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On Saturday, December 14th

2024-12-16T17:36:00.002-05:00

I spent a good portion of the day watching the Flintstones holiday marathon (with some breaks for “A Christmas Story,” “Knots Landing”-the Season One two-parter where Gary Ewing falls off the wagon and how and “Ken Burns: Country Music”). The marathon consists of 3 Christmas-themed shows-2 specials and 1 regular episode. Showing them in order as the Cartoon Network has allows you to see the cultural changes that each one reflects.

The Flintstones Christmas Episode (1964)

The first episode was a regular season episode from 1964. It was clearly made during the time when tv shows made sure that they made a Christmas episode if not every season, at least once during their run.

Fred Flintstone gets a side hustle as Santa to afford presents for his family. This leads to him being on tv and convincing daughter Pebbles that he is Santa and it results in Fred subbing for Santa on Christmas Eve, when the latter comes down with a terrible cold. Fred along with Santa’s elves, Winky and Blinky deliver toys and presents all over the world, as signaled by Fred wishing each destination “Merry Christmas” in their mostly European, native language. Fred of course forgets his presents for the family but Santa does him a solid by rolling out of bed-sick with a cold-and dropping off Fred’s gifts himself.

The end of the episode has the Flintstones and the Rubbles gathering around the Christmas tree wishing everyone a Merry Christmas.

This episode might be a response to Rankin/Bass’ “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, ” which debuted in primetime that year. The Flintstones were the Simpsons of their time, meaning that they aired in primetime and dealt with topics that you usually wouldn’t find in a children’s cartoon. Not a lot of TMOC (True Meaning of Christmas) or at least anyone needing to learn it. This was probably a case of Fred and company (there are b and c plots having to do with Wilma and company and the kiddies) demonstrating TMOC vs learning it).

As I remember, this episode until the 21st century only aired at Christmas time and not as a part of the regular syndication run. I was not alive when this debuted and for the many years afterwards. I imagine since the Flintstones were popular, this episode did well in the ratings.

A Flintstones Christmas (1977)

“A Flintstones Christmas” took place in 1977 and is a holiday special. Again not around when this came out but it aired a few years in the 1980s and possibly once in the 90s at Christmas time.

Keep in mind, when I speak of these shows airing, I am speaking of broadcast tv. Cable may have been a different affair but I didn’t get cable until 2009.

This special takes place in a very busy and commercial holiday season in Bedrock, complete with Salvation Army kettle ringers (with the serial numbers filed off). Fred and Barney are about getting gifts for the holidays. Fred’s boss, Mr. Slate, is about getting a Santa for a Christmas party his wife is sponsoring. Fred and Barney become Santa and his helper elf and they happen upon Santa (lol if I received $5 for each time I started typing “Satan” for “Santa” I would be at least Tyler Perry rich.) who needs help distributing toys and presents. (I think he was sick also in this special.) Fred and Barney say “yes” (how hard can it be? Pretty hard it seems.) and hilarity ensues. They actually lose presents, making it necessary for Santa and his workshop to create replacement presents.

It’s clear that the writers intended Fred and Barney to have Laurel and Hardy/Laverne and Shirley -esque adventures. Some of it lands and some of it doesn’t. I don’t think some of these landed even in the late 70s. And no one has an inside voice especially not inside. Unlike the 1964 cartoon, Wilma. Betty, Pebbles and Bamm Bamm hardly figure into this plot. This is interesting because Pebbles and Bamm Bamm are look like they are between 5-8 years old and they speak in complete sentences. This is the first special that features a different voice for Fred. Henry Corden took over from Alan Reed. There are songs in this special, probably to show that Hanna Barbera can keep up with the kind of holiday specials that Rankin/Bass has been pumping out for nearly every holiday on the calendar and Christmas besides. Unfortunately, these songs feel like they are searching for a relevant plot point to exist in.

Fred and Barney manage to deliver Satan’s presents (just kidding) and make it in time to do the holiday party organized by Mrs. Slate and others. Here is where we see next see Pebbles and Bamm Bamm and their mothers and hear them maybe speak. Forgetting the presents for the children at the party, Santa Fred and Elf Barney remember that they had a little bit of Santa’s magic left and pull a deus ex machina to provide the children, who at this point grabbed up their little pitchforks and torches, with their presents, including their own. Santa thanks they guys and before you know it, the special is over.

The Flintstones’ Christmas Carol (1994)

The last special was/is “The Flintstones’ Christmas Carol” (1994). It’s been 17 years since the last Christmas special. The late 80s-early 90s saw a renaissance where Hanna Barbera’s characters were concerned. More so for the older characters such as the Flintstones, the Jetsons, Yogi Bear, etc than for Scooby Doo and the gang (they’ll get theirs closer to the end of the 20th century and of course ebbing and flowing through out the 21st.). The Flintstones recently returned to Saturday morning tv in the form of little kids. During this period, Hanna Barbera did that with a lot of their characters and tried to make them “hip.”

