a little red hen

Super Bawl* Sunday: Ads a Feminist Could Support

Much chatter* about this year's TV ads accompanying today's football event, the yearly display of testosterone with accompanying rise in spouse abuse.  Women's Media Center has coordinated shout-outs to  CBS to dump the ad.  And been ignored.  Everything more you'd want to know appears in the blog,  The Reclusive Leftist.  She rightly nails patriarchy as the true source of the problem.

For image, I offer one  saved on my desktop for a couple of years--a poster on bus kiosk around New York City.   I'd support variations on it year round.  Living closer to the ground, so to speak, these days in Portland, Oregon,  I now start the day with the  local Oregonian delivered to my door in contrast to the national NY Times (read later when picked up at the front desk of my retirement community).

Locally Portland would seem to harbour more women abusers than back east (I doubt this) because the "small" incidents here are reported by the media.   In NYC only prominent men receive notice by journalists.  Coast to coast, however, they are always lightly punished. 

Writing to promote the "Geezers' Crusade" , David Brooks on the Op-Ed page of the Times, wants us to do more on behalf of younger people.  Would he support a movement by older people that demands  more visible signs of respect for women in every American city--bold ones like this poster? 

Could it happen in  your city?

Winning on YES but at what cost?

The Oregon tax measures I've posted about--66 & 67--won by a good margin.  But it cost around six million dollars when you add up expenditures by both the YES and NO campaigns, and an unbelievable effort in time for door-to-door canvassing, telephone banking.  Important as it was to the life of  schools, social services in the state, I'm bothered by how anti-government, ultra-conservatives (names of the really big spenders can be seen here) forced this effort on the rest of us.

And, with the popularity of initiatives, there will be more efforts like this.  One personal outcome is that our family will never agaoin buy clothes we have enjoyed in the past  from Columbia Sportswear (and that is why no link is provided here).  Owner Tim Boyle, who says he has supported education in other times, seems to have turned a dark corner in his explanation to the Willamette Week.

"Class Warfare?" asked the WW in their editorial supporting the two measures. But elsewhere local journalism--the Portland Tribune, another weekly and the Oregonian came out strongly on the No side.  But the major shock was the way that the Oregonian chose to oppose the two measures with a startling front page on the  Sunday paper shortly before the voting ended. 

Once known for quality work and  Pulitzer Prize reporting a recent purchase by a conservative Californian, has changed the Oregonian.     Clearly it was keeping close to both its new values and major advertisers when it shocked readers with a  spadea  featured on the front: an advertisement  that looked like an editorial against Measures 66 & 67.

Now many of us have this new word, "spadea," an ad wrapped around a newspaper section, in our collection of seldom-used vocabulary.  It was no surprise when the Oregonian  came out with its own strong editorial against the tax measures.  Its negative reporting along  the way seemed destined to produce this result.

So, though the  YES side won, we have all paid a high price in real dollars and media degradation.

Bialy via PDX...message to New Seasons: bigger but not better

We first noticed them last winter at New Seasons Market on Division Street on our visit to Portland to find an apartment.  They intrigued us with their boldness, bialy's twice as big as those we knew from New York City .  Maybe, we wondered, it's about the West, the frontier, the big sky, etcetera.

Last night at New Seasons, we made our move and bought one--all nine-inches of it.  [Once again I've taken an unauthorized photo and escaped being admonished by New Seasons' very pleasant monitors.] 

We negotiated ingesting it this morning--before I had a chance to take its picture in our own environment.   "Not sure how to divide this thing," Ron said.  Yes, it took real skill to suppress memories of our old 4-inch NYC bialy.  Those are the ones described in Mimi Sheraton's, The Bialy Eaters, A Story of a Bread and a Lost World** which includes a recipe (for the brave and hardy) to make an almost-authentic Kossar's bialy. 

Sheraton believes that Kossar's is the only place to buy an authentic one.   To order some by mail, you go HERE.

Taste?  According to the bialy maven here (whose late mother came from Bialystok, Poland), "At best, I'd give it a D-minus.  But what can you expect?  It's made with cibatta dough, not sticky enough...needed NYC water."  We're guessing this New Seasons' product is known as the "Montreal bialy."  The store held cooking classes on making these last year, I heard.

Other efforts to re-create this delicacy are on the King Arthur flour site, a blog from a Virginia-based librarian, and a guy with great photos of the baking process--but the belly-reduction ad on his blog is definitely at odds with the true intention of the bialy--bulk up!

**Thanks to our downstairs neighbor, Elisabeth, for the loan of Sheraton's book (the hardback one with removable  paper cover featuring two bialys lovingly held by a woman's hands, inside pages are only black and white).  This is what authentic ones look like, color and shape.

What I Miss about Manhattan: The Voting Booth

Let's start with how disappointed we are that the state of Oregon uses mail-in ballots.  That little oval to fill in (blue or black pen suggested) led me to  obsess about getting it right.  Annoying.

