Joy and I set ourselves the task of watching the Republican National Convention.  Last week we found ourselves glued to the Democratic convention every night, watching about twelve hours of coverage and every major speech.  It made me think of an era when political rhetoric was considered a form of popular entertainment, and families would drive into town to hear the great orators of the day.  Michelle Obama is a fine speaker, Bill Clinton is always fun to listen to, and Barack Obama was mezmerizing.  I missed Kucinich, but I caught some of the highlights later (unfortunately, it was on the Dailey Show).  So, to get a more or less balanced view of the election, it seemed only fair that we check out the RNC.

I know that we're biased, but the contrast was striking.  Laura Bush speaks in a monotone, George Bush was only allowed an eight-minute pre-recorded address, Fred Thompson is ponderous, I wanted to reach through the screen and throttle Rudy Guliani, Cindy McCain looked like she just got out of bed, and Joe Lieberman should be arrested for impersonating a Democrat.  Oh, and did you know that McCain was a POW during the Vietnam War?  I think I heard someone mention that - about once every five minutes.  By the time we got to Sarah Palin's acceptance speech, it had become something like Mystery Science Theater 3000 - we were talking back to the television, calling her on her lies and generally terashing a poor littel backwoods beauty queen who is about to find herself so far out of her depth.  Her speech was carefully scripted adn well rehearsed - she's perfectly adequate speaker (better than some I heard this week), but the material she was given was sarcastic and smarmy

John McCain spoke for 49 minutes (did you know he was a POW?) and although he and the convention handlers tried to whip up the crowd's enthusiasm, the poor man is not a good speaker.  The rhetoric never gets off the ground, he spent half his time telling the republicans how much they suck, and you could play a drinking game with his inappropriate smirks (he ends every couple of sentences with a creepy little grin, like he knows something we don't).  The delegates jumped to their feet to cheer every ten seconds or so, but the cameras caught a lot of yawns and several protesters being hustled to the doors.

Oh, and one more thing.  Please don't ever again put Laura Bush in a red dress in front of a fuzzy giant video screen showing a Patton-sized waving American flag.  It's enough to cause an epileptic seizure.

Now on to the campaign.  I've got my tub of popcorn and I'm ready to watch the bloodshed.

 I've given away a million dollars this week.  The board decided to give unsolicited grants to nonprofit agencies that give emergency assistance (food, clothing, utilities assistance, rent assistance, prescriptions, burial assistance, etc., etc. etc.)  Since they weren't expecting these grants, I've hand delivered most of them, sometimes making an appointment for a site visit, sometimes just popping in to see who has time to see me.  I've made grown women burst into tears, I've been hugged by nuns, and I've heard stories, lots of stories.  The rebublicans are spreading it around that the economy is just fine, hard working Americans are doing just great, and the recession is just overblown media hype (really, I've been reading this intensifying drumbeat), but lots of people are falling off the edge.  Nonprofit agencies are running out of funds, county and city governments are broke and cutting off their contributions to emergency funds, and the food pantries are seeing lots of new faces coming through the doors.  Meanwhile, I'm dropping off checks for $10,000, $25,000,  $50,000 and in one case even $100,000, and spreading momentary joy.  Gotta go - like Santa Claus, I have a million stops to make before midnight.

 

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Asterisk the books you LOVE. (The original instructions say to underline, but I don't know how to do that.)
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling *
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee *
6 The Bible 
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman:
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien*
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger:
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger *
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams *
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck *
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett: Maybe...
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole *
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I've read 44 on the list, though I had to stop and think, because several were college reading assignments, and I tried to differentiate between "Read the Book" and "Know a lot About the Book."  I fudged on the Bible, the Works of Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes, as I am sure that I haven't read every word.  There need to be symbols for "started but couldn't finish" (On the Road), "hated the book'" (Madame Bovary) and "didn't read the book but saw the movie" (Memoirs of a Geisha).

 So I go to mow the lawn the other day with my lovingly maintained Black & Decker 17" electric mower, bought new for $125 in 1986.  I have accomplished this mundane household task two or three times since the beginning of spring, but this time the engine keeps cutting out.  I get 2/3 of the way through my tiny yard and sparks start shooting from the cord next to the handle.  Problem identified.  I finish the lawn with my big old non-powered reel mower, picked up free from the curb after no one would buy it at a neighborhood garage sale.  The following Saturday I throw the mower in the trunk of my car and drive over to Kansas Power Mower in KCK, where I've been taking it for maintenance for over a decade.  Once there, I am informed that they do not work on electric mowers.  More specifically, I am informed after arguing the point, that they no longer have an electrician certified to work on electric mowers.  

I go home and call Scott to see if he knows anyone who works on mowers out of their garage.  He doesn't, but offers to replace the cord for me.  Two days later I take the mower to his house, where he makes the repair in about ten minutes.

I get back from Heartland, pull out the mower, get about 2/3 of the way through mowing the the now overgrown lawn, and the little back plastic handle that you pull to make the engine run snaps off in my hand.  A six inch piece of plastic, but without it, an otherwise perfectly working machine will not run.  I call Black & Decker, which has a few years ago moved from 43rd & Main to South Jesus, Johnson County.  They send me to the Dewalt Service website, which promptly refers me back to the "local" B&D.  I give them the model number of the mower.  They inform me that B&D stopped producing this model ten years ago and no longer supplies replacement parts.

I can get a new mower for $300, but being me, I am unable to give up on a working machine for lack of a six inch plastic handle.  This afternoon I checked Craigslist to see if someone might have lawn mower parts,and lo and behold, someone is selling a rusty clone of my mower for $25 under the heading "Ugly but Runs".  I promptly emailed him to see if he still has the mower, but stipulated that it must have an intact plastic power handle.  I hope to hear back tomorrow.

Current Mood: determined