If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry.
If it's not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.

Tenzin Gyatso

14th Dalai Lama of Tibet

 

Sweetie Sue just got invited to be on THE VIEW in February for the 3rd annual mutt contest.  We're so excited!  Except, it'll cost lots as they won't pay for anything.  How will we do it?  Maybe our friend, Mark, can go with us to help out.  Sure hope so.

 

Then, should we fly or drive?  So many decisions!

Oye!  What will happen?  How will it all unfold?

  I plan to be "Buddhist" about it all and let it unfold naturally and without woe.  More to come. . . .

Today's Daily OM

January 26, 2011
Circling the Wagons

Surrounding With Protective Light

Sometimes we need to circle the wagons in our own life which means asking for help and support.

There are times when we may know of someone who is in great need and wants help, but we may feel at a loss about how best to help them. It is at such times that we can ask for help in surrounding them with support and protection, just like the pioneers once circled their wagons in the middle of unknown territory. Whether this means turning to an already established community such as a service organization or gathering support from diverse sources, a group of people can be brought together to help an individual or an entire community. It doesn’t always take money to help someone either--cooking, cleaning, driving, fund raising, or offering emotional support are all valuable and have the added benefit of the closeness of the human touch. In any case, the universe sends angels in the form of willing friends or strangers to gather their individual lights to surround those in need with the warmth of compassion.

Some people may have difficulty accepting or even recognizing aid when it appears in unexpected guises from unlikely sources. All we can do is to follow our inner guidance, give when we are moved to do so and shine our light to the best of our ability. As we join our energy with those in the circle, we become part of something that is larger and more powerful than the individuals within it.

When we act as part of a community of service like this, we are reminded that we are not only assisting an individual or select group in the moment, but we are serving the greater good. We are creating a better world, and can rest assured that help will be there for us as well. As we offer our own light to the collective glow to help someone through a time of darkness, all of our lights become brighter. We can live every day from this place of light, knowing the freedom from fear and worry that allows us to receive and share the protective and supportive light of life.

To Thine Own Self Be True

Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.

Lucille Ball, 1911-1989

American Actress and Comedienne

Logic will get you from A to B.
Imagination will take you everywhere.

Albert Einstein, 1879-1955

Theoretical Physicist, Author and Philosopher

Love is always bestowed as a gift -
freely, willingly and without expectation.
We don't love to be loved;
we love to love.

Dr. Leo Buscaglia, 1924-1998

American Author, Professor and Inspirational Speaker

Edith Wharton's Birthday

It's the birthday of the writer who said, "Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope." That's Edith Wharton, (books by this author) born in New York City (1862). She wrote about frustrated love in novels like The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.

She came from a rich and snobbish New York family who lived off the inheritance of their real estate and banking tycoon ancestors, and she spent several years of her early childhood traveling around Europe. When she was 10, her parents re-settled in New York, around 23rd and Park Avenue. She was a teenage bookworm, reading insatiably from her family's expansive library and feeling alienated and adrift in the New York high-society circles her family moved in. At 23, she married a family friend, a classy, good-looking sportsman named Edward "Teddy" Robbins Wharton, who wasn't particularly fond of books. He had a tendency for manic spells, extravagant spending sprees, and infidelity. It was a long and miserable marriage.

She met Henry James in Europe and became good friends with him. He encouraged her to write about the New York City she knew so well and disliked. He said, "Don't pass it by — the immediate, the real, the only, the yours." And it was Henry James who introduced her to his friend Morton Fullerton, a dashing, promiscuous, intellectual American expat journalist who reported for the London Times from Paris. Edith Wharton fell hard for the man, filled her diary with passages about how their romance and conversation made her feel complete, wrote him pleading letters, and about a year into their affair, when she was in her late 40s, moved full-time to Paris, where he resided. The affair ended in 1911, the year she published Ethan Frome. She once wrote to him:

"Do you know what I was thinking last night, when you asked me, &; I couldn't tell you? — Only that the way you've spent your emotional life while I've ... hoarded mine, is what puts the great gulf between us, & sets us not only on opposite shores, but at hopelessly distant points of our respective shores. Do you see what I mean?

