I'm in daydreaming/planning mode today, pulling together the syllabus for the class I teach in personal essay writing at the lovely little liberal arts college down here, and I have been distracted by a story about a cool new dinosaur dig I was reading about. I was also daydreaming about my significant other, who is just overwhelmed as a grade school teacher this time of year as she tries to set up the groundwork for the term ahead of her, and this image came to me of writing and teaching both being a process of laying down layer after layer of information the way natural erosion and disintegration and the passage of time creates layer after thin layer of slowly eroding bones and debris that explain something important about the world we live in.
I know that sounds weird but I wanted to see if I could get it down in words and it was also an excuse to think about dinosaurs instead of what I ought to be doing. In other words I haven't changed much since I was daydreaming my days away instead of listening to the teachers at Immaculate Conception grade school in Columbus, Ohio way back, speaking of ancient times, in mid-20th century columbus ohio.
Ps that first sentence above is 128 words and three commas long and looking back I could have gotten away with ditching one of the commas. I wouldn't dare try a sentence like that if I were writing for publication but I think it hangs together pretty well for just goofing around.
Why on earth do we allow football practice - even down to the grade school level - to begin in the height of August heat ?
Another young boy just died in Kansas from the heat of football practice. That makes more than 50 over recent years.
Years ago, while making small talk conversation in my cockpit with an "Observer" from Arizona, He explained that it was against the law for pre-season football to begin before 9:00 pm. He had to walk home (several miles) after practice at that time of day - sometimes after midnight. After a certain date passed, they were allowed to start earlier. I wonder if that is still the case?
Having sixth-graders out, doing serious phystical workouts in near 100 degree temperatures seems so obviously dangerous and downright stupid.
Update - that is the third such death this month and 77th since 2000!
An elderly couple walked by me holding hands and as they did, I tolde the gentleman to have her home by 10, with a smile and a wink...
The elderly man stopped in his tracks and without missing a beat said, with a returned smmile and wink: "Don't worry, I will. Her husband comes back home at 11."
Most people are at the age where they are using their phones to document the good times in their lives.
I am at the age where I use my phone to take pictures of labels that I can't read and use my phone to enlarge the print so that I can read it.
When old people say "Enjoy them while they're young" they are talking about your hips and knees..... Not your kids,
Joe - Having just returned from a five day family get-together with my three kids/spouses and nine grandkids (ages 2-10), I got a kick out of your post above. None of the grandkids have phones (yet!) so they do still interact with us, but I can only imagine what it will be like in a few years.
Joe: I'm reminded of all the lectures we got about all the modern conveniences we had that our parents did not have as children and that we had no idea what it was like to Go Through The Depression.
Seems to me I could count on hearing that lecture any time I left food on my plate. Something tells me I wasn't the only one.
I always heard "You better clean your plate. Think of the starving children of China, India, and Korea."
In contrast to this emphasis on frugality, I am disgusted (but not surprized) to read today's headline about Ben and Jaylo. Today she filed for divorce - yes, the second time from him, after only about two years. But here''s the kicker - I was among the 40 or so drivers getting guests to and from the wedding venue - his lovely plantation near Riceboro, GA - about and hour south of here. We were told the three days of festivities cost a total of $26 million (yes, Million).
Prior to this, a few years ago, we drove guests to and from nearby Palmetto Bluff for Justin and Hailey Bieber's wedding. We were told they only spent $2.5 million.
Imagine how many starving Asian children those would have paid for.
Get this;
My first pickup at Ben and Jaylo's (at about 1:00 am) was only going about 45 minutes away from the wedding venue. I dropped him at a motel where he was only grabbing his bags and heading on to a flight at Charlotte - another 4 hours - with another driver. When I pulled into the motel parking lot, I realized the driver for that next longer leg of the trip was a (super nice) guy I knew well from another car company. He was going to drive this guy (a financial planner buddy of Ben's) 4 hours one way to drop him in Charlotte and then back home by about 10:00 am.