Fortunately, this special does not have the main characters as little kids. The essential plot is that Fred, Barney, Wilma and Betty are in the Quarry Construction’s amateur dramatics company version of “A Christmas Carol.” Wilma started out as the stage manager and script girl, but due to a plague of “The Bedrock Bug” (Can you say nausea, heartburn, indigestion, upset stomach, and diarrhea?), she plays Belle and other roles in the play. Barney is Fezziwig and Bob Cratchit, Betty is Mrs. Cratchit and resumes her nudge-nik role when it comes to getting Wilma to speak up for herself and to keep the show rolling. Pebbles and Bamm Bamm are toddlers again. Pebbles can walk but her and Bamm Bamm’s vocabulary is still limited. Pebbles plays a Cratchit daughter and Bamm Bamm is Tiny Tim. Fred is Ebonezer (how did they get that one past the censors?) Scrooge and has let this go to his head harder than when Marcia Brady thought she was THE JULIET CAPULET and Greg Brady thought he was THE JOHNNY BRAVO.

We are treated to parallel storylines where Fred indulges in moments of jackassery in his real life and in the play as Scrooge. While he did remember to get his family Christmas presents, we see him not engaging enough with his daughter, which irritates Wilma to no end, but surprisingly she doesn’t voice this to him as forcefully as she would have in the past.

The production of “A Christmas Carol” is decent. They are pretty faithful to the story. Reminiscent of the 1962 version starring Mr. Magoo, there are moments where you forget that Fred Flintstone is playing Scrooge. This version was a straight ahead dramatic version. Thankfully, they didn’t attempt to add lots of songs as the 1977 version did. The producers, in addition to likely saving a few dollars, realized that not every holiday special needs a musical soundtrack.

As for the plotline outside of the play, it was decent also. Definitely was focused on Fred learning the TMOC lesson of caring about others and teamwork. A way this was demonstrated is that one of the kids who was in the play that he was tough on AND whom he made wait in line to get Fred’s last minutes gifts to his family wrapped, actually did this and wouldn’t take money from Fred because it’s Christmas.

Fred did at one point break into the department store because he didn’t know that the kid got the presented wrapped and then schlepped them all the way to the theater where they’d be safe. If Fred’s big ego hadn’t got in the way, then he wouldn’t have ignored the kid and needed to break into the store. The store where we meet the ONLY person of color to be seen across any of these holiday specials, much less in the various iterations of the Flintstones over the decades. He’s a police man and thankfully for Fred, this cop doesn’t shoot first or else this special would have had a different ending. Not only is the Black cop understanding enough to believe Fred’s story and his “road to Damascus” conversion that led him to discovering the TMOC, he gives Fred a ride back to the theater so that he can complete the play and does not arrest him.

The play goes off well. Wilma gets her flowers literally and figuratively for saving the show by stepping into so many roles. Fred makes amends to everyone and well, “God Bless Us Everyone!”

It was interesting, as mentioned, to see the cultural changes, as you viewed these characters across the different cartoons. An interesting constant was the emphasis that was put on making sure that Fred gets his family their presents. You’d think, especially in the 1st two that the fact that Fred was helping Santa Claus in his mission would make Wilma and Pebbles understanding in regards to why Fred didn’t have their presents right then. I also find it interesting that the 1994 special made sure that we knew that there were women other than Betty and Wilma in Bedrock as well as people of color. The 1964 episode barely worried about additional women and/or people of color being represented. By the time you get to the 1977 special, it feels really awkward that Wilma and Betty were practically non-existent in the episode along with anyone of any color. You only get maybe Mrs. Claus as the other woman with any major role.

Of the individual specials, I would say that I’d watch the 1964 and 1994 ones again or at least have them on in the background. The 1977 one isn’t completely dreadful. I do now understand why it’s not aired as much.

And yeah we really have to handwave the whole “cavepeople/stone age people celebrating Christmas especially ‘A Christmas Carol,’ which was written in the 1840s.” I mean, we should be focusing on the TMOC anyway, right?

