Mom, Dad and I Went To See Brett Robert

Mom, Dad and I went for the day to see Jenny and Brett. Unfortunately, Kyle had to work and we were leaving about the time he came home. But I got some of the best pictures of little Brett. By the way, Kyle got the recruiters job. He leaves for training at Lackland AFB in Texas on 4/19/2010. He will be gone for 6 weeks. Jenny's going to keep the house so we can all go visit her while he's gone and she can come home when we aren't down there pestering her! When he gets back they will be preparing to move to Peru, Illinois where he is suppose to be for 4 years. Fortunately for them, it's close to his family but it's 14 hours away from our family! I can't stand the thought of that! None of us can! Mom's afraid Brett will never see her and Daddy again because of their age. Luke is on again and off again about whether or not he will be leaving for overseas duty. All the stars have to line up for him one way or the other before he will know for sure. So I guess we won't know until closer to May. If he goes, we are moving Hannah into the guest suite (where Jenny lived last year) so she can be home with her family and ours (Sptbg is her home town). I don't look forward to Luke being overseas but I do look forward to having Hannah with us. She's such a doll!

When little Brett Robert first saw me, he acted shy and hid behind the curtain, but he would peep out and grin so he wasn't really shy.


He has his Great Great Uncle Glenn Reese's smile! All teeth!


His Grandmother, Grommie Elaine, sent him an Easter basket. So here he is seeing it. I think Jenny was hoping for a chocolate bunny rabbit that she could sneak and eat! LOL!















Here he is getting all the peeps out of the basket.




Within minutes, he is running around throwing them up in the air! He tried to taste them but he didn't like the grit of the sugar so he just enjoyed tossing them around.







OK, through with the peeps, it's now time to eat a chicken nugget and some gold fish. Here he is with his little plate.


But nothing stays in the plate for long. Choxie is such a good nanny dog! She did not attempt to eat anything out of his hands or off the floor until Jenny told her she could. So he ate and played with his food and when he was through, Jenny called Choxie over and told her she could eat now. Choxie carefully looked at Jenny and Jenny repeated it and Choxie was good to go. She cleaned up the leftover gold fish and half eaten chicken nuggets. Man, Little Miss MoneyPenny would have knocked Brett over, stood on his chest and grabbed the chicken nugget out of his very mouth! And Choxie always keeps an eye on Brett and is careful around him. She will want to play with me and almost knock me over with her exuberance but she doesn't do that with him. She's very careful around him. I've always heard Labrador Retrievers were good with kids and I believe it now. She's just a wonderful and beautiful dog!









Kyle bought Brett's madras shorts, shirt and flip flops! It's so cute! Stan and I almost got Brett some at Sam's the other day.





No more bottles, he's in sippy cups now!



He loves cell phones. Here is his.



And here he is answering his cell phone!



Jenny and I took him to the base park. Notice the plushy rubber mats under the equipment. A child can hardly get hurt on this playground. What a far cry from the playgrounds at our schools. The more children, the more hard packed the earth got so it was like playing on concrete. And all you had were a long hot metal slide, some swings, a spinner, monkey bars, and see saws. Almost all of that was dangerous. You learned how to avoid pinched fingers, dizziness and vomiting, busted chins, bruised and skinned knees and bare legged burns the hard way!











He was fascinated with the big basketball.



Jenny is in great shape!



On to the slides!







The little daredevil wanted to go down the big slide!



















Mom & Dad, Jenny, Brett and I went to Jim and Nick's BBQ in N. Charleston. It was very good food! Dad had a half rack of ribs and it was too much for HIM to eat (he took some home). I had the catfish and it was excellent and I had to bring the 2nd fillet home. Mom and Jenny had fried chicken cut up on a big salad. Brett shared Jenny's salad. I recommend this restaurant. I even accidentally left my camera bag with my expensive cameras, lenses, etc under the table. We got back to the base and I realized it (thank God before we left the area) and she called and they had found it and locked it in the office. We turned around and went straight back and got it. The waiter was Paul and he was great. He kept up with us and brought Brett a balloon which helped him last until we got everything paid and back in the car.

