, are 'not going to go gentle into that good night,' or so my loose quotation of Dylan Thomas's poem goes. So here's the deal: up here in Canada you can sponsor a care worker from a third world country to look after your kids, your handicapped who are living at home, or your old folks. These people live with you. You sort this out with the government. If all works out well you have a very lovely individual who lives with you and your family for two years and who becomes a fine and valuable member of your home. Everyone benefits, the new kid learns the ways of his/her new country, and you have not paid the break yer financial back fortune that you would have had to have paid had this option not been available. This is what Green and her Signif Other had thought that they had seen put in place last Sunday.

This business of beliefs is a difficult one. The government has just snatched three of the four surviving sextuplets born to a Jehovah's Witness family in British Columbia, Canada. They were born prematurely and the parents are adhering to their faith's belief that blood transfusions are just plain wrong.

You give good post, BabyG, and thank you for the above quoted one and your earlier post, too! Cusano, you know that a number of us have repeatedly said that your tone is less than cool. Hectoring is never an effective way to win folks over. As you know by now, I am an atheist. Nevertheless, there are a great many Christians who post on this site whom I both admire and kinda envy for their sweetness and their generosity of heart and spirit. These are all people who do not hide their belief and they are all interested with interacting in a positive manner with others who may have divergent views and who also post on this site. This, as you know, has not been the case with you. From what I understand of Jesus's activities, He went around preaching and performing miracles. Those who chose to listen and follow did so. His contre-temps with the money changers in the temple was related to a specific issue, that of introducing Mammon into God's house. Citing this incident as a reason to hector and rail against those of us whom you view as being infidels does not follow. Might I suggest the following approach? You examine what it is about your belief that brings you joy and certainty and then you explain this to us and you tell us that you hope that we will be open to listening to you. You then follow this up with a prayer to your God that he will assist you by enabling us to understand your message. I am aware that this may sound impertinent coming from an atheist but these are my thoughts on this matter.

As for misspelling and wonky grammar, I generally make a practice of proof reading my own material before entering it for your consumption. What I first write can often sound quite peculiar.:phanvan :embarassed: :rolleyes

Cusano makes a good point. Just as I, an atheist, would be unable to teach my children to believe, the devout Christian would find it impossible to teach his or her children to be skeptical.

Yep, but this also forbids criticism of all life styles, even those of the fundamentalists.:confused: It is, however, a controversial law and I am not sure that I am comfortable with it even though its roots were based in idealistic sentiments. I believe that the UK is struggling with similar problems vis-a-vis hate laws and freedom of speech issues at this time. The issues at stake are impossible to hammer down with these clumsy laws it would appear.:cry

Oooh................ And how long did this go one for?:nervous

I am a member of two minorities. I am an atheist. My father's side of the family is Jewish and while I am not Jewish to a Jew I am Jewish to any and all anti-Semites. Just as there was revulsion in the Western world not so long ago over the story of a Muslim who had converted to Christianity and who was going to be put to death by his state for this reason, there is presently great anxiety amongst many of us who live in North America at this time and who do not conform to the evangelical right wing vision of what they would like to see in a political state. Note that this group would not only include the usual suspects, that is to say those of us who are atheists, Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, pro-choice, left-wing-nuts, Democrats, and New Age Buddhists, but this group would also include a bunch of Christian co-religionists: Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, etc.... Should the state not be kept separate from the religious power brokers of the fundamentalist right, all of us who do not satisfy those who obtain power (let us now call you The Thought Police) will be at your mercy. We will be the dhimmi. You will cut us no slack. You might remember that this continent was settled by individuals who wished to be left in peace in order that they might believe and worship according to their needs. You might also need to be reminded that the framers of your Constitution were meticulous in keeping these needs, the needs of you and of any other folk who should chose to come to this continent, in mind. This is why they were kinda fussy about separating religion and state. I think that this was mighty kind and mighty civilized of them. What do you think?

All of this is extraordinarily shocking for us politically correct moderns but this is part of history, of recent history at that. Indeed, I do believe that there is a kind of latent racism in all of us, even the most carefully educated and liberal folks. I guess I base this not only on the Jewish Holocaust, which directly affected my own family, but also on the histories of the two Armenian holocausts which happened towards the close of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the mass starvation of the Ukrainian people as ordered by Stalin during the 1930s, the fate of the Kurdish folk, and of course the tragedies in Rwanda and in Bosnia not so long ago. I guess I also base this on the fact that the city that I live in, Toronto, has become kind of dysfunctional over the past few years. As you may or may not know, Canada's laws regarding gun ownership and use are extremely illiberal compared to those of the states. We follow the British approach with respect to gun laws; this is to say that few Canadians have ever seen a gun let alone own one. Canada is, by and large, a gunless society. We have become a multi-cultural city, a city of immigrants and this has been, by and large, a success. What we have, however, is a disproportionate number of young black men, men who have their roots in Jamaica, who belong in gangs and have guns. Over the past four or five years there have been a lot of shootings, and while the number of deaths per capita would seem low by American standards, they are high by our standards. Most of the victims are black. Those who do survive don't talk. If you are white and live in my city your chances of dying a violent death are remote. I would dare to say that living in my city is kind of an Eisenhauer experience in many ways. There is, however, a young urban black male culture up here that is exceedingly violent for those who are players. And for those who stand outside this mess, well, it becomes easy for them to drift into judgemental, racist attitudes. This isn't what we wanted to see, you know.

And........Ron Howard, Howdy Doody, Alfred E Neuman, Richie Velch? :confused: I see archetype here.:help:

Jawohl, du bist* right! *Green is showing off her high school German, eh.:faint: Let us move on to the sad case of Clarabel and her/his gender and species confusion issues. Y'all realise that this cow was sorting this out during the time before Womyn's Issues, Lesbian Power, Gay Lib, Sensitivity, Peta, and Politickal Correctness came about. :phanvan The dude was undoubtedly having a rough time in his grrly cow suit wondering whether he was a boy or a grrl, human or beef.:cry Talk about yer identity crisis, eh.:rolleyes Clarabel has undoubtedly become brisket by now. Let us pause for a moment in order to respect this fine faux cow.

Yah, I have read that there was a time in America when folks who had black ancestors buried somewhere in their remote past had to have this documented on their identity papers. These were individuals who looked white but who were not allowed the rights and privileges of living white during America's apartheid past. And TOM is right of course: most African Americans with long, long roots in America are likely to have a greater or lesser amount of European and, perhaps, native American blood as part of their genetic heritage. Indeed, it sometimes true that many white Americans with old roots in this continent may also have an array of interesting genetic material, material that might possibly prove disturbing in some cases to those very white guys themselves.

Dude! That comment was some seriously pointed political commentary on the part of TOM. :rolleyes TOM is one of the folks on this site who dresses to the left.

:confused: And we would have been saved a lot of grief!