Harris with the organ 

out in the snow 

Harris 

Emily and Harris 

James, Emily and Harris 

Russell Murdock - Sports writer

Cougars dominate men's track ::: "By Russell Murdock The Daily Universe"

Mercora P2P Radio review by PC Magazine

Mercora P2P Radio review by PC Magazine: "Looking for a way to share digital music without risking a lawsuit? Look at Mercora, a new music-sharing service that adheres to the letter of federal law. Billed as 'P2P Radio,' Mercora lets you broadcast your music collection across the Net and listen to broadcasts from thousands of other music lovers. But you needn't worry about broadcasting copyrighted material and running afoul of the major recording labels. Mercora's parent company pays the labels a rights fee for each song the service streams."

Another Christas Pic

James, Emily and Harris 

Christmas Pics 

The entire family, taken just a few days before Christmas 2004. 

Can therapy fix my parents?

http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2005/01/06/parents_and_therapy/index.html

If, however, you do come to feel that it's your relationship with your parents that is holding you back, then try this: Ask yourself not how you feel about your parents but what you owe your parents. What are your obligations at this point in your life? They have put you through college but now you're on your own: How can you fulfill your obligations?

This is different from asking what your parents want from you. Our parents may want us to fulfill certain unconscious wishes they retain from childhood, from their own relationships with their parents. We cannot help them with that. You can determine, however, what your concrete obligations are. And I think you can probably fulfill many of those obligations.

So what are our obligations to our parents? In general terms, you might come up with a list something like this: To speak with them or visit at least once a month. Not to cause them undue pain. Not to shame them. Not to steal from them. To treat them kindly and with respect. To help them when they become no longer able to take care of themselves. To be a comfort to them when possible.

Beyond fulfilling such obligations as these, we can get into trouble. For not only do you have obligations to your parents, but they have obligations to you. One of their chief obligations is to provide an environment in which you can become who you are. So if you betray yourself, then you betray your parents as well. For instance, suppose you conclude it's your duty to your parents to become a plastic surgeon. If you are not suited to be a plastic surgeon, then in trying to become one you undermine your parents' chief duty to you.

So the best you can do, as an adult, is to fulfill your concrete obligations to your parents. The rest -- the emotional tenor of your relationship, your compatibility, your taste and politics and ideas, their projected wishes for you -- is chancy.

If you can satisfy yourself that you are doing what is right and necessary as a daughter, perhaps it will ease some of the pain that arises when you see your parents. Perhaps it will also allow you to limit your contact with your parents without an undue sense of guilt.

It's hard at 24 to imagine how a lifetime of experience has molded one's parents, and harder still to keep in mind that time will continue to change them, robbing them of both their acuity and their rancor. If you simply go about living, you will find that these things take place, slowly but surely, seemingly without anyone's effort.

Cary Tennis

Very validating. When I grew up I was made to feel bad for being pissed
when my sister stole from me.

There's no way a family can live together if you can't put your wallet down
on a table and be able to grope around later that night, or in the morning,
and find it, and dig out that receipt for the lamp that you got overcharged
for and say, Aha, see, I told you they overcharged me! I mean, that's the
very definition of shelter. Since the very earliest humanids began living in
social groups for mutual protection, the wallet stuffed with receipts has
been the key totem that delineated the domestic sphere from the wild. Proto-
humanid wallets have been found in the oldest archaeological digs -- some
even with the credit cards still in them! Amazing! But true. Because the
wallet is the central item of domestication. Elephant skin. Buffalo skin.
The wallet and the hearth. That's home and family.



I'm not sure there is a whole lot more to say than this: You cannot live
with people who steal your wallet and scatter your credit cards on the
sidewalk in a bad part of town; when family members do that they forfeit the
privileges of the familial bond -- you know, that gray zone where you
tolerate stuff from family that you wouldn't tolerate from a roommate. Theft
of money puts them on the other side of the fence. You can still talk to
them, and they can still be your family. But you can't live with them.

