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June 29th, 2008

KATY IS COMING!

Katy is coming in a week. Katy is my fourth child and fourth daughter. It doesn’t seem possible it is already two years since I’ve seen her. At that time I visited Katy and her family in Indiana on the occasion of Brian’s graduation from Ball U.. I cannot remember the last time Katy visited me here. Have to get the house and yard in order so it won’t look like I’ve neglected everything big time. Have to figure out what I’m going to feed the child. Though she’s well into her fifties she is still my child, and she’s been away long enough so that I don’t know what she likes to eat!

This momentous event requires a moratorium on blogging. So much to do, so little time. If we have a few dry days in a row, I’d like to paint the porch rail. Actually, it seems to me more substantial than a rail and probably it has another name, which is not coming to me. It surrounds the porch and the columns that hold up the porch roof rest on it. Whatever it’s name it needs painting.

There was a doctor appointment yesterday and a dentist appointment scheduled in the coming week, not to mention a lunch this Sunday and the usual prayers at the abortion mill each Tuesday and Saturday (the killing days). Read the rest of this entry »

June 25th, 2008

HOLOCAUSTS COMPARED

William Brennan, Ph. D., in his book, The Abortion Holocaust, very effectively presents compelling similarities between the Nazi holocaust and the present day slaughter of over 40 million unborn babies worldwide each year. The first thing, he says, is to redefine people as less than human, as “subhuman expendables,” and therefore devoid of value or respect. The German Supreme Court in 1936 refused to recognize Jews living in Germany as “persons” in the legal sense. In 1973 the United States Supreme Court declared that the word “person” in the Fourteenth amendment did not include the unborn.

Likewise, the defendants at the Nurenberg War Crimes trials invoked the law to deny personal responsibility. Killing Jews was legal. Abortionists use the same rationalization. “I only do what is legal,” they say.
“What is legal is moral” has been a pervasive slogan used to justify atrocities down through history. Read the rest of this entry »

June 25th, 2008

TV CENSORSHIP?

D.M. writes in my local newspaper (in part):

As a member of the generation who grew up with television in the early 1950’s, I’ve listened to about all I can stand from these various groups that want nothing but pure sugar and no spice on television. The PTA, among countless others, is now thinking about boycotting the sponsors of programs that they feel have too much sex and violence…..

I am the father of two children, ages 8 and 3, and I have a good idea why television has been attacked so often in the past few years. Parents these days are just too busy to babysit for their own children, and they allow the television to supply the amusement and attraction it always has, to keep the children quiet and out of the way.

The real shame, and the basic underlying truth of this whole censorship matter, is that “parental discretion and judgment” are not being practiced in many homes, and its a damn shame that the entire television industry, and those of us who really enjoy watching it, are being caused to suffer for lack of it.

I am really getting tired of those who protest any kind of regulation of television programming with cries of “Censorship!” “Where are the parents?” “Can’t they find the ‘off’ switch?” It either turns out that they have no children or they have children of such ages that they are in bed by 8 p.m., spend little time at the neighbors’ homes, are not old enough to stay home alone, and are never, never awake after their parents have fallen asleep. Read the rest of this entry »

June 24th, 2008

THANK YOU, WORDPRESS

Dear WordPress,

I’m sorry I missed your fifth birthday party but you’ll have to be a lot older than 5 for me to travel all the way to San Francisco to celebrate. Maybe you’ll come to my 85th birthday party next month? (I’ll admit I jumped the gun just a bit in naming my blog Musingsat85.com. Soon it will be official, God willing.)

Please accept my apologies for my criticisms of WordPress in my earliest blogs. I had expected to just have to type and found that I actually had to learn a thing or two in order to blog happily. It’s been three months now and presently I am in awe of WordPress’s capabilities — and I know practically nothing about it — except that anything I want to do seems possible, with a little help from my son.

Once again, thank you, WordPress. You’re the best. (But what do I know?)

Blogging greatgrandmother, and friend for life.

DV

June 24th, 2008

ONLINE CENSORSHIP?

The advertisement shows a little girl sitting before a computer. It says: “See Jane. See Jane click. Click, click, Jane. See, Jane, See.” The last frame shows a picture of Jane looking amazed, shocked. The words say: “Jane saw!”

Jane is perhaps ten. She has stumbled onto a porn site. Jane can never unsee what she has seen anymore than you can forget your own first introduction to raw sex.

The ad is for an internet filter which prevents such sewage from ever reaching your home computer. Not everyone is happy that Jane and her brother can view the grossest of sexual deviancy on line, either by chance or by choice, when they set about surfing the web.

It used to be that one had to seek out porn in adult bookshops, behind-the-counter magazines, or x-rated movie houses. Now it comes into homes, schools, and libraries unbidden. One only has to surf cable or satellite offerings and it’s right there in living, moving color. Read the rest of this entry »

June 21st, 2008

THE DEATH PEDDLERS

Have you noticed? They’re not saying anymore that the unborn baby is not a baby. After all, everyone knows it’s a baby. A woman is “with child.” They can see it on the ultrasound, in the premature nursery, or examine its little parts when it is aborted. They are saying, “Yeah, it’s a baby. But it’s unwanted, it’s an embarrassment, it’s defective, it’s expensive. We should have the right to kill it.”