"And I'm so afraid that the treasures I long to unpack for you, that have come to me in magic ships from enchanted islands, are only, to you, the old familiar red calico & beads of the clever trader, who has had dealing with every latitude, & knows just what to carry in the hold to please the simple native — I'm so afraid of this, that often & often I stuff my shining treasures back into their box, lest I should see you smiling at them!

"Well! And what if you do? It's your loss, after all! And if you can't come into the room without my feeling all over me a ripple of flame, & if, wherever you touch me, a heart beats under your touch, & if, when you hold me, & I don't speak, it's because all the words in me seem to have become throbbing pulses, & all my thoughts are a great golden blur — why should I be afraid of your smiling at me, when I can turn the beads & calico back into such beauty —?"

He left her in 1911, and she stayed married to Teddy for a couple more years, though the two lived apart from each other during the last part of their 28-year marriage. She loved living in Paris, and there she mingled with people like André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Theodore Roosevelt, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom she once told: "To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers." But she wasn't prim or overly proper, and she famously enjoyed one of Fitzgerald's scandalous stories, about an American couple in a Paris brothel, which he drunkenly related the first time he met her.

Modernist writers were among her contemporaries, but she didn't use modernist techniques like stream-of-consciousness in her own writing, and she wasn't a fan of it in others'. She once said about James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), "Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening."

She died in Paris at the age of 75. At the time of her death, she was working on a novel called The Buccaneers, about five rich American girls who set out to marry landed British men, so that they can have English feudal titles in their names, like "Duchess." In her last days, she lay in bed and worked on the novel, and each page that she completed she dropped onto the floor so that it could be collected later, when she was through.

Many of her novels have been made into movies. The House of Mirth, The Glimpses of the Moon, and The Age of Innocence were all adapted into silent films around the 1920s. John Madden directed a version of Ethan Frome in 1993, the same year Martin Scorsese directed a film adaptation of The Age of Innocence. In 2000, Gillian Anderson stared in The House of Mirth, directed by Terence Davies.

In her short story "The Fullness of Life" she famously wrote:
"You have hit upon the exact word; I was fond of him, yes, just as I was fond of my grandmother, and the house that I was born in, and my old nurse. Oh, I was fond of him, and we were counted a very happy couple. But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes."

"And your husband," asked the Spirit, after a pause, "never got beyond the family sitting-room?"
"Never," she returned, impatiently; "and the worst of it was that he was quite content to remain there. He thought it perfectly beautiful, and sometimes, when he was admiring its commonplace furniture, insignificant as the chairs and tables of a hotel parlor, I felt like crying out to him: 'Fool, will you never guess that close at hand are rooms full of treasures and wonders, such as the eye of man hath not seen, rooms that no step has crossed, but that might be yours to live in, could you but find the handle of the door?'"

And Edith Wharton said, "There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it."

Fasten Your Seatbelts

Three Perfect Days

by Linda Pastan

In the middle seat of an airplane,
between an overweight woman
whose arm takes over the armrest
and a man immersed in his computer game,

I am reading the inflight magazine
about three perfect days somewhere: Kyoto
this time, but it could be anywhere—
Madagascar or one of the Virgin Islands.

There is always the perfect hotel
where at breakfast the waiter smiles
as he serves an egg as perfectly coddled
as a Spanish Infanta.

There are walks over perfect bridges—their spans
defying physics—and visits to zoos
where rain is forbidden,
and no small child is ever bored or crying.

I would settle now for just one perfect day
anywhere at all, a day without
mosquitoes, or traffic, or newspapers
with their headlines.

A day without any kind of turbulence—
certainly not this kind, as the pilot tells us
to fasten our seatbelts, and even
the flight attendants look nervous.

"Three Perfect Days" by Linda Pastan, from Traveling Light. © W.W. Norton & Co., 2011.

Love of Life, Love of Writing

“Let us dream of tomorrow where we can truly love from the soul,
and know love as the ultimate truth at the heart of all creation.”