Review: The Tale of the Dark Crystal

2021-01-23T13:53:00.001-05:00

The Tale of the Dark Crystal by Donna Bass
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

View all my reviews

Review: Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia

2021-01-23T13:29:00.001-05:00

Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia by Richard Francis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

View all my reviews

End Rape Culture in 2013 in the United States too

2013-01-05T11:34:00.000-05:00

"We live in a country where politicians call rape a "gift from God" and suggest that women regularly lie about being raped. Where a group of young men in high school think so little of sexual assault that they thought it was fine - hilarious, even - to post pictures online of a passed out rape victim, and to live-tweet the rape, joking about the victim being urinated on. We live in a country where media as revered as The New York Times finds it necessary to describe an 11-year-old gang rape victim as "wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s.” Where a woman can be fired because her boss finds her "irresistable" [sic] and a woman's rape case falls flat because she isn't married.

It's time to acknowledge that the rape epidemic in the United States is not just about the crimes themselves, but our own cultural and political willful ignorance. Rape is as American as apple pie - until we own that, nothing will change.”

— - Jessica Valenti, The Nation

Read the full blog post here:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/172024/americas-rape-problem-we-refuse-admit-there-one#

Mass. Cops Caught Egging Superior Officer’s Home

2013-01-04T11:06:00.000-05:00

Gee Newton Cops, I only thought I would read something like that in a script for the old Car 54, Where Are You? series. Meanwhile, I'm fairly sure the assault victims and unsolved murder victims wished you applied the same work ethic to solving their cases as you did to planning and executing this juvenile act. Actually, they'd want better, because you guys got caught.

Reblogged from NewsFeed:

(NEWTON, Mass.) — Massachusetts police responding to reports of teenagers tossing eggs at a house last month got quite a surprise when they tracked down the suspects.
A department spokesman tells the MetroWest Daily News the three people who egged the house in Framingham early Dec. 11 were fellow law enforcement officers serving with the Newton police. They were off duty at the time.

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/01/05/mass-cops-caught-egging-superior-officers-home/

Historical Red Cross gear makes its way to Cambridge, Massachusetts

2012-12-31T11:44:00.000-05:00

Reblogged from RedCrossEastMA:

"Some old and really awesome Red Cross uniforms recently made their way to Cambridge, so naturally, we played dress up today."

Breaking News repost: Delhi gang-rape victim dies in hospital in Singapore

2012-12-28T15:00:00.000-05:00

breakingnews:

Delhi gang-rape victim dies in hospital in Singapore
BBC News: The 23-year-old woman gang-raped on a bus in India’s capital Delhi has died at a Singapore hospital, doctors say.

“The patient passed away peacefully at 4:45am on 29 Dec 2012,” a statement from the hospital said. The patient’s family had been by her side, it added.
The 23-year-old had arrived in Singapore on Thursday after undergoing three operations in a Delhi hospital.

Follow updates on the story at Breaking News.
Photo: A young woman, one hand covered in fake blood, takes part in a protest earlier Friday in Calcutta against the gang rape of a student. (Piyal Adhikary / EPA via NBC News)

Happy Birthday, Rose

2012-12-05T23:38:00.000-05:00

                                                                  Rose Wilder Lane

                   (December 5, 1886, De Smet, Dakota Territory – October 30, 1968, Danbury, Connecticut)

                               American journalist, travel writer, novelist, and political theorist.

Rose Wilder was first child of Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder. Rose was their only child to survive into adulthood. Her mother, as author Laura Ingalls Wilder, wrote a series of children’s books about her life in the 1930s and 40s, that are now generally known as “The Little House” books. They continue to be in print, and the tv series of the 1970s and 80s produced by Michael Landon entitled “Little House On The Prairie” (the series title was taken from the second book in the series) was adapted from the book series.

Lane’s early years were difficult ones for her parents, the result of successive crop failures, illnesses and chronic economic hardships. During her childhood, Lane moved with her family several times, living with relatives in Minnesota and then Florida, briefly returning to De Smet, South Dakota, before the family finally settled in Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, where her parents eventually established a dairy and fruit farm. Lane attended high schools in Mansfield and Crowley, Louisiana, (where her father’s sister, Eliza Jane Wilder Thayer, had settled), graduating at the top of her high school class in Crowley in 1904. Lane’s ability to compress three years of Latin into one more than earned her the top spot in her graduating class.

Despite this academic success, her parents’ financial situation placed college out of reach and her formal schooling was over. After high school graduation she returned to her parents’ farm and learned telegraphy at the Mansfield railroad station where the station master was the father of a school friend. Wilder worked for Western Union in Kansas City as a telegrapher. She worked as a telegrapher in Missouri, Indiana and California for the next five years.

In 1909, she married salesman and occasional newspaperman Clare Gillette Lane. Around 1910, Lane bore a son who was either stillborn or died shortly after birth. Complications from subsequent surgery appear to have left Lane unable to bear more children. The details of the child’s death remain vague; the topic is mentioned only briefly in a handful of existing letters, written years later to express sympathy and understanding to close friends who were also dealing with the loss of a child.

