How powerful is Television? (From Slate Magazine) “ Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of three.” I’m not an expert on autism, but recently I took a refresher psychology class at The College of Southern Idaho. When we arrived at the chapter on dreams, something reminded me of the textbook from my previous psyche class, three decades ago. Back then, a statement claimed that 95 percent of us Americans dream in black and white. That study was from the early 60's, an era when we watched over 90 percent of TV shows through black and white sets. The textbook from my recent CSI class, posited precisely the opposite: that 95 percent of us now dream in living color! What was there to explain for this grand shift? Is there a correlation between the tones of Americans dreams and the types of TV’s they own? This made me wonder: Is television hi...
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Barefoot from Africa by Catharina © O n a recent cold snowy morning, I was visiting a friend who reminded me that as dazzling as the hypnotic snow is, it’s customary to brush the snow from our cars. Moving slowly and not accustomed to the cold; being from a continent of sunshine with no winters, I find snow enchanting. I was even amused when I saw that the bottle of water kept in my car was frozen.
Funny, in my country there is always a lack of freezers. You have to search for ingenious ways to keep things cool; here you are searching for ways to keep things warm. Odd...funny, inside out and upside down, from where I come. -That is, barefoot from Africa .
As I was trodding around my freezing little blue car, which was the color of my skin after five minutes out of the warmth of his shack; trying to look intelligent and knowing what I am doing in this cold; I noticed the soft inner feather of a bird's wing stuck in the ice of my car's windshield. I calle...
Pink Rabbits and Flying Dreams
Last night, I had a fanciful dream that I was back at my old Virginia house. I haven’t lived there for decades, but recently went on Google Maps and flew around the woodsy neighborhood a bit. Something, I’ve admired about my father, is that whenever he bought a house, it was always adjacent to some woods, giving us young rapscallions a healthy place to run around to release our energy.
In the dream, I awoke on Saturday daybreak and went outside, barefoot in my pajamas to collect a Washington Post from our snowy driveway. In reality, we lived on a sleepy dead end, but in the dream, cars could now connect into the forest. In fact, it was a bustling thoroughfare now; some elaborate racecars were speeding into the woods, as one or two old jalopies were pulling out and returning to civilization. Even though it was snowy, I was excited to be back, and thought I would take an encompassing walk around the backyard, while waiting for th...
Monday September 14, 2009 - A Day To Remember On the evening of September 13 th Doro received a phone call from Darcy Harcourt, a veterinarian technician, who joined Silent Voices a couple of months ago from the Twin Falls area. Darcy exposed a cruelty case going on in Jerome. Five abandoned starving horses, six caged starving dogs, and one goat whose collar tore into her flesh. Aside from two old bales of hay on the premises, no other food or water were present. Doro met Darcy at the blinking light on Hwy. 75 in the early morning. Arriving at the abandoned site, they took pictures and videos of the caged animals and the horrid unsanitary conditions these animals were enduring. Apparently after being in Hawaii for a week, the young couple who owned these animals, decided they were going to stay in Hawaii for six months longer. So they apparently contracted someone to feed the animals but never followed up. They also had two other horses shipped to Hawaii, one was ...
The illuminating crown of thorns
Not long after this letter ran, I dreamt that I was in the basement of my old newspaper haunt, briefly hanging out with some former colleagues. Suddenly several of us had inkling to rush out to the back ‘smoking’ lot, where we found an enormous pin oak illuminated by a brilliant golden light, coming from within the tree. The oak had about sixty branches shooting out to the sides, rou ghl y in an equilateral circle. Thirty of these were large branches, too large to encompass with your arms. These were intertwined with thirty smaller branches. Another strange thing about this tree is that somebody had recently lopped the trunk off from its base, which caused the branches to fall out in their great circle. This was also causing the tree to levitate three feet off the ground, as the branches held together like a large crown of thorns.
Well the newspaper couldn’t have a levitating crown of thorns like that, just blocking their loading d...