Michael Jackson

It's the birthday of Aryn Kyle, (books by this author) born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1978. Her first novel, The God of Animals (2007), was an award-winning international best-seller.
She always wanted to be a writer. And in the fourth grade she really, really wanted a puppy. But she couldn't have one, so she spent most of that year working on a novel about a magic puppy. In fifth grade, her parents got her a puppy, and when they did she abandoned the novel. But she kept writing fiction, and even years later sometimes still wrote stories about young girls who like animals. One of those stories, "The Foaling Season," was published in The Atlantic Monthly, and it won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. "The Foaling Season" became the first chapter of her first novel, The God of Animals (2007). Four days after she finished the draft, the novel sold. When it was published, critics called her one of the best young novelists in America.
She's not a daily writer or a rigidly disciplined one. In fact, she said, "I tend to have two speeds when it comes to writing: All The Time; and Not At All." She said: "Months pass in which I don't work at all. But when I am writing, that's all I do. I hardly sleep, hardly eat, hardly have any contact with the outside world. I stop answering my phone, I don't respond to emails, I forget to pay my bills. This is neither terribly healthy nor terribly good for my social life, but I try to remind myself that Emily Dickinson lived in an attic, which makes me feel well adjusted by comparison."
She said that as she gets older, she trusts this process more. "I can only loaf around for so long before I start to feel pent-up and anxious, before I feel a skittish energy begin to build inside of me, and then I know it's time to get back to work."
She loves the thrill of beginning a new story and she loves the glory of finishing a first draft. But all of that time writing in between can be difficult and discouraging, she said, like "digging through concrete with a salad fork" or being "adrift in threads that don't tie together and arcs that go nowhere." At that point, she says, there's nothing to do but "clench your jaw and power through."
She said: "Finishing a story is truly the most amazing experience in the world. ... It's like being on the most fantastic, perfect drugs. I feel like I can fly. Literally. Everything I've ever written has been finished around 3:00 in the morning — probably because I write at night — and when I'm done, I'm filled with so much adrenaline, I can hardly contain myself. I want to go running or dancing or find a trampoline."
Her most recent book, which was published last spring, is a short-story collection called Boys and Girls Like You and Me (2010). In it, she writes:
"She wasn't bored, not exactly. There were a lot of things she liked about Mark. His jawline smelled like crayons and freshly cut grass. His hands were always clean. At night, he curled his body around her in bed, one arm beneath her neck, the other looped across her waist. She would press herself into the warm weight of him and feel his breath, damp and hot on her throat. And in that foggy place between sleep and waking, he could have been anyone. That was what she liked most about him: In the darkness, he became whomever she wanted."

Time Waits for No One

In my first book, I wrote about wanting to meet Robben Fleming, the gentleman who was president of The University of Michigan during my undergraduate years.  I'd heard he was living in Glacier Hills Retirement Center in the summer of 2009.  As soon as I'd heard that, I instantly thought I'd like to visit him there, talk about the good ol' days and get to know him as a person, now, in his old age.  But, I procrastinated, put it off and didn't follow my instincts.

The following December, I signed up to take my dog to visit the seniors at Glacier Hills and heard that Robben Fleming was amongst them on the third floor, where my dog and I would be visiting.  I was elated that I would finally get to meet him and asked if we could come soon.  The activities director said she had to use up her vacation time or lose it, so asked that I come a week later.

I did.  Three days after Robben Fleming had passed.  I was crestfallen, stunned and deeply regretful.

This article illustrates much of the same remorse and echoes my sadness:

Vivian Maier's Life In Obscurity
By John Maloof
Jan 17, 2011

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This was created in dedication to the photographer Vivian Maier, a street photographer from the 1950s - 1990s. Vivian's work was discovered at an auction in Chicago where she resided most of her life. Her discovered work included over 100,000 mostly medium format negatives, thousands of prints, and a ton of undeveloped rolls of film. I have approximately 90-95% of the work.

Some have suggested that I add more information on the story of Vivian's work and such. Here is what I know.

