The Texas school board bans Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote our constitution, from their textbooks because he is apparently too liberal for them. And they are proud of this. They are proud of their ignorance.
Now I understand George Bush. He’s the perfect Texan.... proud of his ignorance.
For all you Texans out there who this angers, change your school board and put Thomas Jefferson back in your American history books and then I’ll apologize.

I bought strawberry bulbs? seeds? plants? I don’t know. They’re in a plastic bag but the picture shows strawberries. I bought them to plant because it was looking so much like spring that I couldn’t resist. The next day, it snowed.
Thanks a lot, Mother Nature.

The bad news is that with aging comes a definite loss in the ability to remember things. The good news is that you equally forget happy and unhappy moments.

Is it just me or do you see a pattern too? When Bush started his misbegotten war of choice, people against the war held peaceful protests, standing on street corners holding signs and marching… with approved permits, of course. Here in Alaska, that was met by people who supported the war pouring water over the protesters in the middle of winter, a violent act.
So the liberals are peaceful, the conservatives are violent.
Then we have the anti abortion movement. They claim to be pro life and prove it by shooting people and blowing up clinics with people in them. Again, conservatives use violence.
And now we have health care reform, an idea that for some reason has people ready to draw blood. While vigorous debate is a hallmark of a healthy democracy, once again the conservatives use violence… throwing bricks through the windows of members of the House of Representatives who voted for the bill and threatening violence to others. This is a health care bill, for Christ’s sake. It’s about lower premiums and extended coverage. While you may not agree with it, it’s hardly taking America on the first step to hell. And certainly not something to warrant violence. Yet once again, the conservatives act violently.
Do they not even get the message of the man most of them purport to follow. He was a man of PEACE who ordered his followers to turn the other cheek.
If this is the way conservatives protest what they don’t like, than I am proud to NOT be one of them. Because I am a proud American and they don’t have a clue what that means. They should all move to Texas where Thomas Jefferson, who for the love of Pete wrote the Constitution, has been erased from history books for not being conservative enough. Texas isn’t American enough to deserve to be part of our country and neither do conservatives who use violence to get their way.
Get the hell out of my country!

Whew! One week into health care reform and the United States still stands. We must be stronger than we thought we were. But why, oh why, has Rush not left yet?

Anita Bryant circa orange juice commercials or senior prom circa 1972? And yet appropriate as her politics seem to want to take us back to the halcyon days of the 1950s when all Americans were happy white folk living in clean little communities with nothing more to worry about than the atom bomb.

I was raised an Italian Catholic in the 1950s and 60s.  I spent sixteen years in Catholic school being taught by nuns and the occasional priest or layperson. And while I know that it is considered cool to snicker at that now, I have to say that those were some of the best years of my life.

Sure, I got some strange ideas along the way. For instance, it turns out the pope isn’t the king of the world and the president isn’t the guy who helps him run America. It’s not that I was ever actually taught that as much as I just assumed it based on what I could see from my desk at St. Michael’s.
And while I must suppose there is every chance my parish did not escape the horrors of the child sex abuse scandal now rocking the Church, the reality is that no one has ever come forward with any accusations. To me those priests were, and remain, warm, wonderful men who enveloped me in hugs that were perfectly appropriate because God was in essence hugging you and that was a blessing.
The scandal that threatens to wreck the moral authority of a church that has survived for 2000 years has now reached its apogee with the disclosure that the current pope may have helped to protect a pedophile and even allowed him to continue to have access to children through parish assignments. And so the final piece of my childhood’s moral authority comes crashing down.
The fact that in the face of the decline of vocations for the priesthood, and the almost complete absence of women entering the convent except in Third World countries, the Roman Catholic Church continues to insist that its priesthood remain an all male, unmarried group is nothing short of ludicrous. I can understand and respect that the church does not feel its moral teachings should change to accommodate the morality of any given age. But this has nothing to do with morality or the teachings of Christ.
Marriage was forbidden sometime around the year 1000 A.D. when the Church got upset that married priests were viewing their parishes as property and willing it to their offspring. The Church wanted all Church property to remain in the Church. And so the rule of celibacy became the norm – though, one must add, a norm most often honored in the breech. Otherwise we would not have had the spectacle of medieval popes making their bastard sons cardinals at 15. Just another way to insure their family kept the “family” property.
Even my mother, as conservative a Catholic as you would ever meet, understood when Father John, a priest who had helped her and my dad through a rocky patch in their marriage, left the Church to marry the woman he loved. Her explanation to me? “He gave twenty years of love and devotion to the church and now he deserves to be loved himself.” How does any institution justify depriving any person of that simple human comfort? Every married Christian minister who successfully devotes his life to his church is living proof that you can have a home life and serve your God without cheating either.
When I look at the Muslim world and see how backwards so much of it can seem compared to Western nations, my first thought is that when you keep half your population closed up in a room, allowed out only wearing a head to toe covering that makes women ghosts in their own communities, then you deprive yourself of 50% of the leadership and intelligence they can bring to society.
When the Catholic Church continues to shut the door on married and female priests, it limits its pool of applicants and opens itself up to the possibility of unimaginable abuses. Unimaginable, that is, until a few brave people come forward and speak the words, “J’accuse”.
For so long as the Catholic hierarchy remains a closed, dark, secret society, more interested in protecting its members than the congregations they purport to serve, for so long will their moral authority be viewed with something between derision and laughter.
Even though I now consider myself a recovering Catholic, I still want better for the Church that gave my childhood so much love, education, attention and joy.

Last week I had to put on a bra and makeup three times in one week for social events that required both. I may need at least a month to recover.