Do people really watch political conventions on TV? I don't, for the same reason you might not open the front door if you knew that it is Jehovah's favorite folks coming by for a chat.
But last night, after missing Michelle, I wound up listening to her husband. And, watching the clip of them hugging onstage on this morning's TV. I am reminded by our youthful excitement at Jack Kennedy and Jackie as young and Catholic, and their promise for our future way back when.
For me, personally, Jack blew it. And then later Bill did the same sort of in reverse.
I think Mr. and Mrs. Obama are the pride of our nation and if we don't watch out, they just might lead a drive to return this country to the kind of rationality we had before the far right reacted so viciously to a darkie in the whitest of places. Fingers crossed...and while I can't march, I can send in a few bucks. The race is on.
Tim, I did watch the main speeches given at the Democratic Convention - Biden's, Obama's, and I'll watch Bill's and Kamala's. They made feel some hope where I was really discouraged before. The 'other' convention - didn't bother - not interested in division, polarization, etc. Joe
Tim: I was just thinking about last night's Devastating Dem-onstration and also wondering whether to write about it.
Glad you did. Glad to hear from someone else as energized and charmed and inspired as I was.
Least boring political event I've ever watched, thanks to that husband-wife riighteous comedy team formerly known as the Obamas. But the humor cut like a righteous sword.
I kept thinking: This represents a generational turning point. This Will Be In Our History Books.
It was both funnier than most variety shows and more enlightening than most documentaries.
It appealed to my senses -- as in my sense of humor and my sense of patriotism and above all my sense of righteousness,
There's an evil in our country. Last night I laughed at it.
I know this is way off topic but I didn't want to hold it any longer. I think you are about to hear a whole lot more about this young french girl - INDILA.
(Young? - she's 40)Still never heard of her.
Just found her last night by accident on YouTube whre she has apparantly had over a BILLION hits!
Getting caught up! So sorry you had to deal with the pain of losing a loved one Monica. Your brother was fortunate to have a sister as great as you are. On to Mary Margaret, Afghanistan became our longest war. Someone had to have the backbone to get us out of there. We were there 20 years!!!!! I say thanks President Biden
I don't care what party you belong to. If you are an American, or for that matter a human being, you need to call up Oprah's appearance at the Democratic Convention last night and watch it. And make sure your children and your children's children do it, too.
Meanwhile this Robert Kennedy thing will insure that the upcoming election will have at least one bizarre subtext.
Mike. before Biden became President, plans to draw down U.S. troops from Afghanistan had already been undertaken by Trump. He entered into an agreement with the Taliban that complete withdrawal would be completed by May/2021 if the specified agreement was upheld by the Taliban. It was Biden who had to delay that date b/c the Taliban were not holding up to their part of the bargain, but by April, 2021 Biden had decided to move ahead and set the new date for September, 2021 and we all know the how that turned out.
Does anyone think it a bit disingenuous to be lectured about income inequality from Democratic convention speakers who own multiple multi-million dollar homes, party on the $100 million yachts of billionaire friends, own their own jet planes and travel the world? I find it very difficult to believe their sincerity in wanting to help the middle class and the poverty stricken of our nation when they consistently demonize the wealthy among us for not paying whatever "fair share" they deem necessary. I remember a famous quote by someone who said to a struggling blue collar worker...."I mean, I do think that at a certain point you've made enough money." Hmmm, i am wondering when this person will think they have reached that point....it apparently isn't $70 million.
Probably the greatest political snow job of our lifetimes is that Republicans have convinced people of average means that today’s GOP is looking out for their interests. They’ve done this by demagoguery, blaming all the ills of ordinary people on welfare mothers, migrants, Muslims, or other convenient groups - anyone who is “other”, not white or native born. And no one stokes anger, grievance and resentment better than Trump.
But when it comes to tax and economic policy, the Pubs throw crumbs to ordinary people to camouflage the huge benefits they bestow on those who don’t need (or deserve) them - Exhibit A is the Trump tax cut of 2021.