I acquired Vivian's negatives while at a furniture and antique auction. From what I know, the auction house acquired her belongings from her storage locker that was sold off due to delinquent payments. I didn't know what 'street photography' was when I purchased them.

It took me days to look through all of her work. It inspired me to pick up photography myself. Little by little, as I progressed as a photographer, I would revisit Vivian's negatives and I would "see" more in her work. I bought her same camera and took to the same streets soon to realize how difficult it was to make images of her caliber. I discovered the eye she had for photography through my own practice. Needless to say, I am attached to her work.

After some researching, I have only little information about Vivian. Central Camera (110 yr old camera shop in Chicago) has encountered Vivian from time to time when she would purchase film while out on the Chicago streets. From what they knew of her, they say she was a very "keep your distance from me" type of person but was also outspoken. She loved foreign films and didn't care much for American films.

Some of her photos have pictures of children and often times it was near a beach. I later found out she was a nanny for a family on the North Side whose children these most likely were. One of her obituaries states that she lived in Oak Park, a close Chicago suburb, but I later found that she lived in the Rogers Park neighborhood.

Out of the more than 100,000 negatives I have in the collection, about 20-30,000 negatives were still in rolls, undeveloped from the 1960's-1970' s. I have been successfully developing these rolls. I must say, it's very exciting for me. Most of her negatives that were developed in sleeves have the date and location penciled in French (she had poor penmanship).

I found her name written with pencil on a photo-lab envelope. I decided to 'Google' her about a year after I purchased these only to find her obituary placed the day before my search. She passed only a couple of days before that inquiry on her.

I wanted to meet her in person well before I found her obituary but, the auction house had stated she was ill, so I didn't want to bother her. So many questions would have been answered if I had.

Getting Paid What We're Worth

It's the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, (books by this author) born in Boston in 1809. When he was two, both his parents died from tuberculosis, and Edgar was taken in by a wealthy tobacco merchant named John Allan, and Edgar Poe became Edgar Allan Poe. He went to the University of Virginia, and for years he was in and out of the Army and West Point, publishing several books of poems, including Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems (1829). He started writing short stories as well, and we remember him for many of those gothic horror stories, like "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Fall of the House of Usher."

But Poe lived most of his life in poverty and sometimes in misery. He would work and work on a poem only to sell it to a newspaper for a few dollars. In 1836, Poe married his 14-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. She was sick with tuberculosis, and they had no money to pay for heat so Poe trained their cat to sit on her lap to keep her warm. Virginia's mother lived with the couple as well, and Poe was trying to care for them both with almost no money. When he did get money, he often spent it on alcohol. His biggest problem was that he wasn't paid enough money for what he wrote; in 1845, he sold the poem "The Raven" to a newspaper for $15.

Ain't It the Truth?

There are five things that you cannot recover in life:  (1) The Stone...........after it's thrown,
(2) The Word...............after it's said,
(3) The Occasion......after it's missed,
(4) The Time.....after it's gone,
(5) A person...............after they die.    

Susan Sontag's Birthday

It's the birthday of writer Susan Sontag, (books by this author) born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City (1933). She said, "Childhood was a terrible waste of time." Her own childhood was often lonely. Her parents were wealthy — her father owned a fur trading business called the Kung Chen Fur Corporation, and they lived in China. They also kept an apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City, so before Susan was born her mother started to worry about giving birth in a foreign country and went to New York for her daughter's birth; but shortly afterwards she returned to China, leaving Susan in the care of relatives. Her mother came back a few years later to give birth to a second daughter, Judith, then left again. In 1938, their father died of tuberculosis when he was 34. Their mother, who was even younger, moved back from China, and instructed the girls not to call her "mother" in public so that no one would know she was old enough to have children.

The family moved to Miami, then Tucson, then Los Angeles. Susan was a very smart young woman, bored by most of her classmates and the Southern California culture around her. After her first semester of her sophomore year of high school, the principal of the school informed her that the school had nothing more to offer her and offered to let her graduate then. So she spent a semester at the University of California, Berkeley, and then transferred to the University of Chicago. When she was 17, she went to a class taught by a 28-year-old sociology professor and they hit it off. About two weeks later, they got married. She got two master's degrees from Harvard, studied at Oxford and the Sorbonne, had a son, and got divorced, all by the age of 26.