Islands Don't Tip Over

I'm under the impression that just about anyone can be a representative of Congress. Congressman, Congresswoman, doesn't matter. I'd like to test my theory that a rhesus monkey could successfully win a campaign to be said Congressprimate, but I don't have much interest in going through to whole process of acquiring a rhesus monkey. (I'm assuming there's a process. Seems like there would be. Actually, I take that back. It seems like their should be. In which case, it would be fair to assume that I could probably pay off a zookeeper somewhere and make my way home with a new little friend.) Being as how I'm sans monkey (in more ways than one), I'm going to have to rely on actual members of Congress to make my point here.

Meet Hank Johnson.

Rep. Johnson represents the US state of Georgia in Congress. He was attending a Congressional hearing where the topic of discussion was locating approximately 8,000 - 9,000 US Marines in Guam. If we take into consideration the family size of these troops, that amounts to somewhere around 25,000 people who will potentially be relocating to Guam. This is important to know, as it makes the story funnier.

Guam, if you are unfamiliar with it, is a small island. Not "relatively" small. Small small. It's about 212 square miles. See? Small. For the sake of comparison, Rhode Island is approximately 2,000 square miles. So, Guam is one tenth the size of the smallest state in our fine land. It's small. Now, the size of Guam is important because of the number of people that will be potentially living there in the near future. And if it had been me debating that information, the only thing that I could possibly see myself being concerned about with that many more people in such a small area would be the potential for over-crowding or the potential for a lack of water and/or food. Those would be my concerns if I were to have any. (In reality, I don't think I give a fat rat's ass what goes on in Guam. Sorry, Guam.) I would not be concerned that the island would, in fact, tip over. Wait. What now?

Correct. According to CBS News (and the rest of the entire Internet at this point), Rep. Johnson is concerned with all of those extra people being on the island to physically cause the island to capsize. He voiced this odd, odd concern when he was questioning Admiral Robert Willard, who heads the US Pacific fleet. It took him a while to get to it, though. He had to noodle his way through the actual size of the island first. Let's read a portion of what he said, shall we?

Rep. Johnson: This is a island that at it's widest level is, what, 12 miles from shore to shore? And at it's smallest level, uh, smallest, uh..location, it's uh, 7 miles, uh, between one shore and the other. Is that correct?

Admiral Willard: I don't have the exact dimensions as to your point. But Guam is a small island.

Rep. Johnson: Very small island. About 24 miles if I recall long. 24 miles long. About 7 miles wide at the least widest place on the island. And about 10, about 12, miles wide, uh, uh, on the widest part of the island. And, um, I don't know how many square miles that is. Do you happen to know?

Admiral Willard: I don't have that figure with me, sir. I can certainly supply it to you if you'd like.

OK, let's just stop right here for a moment. After I had sent a link to this video to a friend of mine (Oh, calm down! Calm down! The video is below! I'm not just going to make you read about something this good! You need to actually see and actually hear this one to get full enjoyment out of it.), she commented on how the guy knew what the length and the width of the island was (even though he couldn't come up with the term "width" or "wide", which would have been sufficient as well), but claimed to not know what the square footage was. He couldn't do the basic math for calculating area and multiply length times width? Huh. Interesting. But not as interesting as what comes up next!

Rep. Johnson: Yeah. My fear is that, uh, the whole island will, uh, become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize. Wait. What now?

He's afraid the island is going to tip over?! For reals?! Um, Congressman? Do you really think that the US Marine folks who would be in charge of all of the relocating would put all of the troops on the same side of the island? Because if you really thought that, wouldn't that be kind of crazy? You know. Almost as crazy as thinking that an island can tip over in the first place?! Good Lord, man. What is wrong with you? (And when you watch the video below, take note of the hand gestures. I really appreciated those. Just in case I was a little unclear on what he was trying to say, he made sure to gesture in a tipping motion just what he meant. It's awesome.)

Now, I wasn't the only one having a hard time with this line of questioning. The Admiral seemed to be working very hard at controlling any sort of laughing outburst.

Admiral Willard trying not to crack up: Uh, we don't anticipate that. Uh, the Guam population is currently about 175,000. And again, with 8,000 Marines and their families, it's an addition of about 25,000 more into the population.

