Didn't go to dance class last night. I opened the front door exactly once all day, and slammed it shut again immediately. It's too darn cold out there! When I'm cold I want my bed, so I crawled under the covers at 7 pm, intending to read and watch TV, and accidentally fell asleep. I woke at 1 am and have been awake since.
I did try the snowthrower on Sunday. It started. It didn't want to keep running, but I think that's just because it hadn't been run in ages. I can probably nurse it past that. There's a few inches of snow on the drive now, but not enough to bother the van, and there's no danger of it melting down to frozen slush for a few days (it's about 5 degrees out there now, and won't get above 25 all week), so I'm going to let it go for now. It'll be in the 20s on Thursday, so I might clear it then.
I HATE COLD!!!
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I got a comment from a reader on #110 (about why some crises get all kinds of help and others are ignored) that I had to think about a bit. She says "As soon as Americans are involved in a disaster, we rush to aid them. If there are no American deaths, victims, casualties, or survivors to tell the story, no one cares. As soon as there are Americans involved, everyone wants to know what's going on and they will do whatever they can to help."
It is true that involvement of Americans gets the media there, and often will get the government involved (at least to the extent of getting the Americans out (unless the Americans are missionaries, then the US state department seems to look away)). That gets the ball rolling. But what Nightline was wondering about was the enormous and continuing emotional response of the American people - the private contributions and public pressure on the federal government to do more.
All these private contributions for the tsunami are not going to help the Americans - they are going to help the local people, since all the Americans are all either gone or safely on their way home (or staying to volunteer). We don't have that same emotional response to Somalia, or the street children of Brazil (6 year-olds begging on the street to feed younger siblings, children being hunted and murdered by "cleanup squads"), or the famines in Ethiopia, or the sex trade in children in South America and southeast Asia, or the earthquakes in China, all of which have been covered by the media - until it was obvious no one was interested. Maybe it is that Americans were there and experienced it, and somehow we emotionally connect more through them.
We'll see how long it lasts. The government has already lost interest.
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Heard recently: The reason many business women are uncomfortable in positions of authority is that they have been trained to be conciliators, and they are therefore afraid/reluctant to anger peers and subordinates.
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The new tack from the Creationists is to call it "Intelligent Design". I don't understand why there's so much distance between the Creationists and the Evolutionists. One would think that it would take intelligence to set up evolution. A Jewish scholar(**) once told me that in Genesis, the old word for "day" in the singular meant "one day", but in the plural it was an undefined period of time, so that "days" could refer to an eon. So saying that the world was created in seven days could be translated as seven eons. If you look at it that way, Genesis tracks geological history and evolution, which is absolutely astounding!
(**) Mordecai Treblow, in 1964, to be exact - Rabbi D., do you remember him? The chemistry professor who kept falling off his stool, used his office window as a door, stunk up the lab once a month, looked exactly like Jerry Lewis' nutty professor, chess club advisor? I adored him.
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