She said that she arrived in New York in 1959 with "70 dollars, two suitcases, and a seven-year-old." Growing up, her dream was to write for the Partisan Review. In New York, she marched up to the editor at a cocktail party and asked if she could write for the magazine. In 1964, in the Partisan Review, she published the essay that made her famous: "Notes On 'Camp.'" She discussed what made something "campy," why camp is a phenomenon, what separates camp from just plain bad, and why camp should be taken seriously. She wrote: "The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste. (Genet talks about this in Our Lady of the Flowers.) The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating.

The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion. Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation, — not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it's not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Camp taste doesn't propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn't sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures."

The Art of Life

The most visible creators I know of are those artists whose medium is life itself. The ones who express the unexpressible– without brush, hammer, clay or guitar. They neither paint nor sculpt. Their medium is being. Whatever their presence touches has increased life. They see and don't have to draw. They are the artists of being

Anonymous

Pema Chodron's beautiful verses:  Aspiration
Throughout our lives until this very moment, whatever virtue we have accomplished, including any benefit that may have come from our thoughts, words, and actions today, we dedicate to the welfare of all beings.
May the roots of suffering diminish. May warfare, violence, neglect, indifference, and addictions also decrease.
May the wisdom and compassion of all beings increase, now and in the future.
May we clearly see all the barriers we erect between ourselves and others to be as insubstantial as our dreams.
May we appreciate the great perfection of all phenomena.
May we continue to open our hearts and minds in order to work ceaselessly for the benefit of all beings. May we lead a life of generosity, virtue, patience, perseverance, love, and courage.

 

A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up to make new trees.

Author: Lawrence G. Lovasik

Ode to Bob

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.
~George Eliot

A sunbeam to warm you,
A moonbeam to charm you,
A sheltering angel, so nothing can harm you.
~Irish Blessing

Never part without loving words to think of during your absence. It may be that you will not meet again in this life.
~Jean Paul Richter

latimes.com

Debbie Friedman, self-taught Jewish folk singer, dies at 59

Inspired by 1960s folk singers and bored by synagogue services, she began infusing traditional Jewish prayers with a contemporary sensibility, transforming the worship experience.

By Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times
January 11, 2011

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Debbie Friedman, a self-taught Jewish folk singer and composer who transformed synagogue music and worship by infusing traditional prayers with a contemporary sensibility, died Sunday at Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo. She was 59.

The cause was complications of pneumonia from an unknown viral infection, said her sister, Cheryl Friedman.

Over the last four decades Friedman recorded more than 20 albums of songs that combine English and Hebrew texts with folk rhythms. Among her best-known compositions is "Mi Sheberach," the Jewish prayer for healing. Written for a friend who was struggling to adjust to getting older, it became a staple of Reform Jewish services and a central part of the Jewish healing movement, which reaches out to people coping with serious illness.

The song was performed at a Tucson temple Sunday for Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, critically wounded during a shooting rampage the day before, as well as at healing services for Friedman after she became ill last week.

Friedman, a self-described child of the 1960s, somewhat resembled Joan Baez with her dark, closely cropped hair. She taught herself to play guitar and compose by listening to the music of artists such as Judy Collins, Carly Simon and the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary.

"Debbie Friedman has carved a very powerful legacy in the Jewish world," the trio's Peter Yarrow, who performed with her at Carnegie Hall, said some years ago. "She took all the energies of the folk music that preceded it and turned it into something that directly related to Jewishness. I don't think anybody else has done that, and she has done it brilliantly."

Since last year, Friedman was a music instructor and artist-in-residence at the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College, where she taught a course on using Jewish texts as a source for songs, sermons, and study.

"She led a revolution…. Her music is quite universal in the Jewish community," Rabbi Richard Levy, a longtime friend and director of spiritual growth at the college, said Monday.

Her music is most popular in Reform and Conservative synagogues, but it has also been performed in Orthodox Jewish settings and in Christian churches.