For the next few years Lane and her husband traveled around the US working various marketing and promotional schemes. Letters to her parents described a happy-go-lucky existence with both Lane and her husband traversing the US several times and working a variety of jobs, both together and separately. However, in diary entries and subsequent published autobiographical pieces concerning this time, Lane described herself as depressed and disillusioned with her marriage, caught in the tension arising from the recognition that her intelligence and interests did not mesh with the life she was living with her husband.

One account even had her attempting suicide by drugging herself with chloroform, only to awake with a headache and a renewed sense of purpose in life.

During this time Lane read voraciously and taught herself several languages. Her writing career began around 1910, with occasional free-lance newspaper jobs that earned much needed extra cash. Between 1912 and 1914, Lane – one of the earliest female real estate agents in California – and her husband sold farm land in what is now the San Jose/Silicon Valley area of northern California. It made sense for the two to work separately to earn separate commissions, and Lane turned out to be the better salesperson of the two. The marriage foundered, there were several periods of separation, and eventually an amicable divorce in 1918. Lane’s diaries reveal subsequent romantic involvements with several men in the years after her divorce, but she never remarried.

The threat of America’s entry into World War I had seriously weakened the real estate market, so in early 1915 Lane accepted a friend’s offer of a stopgap job as an editorial assistant on the staff of the San Francisco Bulletin. The stopgap turned into a watershed. She immediately caught the attention of her editors not only through her talents as a writer in her own right, but also as a highly skilled editor for other writers. Before long, Rose Wilder Lane’s photo and byline were running in the Bulletin daily. She easily churned out formulaic romantic fiction serials that would run for weeks at a time. Her first-hand accounts of the lives of Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, Jack London, and Herbert Hoover were published in book form.

In 1915, Lane’s mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, visited for several months. Together they attended the Panama-Pacific International Exposition; many details of this visit and Lane’s daily life in 1915 are preserved in Wilder’s letters to her husband and are available in West from Home, published by Lane’s heir in 1974. Although Lane’s diaries indicate she was separated from her husband in 1915, Wilder’s letters do not indicate this. Gillette Lane was recorded as living with his wife, although unemployed and looking for work during his mother-in-law’s two month visit. It seems the separation was either covered up for her mother’s visit, or had not yet involved separate households.

By 1918, Lane had quit her job with the San Francisco Bulletin to launch a career as a freelance writer. From this period through the early 1940s, Lane’s work regularly appeared in leading publications such as Harper’s, Saturday Evening Post, Sunset, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies’ Home Journal. Several of her short stories were nominated for O. Henry Prizes and a few novels became top sellers.

Lane was also the first biographer of Herbert Hoover, writing The Making of Herbert Hoover in 1920 in collaboration with Charles K. Field, editor of Sunset magazine. She was a friend and defender of Hoover for the remainder of her life, and many of her personal papers reside in the Rose Wilder Lane Collection at the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa. Lane’s papers contain little actual correspondence between Hoover and herself, but the Hoover Post-Presidential Individual series contains a file of Lane correspondence that spans from 1936–1963.

In the late 1920s, she was one of the highest-paid female writers in America, and counted among her friends Sinclair Lewis, Isabel Paterson, Dorothy Thompson and Lowell Thomas. Despite this success, Lane’s compulsive generosity with her family and friends often found her strapped for cash and forced to work on material that paid well, but did not engage her growing interests in political theory and world history. She suffered from periodic bouts of self-doubt and depression in mid-life, diagnosing herself as manic-depressive (now more commonly known as bipolar disorder). During these times of depression, when she was unable to move ahead with her own writing, Lane would easily find work as a ghostwriter or “silent” editor for other well-known writers.

Lane’s occasional work as a traveling war correspondent began with a stint with the American Red Cross Publicity Bureau in post-WWI Europe and continued though 1965, when at the age of 78, she was reporting from Vietnam for Woman’s Day magazine, providing “a woman’s point of view.” She traveled extensively in Europe and Asia as part of the Red Cross. In 1926, Lane, author Helen Dore Boylston and their French maid traveled from France to Albania in a car they had named “Zenobia”. An account of the journey, Travels With Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford was published in 1983 by her heir. Lane became enamored with Albania, and lived there for several long periods during the 1920s, spaced between sojourns to Paris and her parents’ Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri. She informally adopted a young Albanian boy named Rexh Meta, who she claimed saved her life on a dangerous mountain trek; she later sponsored his education at Oxford University in England.

In 1928, Lane returned to the U.S. to live on her parents’ farm and there she took in and educated two local orphaned brothers. In 1938, Lane purchased a rural home outside of Danbury, Connecticut, where she spent the remainder of her life.