First, let me share some information that is so dangerous I probably should keep it to myself:
Hagan Dass Caramel Cone is the crack of ice creams.
Just curious if anyone else is addicted to it.
The rest of you just forget I ever said anything about it. You're better off if you do.
Now:
Been doing a little reflecting lately, looking over old clips.
I'm hoping you will tolerate me for sharing an obit I co-wrote about 20 years ago in honor of the most charming woman I ever had the privilege of memorializing.
Ordinarily, being called on to write an obit was a drudgery assignment. But this one was different. I called it up to read recently and then I thought some of you might appreciate it. I'm thinking that in part because I remember when I was younger being charmed by "The Yearling" and perhaps you all were, too. The book is lovely, as was the Disney movie based on it.
(One note about the story below. I'm not sure how common the usage of "cracker" is for describing countrified individuals - I never heard the expression 'till I was down south - but that's what the term means, and it's ordinarily one of affection, or at least friendly amusement.)
By Michael McLeod and Heather McPherson
Staff Writers
Perhaps she was the last of the Florida Crackers. Perhaps she was simply one of a kind.
Dessie Prescott was an irrepressible woman. She hunted antelope, killed a bear, built a log cabin at the age of 19, ran a hog farm, learned to fly airplanes, joined the Army, owned her own fishing lodge, married six men — “four of them doctors,” she liked to brag — and helped inspire a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
She was, says a longtime friend, former Citrus County Sheriff Charles Dean, “an individualistic lady, back before that sort of thing became popular.”
She died of cancer late Friday at 95 at her rustic home on the backwaters of the Withlacoochee River. She had lived life with gusto but never sought fame, which is why only a circle of friends and scholars knew of her friendship with author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings — and the part Prescott played in inspiring two of the greatest literary tributes to the natural beauty of Florida.
It was Rawlings who won praise for Cross Creek, a 1942 memoir of life in the Florida scrub. It was Rawlings who earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1939 for The Yearling, a tender portrait of a young boy named Jody and his all-too-fleeting friendship with a deer named Flag. But it was Prescott who made it all possible.
"If it weren’t for Prescott, there would be no Yearling — and there would be no Cross Creek, " said Rawlings scholar and author David Nolan.
2 NORTHERNERS ARRIVE
Prescott was living in Cross Creek, a poor, rural lakeside community near Gainesville, in 1928. Its residents — who survived by fishing, hunting, tending orange groves and planting kitchen gardens — were taken aback that year by the arrival of two Northerners who knew absolutely nothing about any of those things.
Marjorie Rawlings and her husband, Charles, had bought a 72-acre farm in Cross Creek. Fifty-two acres were planted with orange trees, 20 in pecans. The two aspiring writers planned to live off the proceeds of the groves and write novels and essays in their spare time.
This was such a patently ridiculous idea — the profit margin for oranges that year was 8 cents a bushel — that other residents of the Creek were embarrassed to have to explain it. They begged Dessie, who could get along with anyone, to help out the newcomers, lest they starve.
“They would have, too,” she once said.
Prescott took Marjorie under her wing. She taught her to hunt. She introduced her to the area’s flora and fauna, not to mention its eminently potent moonshine. She paved the way for Marjorie to not only survive the scrub, but to fall in love with it. One of the results was a literary masterpiece. No one before or since has captured the unforgiving but irresistible beauty of the Florida of that time and place as Rawlings did in The Yearling.
Critics suspect that Rawlings funneled a good deal of Prescott’s love of the land and plainspoken charm into the novel. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Marjorie added a little of Dessie to Jody’s character,” Nolan said.
But it was Rawlings’ memoir, Cross Creek, that immortalized Prescott most directly.
The book included a chapter about a 10-day journey the women took down the St. Johns and Ocklawaha rivers in 1933.
During the trip, Prescott carried a revolver on one hip, a bowie knife on the other. The women used an 18-foot wooden boat powered by a tiny, 3-horsepower engine to wend their way through the untamed and unpredictable waterway, traveling by day, camping by night in abandoned cabins.
