Buster

Do you recall the words, "You're going to make me a lot of money"?

While you were eyed, as though you were livestock in a pasture somewhere -- a steer or a gilt on the hoof awaiting sale and slaughter..

Years later, did you become a vegetarian?

You are not alone in this nightmare. Consider this from Grace Uncensored ... [Read The Rest] ...

Beautiful, carnivorous and fragile, Venus Flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) are being bulldozed, paved over and trampled to the edge of oblivion.

For the time being, they're found in boggy areas of North Carolina coastal plain. If you look hard enough. According to USA Today:

... [read the rest] ...

These are Venus Flytraps with flowers (Dionaea muscipula).

They were photographed by Claude W. Rankin, Jr., with the help of his wife, Josephine Moore Rankin, in the spring of 1968 in a wet, Brunswick County, N.C., forest glade.

Venus Flytraps are rare, protected under the N.C. Plant Protection and Conservation Act of 1979.

...More about Venus Flytraps in North Carolina ... .

Author: J. Samuel Burner

Amid the holiday celebrations this one-time prospective divinity school student casts a fugitive eye at pastors who cross his path, wondering which may be driven to the post-holiday departures which involve the cleaning out of desks and packing of boxes full of personal belongings.

As Baptist Planet put it:

Playwright Harold Pinter paused forever on Christmas Eve, his voice unstilled.

On hearing of his death my thoughts turned first to his plays, and then to his videotaped Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech.

He excoriated and illuminated the nature of a "brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless" United States, ending with a darkly optimistic view of what fierce, determined citizenship may yet recover:

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

. . .

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, "the American people," as in the sentence, "I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people."

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words "the American people" provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

. . .

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.

Merry Christmas and a Happy 2009

This Wild Poinsettia (Euphorbia heterophylla) was photographed by the late Claude W. Rankin Jr. in a burned-over, Cumberland County, North Carolina, woodland clearing.

© 2008 Claude W. Rankin Jr. and Southern Connections Inc. (all rights reserved)

Jesus and Mary: Black Madonna of Czestochowska

Tony Cartledge reminded me this Christmas Eve morning of a few lasting, last-minute, life-saving gifts for those in greatest need:

If you're trying to think of something for me, please visit Heifer International's website.

I'm sure you can find something there.

Take it from the old farm boy.

Breeding pairs are best if you can afford them.

That kind of Christmas gift may be in part what He had in mind with the example of the loaves and fishes.

This may be the last Thanksgiving with blind Steve, to whom I showed February's lunar eclipse.

Named "Easter" lily by Colonial Era settlers, this flower's Latin name is Zephyranthes atamasco.

It blooms from March until May.

Copyright Claude W. Rankin and Southern Connections Inc.

Often called "rain lily," it is a North Carolna native found in sunny, moist (boggy), wild areas from the coast to the mountains.

I first saw them down by the Cape Fear River near Fayetteville.

They had a pale pink cast, as is often the case, and took on a red color as the flower matured.

Hence the name "Atamasco," which means "red."

This photograph was made by the late Claude W. Rankin Jr. of Fayetteville, whom my sons George and Jack grew up calling "Uncle Claude" -- altogether appropriate for their loving great uncle.

Four decades have passed since my maternal grandfather, B.L. Hinnant, used his favorite target pistol on himself. That was a couple of years after my maternal grandmother. Ruth Hinnant, was killed in a car/train accident.

I have often wished for a worthwhile support newsletter.

Unable to find one which meets my needs, I have accumulated a short list of potentially useful links this morning.

Resources offered by the Women and Children's Hospital of Buffalo (NY) struck me as useful and a constructive place to start. Two from their collection are:

• Surviving the First Year
• What Others Can Do is a part of that collection addresses some of my concerns.

Catherine Skidmore is a daring woman who left a dull, Web-pioneering Associated Press job in April, 1997, to work for Arcus Inc.

She reported that transition in her Web journal, Suck-My-Big.org: A more-than-intimate look at my life.

Visitors were required to fill in a "What is your name" form upon arrival, and then served the personalized greeting, "Bite me, [name you gave]".

By current standards, she was quite modest in her self-revelation, concluding each entry with a piquant -Bite me.

Her choice of domain names rankled the AP executive hierarchy, as did the Webcam pictures of her working studiously and in untraditional garb at home on her Macintosh. AP managers up the chain of command from her had, as she correctly summed it up in a conversation with me after leaving the AP, "an underdeveloped sense of humor."

Because she was deeply involved in the AP's move toward online publication and specifically in putting stock market information online, I had the good fortune to talk with her from time to time while I was still with the Fayetteville Observer.

From the first entry I read from her Web journal I still recall the words, "I've been compared to Dorothy Parker all my life (is it the biting wit? the sassy sarcasm?), and I maintain the Dorothy Parker Poetry Archive online. It's all of her poetry. It kicks ass."

Those words were written more than a decade ago.

She describes herself now as a "nurse," and went back to school to earn that right.

Today the daring of her largely unformatted, almost photograph-free Web journal lies in its recourse to the puristic austerity of text on the screen.

When I read her Web journal now, I still hear in her words the voice of a writer who has penned "a play in 1991 that won the NJ Young Playwrights Award," still reads constantly and loves baseball.

To my nostalgic eye her Web journal still "kicks ass" because it still speaks with a clear, true voice, about her life as she lives it.

Although the Sunday sun has begun to drop toward the horizon, the back office temperature with air conditioners blasting and ceiling fans running hard is just over 90 Fahrenheit.

That's about 8°F below the external temperature.

With the air conditioners going full blast at 8 Saint Marys' Street, #9, in downtown Raleigh, N.C., the indoor temperature is 86°F.

All of the blinds are closed.

All of the ceiling fans are twirling.

That's 11 degrees Fahrenheit below the current 97°F outdoor temperature.