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I have many things on my mind, and one has just been added, as a start: The fact that my original Thursday Thoughts essay disappeared after working so hard on it, and before it was even finished! I admit to being ticked off, and it's hard to shrug it off as "oh, s**t happens" when one has written so much, only to have it vanish! Oh, boy oh boy!! I wrote a long, long Thursday's Thoughts letter, which disappeared...dammit! I wish this site could be fixed so that won't happen again! It took me soooo long to write it...and poof.,...it's gone, f**king gone! I have many things on my mind..and it's blown to smithereens by a stupid glitch that I wish didn't exist!
This is something that I find hard to accept; something that I've worked long and hard on getting screwed up for whatever reason. I've had disasters happen to pieces that I've come close to finishing, I've had other essays disappear that I've come close to concluding. It's funny how these things happen when one's just about at the end and about to finish! Oh, well.
Okay--back to business; I've got many things on my mind, and having made my righteous rant, I will now go on to other stuff. Here goes:
Hey there, firefly-dreamers!! Can you stand another Open Thoughts Thread revolving around and pertaining to the great, golden oldie-but-keeper of a classic film, West Side Story? This isn't so much about the film itself, as it's about the number of different posters of this great film that've evolved from different countries throughout the world.
This week, I will be doing a promised report on my recent screening of my alltime favorite film:
This past Monday night was a night I'd been looking forward to for quite awhile, since my all-time favorite film was playing at a movie theatre here in the Bay State. I had, in fact, emailed the people who worked at this particular movie theatre, the Strand Theatre out in a town called Clinton, MA, which is out in the northwestern central part of the state. Clinton, MA is a cute little town, but I certainly wouldn't want to live out there, since it's way too far out on the frontier for my liking, particularly in the winter. The film West Side Story comes to the Bay State at least twice a year, or so it seems. I'd be happy to see it come a little more often than that, but, hey...I guess those are the breaks sometimes. Anyway, here comes the crux of this Thursday's Open Thoughts Thread:
Today, I will be posting something different; I'll be going back to Aziza, but here is the longer essay on her that I promised to write about.
This is a photograph of Aziza, where she looks like she's doing a dance. She's in one of her favorite poses, on her favorite outside-her-cage height and place:
Here's yet another photo of Aziza,
playing in her cage, looking curiously down at something while she's on her bong rope swing, which is a favorite inside-her-cage perch of hers.
Here's another more exuberant photo of Aziza.
She certainly reveals her beauty, exuberance and gracefulness when she's in that position. It's great!
This is a photo of Aziza perched on my forearm/hand. You now have a close-up view of her, and you can see her beauty on a somewhat larger scale.
Here's yet another photo of Aziza, in one of her most pensive modes:
This photo, too, reveals how beautiful she really is! One of my favorite photos of Aziza.
Part of last week's Thursday's Open Thoughts was sort of a prequel to what I have planned for this week's Open Thoughts Thread on my part. For some reason, I keep missing the music from the mid to late 1960's, and wishing that they'd play them more often than they do on the radio station (s) here in our area. I loved listening to many of those oldie-but-goody songs of my era, and have one rather large regret; the fact that I never got to dance to any of that music, due to my relative isolation from most other kids, and the fact that, perhaps, due to the way in which I'd been hardwired even before birth, my emotional development precluded that, even though I was of average intelligence and my physical development was normal. Nonetheless, that hurt, and I couldn't even accept myself, which probably made me even more isolated. Anyway, here are some favorite songs of mine from that period:
This is my first weekly Open Thoughts thread. Here goes:
In order to get my Open Thoughts Thread for this week going, I thought I'd open it with a picture of Aziza in one of her many pensive states and poses. Here she is:
Although much of the debate surrounding the tragic and untimely death of 23-year-old peace activist Rachel Corrie of Olympia, Washington, who was fatally mowed down in mid-March 2003 by a bulldozer operated by 2 Israeli soldiers, while trying to save an ordinary Palestinian family's home from demolition, has been somewhat muted due to our then-impending and now- present wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, there is still much fierce debate to go around, whether it be on blogs, forums, or even in chat rooms.
I, myself have written some opinions on it, and have had some people disagree with me, sometimes calmly, sometimes angrily. I do not support Israel's longterm occupation of West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, with the demolition of Palestinian homes, the extremely harsh treatment of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli Army and the rightwing Israeli Jewish settlers, the illegal building of Israeli Jewish settlements by the Israeli Government in the Occupied Territories, and the regular sorties by the Israeli Army into those territories that frequently result in the maiming and/or killing of innocent Palestinians civilians. All of these actions/behaviors are wrong--and clearly detrimental to the people under occupation--the Palestinians, but are equally bad for the occupier--Israel.
However, I believe that the fact that the Palestinians are stateless and oppressed today is also partly the fault of the rest of the Arab world as well as Israel, not to mention many of the Palestinians themselves. Back in 1947-1948, the Arab countries, refused to accept the UN-proposed partition of the land in question into two separate, independent sovereign nation states of Israel and Palestine, and began a long campaign of war against the then-newly-formed State of Israel in the hopes of destroying it, a campaign that more or less continued for many years thereafter, exploiting the disenfranchised Palestinians as a political football for that purpose.
