Turns out life IS just a bowl of cherries!

Garrison Keillor - American Master

Garrison Keillor, the author, humorist and creator of "A Prairie Home Companion" radio show was featured on American Masters this week. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/garrison-keillor/the-man-on-the-radio-in-the-red-shoes/1159/

This is a great man doing great work.

Here are a couple of quotations I noted:

"Our impact on the world is slight
so take life as a comedy,
play it for laughs.
You die, there is a sort of decent grief
a few people really do suffer from your absence
but the impact on the greater world is not that big.
You do not leave a big hole.
They dig a hole and they put you in it."


and

"Now that I am the age that I am
I find myself less interested in the adult world.
I feel myself going back to the ravine
and going back to the sort of loose, dreamy feeling
that you had when you were twelve and thirteen.
We see the world clearly when we are children,
and we spend the rest of our lives
trying to remember what is was we saw."

Whose hands are these before me?

Whose hands are these before me
wrinkled, dry and cracked
where for the longest time
there were another two, fair
young and supple?

Yet the same spirit inhabits both,
drives both sets to write
different songs
from the same heart.

Rob Seward
December 2008

Letterman WILL be voting for Sarah Palin

You gotta love David Letterman, he really knows how to sell stuff.

Here he is explaining a tiff with Sarah Palin.

Why would a governor get into a flame with a comedian, except that she is a marketing genius too: there is no such thing as bad press!

http://lateshow.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow/video_player/index/php/988845.phtml

Summer Cottage

by Anne Porter

This is a house
That smells of melons and roses
Sea-wind pours through it
The airy curtains float
And the wiry sprays
Of the sea-lavender
Tremble on the table

The hushed roar
Of the massive ocean
Covers us night and day
It shelters usLike a tree shadow
We live in it
As in a forest.

"Summer Cottage" by Anne Porter, from Living Things Collected Poems. © Zoland Books, 2006.

Glorious sunshine

We went to the local high school to watch the boys play softball night before last. Here is the ball field. Can you see the glacier there in the background?















Here is another view. That is Thunder Mountain in the background.
















Every night for a week an eagle has roosted in this tree behind our house. I was watering the garden last night and took these pictures, from the garden and the front of the house respectively.

Can you tell I love living in Alaska?

"Pro-Life" Murderer

I was amazed to learn that a doctor was murdered because of his work helping women.

"George R. Tiller, the nation's most prominent provider of controversial late-term abortions, was shot and killed yesterday in the lobby of his Lutheran church in Wichita, where he was serving as an usher."

http://www.kansas.com/news/tiller/story/834438.html

I have thought long and hard about abortion, and I think it is an unfortunate birth control alternative. Abortion is morally wrong, too. We should not kill. I am a pacivist, and committed to non-violence.

I want us to work to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies through education and free access to birth control, especially for teenagers, and other means. So I support Planned Parenthood and comprehensive sex education in schools.

I am also in favor of a woman being free to decide about her own health. Who am I to decide for her? I am not the one pregnant. Should the government decide? No. Do you want the government to make decisions about your healthcare? So I support freedom for people making reproductive health decisions.

Whatever your opinion about this issue, someone is so "pro-life" that they murdered a man in his church yesterday. And we should all condemn that.