The stock market crash of 1929, which wiped out both Lane’s and her parents’ investments. The ensuing Great Depression further reduced the market for her writing, and she found herself isolated and depressed at Rocky Ridge Farm, struggling to maintain her commitments to support herself, her adopted children and her elderly parents, who had retired from active farming with Lane’s encouragement and financial support. Her ghostwriting jobs increased at this time, because her depression tended to affect her ability to generate ideas for her own writing projects.

In late 1930, her mother approached her with a rough, first-person narrative manuscript outlining her hardscrabble pioneer childhood, titled Pioneer Girl. Lane, using her well-developed sense of what was marketable, took notice. She recognized that an American public weary of the Depression would respond warmly to the story of the loving, self-sufficient and determined Ingalls family overcoming obstacles while maintaining their sense of independence, as told through the eyes of the spunky Laura as she matured from ages five to eighteen. Despite Lane’s efforts to market Pioneer Girl through her publishing connections, the manuscript was resoundingly rejected, although one editor recommended crafting a novel for children out of the beginning. Wilder and Lane worked on this project, thus producing “Little House in the Big Woods”, which was accepted by Harper & Row in late 1931. The success of the book resulted in the decision to continue the series, following young Laura Ingalls into young adulthood.

It remains unclear whether Laura Ingalls Wilder was a naturally skilled novelist who never discovered her talents until her sixties, with Lane’s only contribution to her mother’s success her encouragement and her established connections in the publishing world, or if Lane essentially took her mother’s unpublishable raw manuscripts in hand and completely (and silently) ghostwrote the series of books we know today. The truth appears to lie somewhere between these two positions — Wilder’s writing career as a rural journalist and a credible essayist began more than two decades before the Little House series, and Lane’s formidable editing and ghostwriting skills are well-documented. The existing written evidence (including ongoing correspondence between the women concerning the development of the multi-volume series, Lane’s extensive personal diaries detailing the time she spent working on the manuscripts, and Wilder’s own initial draft manuscripts) tends to reveal an ongoing mutual collaboration that involved Lane more extensively in the earlier books, and to a much lesser extent by the time the series ended, as Wilder’s confidence in her own writing ability increased, and Lane was no longer living at Rocky Ridge Farm. Lane insisted to the end that she considered her role to be little more than that of an adviser to her mother, despite much documentation to the contrary.

Many of Lane’s most popular short stories and her two most commercially successful novels were written at this time and were fueled by material which was taken directly from her mother’s recollections of Ingalls-Wilder family folklore—Let the Hurricane Roar (later retitled Young Pioneers) and Free Land, both addressed the difficulties of homesteading in the Dakotas in the late 19th century, and how the “free land” in fact cost many homesteaders their life savings. Let The Hurricane Roar was based on the early life of Lane’s grandparents-who would be know to future generations as Caroline “Ma” Ingalls and Charles “Pa” Ingalls. Free Land was based on the early years of her Lane’s own parents’ marriage and included members of both sides of the family. The Saturday Evening Post paid Lane large fees to serialize both novels, and both were also adapted for highly popular radio performances. The Young Pioneers would later be adapted into a TV movie in the 1970s.

During World War II, Lane had one of the most remarkable, but little studied, phases of her career. From 1942 to 1945, she wrote a weekly column for The Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely read American Black newspaper.

Rather than hiding or trimming her laissez faire views, she seized the chance to sell them to the readership. She sought out topics of special interests of her audience. Her first entry glowingly characterized the Double V Campaign as part of the more general fight for individual liberty in American history.

“Here, at last, is a place where I belong,” she wrote of her new job. “Here are the Americans who know the value of equality and freedom.”

Her columns highlighted black success stories to illustrate broader themes about entrepreneurship, freedom, and creativity. In one, she compared the accomplishments of Robert Vann and Henry Ford. Vann’s rags to riches story illustrated the benefits in a “capitalist society in which a penniless orphan, one of a despised minority can create The Pittsburgh Courier and publicly, vigorously, safely, attack a majority opinion” while Ford’s showed how a poor mechanic can create “hundreds of jobs … putting even beggars into cars.”

She combined advocacy of laissez faire and antiracism. The views she expressed on race were strikingly similar to those of Zora Neale Hurston, a fellow individualist and writer who was Black.