Although Friedman's modern twist on Jewish spiritual music met considerable resistance at first, she eventually led congregations as cantorial soloist, even though she was not an ordained cantor.

The daughter of a kosher butcher and a food service director, Friedman was born in Utica, N.Y., on Feb. 23, 1951, and moved with her family to St. Paul, Minn., when she was 6. She took piano lessons as a child and taught herself to play guitar at a Jewish summer camp when she was a teenager.

Instead of attending college, she moved to Israel after graduating from high school and lived on a kibbutz for six months. When she returned to the U.S., she began attending a St. Paul synagogue but found the services boring. "I realized the rabbi was talking, the choir was singing and nobody was doing anything. There was no participation," she recalled in a 1995 interview with The Times.

Not long after, she was riding a bus from New Jersey to New York when a melody came into her head. She joined it to "V'ahavta," a prayer about unity with God, and taught it to Jewish youths at a summer camp. Their reaction startled her. "All of a sudden they stood up, grabbed each other's arms and joined in this prayer," she said. "I realized something powerful was happening."

The popularity of "V'ahavta" led her to make a demo. When she quickly sold 1,000 copies of the recording, she knew she had found her vocation.

"Music was the way she found to express her commitment to and love for Judaism, and that really was her calling," Cheryl Friedman said of her sister, whose other survivors include her mother, Freda, of Laguna Hills, and sister Barbara Egli of Minnesota.

Several of Friedman's songs are in the Reform prayer book, and some of her lyrics have appeared on Hallmark greeting cards. One of her most popular children's compositions, the "Alef Bet Song" about the Hebrew alphabet, has been performed by Barney, the purple dinosaur from children's TV.

Her primary objective was to "try to make prayer user friendly," she told Reform Judaism magazine in 2002. "Because the music is in a familiar genre, people are able to make the connection between the music and the text. The real power is in the poetry of the liturgy, how moving and stirring it can be, connecting us to our deepest and most precious ideas, hopes, and fears."

The funeral will be held at 11 a.m. Tuesday at Temple Beth Sholom, 2625 N. Tustin Ave., Santa Ana.

elaine.woo@latimes.com

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

"Beyond the beauty of external forms, there is something more existing here:
something that cannot be named or defined, some deep and holy.
Whenever and wherever there is beauty, this inner essence shines through somehow.
It only reveals itself to you when you are present."

The power of now
Erkhart Tolle

It's the birthday of Cassandra Austen, born in Hampshire, England (1773). She was a good watercolor painter, and she was extremely close to her sister, novelist Jane Austen. Neither one of the two sisters ever married and they shared a bedroom all of their lives. When they were apart from each other — when one traveled to visit distant relatives and the other stayed home — they wrote letters, hundreds of them. And it's from these letters between the Austen sisters that scholars have been able to piece together many of the details about Jane Austen's life.
We also know what Jane Austen looks like because of drawings by her sister Cassandra. One of Cassandra's illustrations of Jane is on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Things Babies Born in 2011 Will Never Know

Things Babies Born in 2011 Will Never Know

by Stacy Johnson
Wednesday, January 5, 2011

provided by

Huffington Post recently put up a story called You're Out: 20 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade. It's a great retrospective on the technology leaps we've made since the new century began, and it got me thinking about the difference today's technology will make in the lives of tomorrow's kids.

I've used some of their ideas and added some of my own to make the list below: Do you think kids born in 2011 will recognize any of the following?

Video tape: Starting this year, the news stories we produce here at Money Talks have all been shot, edited, and distributed to TV stations without ever being on any kind of tape. Not only that, the tape-less broadcast camera we use today offers much higher quality than anything that could have been imagined 10 years ago -- and cost less than the lens on the camera we were using previously.

Travel agents: While not dead today, this profession is one of many that's been decimated by the Internet. When it's time for their honeymoon, will those born in 2011 be able to find one?

The separation of work and home: When you're carrying an email-equipped computer in your pocket, it's not just your friends who can find you -- so can your boss. For kids born this year, the wall between office and home will be blurry indeed.