“If I could have, to hold forever, one brief place and time of beauty, I think I might choose the night on that high lonely bank above the St. Johns River,” Rawlings wrote of one such evening. “Suddenly the soft night turned silver. The moon was rising. We lay on our cots a long time, wakeful because of beauty. The moon shone through the doorways and windows, and the light was patterned with the shadows of Spanish moss waving from the live oaks. There was a deserted grove somewhere behind the cabin, and the incredible sweetness of orange bloom drifted across us.”
PRESCOTT NEVER INTIMIDATED
Prescott, who had a lifelong habit of calling older friends “young ‘un,” did the same with Rawlings, who was several years her senior. She was never intimidated by her famous literary friend, though she was envious of her way with words. “Marge could describe a magnolia and I could smell it,” she liked to say.
Rawlings, for her part, wondered what on Earth a woman as self-sufficient as Prescott saw in her.
“Why Dessie wants a sissie like me, I’ll never know,” she once wrote to a friend, “except that she loves to eat and knows I can whip up a good meal on the Sahara or the Siberian tundra. Also, she can boss me.”
Theirs was not a storybook friendship. Prescott felt abandoned when Rawlings, fearing negative publicity, refused to testify on her behalf in a bitter divorce trial, but she was too loyal to let the animosity linger. She never seemed to have time for such things.
A few years later, in 1946, Rawlings was sued by a Cross Creek resident, Zelma Cason, over how Cason was portrayed in Cross Creek. Now the shoe was on the other foot. Rawlings needed Prescott to testify on her behalf in a jury trial to settle the $100,000 lawsuit. Prescott agreed — but only if Rawlings would call her and ask her personally for the favor. She did.
Rawlings had written that Cason resembled an angry canary. Prescott took the stand and told the judge it was a pretty accurate comparison. Rawlings, in a victory, wound up having to make a token payment of a few dollars to Cason.
Even apart from her relationship with a literary legend, Prescott was a remarkable person. She was born Aug. 4, 1906, in Island Grove, a hamlet in Alachua County. She started hunting when she was 5 years old, charging through the scrub after birds the grownups had shot. “My uncle said even at the age of 5 or 7 that I was the best bird dog, the best retriever he ever owned. And why I never got bit by a rattlesnake, I’ll never know,” she said.
As a young woman, she saved money by working at diners in Florida and New Jersey, parlaying a flashing smile into tips, and she used what she made to build a log cabin and hunting camp on property in Florida that was given her by an uncle. Later, she operated the Withlacoochee River Lodge off U.S. Highway 19 in Citrus County, a rustic haven for outdoor enthusiasts from all over the country.
She earned a commercial pilot’s license before anyone had heard of Amelia Earhart. She was a deadeye shot, once killing a bear that ventured too close to her cabin, and hunting antelope in Africa with the last of her husbands, Howard Prescott, who owned gold mines in the West. He took her on four safaris and shared her love of the outdoors. He died several years ago, the only husband she never divorced.
Prescott remained vigorous into her early 90s. “The world is my oyster, and I spent my life cracking it,” she would tell her friends. She hobbled around, using a tomato stake as a cane, reminiscing about Rawlings and telling stories of her own.
As she grew older, she came to accept the inevitable. She once told Dean, the former Citrus County sheriff: “If I can’t be what I want to be or do what I want to do anymore — well, hellfire, Charlie, I’m ready to get gone.”
So she did, asking to be sent home from the hospital after taking a turn for the worse a few weeks ago, dying on her own terms in her rustic country home of 35 years on the backwaters of the Withlacoochee River.
She was tended by her stepdaughter, Amy Gilbert, and her friend and caregiver for the past 19 years, Candy Booth.
A week ago, Booth rolled Prescott into the living room. She sat upright in her bed in a shaft of an afternoon sun that streamed in through the window. Outside, on the untainted 60-acre property, the Florida landscape was much the same as it was when Dessie was a girl. The magnolias were a week away from blooming. Cows grazed in a distant pasture. The inky blue waters of Lake Rousseau were ringed by cypress, pine and cabbage palms.