Rep. Johnson taking things in a very different direction: And uh, also, uh, things like the environment, uh, the sensitive areas of the environment. The coral reefs and those things. And I know that lots of people don't like to think about that, but you know, we didn't think about GLOBAL WARMING EITHER. And, um, now we do have to think about it. So, um, I'm concerned from an environmental standpoint as to whether Guam is, uh, uh, the best place to do this relocation, but it's actually the only place, is that correct?

I'm lost. Someone help me out here. The coral reefs? And "those things"? What "things"? By "things", does he mean all of the bodies that will go tumbling into the sea when the island takes a nose dive into the watery abyss? What in the world does global warming have to do with the imbalance of an island?

Admiral Willard, still stifling laughter: Um, this is the BEST place. This is the farthest west US territory that we own. And, you know, this is part of our nation. And in readdressing the forward presence and posture importance to Pacific command, Guam is vital to this decision.

OK, then. Wow. That's a new one. The island might tip over. But wait! There's more! More from Rep. Johnson's camp! Of course, once this thing caught fire on the Innerwebs, Johnson had to explain his remarks somehow, so he issued this statement: "The subtle humor of this obviously metaphorical reference to a ship capsizing illustrated my concern about the impact of the planned military buildup on this small tropical island." Huh?

The humor wasn't subtle. It was overtly hilarious. And I know what a metaphor is and that wasn't one!

At the same CBS News link above, they provide a response to Rep. Johnson's "concerns" by Madeleine Bordallo, who is Guam's delegate in the House. She said, "I know Congressman Hank Johnson, and I'm sure that -- he's been here to Guam -- so I'm sure that it was just a joke." Hmm. Let's say that was the extremely unlikely case. Are you not a bit annoyed by someone joking around in a Congressional hearing? I think I might be. Might. I don't know, maybe I wouldn't. But considering that almost everything that Congress does these days annoys me, I'm guessing I would be.

The article continues with, "Furthermore, Bordallo added, she is not concerned about Congress being ill-informed about the island. Over 50 percent of the Armed Services Committee has been to Guam, she said." Is she not concerned about folks being ill-informed about THE island or about islands IN GENERAL?! Because I, for one, am a bit concerned about folks who think that an island can TIP OVER like it's some sort of boat or something. Those folks concern me a great deal! They concern me because if they think that, I have no choice but to assume that they're morons. And yes, I am concerned by morons in Congress. Thus, this concerns me.

CBS News even went with the headline "Guam Tipping Over Comment No Concern For Guam Officials". So does that mean that they weren't concerned about Guam itself tipping over? GOOD!! They shouldn't be! NO ONE should be!!

Poem: Gary Soto

Back when I was teaching schoolchildren about poetry, one of the poets I would dip into was Gary Soto (1952-), a poet they instictively grasped and could both follow and model their own work after.  I started reading Soto intensively then, and really grew to appreciate his work. I also learned that some 20 years before, during the mid-to-late 1970s, Fresno-native Soto had become one of the best known and most popular Latino poets, in no small part because of his powerful skills as a scene-setter, his story-telling skills, his simple but never simplistic and effective use of imagery, his deft and subtle control of meter and rhythm, and the deep feeling that infuses his best work. I hadn't looked at his work in many years, but when I knew my poetry month postings would be rolling around, I made a note to post a Soto poem. So here you go, "A Red Palm," which includes all of the elements I mention above, and more. Enjoy!

A Red Palm

You're in this dream of cotton plants.
You raise a hoe, swing, and the first weeds
Fall with a sigh. You take another step,
Chop, and the sigh comes again,
Until you yourself are breathing that way
With each step, a sigh that will follow you into town.

That's hours later. The sun is a red blister
Coming up in your palm. Your back is strong,
Young, not yet the broken chair
In an abandoned school of dry spiders.
Dust settles on your forehead, dirt
Smiles under each fingernail.
You chop, step, and by the end of the first row,
You can buy one splendid fish for wife
And three sons. Another row, another fish,
Until you have enough and move on to milk,
Bread, meat. Ten hours and the cupboards creak.
You can rest in the back yard under a tree.
Your hands twitch on your lap,
Not unlike the fish on a pier or the bottom
Of a boat. You drink iced tea. The minutes jerk
Like flies.