Amazon.com Is For Republicans / Attention, liberal shoppers! Next year, screw those GOP-supportin' companies, and try buying blue

Amazon.com Is For Republicans / Attention, liberal shoppers! Next year, screw those GOP-supportin' companies, and try buying blue: "And the site, called buyblue.org (along with its more detailed but less intuitively named counterpart, choosetheblue.com), spawned a mini movement and the mini movement spawned this very column and now you are right now encouraged to go see for yourself and discover the moderately shocking truths regarding which big shiny companies suck up to the happy sneering homophobic enviro-slappin' warmongering Repubs and which give thousands to the whiny limping kick-us-when-we're-down Demos. "

Here's a few hints to help you watch those pounds this Christmas.

1. Tip: Eat a chocolate bar before each meal - It'll take the edge off your
appetite.

2. If you eat equal amounts of dark and white chocolate, that's a balanced
diet.

3. Chocolate has many preservatives. Preservatives make you look younger.

4. Put 'eat chocolate' at the top of your list of things to do today. That
way at least you'll get one thing right.

5. A nice box of chocolates can provide your total daily intake of calories
in one place. Now isn't that handy?

6. Chocolate covered raisins, cherries, orange slices and strawberries all
count as fruit, so eat as many as you want.

7. Two reasons why chocolate is a vegetable.
(a) Chocolate is derived from beans. Beans = vegetable
( Sugar is derived from either Cane of Beet. Both are plants, which
places them in the vegetable category

8. If not for chocolate, there would be no need for control pantyhose. An
entire garment industry would be devastated.

9. REMEMBER: "Stressed" spelled backwards is "desserts".

AlterNet: MediaCulture: Unembedded in Iraq

AlterNet: MediaCulture: Unembedded in Iraq: "The US Corporate media consistently characterizes the Iraqi resistance as 'foreign terrorists and former Ba'athist insurgents'. In your experience, is this an accurate portrayal? If not, why?

This is propaganda of the worst kind. Most Iraqis refer to the Iraqi Resistance as 'patriots.' Which of course most of them are-they are, especially in Fallujah, primarily composed of people who simply are resisting the occupation of their country by a foreign power. They are people who have had family members killed, detained, tortured and humiliated by the illegal occupiers of their shattered country."

Blonde Joke

Last year I replaced all the windows in my house with those expensive double-pane energy efficient kind. But this week I got a call from the contractor complaining that his work had been completed a whole year ago and I had yet to pay for them.

Boy oh boy, did we go around! Just because I'm blonde doesn't mean that I am automatically stupid.

So, I proceeded to tell him just what his fast talking sales guy had told me last year... that in one year the windows would pay for themselves. There was silence on the other end of the line so I just hung up and I haven't heard back.

Guess I won that stupid argument.

NEWS -- march to the right

Molly Ivans
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/20413/

Mourning in America

By Molly Ivins, AlterNet
Posted on November 4, 2004, Printed on November 6, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/20413/

Do you know how to cure a chicken-killin' dog? Now, you know you
cannot keep a dog that kills chickens, no matter how fine a dog it is
otherwise.

Some people think you cannot break a dog that has got in the habit of
killin' chickens, but my friend John Henry always claimed you could.
He said the way to do it is to take one of the chickens the dog has
killed and wire the thing around the dog's neck, good and strong. And
leave it there until that dead chicken stinks so bad that no other dog
or person will even go near that poor beast. Thing'll smell so bad the
dog won't be able to stand himself. You leave it on there until the
last little bit of flesh rots and falls off, and that dog won't kill
chickens again.

The Bush administration is going to be wired around the neck of the
American people for four more years, long enough for the stench to
sicken everybody. It should cure the country of electing Republicans.

And at least Democrats won't have to clean up after him until it is
real clear to everyone who made the mess.

In some circles, that will be seen as sour grapes. But in Texas, we've
been losing elections to the demagogic triad of God, gays and guns
long enough to be pretty cynical about how it works out. I'm sure
millions of Americans voted for George W. under the honest impression
that he stands for moral values â?? family, patriotism, faith in God.
I'm sure it's the Democrats' fault that such a silly ruse is allowed
to stand. What Bush actually does stand for is nicely summed up by a
rather common news story that got stuck on the business pages lately.