Books, magazines, and newspapers: Like video tape, words written on dead trees are on their way out. Sure, there may be books -- but for those born today, stores that exist solely to sell them will be as numerous as record stores are now.

Movie rental stores: You actually got in your car and drove someplace just to rent a movie?

Watches: Maybe as quaint jewelry, but the correct time is on your smartphone, which is pretty much always in your hand.

©Will D/flickr

Paper maps: At one time these were available free at every gas station. They're practically obsolete today, and the next generation will probably have to visit a museum to find one.

Wired phones: Why would you pay $35 every month to have a phone that plugs into a wall? For those born today, this will be a silly concept.

Long distance: Thanks to the Internet, the days of paying more to talk to somebody in the next city, state, or even country are limited.

Newspaper classifieds: The days are gone when you have to buy a bunch of newsprint just to see what's for sale.

Dial-up Internet: While not everyone is on broadband, it won't be long before dial-up Internet goes the way of the plug-in phone.

Encyclopedias: Imagine a time when you had to buy expensive books that were outdated before the ink was dry. This will be a nonsense term for babies born today.

Forgotten friends: Remember when an old friend would bring up someone you went to high school with, and you'd say, "Oh yeah, I forgot about them!" The next generation will automatically be in touch with everyone they've ever known even slightly via Facebook.

Forgotten anything else: Kids born this year will never know what it was like to stand in a bar and incessantly argue the unknowable. Today the world's collective knowledge is on the computer in your pocket or purse. And since you have it with you at all times, why bother remembering anything?

The evening news: The news is on 24/7. And if you're not home to watch it, that's OK -- it's on the smartphone in your pocket.

CDs: First records, then 8-track, then cassette, then CDs -- replacing your music collection used to be an expensive pastime. Now it's cheap(er) and as close as the nearest Internet connection.

Film cameras: For the purist, perhaps, but for kids born today, the word "film" will mean nothing. In fact, even digital cameras -- both video and still -- are in danger of extinction as our pocket computers take over that function too.

[Minivans Making a Comeback]

Yellow and White Pages: Why in the world would you need a 10-pound book just to find someone?

Catalogs: There's no need to send me a book in the mail when I can see everything you have for sale anywhere, anytime. If you want to remind me to look at it, send me an email.

Fax machines: Can you say "scan," ".pdf" and "email?"

One picture to a frame: Such a waste of wall/counter/desk space to have a separate frame around each picture. Eight gigabytes of pictures and/or video in a digital frame encompassing every person you've ever met and everything you've ever done -- now, that's efficient. Especially compared to what we used to do: put our friends and relatives together in a room and force them to watch what we called a "slide show" or "home movies."

Wires: Wires connecting phones to walls? Wires connecting computers, TVs, stereos, and other electronics to each other? Wires connecting computers to the Internet? To kids born in 2011, that will make as much sense as an electric car trailing an extension cord.

Hand-written letters: For that matter, hand-written anything. When was the last time you wrote cursive? In fact, do you even know what the word "cursive" means? Kids born in 2011 won't -- but they'll put you to shame on a tiny keyboard.

Talking to one person at a time: Remember when it was rude to be with one person while talking to another on the phone? Kids born today will just assume that you're supposed to use texting to maintain contact with five or six other people while pretending to pay attention to the person you happen to be physically next to.

Retirement plans: Yes, Johnny, there was a time when all you had to do was work at the same place for 20 years and they'd send you a check every month for as long as you lived. In fact, some companies would even pay your medical bills, too!

[Watch: Toddler Can Name U.S. Presidents]

Mail: What's left when you take the mail you receive today, then subtract the bills you could be paying online, the checks you could be having direct-deposited, and the junk mail you could be receiving as junk email? Answer: A bloated bureaucracy that loses billions of taxpayer dollars annually.

Commercials on TV: They're terrifically expensive, easily avoided with DVRs, and inefficiently target mass audiences. Unless somebody comes up with a way to force you to watch them -- as with video on the Internet -- who's going to pay for them?

