I sat tonight after a very long day at work enjoying a movie (see the music, books and movies I'm enjoying in the column at the right) and ate some thawed frozen shrimp.
Crazy intense week helping friends going through pretty severe crises. It felt good to be there for them. Now, these past few days, I've been enjoying myself in the evenings around a wonderful crackling fire in the fireplace. Good company.
Isn’t it curious that I meet someone now and, without knowing that person, decide to invest time and energy trying to deepen our connection to a level that I have already with someone else. Why would I not equally invest time and energy trying to deepen my love for someone with whom I already feel a deep connection?"The senator has got to understand if he's going to have--he can't have it both ways. He can't take the high horse and then claim the low road."
More Americans now die from misuse of prescriptions drugs--including anti-depressants, painkillers, and sleeping pills--than from heroin and cocaine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. Fatalities due to drug overdoses have been rising dramatically in the U.S. since 1999, largely because of the abuse of prescription drugs.
Los Angeles Times
Americans eat about 100 billion cows, chickens, pigs, and other animals every year.
The New York Times
A mouse looked through the crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife open a package. “What food might this contain?” the mouse wondered - he was devastated to discover it was a mousetrap. Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed the warning: “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!”Though I usually don't respond to such forwarded e-mails, I did reply to inform the sender that origin of the mouse fable is likely based upon a speech by the German Lutheran pastor named Martin Niemoeller, and was later turned into the following poem:
The chicken clucked and scratched, raised her head and said, "Mr. Mouse, I can tell this is a grave concern to you, but it is of no consequence to me. I cannot be bothered by it."
The mouse turned to the pig and told him, "There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!" The pig sympathized, but said, “I am so very sorry, Mr. Mouse, but there is nothing I can do about it but pray. Be assured you are in my prayers."
The mouse turned to the cow and said, "There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!" The cow said, "Wow, Mr. Mouse. I'm sorry for you, but it's no skin off my nose."
So, the mouse returned to the house, head down and dejected, to face the farmer's mousetrap alone. That very night a sound was heard throughout the house -- like the sound of a mousetrap catching its prey.
The farmer's wife rushed to see what was caught. In the darkness, she did not see it was a venomous snake whose tail the trap had caught. The snake bit the farmer's wife. The farmer rushed her to the hospital, and she returned home with a fever.
Everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard for the soup's main ingredient. But his wife's sickness continued, so friends and neighbors came to sit with her around the clock.
To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig. The farmer's wife did not get well; she died.
So many people came for her funeral, the farmer had the cow slaughtered to provide enough meat for all of them. The mouse looked upon it all from his crack in the wall with great sadness.
So, the next time you hear someone is facing a problem and think it doesn't concern you, remember -- when one of us is threatened, we are all at risk. We are all involved in this journey called life. We must keep an eye out for one another and make an extra effort to encourage one another.
But, of course, animals are far more cuddly and warming than humans. So it is easier for most of us to imagine speaking up for a horse, a pig or a mouse than it is to speak up for groups of people we don't like.
I like to think of it as an early gardening technique. If you burn out the brush of weeds and sprinkle the earth with the ash, the plants you want to grow will grow healthier. Not only because they don't have to compete with the weeds, but also because they are nourished by the death of those weeds (in the form of nutrient-rich ash)."There is no such thing necessarily in a dictatorial regime of iron-clad absolutely solid evidence."
- President George W. Bush, Meet the Press, Feb. 2004