Ron and I loved going to our polling place, meeting neighbors, seeing how the poll workers did their jobs (very efficiently).  We've heard that mailed ballots increase participation.  Really?  My impression is this approach encourages proliferation of damned initiatives like 66 & 67, started by people who want to override decisions by the state legislature.  Oregon and the state of Washington are the two that have mail-in ballots.

And the cost?  I've been trying to track this one down without success.  Must be enough paper consumed to pay all the teachers in my grandson's elementary school (where they could use a few more teachers and classrooms, thank you).  And  the photo does not include the hefty Voters' Pamphlet, all 91 pages of it! Trying to resist are the founders of the  No Vote by Mail effort.  Good luck to them! 

Since I first voted for Adlai Stevenson in 1956, it's been exciting to get in line--New York City, Albuquerque, Oberlin, Baltimore--to pull the lever and feel the surge of participatory democracy.  Not a feeling I get in my living room.  But another change, after much resistance, is coming to the Big Apple, a holdout from the rest of New York state.  Now, folks there will vote electronically, wait in vain for the old familiar  "thump" of the lever, the sound that lets you know your vote has been recorded. 

Continuing  "yarn in the public interest," I knit my smallest YES patch and attempted to write the letters in single crochet.  Whatever it takes.  Judged readable by the very upbeat couple at the Happy Swallow, a coffee shop on Belmont Avenue that's brought kolaches to Portland from Austin, Texas.  This is result of immigration (story here).  Many surprises in our new digs, caffeine-land PDX.  Creative people always thinking how to differentiate themselves from the gazillion other cafes.

Kolaches, clever little cafes--work better for us than mail-in ballots and/or electronic voting.

PDX Bands @$5 Fund-raiser: NO-people running scared?

Our daughter Rachel truly has been knocking herself out this month.  She's sprained an ankle, has the flu, but says it will be worth it when (not "if") YES wins the day.  In this photo she's phone banking from home with ice on her foot.  The hat is one I made in those halcyon days of big deal knitting--it matched a zip-front pullover.  For figure skating when she was 13, few years ago.  Another YES patch--blue yarn, scratchy wool/hemp from China that's found its best use.

Her young staff at her business, FULL LIFE, wanted to pitch in some way.  Why not use their Coffee House space on a Saturday night for a low-cost event that would attract and raise consciousness of twenty and thirty-somethings.

Music, of course, is the way in Portland, Oregon.  On yesterday's post here, the card created by clients at Full Life features "YES, PLEASE!" an evening of music in support of Measures 66 & 67.  Speaking to Portlanders of all ages, last week's editorial in Williamette Week, came out for YES.  Under the title,"Class Warfare,"  all the issues plus charts were carefully laid out.  What rock are "undecideds" living under?

Back to the bands.  "Quiet Countries," here's the cover of their latest CD.  And "bazillionaire"--from Jesse, seen here playing guitar, works at Full Life, runs all kinds of activities for clients--a radio show for one.  (Yes, I lifted this photo from Jason Quigley's blog; he is a real PDX photographer.  I think the idea for tonight's event started with Jesse.  Two more bands, "St. Frankie Lee" and--you have to wonder how their high school English teachers would react to some of these titles--"Swim Swam Swum."

The latest development in the struggle over the lifeblood of schools and social services in Oregon, which is what this is all about, happened where Ron and I live.  Every Saturday morning there's a Men's Breakfast with a speaker.  Oh, I hear you, Hattie as you demand, what's with that?  From my perspective, it's a good thing:  older guys are so (how do I say this nicely?) less-able  than women around socializing outside of work and sports.  When we came to look over Terwilliger Plaza last winter, we were surprised how many of them lived here.  (That would make an intriguing research project.)

Anyway, a few weeks ago, the Breakfast speaker was a Vote Yes proponent, a CEO named John Calhoun, who returned a couple of weeks later for an afternoon debate with Bob Wiggins, a venture capitalist from the other side.  Meanwhile, in this very active retirement community, a Vote No proponent was invited as the solo speaker for this morning's Saturday breakfast.  In the interest of niceness, I will not give his name because he did not show up!  As they say, what's with that?

Both sides have been pouring many dollars into this struggle but I'm sure the Noes feel confident with the number of big corporations behind them--Nike (Phil Knight is the real-life bazillionaire), Columbia Sportswear (real loss to us because we've had to boycott their clothes which havve been favorites), Whole Foods (well, John Macky their CEO is opposed to universal health care, so that's no surprise;).  Great sadness when THE paper in town, The Oregonian, came out for the No side.  Many cancelled subscriptions--including Rachel Bloom's.

Could it be that the heavy-hitters are over-confident?  Let me end with this link to the Flashmob singing and dancing to the tune of "Hey, Mackey" at the Oakland, Whole Foods.  Yes to 66 & 67 and to more music by more bands in PDX!  If you go tonight, the "Portland Mercury" wants you to write a review HERE.

 

Bring Out the Bands: VOTE YES!