Have you noticed? They aren’t saying anymore that the disabled should be allowed to die and have extraordinary means of life support removed. They are saying, as in the Cruzan case, as in the Schiavo case, “She is not on life support systems and shows no signs of dying. Her quality of life is very poor and nursing care is expensive. The taxpayer is footing the bill. It is time to withdraw food and water and let her go. She can be medicated to help with the suffering of dehydration.” In other words, we should have the right to kill her.

And, God help us, we are buying the lies of the death-peddlers! Read the rest of this entry »

June 21st, 2008

CHEMICAL WARFARE AGAINST WOMEN

Women are complaining of a “shocking gender inequity” because some insurance companies that will cover Viagra for men will not cover birth control pills for women. After all, they say, thirty years of buying The Pill will cost a women close to $5000. According to the ACLU, women of reproductive age pay 68% more than men in out-of-pocket health care costs.

The men have something broken that they want fixed. The women, on the other hand, have something fixed that they want broken. They want their fertility destroyed. The men want a medicine. The women want a drug that does nothing at all to promote wellness and has many harmful effects. Women who would not consider polluting the environment are willing to pollute the “ecosystem” of their own bodies in such as fashion that every cell of every organ is affected. With good reason Dr. Herbert Ratner has called birth control pills “chemical warfare against women.” Obviously he has a different perspective than the women clamoring for The Pill. Why? Read the rest of this entry »

June 20th, 2008

SUMMER THOUGHTS

Today is the first day of summer and a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Red and white roses in full bloom – my fig tree has not only survived the winter but is growing apace – a wee brown bunny apparently lives in my yard and has eaten my parsley to the ground twice so far.

It seems I’ve been given a second chance when it comes to baby birds. My spring trauma was that there was a nest in the rose bush with three baby robins in it and nurturing parent birds going back and forth. Then, all of a sudden, an empty nest! And not a clue as to what happened to them. But now, in the hanging verbena that Dan gave me for Mother’s Day, there is a wee nest containing five little white eggs. The verbena blooms profusely with red and pink flowers but needs to be watered daily or it dries out. Imagine my surprise when I climbed up on the porch rail to water the verbena and a slender brown bird flew out of the plant.

I guess it’s a sparrow, but I read that sparrow eggs are speckled and I see no spots–-and the eggs seem to me to have a tinge of blue. Anyhow, in spite of daily watering the momma bird keeps coming back and this time around I have hopes of seeing the entire birdie cycle completed. Read the rest of this entry »

June 18th, 2008

MY MOM

Just as this blog began because I wanted to publish a tribute to a dear, deceased friend, Dr. Herbert Ratner, so this post is happening because my daughter, Terry, has asked for some information about her now-deceased relatives. What could be more natural than to begin with my mother who died 18 years ago at the age of 95. The following is what I e-mailed to her yesterday, a thumbnail sketch of Agnes Hodson’s life:

Agnes Mary (Elizabeth) Geoghegan, was born October 2, 1894, in West Cromwell CT, the second of 11 children. Her older sister died at age 7 and her next younger sister died at age 4, both from diphtheria, leaving Mom the oldest living child. As I recall they all went to a one room schoolhouse in Cromwell, and Mom went to Middletown high school, graduating on June 14, 1912, as valedictorian. (I have a copy of her speech, which was published in the local newspaper.) She then studied bookkeeping/accounting at a nearby college and got a job in Washington DC as a secretary. Read the rest of this entry »

June 11th, 2008

SEEKING A PEEKABOO GOD

Warming up my car, getting ready for 7 AM mass, I flicked on the radio. Hearing something about football, which was unacceptable, I flicked it off again. “I should pray,” I thought. . Now I had been awake for hours. I had checked the weather on the computer so I’d know what to wear. Checked my e-mail. Made my bed. Had egg and coffee for breakfast. Washed my dishes. Got dressed. Not a word to God.

“I’m sorry, God,” I said. “You know, I’d talk to you more if you were more interactive.” I imagined God talking back. “What would you want me to say?” he asks. I looked at the dawnlight in the eastern sky. The bare trees against the morning glow. I think of Joyce Kilmer saying “Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.” Now I’ve never thought of Kilmer as a major poet, rather more in the Longfellow category. There is no wondering about what his poems mean. Every line is crystal clear. And they rhyme. Who rhymes nowadays?

Yes, Joyce, the trees remind you and me of God. The dawn sky is beautiful. I, among others, have long appreciated the beauty of the earth. And the universe. And the universe within the smallest cell of my body. The wonder of DNA, that tiny speck that directs the growth and development of a human being, or a sweet pea, or a rattlesnake, each with its own specific directions. There is no way, in my opinion, that this could have happened by accident. I find God in his creation.

I have never had a dialogue with Jesus. Like Sister Faustina did when Jesus Read the rest of this entry »