I had two social events to go to this past weekend. One on Saturday night and one on Sunday afternoon. Thank god. That way I already had my make up on from Saturday and didn’t have to fuss on Sunday.

I look at the dogs and I look at Lance Mackey and then I look at them together and think that PETA should be using them as poster children for how dogs and humans best interact. Both species vibrant, healthy, athletic, involved in a project they do well together.... that the way all pets should get to live their lives, with purpose and love and respect. And even as I write this, Blue and Blondie look at me and explain that their purpose in life is to get me to walk every day for my health and then clean up all the food the birds drop around their cages for the rest of the day - in between naps, of course. It’s a good life for my dogs and for Lance’s dogs. 

One of those e-mails came to my in-box recently that purported to show famous women with and without makeup. The idea, apparently, was to show that they were just like you and me except with better staff to apply the paint. Quite honestly, most of them looked better in their before makeup picture than I do in after makeup pictures.
However, I am not deterred by something like that. So when I had to go to a reception recently, I gamely applied makeup thinking that this time, maybe when I was done I could at least look like a better version of their before pictures. This dream held true until I tried to put the mascara on. My lashes got all clumped together on one eye. I tried to separate them but only seemed to make them angry so that they clung even more tightly together. I was in a rush and had no time to negotiate with my eyelashes so I grabbed a tissue and tried to just wipe off the mascara so I could start again. Bad idea. The mascara transferred from my lashes to all over my eye. Now I had one eye with lashes and one eye that looked like it had been punched out. So I tried to rub the mascara off but it tends to be somewhat stubborn unless you wash your whole face. I decided to rub my other eye in the hope the mascara would also rub off from the eyelashes that looked good and then I could go to the reception with a general goth look in both eyes.
And do you even want me to go into the tale of trying to get the lipstick right after the dog jumped up on me as I was applying it?
This, girls and boys, is why I generally avoid makeup.

Have you noticed on TV how there are suddenly a whole lot more middle class African-American families being portrayed in commercials for just about everything? How come Obama doesn’t get credit for creating those jobs?

My shift was ending at Bird TLC when the gentleman came in holding something in a towel. He said he’d been working on offloading a freighter’s cargo when he was handed the towel. It contained a very tired, hungry and thirsty scoter, an unintentional hitchhiker to Alaska.

While scoters can be found in some parts of Alaska, they wisely tend to avoid Anchorage in the winter. But there is always one in every crowd who marches to his own drum, right? And the scoter staring up at us from the blanket was definitely that marcher.
The guy who brought him in said he’d done this once before with a bird that had inadvertently hitchhiked to Alaska on a boat. He knew from experience that if he just got the bird to Bird TLC, we could take it from there. So he put the scoter in our arms and left, secure in the knowledge that there was a place in Anchorage for this bird to rest up after the watery journey. The scoter ultimately went to the Sealife Center (thanks, Uncle Ted) where the accommodations are much more to his liking. But without a first stop at TLC, there is every chance he wouldn’t have made it to the Sealife Center.
Bird TLC is an organization that respects nature and is very aware that the circle of life often involves one species preying on another for its survival. It does not shrink from this reality. It knows that predators like Merlins and hawks eat birds like Red Polls and finches. The volunteers know that magpies and even Stellar Jays will take full advantage of a weak or injured bird and have it for dinner if possible. They know this and respect that this is what nature requires for survival.
On the other hand, sometimes these noble creatures can be pretty dumb as they go about the business of survival and need our help to overcome their momentary stupidity. For instance, an eagle recently came to TLC after spending one day too many feasting in a turkey pen. Simply put – salmon, good; overdose of turkey complete with feathers, bad. The smell of what came out of her crop after “cooking” in there for a few days brought tears to your eyes even if you were three rooms away.
So despite the fact that almost everyone who volunteers at Bird TLC is well aware of the inherent dignity of the birds they tend, we are also continually faced with the fact that birds can sometimes be foolish in their choices.
Another example – fried ravens and power poles.
A few months ago, there were pictures in the paper of some Fairbanks ravens circling a utility pole where a couple of other ravens had accidentally become crispy critters. The nice interpretation of those pictures was that the other ravens were saying a sad good-by. My interpretation of that event was that the circling birds were mothers with children and the mothers were saying, “See. What did I tell you would happen if you sat on that darn pole? Do you believe me now?”
Doing what you can for some hurt or lost creature is one way of sending out a ripple of caring across the big pond that is our world. So come to our For the Birds auction at the Sheraton Hotel this Saturday night, March 20, and help us keep our doors open to our feathered friends in need while getting to meet some of our wonderful education birds.
Hand Kodi, the Cache Crow, some bills – preferable large ones – and watch him deposit them in his jar, asking only for a mealworm in return. He works almost as cheaply as the volunteers
Have an up close encounter with Denali, our Golden Eagle whose beauty will take your breath away. Whether large or small, our education birds will be there to give you a chance to get to know some of Alaska’s most intriguing wildlife on a very personal level.
It is honestly a more fun evening than videos, games, TV or the movies. And we promise not to let any of the birds poop on you as long as you remember volunteer rule Number 1. Don’t stand behind the birds.

According to New York Magazine, there is a company in New York City offering to take care of your pets when you are taken up in the rapture. You only have to pay them $110/year to keep them on retainer. Apparently they are pretty sure they won’t be going. Since I’m pretty sure I don’t have a ticket on that particular ship either, I’d like to offer to anyone in Alaska that for only $100/year, I’ll do the same for you. How great a deal is that?
Happy St. Paddy’s Day. Now go out, drink green beer till you puke and show the world just what being a Catholic saint is really all about.