Git to Fiddlin'!

Via elnellis via m1k3y

Random Calcium & Vitamin D Plug

I am the youngest person I know who subscribes to Prevention magazine.  Okay I am the only person I know who subscribes to it.  This is a magazine which has a well-groomed, middle-aged, Nordstrom-ad-looking woman on every cover.  My subscribing to it means I have a need for soundbite stats about what vegetable or type of tea can reduce your chance of getting cancer by 25%-45%.  It is the perfect magazine for paranoid and OCD personality structures.  But on a less pathological note, it's just fascinating and helps me begin to overcome a lifetime of ignorance and neglect about food and body.  I could easily maintain a whole blog on the knowledge I am learning from Prevention and other places.  But maybe I'll just try and throw one post out there.  So here.  I like to picture myself delivering this as a news anchor in my "mamaw" character beaming into the camera:

Bone health!  Have you had your recommended daily dosage of 1000mg of calcium today?  But don't forget its besty, vitamin D, which helps calcium absorb into your system.  Besides milk, which contains both vitamins A & D, here are some other sources of calcium:

source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/30324794#30324794

Gracias a Today Show!  I don't even know what arugula is, and I have never eaten a dried fig, but obviously they are calcium bombs I need to befriend.

Another interesting quote from this video: "Vitamin D surprisingly is not found in many foods because our skins can make it."  (P.S. How about that perfect noun-verb agreement--"our skins".  Skills.) 

And now for some good sources of vitamin D:

• 10-15 minutes of sunlight every day (P.S. sunscreen interferes)
• fatty fish (e.g. salmon, chinook, sardines, shrimp)
• eggs
• meat
• light-exposed mushrooms
• 1 TBS of pure cod liver oil gives you 340% of the daily amount you need (though many of today's refined kind have the vitamin D removed, so check the label)

Vitriol

When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous," the sheriff said. "And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.

I do not know the circumstances or mental condition of the young man named Jared Loughner, 22, who killed at least six people yesterday in Arizona.  But many such acts are committed by paranoid delusional persons,  so I'm taking a wild guess that something similar is going on with this young man.  This is why, as someone who works with mentally ill persons in crisis, I appreciated the above statement from the Pima County, Arizona sheriff, Clarence Dupnik.  It is a statement which places yesterday's evil in a larger context than just an unstable person acting out in complete isolation from societal forces.

The article I got this quote from gave a glimpse into to what societal forces Jared may have been responding (in conjunction with the forces inside him, of course): the violent and hateful language used by political candidates and the whole political media machine in America.  For example, Sarah Palin, who uses gun battle language in her political rhetoric, saying things like, "Don't retreat, reload!" and who also placed Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the Democratic congresswoman shot by Loughner, on her 'targeted' seats list.  Another example:

During his campaign effort to unseat Gifford in November, Republican challenger Jesse Kelly held fundraisers where he urged supporters to help remove Giffords from office by joining him to shoot a fully loaded M-16 rifle. Kelly is a former Marine who served in Iraq and was pictured on his website in military gear holding his automatic weapon and promoting the event.

Clearly Mr. Kelly, age 28, was not thinking of the unsound-of-mind when he came up with this ploy to pose in military dress and SHOOT A LOADED RIFLE in a gesture of defeating another (female) political candidate.  Clearly his mentally unstable supporters were not on this businessman's mind when he chose to use a concrete act of violence to demonstrate what he would like to do to Giffords--*symbolically*, of course.  (Speaking of concrete thinkers, what are we telling our children when they see legislators shooting automatic rifles and speaking contemptuously of their opponents?)  I'm assuming Mr. Kelly is white, as I can hardly imagine such a stunt benefitting a brown person running for office in Arizona.

On his website, votejessekelly.com, Mr. Kelly offers his condolences to the victims, stating, "Senseless acts of violence such as this have absolutely no place in American politics." Is he speaking too of his own act of violence, as 'symbolic' as it may have been?  Is he referring also to the senseless language of violence used in political rhetoric today?

"I can't trust the current government because of fabrications. The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar."  --Jared Loughner

I do not refer to Mr. Kelly as the lone contributor to Jared's delusions.  It's possible Jared did not even know who Jesse Kelly was, or of his rifle stunt.  I don't suggest that Jared had no control over the long line of decisions and actions that led to his acts of violence.  But I agree with the sheriff that these murders should check hard the rhetoric used in American politics.  It is dramatic, sensationalist, overrun with falsehood, prideful, polarized, fear-mongering, increasingly violent, and thank you for the word, sheriff, vitriolic.  When did the public servant become the public militant?

We are naive to think there is no cost to contemptuous and murderous rhetoric in any common arena, much less on the political stage.  (Could we also be naive about the cost of our nation's gun laws?)

I look at these two men's photos and think, are we not all connected?  And how will we get by without being each other's keepers?

Advent Cheer: The Old Shall Be Made New...Or Shall Rock and Roll

In 1982, a 70-year-old English granny named May Booker wrote a letter to the BBC about her favorite band, Thin Lizzy, and how nice it would be to play with them. Which brings us to this....[thanks Danny!]

Me love.

You can now find me attached to this new album by Cortney Tidwell and Lambchop dude Kurt Wagner like it's an oxygen mask.  Downloadable here.  It's re-makes of songs from an old Nashville label called Chart Records, which happened to be run by Cortney's granddad back in the day.

Aaaaaaaahhhhh, I can breathe.

Might even wanna check out their only North American performance, here.

Here's what Nashville Scene has to say about Invariable Heartache:

"It deserves to be heard because it's so good, so original and unexpected, that it allows old Nashville to be seen through a new lens. Instead of retro cliché or surface revivalism, there is a deep, palpable yearning in these songs, an earnestness seldom found on records this sonically sophisticated."

Camille Paglia on Lady Gaga.

Thanks Hedder Vedder for the link.    

"How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? . . . Most of her worshippers seem to have had little or no contact with such powerful performers as Tina Turner or Janis Joplin, with their huge personalities and deep wells of passion.  Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions.  Gaga's fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. "

Allen Wheelis

"I seek the sound of a human voice.  A voice that bears witness, attests the way things really are.  This means a voice that has freed itself, usually with great suffering and effort, of the vast corruption of language and experience, of the cliches, the jargon, and the kitsch, of that sea of deceit and pretense in which we drift.  When I hear it, I feel respect, I turn back to page one and read carefully.  Such voices are rare, are usually drowned out by the din around us.  

Allen Wheelis 1915 - 2007

A human voice is one that bears the awareness of death--that once-only-once-and-never-again resonance.  Sex and death, eternal antagonists, forever contending, forever overturning and contradicting each other.  And beyond these difficult two, that impossible third, love, inextricably commingled.  This is the text of my life, this unruly trio."


--Allen Wheelis, The Listener: A Psychoanalyst Examines His Life