  

More North Carolina, past and present

After many years visiting Cape Cod beaches in the 1980s-, we were ready for a less expensive venue.  Much as we enjoyed Welfleet, Truro, Provincetown, it was time for a place with fewer airs and crowds.  We also were tired of socializing with smart people who talked mostly about their great  real estate ventures.  That was the 1980s.

Judy Lombardi, our Baltimore friend told us about  Holden Beach, a barrier island near Wilmington,  North Carolina.  It was very different from the Cape, quiet and reasonably priced.  "Proud of what we do not have" is their motto. Going south was a change for us-- territory where we knew no one.  We found a comfortable house right on the beach, "PostHazel," named after a 1954 hurricane, "one of the worst of the 20th century on the east coast."

Through another Baltimore friend, Debbie Bedwell, we were encouraged to visit a gallery run by her friends, Tom and Stephanna Tewey above their printing shop in nearby Southport. Debbie and other artists from Baltimore Clayworks had exhibited in their  gallery, Blue Dolphin.    The second year we were at Holden, I showed some of my own work, necklaces of shells, beads, hardware.

They have sold the business and moved into Wilmington where we visited their house in the woods one afternoon on this trip.  Always active in politics and the environmental movement, we asked many questions about newspaper stories we'd read in the local paper--good news and bad.

January 1, 2010 marked the start of a smoking ban in restaurants and public places.  Who would have thought a tobacco state would do that!  The dark side was opposition by the county to permitting  high school grads who were illegal immigrants to attend the local community college.

As a northerner who expects the worst from the conservatism of the south about social issues, I was surprised by  this sign in a Wilmington gift shop (great selection of altered rubber duckies--as hippies, pirates).  Talking with the owner of The Black Cat Shoppe, about her strong commitment to health care reform reminded me--once again-- that there are people of reason everywhere.  She had made a trip to D.C. with her business organization, The Main Street Alliance, to talk with her congressmen.  She  joined the Alliance after becoming disgusted with the local Chamber of Commerce.  Check out her website.

Wilmington, an old port on the Cape Fear River, was a place we enjoyed when we were vacationing at Holden Beach.  Ron suprised me on my 60th birthday when he asked a women's trio (what were their names, my faulty memory wants to know) playing at a local bar to sing "Happy Birthday."  They were a group from D.C. with an hilarious extended version that delighted me--and the bar crowd. 

Here's the river at twilight...with a red kayak  in the background.

Knitting for Vote YES in Oregon

More about this very important tax measure coming soon...

Could it be? Yes, it could. Something's coming, something good. Around the corner, waiting for you and me...

It is challenging to have the enthusiastic expectation of the lyrics in "Something's Coming" as the healthcare debacle rounded its own corner yesterday.  But I do want to believe the Senate bill to be, as Paul Krugman describes it in today's New York Times, "a great achievement."  Like me, that upbeat song from the musical, "West Side Story," contains a 1950s hopefulness.

Over these many months of strum and drang in Congress, our son, the urban historian, has assured us that something of substance would emerge.  Our daughter, the businesswoman working with people with disabilities, has held out hope too.  Since this is all more about their futures, what their children will experience, I think it's important to listen to them.  Nick says the bill offers hope for people in their twenties, younger than him, who feel so left behind economically.  Rachel too hopes the healthcare changes that  finally emerge will benefit her young employees.

Again, Krugman in today's New York Times:

         So progressives shouldn't stop complaining, but...congratulate themselves on what is, in the end, a big  win for them--and for America.

The view here is toward the north from our window on foggy Portland mornings.  Doesn't it appear to be  a storybook scene, a bit magical. One hopes...

Unsubsribe OBAMA

Soooo many of us are disappointed.  We've been making excuses for why this administration could not do better on this issue and that one.  But we have had it.  The hip might say, "It's over, boyfriend."

The failure of meaningful healthcare reform has brought us to the brink.  After personally working for significant changes, watching HR 676 pushed aside, been open to new ideas like the public option, I can only relate to Howard Dean's NO, NOT THIS ONE approach.

Why encourage our congressional representatives, the somewhat willing, to vote for meaningless healthcare reform...then wait to see what that actually means once it's delivered? 

Do you feel your voice has been heard?  Only by all the progressive groups that have been doing the work and offering me a way to send many messages to Congress, like Representative Grayson (D.Fla) whose petition I signed as one of the 100,000 against the escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

This morning I took the only route that made sense, the one that Obama and his people might actually "hear."   I unsubscribed from "Organizing for America" a/k/a/ Barackobama.com.  The request to "ring in reform" and call my senators seemed especially hollow on a rainy day in Portland, Oregon, where we read one terrible story after another about the suffering of the uninsured, the underinsured. 

When we have watched Joe Lieberman (you don't need a link, do you?) free to bully the Democratic Party into submission.

The only positive thing about unsubscribing OFA is that finally I can leave a comment.  Mine starts wih "Devastated" and points to Obama's waiting too long to come out for meaningful healthcare reform, sending more  troops to Afghanistan.  If you join me in this, please let me know.

 I'm also taking the button off my purse.

 You do what you can do.