North Coast Cafe, South

 Riley, Golden Retriever

He was seventeen.

We lived together those many years,  never apart.

My closest & constant companion--my only companion.

He was the object of my affection and recipient of

My love.

He was always happy to see me

when others weren't. Always wanted to be at my side, when others didn't.

Always willing and eager to walk about & travel

To Mexico—we went
depending on each other. A bond, a team

a beloved friend.

Gone now.

Woe!...gone.

So quiet in the house. So empty, so alone.

Oh..........

Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics.

What will future generations condemn us for?

Our prison system

Our treatment of animals in food production

Our isolation of the elderly

Our treatment of the environment                                                                    

The question is artfully posed by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the Washington Post.

Hope Not

In an exclusive interview with National Journal on Thursday, Shepard Fairey, the artist who created the iconic red-blue poster "Hope", expressed his disappointment with the president -- a malaise that seems representative of many Democrats who had great expectations for Obama.

Fairey explained that when he came up with the poster in 2008, he was trying to find a single image that embodied the issues he cared most about -- promoting health care, helping labor, and curtailing lobbyists. He likened the issues to projectiles.

"Looking at Obama's standpoint on various policies, it was like, 'Why throw all these particular projectiles over the wall... when I could put all those things in one projectile that I could hurl over the wall,'" Fairey said in a phone interview from Los Angeles, where he lives. "Obama was the delivery device in theory. Now, I realize that he maybe is not the correct delivery device, and I'll just deal with those issues separately."
... "There's a lot of stuff completely out of Obama's control or any of the Democrats' control," Fairey allowed. "But I think there's something a little deeper in terms of the optimism of the younger voter that's happening. They wanted somebody who was going to fight against the status quo, and I don't think that Obama has done that."   Source

 


The place where I live, about 2,000 feet above sea level atop a modest group of the Appalachian mountains known as the Blue Ridge, is one of the oldest places on Earth and the highest point in western North Carolina.

A few miles north at Mt. Mitchell the elevation is 6,684 ft.-- the highest point west of the Mississippi.

Nearby are the Great Smoky Mountains, a part of the Appalachians' Blue Ridge chain, best known as the home of Great Smoky Mountains National Park—the most visited National Park with over 9-million visitors a year.

The Great Smoky Mountains are also designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and are part of an international biosphere reserve with an estimated 187,000 acres of old growth forest, the largest stand east of the Mississippi.

The Appalachians are remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is they are thought to be the oldest mountain range on the planet formed 480 million years ago when North America and Africa were connected. For that reason the Appalachians and Morocco's Anti-Atlas mountains are said to be related.

Geologists claim when younger the Appalachians probably looked like the southern hemisphere's Andes do today. Over millennia the Appalachians have simply been ground down by time making for their more rounded,  tree-covered appearance of today. They are still dramatic mountains, but create a gentler landscape when compared to the ragged, craggy, sharp rock-faced heights of the Andes, Alps, or Rockies.

Still, it's an impressive landscape to behold on those days, in those moments, when one's eye catches the freshly sighted, often unexpected, and frequently breathtaking vista--that the far-reaching landscape, hill over hill, mountain to mountain, and beyond. Everyday living in these mountains is a joyous wonder.

Netflix has admitted and now apologized for hiring actors to pretend to be "enthusiastic customers" at a press conference in Canadian announcing the launch of it's new Internet streaming service.
The actors were asked to spill into the street and encouraged to "play types, for example, mothers, film buffs, tech geeks, couch potatoes etc. reciting lines from a prepared script.
"Extras are to behave as members of the public, out and about enjoying their day-to-day life, who happen upon a street event for Netflix and stop by to check it out," reads an information sheet handed out to extras.
"Extras are to look really excited, particularly if asked by media to do any interviews about the prospect of Netflix in Canada."
One has to wonder how typical this kind of corporate behavior is, a board-room full of people inhabiting a reality-distorted bubble nodding enthusiastically to one another without a care about what people really think about their product or service, making strategic decisions based on make-believe.
Do U.S. auto makers come to mind? Health Insurance companies? Wall Street?