It's dusk, now night,
And the lights in your home are on.
That costs money, yellow light
In the kitchen. That's thirty steps,
You say to your hands,
Now shaped into binoculars.
You could raise them to your eyes:
You were a fool in school, now look at you.
You're a giant among cotton plants.
Now you see your oldest boy, also running.
Papa, he says, it's time to come in.

You pull him into your lap
And ask, What's forty times nine?
He knows as well as you, and you smile.
The wind makes peace with the trees,
The stars strike themselves in the dark.
You get up and walk with the sigh of cotton plants.
You go to sleep with a red sun on your palm,
The sore light you see when you first stir in bed.

"A Red Palm," from New and Selected Poems by Gary Soto. Copyright © 1995 by Gary Soto. Used by permission of Chronicle Books.

(Inter)National Poetry Month + Poems: Lucille Clifton & Ai

It wouldn't be (Inter)National Poetry Month without some J's Theater poems, would it? So, to start us off, here are poems by Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) and Ai (1947-2010), both of whom have left us with their words this year. I won't post bios, as those are widely available; I'll let their artistry, so differently and amply demonstrated in these works, speak for them.

wishes for sons

by Lucille Clifton

i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
i wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn't believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.

let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.

Lucille Clifton, "wishes for sons" from Next: New Poems. Copyright © 1987 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.

Source: Next: New Poems (BOA Editions, Ltd., 1987)

***

Nothing But Color

by Ai

for Yukio Mishima

I didn’t write Etsuko,
I sliced her open.
She was carmine inside
like a sea bass
and empty.
No viscera, nothing but color.
I love you like that, boy.
I pull the kimono down around your shoulders
and kiss you.
Then you let it fall open.
Each time, I cut you a little
and when you leave, I take the piece,
broil it, dip it in ginger sauce
and eat it. It burns my mouth so.
You laugh, holding me belly-down
with your body.
So much hurting to get to this moment,
when I’m beneath you,
wanting it to go on and to end.

At midnight, you say see you tonight
and I answer there won’t be any tonight,
but you just smile, swing your sweater
over your head and tie the sleeves around your neck.
I hear you whistling long after you disappear
down the subway steps,
as I walk back home, my whole body tingling.
I undress
and put the bronze sword on my desk
beside the crumpled sheet of rice paper.
I smooth it open
and read its single sentence:
I meant to do it.
No. It should be common and feminine
like I can’t go on sharing him,
or something to imply that.
Or the truth:
that I saw in myself
the five signs of the decay of the angel
and you were holding on, watching and free,
that I decided to go out
with the pungent odor
of this cold and consuming passion in my nose: death.
Now, I’ve said it. That vulgar word
that drags us down to the worms, sightless, predestined.
Goddamn you, boy.
Nothing I said mattered to you;
that bullshit about Etsuko or about killing myself.
I tear the note, then burn it.
The alarm clock goes off. 5:45 A.M.
I take the sword and walk into the garden.
I look up. The sun, the moon,
two round teeth rock together
and the light of one chews up the other.
I stab myself in the belly,
wait, then stab myself again. Again.
It’s snowing. I’ll turn to ice,
but I’ll burn anyone who touches me.
I start pulling my guts out,
those red silk cords,
spiraling skyward,
and I’m climbing them
past the moon and the sun,
past darkness
into white.
I mean to live.

Ai, “Nothing But Color” from Vice: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1999 by Ai. Reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., www.nortonpoets.com.

Source: Vice: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1999)

USA Japan For Africa

When it comes to TV, it doesn't get much more wackier than the stuff that the Japanese put on their air. Don't get me wrong. I don't have anything against the Japanese OR their television programs. In fact, it's quite the opposite. I rather enjoy the crazy stuff that they do. I even prefer that it is without translation OR subtitles because it makes it more amusing to wonder what in the heck everyone is doing. And why.