Lane’s columns emphasized the arbitrariness of racial categories and stressed the centrality of the individual. Instead of indulging in the “ridiculous, idiotic and tragic fallacy of ‘race,’ [by] which a minority of the earth’s population has deluded itself during the past century”, it was time for all Americans (black and white) to “renounce their race”. Judging by skin color was comparable to the Communists who assigned guilt or virtue on the basis of class. In her view, the fallacies of race and class hearkened to the “old English-feudal ‘class’ distinction.” The collectivists, including the New Dealers, were to blame for filling “young minds with fantasies of ‘races’ and ‘classes’ and ‘the masses,’ all controlled by pagan gods, named Economic Determinism or Society or Government.”

In the early 1940s, despite continuing requests from editors for both fiction and non-fiction material, Lane turned away from commercial writing and became known as one of the most influential American libertarians of the middle 20th century. She vehemently opposed the New Deal, perceived “creeping socialism,” Social Security, wartime rationing and all forms of taxation, claiming she ceased writing highly paid commercial fiction to protest paying income taxes. She cut her income and expenses to the bare minimum, and lived a modern-day version of her ancestors’ pioneer life on her rural land near Danbury, Connecticut. Literary critic and political writer Isabel Paterson had urged the move to Connecticut, where she would be only “up country a few miles” from Paterson, who had been a friend for many years.

A staunch opponent of communism after experiencing it first hand in the Soviet Union during her Red Cross travels, Lane wrote the seminal The Discovery of Freedom (1943), and tirelessly promoted and wrote about individual freedom, and its impact on humanity. The same year also saw the publication of Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine and Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, and the three women have been referred to as the founding mothers of the American libertarian movement with the publication of these works.

Writer Albert Jay Nock wrote that Lane’s and Paterson’s nonfiction works were “the only intelligible books on the philosophy of individualism that have been written in America this century.”

The two women had “shown the male world of this period how to think fundamentally … They don’t fumble and fiddle around—every shot goes straight to the centre.” Journalist John Chamberlain credits Rand, Paterson and Lane with his final “conversion” from socialism to what he called “an older American philosophy” of libertarian and conservative ideas.

In 1943, Lane was thrust into the national spotlight through her response to a radio poll on Social Security. She mailed in a post-card with a response likening the Social Security system to a Ponzi scheme that would ultimately destroy the US. The subsequent events remain unclear, but wartime monitoring of the mails eventually resulted in a Connecticut State Trooper being dispatched to her farmhouse (supposedly at the request of the FBI) to question her motives. Lane’s vehement response to this infringement on her right of free speech resulted in a flurry of newspaper articles and the publishing of a pamphlet, “What is this, the Gestapo?,” that was meant to remind Americans to be watchful of their rights, despite the wartime exigencies.

There was an FBI file compiled on Lane during this time, which is now available under the Freedom of Information Act.

As Lane grew older, her political opinions solidified as a fundamentalist libertarian, and her defense of what she considered to be basic American principles of liberty and freedom could become harsh and abrasive in the face of disagreement. She broke with her old friend and political ally, Isabel Paterson in 1946, and, in the 1950s, had an acrimonious correspondence with writer Max Eastman.

During the 1940s and through the 1950s, Lane played a hands-on role in launching the “libertarian movement”, a term she apparently coined, and began an extensive correspondence with figures such as DuPont executive Jasper Crane and writers Frank Meyer and Ayn Rand. Lane wrote book reviews for the National Economic Council and later for the Volker Fund, out of which grew the Institute for Humane Studies. Later, she lectured at, and gave generous financial support to, the Freedom School headed by libertarian Robert LeFevre.

With her mother’s death in 1957, use of the Rocky Ridge Farm house reverted to the farmer who had earlier bought the surrounding land. The local townfolk put together a non-profit corporation to purchase the house and its grounds, for use as a museum. After some wariness at the notion of seeing the house rather than the books themselves be a shrine to her mother, Lane came to believe that making a museum of it would draw long-lasting attention to the books. She donated the money needed to purchase the house and make it a museum, agreed to make significant contributions each year for its upkeep and also gave many of the family’s belongings to help establish what became a popular museum which still draws thousands of visitors each year to Mansfield. Her lifetime inheritance of Wilder’s growing Little House royalties put an end to Lane’s self-enforced modest lifestyle; she began to travel extensively again, and thoroughly renovated and remodeled her Connecticut home.

During the 1960s, Lane revived her own commercial writing career by publishing several popular magazine series, including one about her remarkable tour of the Vietnam war zone in late 1965.

Lane wrote an immensely popular book detailing the history of American needlework (with a strong libertarian undercurrent) for Woman’s Day and edited and published On The Way Home, providing an autobiographical setting around her mother’s original 1894 diary of their six week journey from South Dakota to Missouri. This book was intended to serve as the capstone to the Little House series, for those many fans who since Wilder’s death were now writing to Lane asking, “what happened next?”. She contributed book reviews to the influential William Volker Fund, and continued to work on extensive revisions to The Discovery of Freedom, which she never completed.