But Dessie Prescott was somewhere else. Booth saw a smile on her face.
“What are you thinking, to make you smile like that?” she asked.
The old woman turned to her, still beaming, eyes shining.
A lovely, fitting obituary for Dessie, Mike.....may all of us have a thousand beautiful memories to make us smile when our life journey comes to an end. Thanks for sharing.
Wondering what you all think of this Harris' proposal:
Kamala Harris supports a tax on *unrealized* capital gains & here’s how that will trigger an economic calamity:
Currently, if you own an asset (stock, house, land, etc.) and it goes up in value, you don't pay taxes on that appreciation until you sell it. Makes sense -- you haven't actually made any money yet.
Biden and Harris want to change that. In 2022, they proposed a "minimum tax of 20 percent on total income, generally inclusive of unrealized capital gains.”
In 2023 and 2024, they bumped that up to 25%. This never became law, but the Harris campaign shows no signs of disavowing it.
Imagine you’re a family farmer or small business owner whose property goes up in value.
Or consider a startup founder, the kid of a middle-class family who had a brilliant idea for a consumer technology company that’s worth a lot on paper. But he doesn’t have spare cash because he poured his savings into launching the business -- which is growing and likely to succeed. The only way it would fail is if he has to sell shares prematurely.
And that’s exactly what this tax would force him to do. The IRS doesn’t care that your newfound “wealth” only exists on paper. They want cash.
The same goes for someone sitting on long-term capital gains in their public stock portfolio: they *have to* sell in order to pay taxes, even though they otherwise wouldn’t have wanted to. This creates a vicious cycle of what's known in capital markets as "forced selling” - you have to sell off assets to pay your tax bill, but so does everyone else at the same time, triggering a downward spiral in asset prices. It's the best formula for triggering a politician-made market crash.
I think your source is jumping the gun a little mm. I did some research and can't find anything that says she's announced her stand on it yet.
I did see where a Harris campaign official said not to make assumptions based on stances taken by Harris before & during her time as vice president. That sounds like a dodge but let's see how it plays out.
As you probably know the reason for the initiative is that the country’s current approach with unrealized capital gains disproportionately benefits high-wealth taxpayers.
Problem is the proposed change would end up discouraging investment strategies and, as the story you're quoting points out, undermine investors in certain situations and even trigger a market crash. I'm jealous of rich people but they have the right to be rich and get richer here in the good old u s of a, and of course nobody wants a crash.
But as for Harris, bottom line, again, is: best to wait and see and not put words in her mouth. She's playing in a whole new ballpark and calling her own shots from this point on. She'll have to weigh in on this issue and it's best to give her a chance to do so.
Over all, though, If you're looking for an issue that can be used as part of a battleplan to draw votes away from her I don't think this one is sexy enough. I'm sure something better will come along. We'll find out at the next debate, which will be Sept. 10.
MM, building on Mike's comments, since there is so much right-wing disinformation and lies out there, I’m deeply skeptical when you cut and paste material and don’t cite a source (which helps to determine whether the author is being accurate/fair or has an axe to grind).
One obviously ridiculous statement is “Biden and Harris want to change that. In 2022, they proposed a minimum tax of 20 percent on total income, generally inclusive of unrealized capital gains.” Can you provide a credible source or exact quote to document that Biden/Harris proposed taxing total income (that means both earned and unearned income) at 20% in 2022 and then increased this figure to 25% in 2024?
Trump might have made arrangements to get us out of a 20 year war, but he did not do it. He did store Top Secret documents at Mar a Lago, he did nothing to stop the January 6 rioters, and he is a convicted felon. The jury was approved by the prosecution and defense. The jury had to make a unanimous decision to convict the felon.
Please do not sanctify Trump. He is very selfish and would not benefit our country if he is reelected. "Don't count the lies, count the I's."