Commercial music radio: Smartphones with music-streaming programs like Pandora are a better solution that doesn't include ads screaming between every song.

Hiding: Not long ago, if you didn't answer your home phone, that was that -- nobody knew if you were alive or dead, much less where you might be. Now your phone is not only in your pocket, it can potentially tell everyone -- including advertisers -- exactly where you are.

Love Begins at Home

It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home. Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other must start.

Mother Teresa, 1910-1997

Catholic Nun, Missionary and Nobel Prize Recipient

New Years Recipe

New Years Recipe:

Take twelve whole months,
Clean them thoroughly of all bitterness, hate, and jealousy,
Make them just as fresh and clean as possible.

Now cut each month into twenty-eight, thirty, or
thirty-one different parts,
but don't make up the whole batch at once.
Prepare it one day at a time out of these ingredients.

Mix well into each day one part of faith,
one part of patience, one part of courage,
and one part of work.

Add to each day one part of hope,
faithfulness, generosity, and kindness.
Blend with one part prayer,
one part meditation, and one good deed.
Season the whole with a dash of good spirits,
a sprinkle of fun, a pinch of play,
and a cupful of good humor.

Pour all of this into a vessel of love.
Cook thoroughly over radiant joy,
garnish with a smile,
and serve with quietness, unselfishness,
and cheerfulness.

You're bound to have a Happy New Year.

Author Unknown

Happy New Year!

Today is New Year's Day. Various New Year traditions have been celebrated for a long time — the earliest recorded celebration was in about 2000 B.C. in Mesopotamia, where the new year was celebrated in mid-March, around the time of the vernal equinox. Iranians and Balinese still celebrate the new year with the spring equinox. The Chinese New Year is based around the lunar cycles, and it can fall between late January and late February. In Europe, the Celtic New Year began on November 1st, after the harvest.

The first time that New Year's Day was celebrated on January 1st was in 45 B.C., when Caesar redid the Roman calendar. He based it on the sun instead of the moon (like the Egyptians), added some days to the year, and declared every January 1st the start of the new year. But Caesar had subtly miscalculated the length of the solar year, and declared an extra day in February every four years, which turned out to be slightly too often, so that by the Middle Ages the calendar was about 10 days off. It wasn't until the 1570s that the calendar was finally refined with leap years in the correct places, and since then, January 1st has been celebrated as New Year's Day.

It's the birthday of J.D. Salinger, (books by this author) born in New York City in 1919. He wanted to be a writer, and his dream was to publish his fiction in The New Yorker, which rejected his work over and over. In November of 1941, he finally got an acceptance letter from The New Yorker for a short story called "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," about a teenager named Holden Caulfield. It was set to come out in the Christmas issue, but then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the story was put on hold. Salinger was drafted into the Army, deployed in the ground force invasion of Normandy, and he was part of the Battle of the Bulge and some of the worst fighting of WWII. When the war ended, Salinger checked into an Army general hospital in Nuremberg, suffering from shell shock. In 1946, The New Yorker finally published "Slight Rebellion Off Madison." Salinger took the character of Holden Caulfield, and he wrote an entire novel about him. And even though it got mixed reviews and Salinger refused to help with publicity at all, it was a best seller: The Catcher in the Rye (1951). And Salinger became a celebrity, which he hated, so he became a recluse. He died just this past January (2010), at the age of 91.

Ode to Last Day of the Year - Hello to the First of the New Year!

This is the last day of the year
they call it new years eve
look back at all the memories
this year you’re going to leave

Some you will cherish always
and keep for all it’s worth
because someone close to you
has been gifted with a birth

Some others you wish to forget
but know you never will
for someone close passed over
and some were never ill

Some will be very pleasant
and close to your heart
sit down and list the good things
back to january make a start

So when you feel unhappy
in the new upcoming year
sit down and read your memories
and smile from ear to ear

Don’t ponder on the bad things now
only tears will be shed
for tomorrow is a new start
a new year is ahead

Happy New Year!

Sharing, caring is the way

Peace on Earth, good will, I pray.

Harmony, joy and abundance stand tall,

Long life, no strife, love to all!