The video below illustrates my sentiments above perfectly. I'm unclear as to whether the show on which this hilarious debacle took place is a game show, a variety show or some sort of "talent" competition. Whatever it is and for whatever reason, a bunch of cleverly costumed performers or contestants provide their interpretation of "We Are The World". Pay close attention to the guy who looks like Smokey Robinson (after all of the weird plastic surgery) but is supposed to be Bruce Springsteen. And, as always, I'm completely open for any sort of explanation to this awesome, yet inexplicable, weirdness.

DWTS - Don't Want Telling Stories

For some reason, Kate Gosselin managed to survive the first cut on Dancing With The Stars. She didn't dance particularly well. Granted, she wasn't the lowest scoring "star", but when you're only scoring a couple of points above the 80 year old Buzz Aldrin, you're really not helping your cause by pointing out you didn't have the lowest score.

I guess I didn't think that she'd be around after the first cut because she is a reprehensible human being. She's loathsome. The only one more loathsome than her would be her ex-husband Jon Gosselin. He is truly a reprehensible human being. The two of them together were damn near unwatchable on their show, Jon & Kate Plus 8, where they exploited their eight children for profit. And when they were getting divorced? Holy crap, I thought that the tabloids and the media would never stop talking about either one of them. Her and her pain. Him and his fornicating dalliances. It was unbearable at one point. That's why it seems like a really good idea to me for Kate's routine on DWTS next week to be a Jon and Kate themed dance with Kate portraying her wicked self and her partner, a one Tony Dovolani, channeling the now rotund and rumored small penis sporting ex-husband Jon. Wait. What now?

Correct. According to the exclamatory folks over there at E! Online : "Kate will be transforming her recent tabloid troubles into a high-stepping dance routine." She will? Yes. She will. And according to Kate, "It's my story over the past two years. We're very, very excited." Um, no we're not.

How in the hell is that even possible? Is it Customs of Native America week on DWTS? And over the past two years? Why limit it to that? What? You can't figure out how to spin the yard of shooting six kids out of your uterus through the wonders of dance? Huh. Shocking. But why on earth would she choose the past two years? (Look, I know that the real question is why this nutjob would be choosing to do any part of her life as a dance routine. The answer to that is that she is a mentally imbalanced narcissist. Any other questions? Good. Now, back to the mocking...)

She's going to dance out her divorce from Jon? Oooh! Are the skanks that he was running around with going to be included in this routine? Because that I could get on board with a little bit. It'd definitely spice things up a bit. She could be all dancing with Tony/Jon and suddenly, some other dancer chick comes running up and boots her out of the way and sashays off the floor with Tony/Jon. Then if Kate laid there on the dance floor and cried for a while, that would make me happy. (Add a bit of running mascara and I'd be highly amused by it all.)


According to the E! Online folks, when asked how to describe said dance, Kate replied with "Dramatic" and Tony added "Lots of drama." That's when Kate felt the need to make clear "Oh my gosh, so much drama." Really, Kate? You had to throw that in? You think that we all don't know about your public trials and tribulations? You ruined a perfectly good summer for a lot of us by having to see your damn face on every gossip/entertainment magazine that we were trying to read whilst lying on the beach. Your entire existence over the past 2 years has been nothing BUT drama!! And now you're going to make us re-live the whole torrid ordeal by making us watch you dance it out?! Are you freaking kidding me?

I'm kind of guessing that she's still on the show because she's horrible and people want to watch her make a fool out of herself. (And if you saw last week's episode where she made her partner, Tony, so frustrated that at one point, he quit and walked out on her, then you know it was very entertaining!) But, of course, Kate (being Kate) says that "My dancing has a lot of work to do, and I'm the first to admit it. I'm not a quitter, I won't quit on this. I want to finish the dance." I don't know if you were the very first to admit it. But don't worry about quitting! It's perfectly all right! If that means that we don't have to look at your really weird fake hair and your forced smile anymore, feel free to quit! Quit away!

She also explains to us that "The frustrating thing for me is I can do it so well in practice that even I'm like, Wow! Did I just do that? Then I come out here and I'm like, Whaaa!" Um, I don't even know what that means, really. Whatever it is, it's unbelievable. And also whatever it is, I certainly don't want it explained to me through a series of dance moves. Because that would be what? Completely asinine, that is correct.