Lane was the adoptive “grandmother” and mentor to Roger MacBride, best known as the Libertarian Party’s 1976 candidate for President of the United States. MacBride was the son of one of Lane’s editors with whom she formed a close bond when he was a young boy; she later admitted that she was grooming him to be a future Libertarian thought leader. In addition to being her close friend, he also became her attorney and business manager and ultimately the heir to the Little House series and the multi-million dollar franchise that he built around it after Lane’s death.

The last of the many protégés to be taken under Lane’s wing was the sister of her Vietnamese interpreter; impressed by the young girl’s intelligence, she helped to bring her to the United States and sponsored her enrollment in college.

Rose Wilder Lane died in her sleep at the age of 81, on October 30, 1968, just as she was about to depart on a three-year world tour. She was the last surviving member of Charles Ingalls’ family line as his daughter Laura Ingalls Wilder (Lane’s mother) was the only one of his four daughters to have children.

I am thinking about Nancy Kerrigan (sorta)

2012-11-16T17:14:00.000-05:00

It looks like her brother is causing more trouble for the Kerrigan family

“RT @NECN: Mass. judge orders Mark Kerrigan to return to jail for 6 months for violating probation http://ow.ly/fmBGC”

From the @elizabethforma headquarters

2012-11-06T00:55:00.000-05:00

#masen #mapol From the @elizabethforma headquarters:

We need you to do three things before you go to bed tonight:

    Plan a time to vote. Polls will be open on Tuesday from 7:00 AM to 8:00 PM. To look up your polling location, or to request a a ride to the polls, visit our voter information center:

http://elizabethwarren.com/vote

    Remind your friends to vote. Even if you think your friends are going to vote on Tuesday, send them a quick reminder. This is going to be an extremely close election, and we can’t take anything for granted. Use this simple page to send your friends an email reminder:

http://elizabethwarren.com/votereminder

    Volunteer on Tuesday. We still need volunteers to help make sure our supporters get to the polls on Tuesday. Please find your closest field office anytime after 7:00 AM and stop in to volunteer - even just a couple of hours can make the difference.

http://elizabethwarren.com/fieldoffices

NaNoWriMo/NaBloPoMo – Day 4 and other things

2012-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00

So I am informed by Ye Trusty ole NaNoWriMo Word Count stats cruncher that:

Your Average Per Day

778

Words Written Today

1,020

Target Word Count

50,000

Target Average Words Per Day

1,667

Total Words Written

3,114

Words Remaining

46,886

Current Day

Days Remaining

At This Rate You Will Finish On

January 3, 2013

So I have upped my word count slightly but I need to pick up the pace to at least hit 50,000 words within this year.

An interesting development is that while watching this:
, (which is about these guys ),
I found a key to unlocking the soul of the story I want to tell. The music from Unknown Pleasures and Closer albums really inspired me.

I came across more writing tips online:

About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and CEO of Copyblogger Media.

AND

Go Into the Story’s contribution of …
“Get the damn thing done!”:
http://gointothestory.blcklst.com/2012/10/get-the-damn-thing-done.html

Lastly, I was tooling around on GetGlue.com (I should say old GetGlue (o.getglue.com), because no one likes the new GetGlue.com website and found this:
I am thinking about Jack Klugman

And so I shared the excerpts from his book, “Tony and Me” on GetGlue that spoke to me:
“I tell young actors all the time: learn your craft and the rest will take care of itself.”

and

“I don’t like to preach, but I’m going to now because I feel this is too important not to say. If you’re like I was, or you’re someone who likes to hold a grudge, or you’ve never really let someone know what they mean to your because you’re afraid, ask yourself this question: what are you really protecting?

If you look, you’ll see it: nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Just phantoms from old wounds that never healed. Give them up and join the people in your life who love you. Risk it all. For me, it was the best gamble I ever made.”

National Novel Writing Month: A Meme

2012-11-03T02:25:00.000-04:00

"The scariest moment is always just before you start". —- Stephen King

The questions/meme are a reblog from clarisaxx.tumblr.com, but the answers are all my own...

Working Title [of NaNoWrimo work for the current season]:
Novel 1: The Tale of Snow White and Rose Red
Novel 2: The Angry Gondals stuff
Novel 3: And the Rest (including Sibs of Doom and Gollumidas stuff)

Genre:
All over the map, but I'm guessing fantastical epic stuff

Projected Word Count:
It would be great if I could get one of them to 50k. My modest expectation is that all combined will be at least hit 50k.

AT THE START DO YOU:

Start typing?
Sure. The deadline is 11:59pm each night to review, word count and repeat.