Jordan and Egypt ruled over the Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank from 1948 until 1967, when, in early June, during the Six-Day War, Israel, encircled by 3 Arab armies poised on its borders ready to attack, launched a pre-emptive strike, taking those lands and others by storm. Israel has been occupying those lands too long, and the time for Israel to make peace with its neighbors, and to withdraw their troops and settlers from West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem is now long overdue.
Upon reading a rather interesting diary about flag-burning on another forum, I was reminded of an incident that took place in Randolph, MA, a town roughly 20 miles south of Boston. It began about 2 months before Ronald Reagan was re-elected to his second term as president, and the debate that took place over this particular incident continued well into the spring of that particular school year.
In the wake of the decimation of Roe v. Wade, the reversal of the 53-year old Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the increasing deregulation of the airlines, as well as the beginning of the deregulation of insurance companies, and the worsening of situations abroad, most notably the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,, as well as the collapse of bridges and the underfunding or non-funding of necessary government programs, not to mention the deployment of much, if not most of our man/woman power to Iraq in an unnecessary, immoral and illegal war, along wit h the constant throwing away of good money after bad at our disastrous Iraq war, I predict at least two possibilities for the United States' future:
Hi--I'm now here to write a long-promised essay about my silversmithing work, but first I'll explain a little bit of the history of Brickbottom Artists Building, as our community is named, and how it got started. Brickbottom was the name of a workingclass neighborhood in Somerville, which is how the Brickbottom community got its name.
The Brickbottom Artists' Building, located in Somerville, a blue-collar city just outside Boston, with an urban feel to it, was started by a bunch of artists, who, having been priced out or evicted from Boston's Fort Point Channel area after it became too expensive for them, or because of developers who wanted to convert the buildings they'd resided in to office space or whatever, looked for two years until they found a building that was big enough and cheap enough. At one point, the artists found a building down in South Boston for that purpose, which was condemned as being structurally unsound, so the artists kept looking until they found an abandoned warehouse that had belonged to the now-defunct A & P Market Stores, and had them refurbished into artists' lofts. I'm happy to say that I like living here, I have a studio in my apartment to do my silversmithing, a garage space down in our basement to park my car, and we're a secure community, because people watch out for each other.
It's in a good location, because it's right within walking/biking distance to Cambridge, Brookline and downtown Boston, and, unlike Newton, Waltham, Everett, Medford, Quincy, Belmont, Watertown and Milton, and Arlington, Somerville feels much more urban, rather than suburban.
Hey there, fellow Firefly-Dreamers! I haven't posted any diaries in awhile, but when I saw Karmafish's diary about Israel and his and Laurie's ancestries and ancestral histories, I thought I'd take a chance and post an I/P diary of my own.
I, too was raised as a secular Jew, and my (late) grandparents both emigrated here long before the war through Ellis Island. My grandmother was from Mir, Russia, which was roughly 80 km outside the Pale of Settlement, my mom's real father, who was a tailor, was a Polish Jew (from Poland). He passed away at the age of 60 from stomach cancer, but my other grandfather, who was really my mom's stepfather, took over and was a wonderful grandfather to us kids. He was from Rumania. When my parents and he had famous arguments about Israel, which were fascinating to listen to, btw, my parents were very critical of Israel's policies, while my grandfather was far less so.
Admittedly, I kind of miss those arguments, which could and did get somewhat heated and quite emotional at times, and, even though I was much more naive when I was younger, both sides of these arguments would sort of tug at my heartstrings, because I thought that there was something to both sides of the argument. Although I feel that Israel must pull their troops and rightwing settlers out of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem in order to survive and preserve their Jewish Majority population and character, I also believe that the Arab countries and Palestinians leaders also have to bear a certain amount of responsibility for the statelessness, lack of sovereignity and oppression of the Palestinians.
While I'm a strong supporter of the two-state solution and believe that it's not too late for that, and think that Israel must pull its troops and rightwing Jewish settlers out of West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem in order to survive, I also believe that it's important to address something that's rarely, if ever addressed: How and why Israel's occupation of West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem came about in the first place.
I've decided to post a personal essay about something different; movies and the movie-going experience. I still remember when going to the movies was a special pasttime for many, if not most Americans, and I think, that, with the economy being the way it is right now, people have been flocking to the movies, wanting to forget about and escape depressing things about the economy and the state of the world for awhile. As for myself, I still like going to the movies and seeing movies the way they're really meant to be viewed...in a real movie theatre palace, on the great big, wide screen, with the lights down low.
I seldom go to any of the huge multiplex cinemas that have taken the place of most movie theatre palaces and dot the USA highways and landscapes, due to rude, obnoxious, cellphone-using, texting audiences, (mostly) junkier movies, and overpriced general admissions and concession stands. However, I have found that in movie theatres that show better-quality films, cell-phone use and texting among the audience seems to be far less of a problem. Anyway--now for the rest of my essay here:
