wws | dagblog

A Kumbaya Curry

By wws on Wed, 01/20/2010 - 6:13pm |

After all that talk about donuts yesterday, dinner was either going to be a complete breakdown at Krispee Kreme or, to forestall that, spontaneously asking friends over (including Republicans) to share a one-dish meal intended to be nourishing, rejuvenating...

ORACLES

By wws on Tue, 01/12/2010 - 7:27pm |

Donal has reminded us how prescient George Orwell and Aldous Huxley were in their imaginings of the future. To that roster of insightful seers I would like to add Doris Lessing, who wrote The Golden Notebook in 1962. Perhaps...

No Anima, No Animus, Just Animation

By wws on Wed, 11/25/2009 - 9:16pm |

Tomorrow is a day to relax with friends and family. A day to give thanks for not only the basics, but also the things that make us smile.Little else makes me smile with as much simple pleasure as does clever...

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2600 reads

Gender Discrimination in Health Care

By wws on Tue, 09/22/2009 - 10:23am |

Few women in America -- even among the wingnuts -- would disagree with Nancy Ratzan, who wrote the following article about gender discrimination in health care that appeared in The Miami Herald this morning:What women need from healthcare reform" by...

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131 comments
2899 reads

"Be Prepared": the motto of a good scout

By wws on Wed, 07/29/2009 - 6:39pm |

When I first came to TPM I wrote a lot -- perhaps ad nauseum -- about the contrast between FEMA and insurance company response to Hurricane Hugo -- in Charleston, SC, in1989 -- and to Hurricane Ivan, which pulverized...

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50 comments
4140 reads

Truth or Dare/Shouts and Whispers

By wws on Sat, 06/20/2009 - 4:49pm |

Because so much of what we read and write about focuses on what is wrong with X or Y, I wanted to make a contribution, and encourage others to make contributions, about what we consider to be right. For...

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15 comments
2819 reads

Northern Exposure

By wws on Tue, 06/02/2009 - 10:29pm |

Some harsh words were said all round during the past week: about the South and about Southerners, about those who - whether ancestrally or personally -- have been hurt in the past by an evolving, but still flawed southern...

Southern. Let the blame games begin, if they must, but hey....

By wws on Wed, 05/27/2009 - 8:47pm |

We can all agree that thorough, thoughtful interpretations of historical fact matter. We know this process requires more than a knowledge of facts on a timeline, especially when the perception of those facts is combined with the perspectives and...

What Women Think About Writing

By wws on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 9:56pm |

With apologies to Flowerchild. If I had posted all these quotes on her thread, I would have hogged it more egregiously than I did (in my enthusiasm). Here, then, is what smart women I admire think about writing: "Censor...

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37 comments
3163 reads

Ethics and Anger; Oh, and also, Feminism

By wws on Thu, 03/05/2009 - 7:33pm |

A few years ago I attended the funeral of a venerable Charleston grande dame whom I knew well. I respected her because she was a woman so sure of herself that, despite being a legatee of the old south,...

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29 comments
3037 reads

Shared Creativity: Just For Fun

By wws on Sun, 02/15/2009 - 12:55pm |

I hereby challenge the wordsmiths of TPM to practice for the annual "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" competition, sponsored by the English Department of San Jose State University that "recognizes (and rewards) the worst examples of 'dark and...

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308 comments
6928 reads

Shared Housing

By wws on Sun, 02/15/2009 - 11:29am |

2) Housing. As Vance Packard said a long time ago in his book, NATION OF STRANGERS, we've lost the cohesion and mutual support we had as a society when people stayed put, sharing houses or living across the street from family...

Job Sharing

By wws on Sun, 02/15/2009 - 10:29am |

Last week my wry wit TPM Cafe editor, Boyd Reed, gave me a Friday deadline for converting a long-winded comment I made on Aunt Sam's blog into three separate blogs on the concept of sharing -- which is, in my...

Connecting the Dots (or the dot.coms)

By wws on Sun, 02/01/2009 - 10:55pm |

I know y'all are watching the Super Bowl. That's a really good thing; relaxation is important (or, as they say in Charleston, "impoewtndt"). None of us needs to be en pointe, 24/7; all of us need all the harmless diversions...

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38 comments
2398 reads

What Will You Do to Serve?

By wws on Sun, 01/25/2009 - 3:55pm |

President Obama wants each of us to contribute -- to give what we know to what we care about.What I know about is art, architecture and design. What I care about is: a) greening the globe without further delay; b)...

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2813 reads

A Heartfelt toast to a first husband's third wife

By wws on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 2:05pm |

M:Tomorrow we will gather together to celebrate Christmas... and you. All of us -- the multi-generational, multi-national group that is part my family and part your family, but which is, because of you, our family. And when we are all...

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6 comments
1972 reads

A Tonic for Election Anxiety

By wws on Sat, 11/01/2008 - 2:12pm |

There was a wonderful article in the Times yesterday about those of us who worry to extreme:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/01/us/politics/01angst.html?pagewanted=2&... note: my dashboard has been inexplicably eradicated, as have my buttons for "following" and "follow me." Nor am I able to reconstruct it....

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6 comments
1771 reads

A Handmaid's Tale: Margaret Atwood Explains It All

By wws on Thu, 10/23/2008 - 1:41am |

You've probably read Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale; you may or may not have gone back to her beginnings and read, in chronological order, every word she has ever written -- whether novel, essay or poetry. IMO, not a wasted moment.Now...

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2724 reads

Time Out from Palin for Your Fellow Americans Who Need You

By wws on Mon, 09/15/2008 - 9:09pm |

".....when some cars containing multiple families finally arrived at the head of the line, only then did they learn that each vehicle was limited to two bags of ice, one case of bottled water and a single 12-pack of ready-to-eat...

Red Cross Low on Funds

By wws on Sat, 09/13/2008 - 11:17am |

Given Ike's path, I just read a disturbing article about the Red Cross and its current lack of emergency funds. No one expects a contribution on par with that of Eastside93, who contributed $600 after Gustav. But please contribute what...

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1392 reads