Crossword puzzles & Quaker plain speech...

My newspaper runs three crosswords daily. I don't do them any more--eliminates another compulsion. But Monday a clue in the NY Times puzzle #0111 caught my eye.

Across

52 Quaker pronoun

Four letters. Yep, it was THEE. So I finished the puzzle.

(puzzle solution from www.puzzle.paxient.com)

On the back page is the speed puzzle, the little one that tells you how long it takes to solve it. Sometimes I squander 10 minutes and blitz through it. There it is, same answer!

Down

29 You, old-style

Four letters. Yep, THEE again. So I finished the puzzle.

Wow. A two-thee day. What're the odds?

beer in the news

Wow, what a week for beer news. Turns out that beer builds your bones. Pale ales and lagers work best. It's the silicon in the beer that helps.

(photo from Bike Friendly Fort Worth)

What a dilemma. I don't like beer much, and I do have osteoporosis.

Then Thursday we had a foot of snow fall on roofs that weren't planned for that. Look what happened to the much-beloved only-game-in-town microbrewery in Fort Worth, Rahr Brewing.

There's video coverage of the damaged brewery on local NBC affiliate Channel 5's site.

Look at the photo credit. Just one of the many groups in town that Rahr has helped. They are friendly to so many groups, I am sure folks will rally to help this often-beleaguered family business.

China contaminating our children. Again.

The cadmium jewelry for kids. Available at WalMart.
Don't buy Chinese & don't go to WalMart.
It's that simple, to be patriotic.
And safe.

Guantanamo prison turns 8 today...

Ride this ^ Not that =>.

...and nobody's getting a trip to Disneyland. (That's where we went on my eighth birthday.)

No such luck for the dozens of innocent men still stuck on a Caribbean island, deprived of their rights, their families, their homes and their health.

Today, on the eighth anniversary of Guantanamo opening as a black hole of a prison for people we're paranoid about, the still-detained prisoners can look forward to a nice round of torture, and it's not an E-ticket ride.

According to Andy Worthington 779 boys and men arrived during the eight years, and 198 remain. This is wrong.

Gitmo-the-prison does wrong in our names. Wrong legally, wrong ethically, wrong morally. It leaves a spiritual stain on our collective conscience.

It is beyond counter-productive. We are waterboarding ourselves in the foot there.

Worthington's exhaustive research showed 93% of those detained were proven innocent. That's 725 men, with 725 families, all stung by grievous harm and injustice.

...a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held — at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.

Stop it now. Stop it before another idealistic young man tries to do us grievous harm and injustice.

(Photo credits: Painting of Khmer Rouge waterboarding from the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum; LIFE Magazine Disneyland photo)

Bad dog!! Greyhound bus lines=highway robbers

Today I discovered it'll cost ya to give someone a bus ticket. And not just the price of the fare.

There will be an extra fee for your generosity, if you charge someone else's ticket on your credit card.

The Gift Ticket Fee.* If the traveler is NOT the card holder, the card holder gets to pay that fee too, on top of the fare.

My round trip = 250 miles each way.

Total cost $58, advance purchase.

Except for that Gift Fee. That'll be ANOTHER $18, please.

My witty friend Lynn says it's highway robbery. Whoa! Yes, exactly where the stick-up happens.

People who take the bus are largely poor, rural, or otherwise disadvantaged. Perhaps they have no alternative but travel by bus, no other way to get from here to there.

Bad dog, Greyhound! For sticking it to your captive customers.

*From the link to the fine-print details:

A non-refundable gift ticket fee is applied to each Will Call transaction where the credit card holder purchasing tickets is not traveling on that trip.

cool site: art, malaysia, antiracism

...discovered while looking for guava info...



Watch their video collaboration. Inspiring and fun.

Their site http://www.malaysianartistesforunity.info/

a sweet potato took me

...to a 40-year-old love letter last night.
Sweet potato
Kept it too long. Shriveled scabby skin. So I peel it, down deep. Pale flesh inside, not orange. Is it OK to eat?

Search engine
Yields ag-school info. Found a yam variety named "Vardaman". Whoa.

English major
Went to my shelf, retrieved Faulkner. Yep. Vardaman character in As I Lay Dying.

The letter
Tucked inside the front cover.
From a lover, posted 40 years ago this week.
He's in New Haven, then; I'm in Austin.

Six months earlier I'd met my future husband, for better, for worse, in Austin.

Jim's letter spoke passionately of life and death, meaning and purpose--concerns felt keenly by brilliant youth. He sensed I'd said goodbye.

He wrote, "Your letter read like a tickertape from a news service as I just read it again for the tenth time--not so warm & human and loving as it was the first several times. It seemed very distant & cold this time--maybe that's me..."

Oh no, dear boy. It wasn't you.

It was I, delivering what you sensed. Distancing myself. Hedging my bet. Hoping the new boy would be the man in my life. He was, and now he's passed away.

Wonder what I wrote you then. Wonder where you are now.