In September, Merck & Co., the huge drug manufacturer, pulled Vioxx
off the market. Vioxx was a popular pain-killing, anti-arthritis drug,
but Merck said it was putting patients' safety first. A new study from
the Federal Drug Administration showed high doses of Vioxx triple the
risk of heart attack and sudden cardiac death.

From there, the story bifurcates â?? it takes two directions. Sen.
Charles Grassley of Iowa revealed that the FDA had tried to silence
the author of the study, Dr. David Graham, associate director of
science in the Office of Drug Safety. Grassley said the FDA first sat
on Graham's study and that then he was "ostracized" and "subjected to
veiled threats and intimidation."

The Wall Street Journal followed the other fork, finding internal
memos from Merck showing that company officials may have been aware of
the dangers of Vioxx as long ago as 1996, including a memo apparently
instructing its sales reps to "dodge" the question when doctors asked
about the cardiac record of Vioxx.

In short, we have a toothless regulatory agency in the pocket of the
industry it is supposed to patrol. We have an administration-wide
contempt for science and plain facts. And the allegation against the
folks at Merck is that they were making such enormous profits on a
drug that killed people that when they knew or suspected it was
killing people, they kept right on selling it. When the information
that Merck had known for a long time about Vioxx and heart attacks
became public, the company's stock fell by 9.6 percent.

That's the system George W. Bush stands for: where a corporation can
knowingly kill people for profit and, when it finally comes out,
everyone knows the penalties will be so light the company doesn't even
lose a tenth of its worth. Hey, just a little bump in the road.

We sure don't want any of that terrible, burdensome government
regulation to control that kind of behavior, do we? We sure don't want
an FDA that listens to its own scientists and acts promptly, do we? We
sure don't want anyone to sue these monster corporations, do we? I bet
if it were possible to compare the odds of an American getting killed
by a negligent regulatory agency and rapacious corporate behavior
versus an American getting killed by a terrorist, it would turn out we
need to be a lot more scared of rank greed and its enablers than we do
of terrorists. And that's not counting what the corps. (pronounced
corpse) steal and mess up.

So, fellow progressives, stop thinking about suicide or moving abroad.
Want to feel better? Eat a sour grape, then do something immediately,
now, today. Figure out what you can do to help rescue the country â??
join something, send a little money to some group, call somewhere and
offer to volunteer, find a politician you like at the local level and
start helping him or her to move up.

Think about how you can lend a hand to the amazing myriad efforts that
will promptly break out to help the country recover from what it has
done to itself. Now is the time. Don't mourn, organize.
© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/20413/

Interesting maps of the election results

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/

This goes a long way toward illustrating how closely the nation split
-- much better than a purely geographic view.

Errol Morris: Election '04

Errol Morris: Election '04: "Listen to Real People who voted for George Bush in 2000, but will be voting for Kerry in 2004.

Why so many? Because people say some are better than others. The problem: no one agrees on which ones those are."

Joke - Shark

Shark!

There is this atheist swimming in the ocean. All of a sudden he sees a shark in the water, so he starts swimming furiously towards his boat.

As he looks back, he sees the shark turn and head towards him. He's scared to death, and as he sees the jaws of the great white beast open, revealing its horrific teeth, the atheist screams, "Oh God! Save me!"


In an instant, time is frozen and a bright light shines down from above. The man is motionless in the water when he hears the voice of God say, "You are an atheist. Why do you call upon me when you do not believe in me?"

Confused, and knowing he can't lie, the man replies, "Well, that's true I don't believe in you, but how about the shark? Can you make the shark believe in you?"

The Lord replies, "As you wish," and the light retracts back into the heavens. The man feels the water move once again.

As the atheist looks back, he can see the jaws of the shark start to close down on him, when all of sudden the shark stops and pulls back.

Shocked, the man watches as the huge beast closes its eyes, bows its head and says, "Thank you Lord for this food which I am about to receive..."