Have an outline?
Yes for the first two, not so much for the third.

Scene-by-scene?
Kinda.

Know how it starts?
Yep.

Know how it ends? (Does it have an ending?)
Novel 1: Yes
Novel 2: Sorta
Novel 3: No, bloody clue-I'll go where the story takes me.

Have your climax in order?
Possibly.

Have your main characters yet?
Yes.

Plan to draw on your experiences?
Maybe. There are very few life experiences that are unique so I'm sure if it didn't happen to me, it happened to someone.

IS YOUR WORK GOING TO BE:

Funny?
I usually infuse some kind of funny in anything fictional that I write. Your Mileage May Vary as to how funny it is.

Serious?
Oh yeah. I do 'Serious' pretty well.

Sad?
Oh yeah. There will be tragedy. It wouldn't be me if there wasn't some kind of tragedy.

Semi-Autobiographical?
Not really, although Your Mileage May Vary there too in reading some incidents.

Based on another story?
Novel 2: Yes. It's my reimagining of the Angria and Gondal tales.

HOW MUCH HAVE YOU PLANNED?
HAVE YOU USED:

A paper journal?
Yep. A lot of material was/is documented in those pretty journals that Barnes and Noble and the now defunct Borders used to sell. My herculean task has been to digitized all of it.

A computer?
Some.

Index cards?
Yep, in ways that would make the teachers that I frustrated because I wouldn't use them and complete term papers go "What The?".

Bulleted lists?
Sometimes on the index cards.

Plot Charts?
On the larger index cards-leftover practice from storyboarding for film.

Character Charts?
Yes and no. I like to keep names + traits + appearances listed, which makes things easier to keep track of, but I know them in my head and so I'll rarely update them.

ODDS AND ENDS:

Favorite writing resource?
Book:
On Writing by Stephen King
The Elements of Style by Strunk and White
The prefaces of the short stories written by Marion Zimmer Bradley in her Sword and Sorceress anthologies
How to Become a Famous Writer Before your Dead by Ariel Gore

Online:
The Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust (http://www.mzbworks.com/)
Forward Motion for Writers (http://www.fmwriters.com/zoomfm/index.php/home)
Vision (http://visionforwriters.com/visionjoom/)
The tweets from @lawnrocket (twitter.com/lawnrocket)
NaNo for the New and the Insane A guide to surviving NaNoWriMo(SM) By Lazette Gifford (http://lazette.net/freestuf/NaNoBook.pdf)

A line you would like to use:
"Cleaving through the night sky" - I came up with it but I don't know where I'll use it yet.

A scene you would like to include:
Possibly the one where one character sleeps with the other but was leading him on to find out what side of the fight he was on and he doesn't see it coming because she pretty much doesn't seem to be cutthroat.

A concept you would like to explore:
Novel 1: The compromises we make
Novel 2: Personal Evolution
Novel 3: Oh the places that we go

A cliché you would like to avoid:
While I'd like to avoid as many as possible (tvtropes.org holla!), I don't think it's possible to avoid even one. You basically find a way to make them less hackneyed.

A character you would like to use:
I can't really think of one that's not my own.

FORWARD THINKING:

Do you expect to be able to complete it?
I'd like to, but realistically I may not. It doesn't mean I can't try.

Do you intend to complete it?
I'll do my level best.

Would you ever try to publish it?
I'd like to try publishing one of the three. That would be kinda cool.

What do you expect to get out this month of frantic writing?
Some really ripping yarns that I would like to read on my own and to share with others.

I am thinking about Day of the Dead (Spanish: Día de los Muertos)

2012-11-02T22:25:00.000-04:00

Day of the Dead (Spanish: Día de los Muertos) is a Mexican holiday celebrated throughout Mexico and around the world in many cultures. The holiday focuses on gatherings of family and friends to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died. It is particularly celebrated in Mexico, where it attains the quality of a National Holiday.
The celebration takes place on November 1–2, in connection with the Catholic holidays of All Saints’ Day (November 1) and All Souls’ Day (November 2). Traditions connected with the holiday include building private altars honoring the deceased using sugar skulls, marigolds, and the favorite foods and beverages of the departed and visiting graves with these as gifts. Scholars trace the origins of the modern Mexican holiday to indigenous observances dating back hundreds of years and to an Aztec festival dedicated to a goddess called Mictecacihuatl.

Reblog: USAID Asks Students for Ideas to Combat Human Trafficking

2012-10-23T20:25:00.001-04:00

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is asking students to come up with new and innovative ways to end modern slavery.

USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah announced the Campus Challenge to Counter Trafficking in Persons (C-TIP) on October 11 at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.

Across three phases and through the USAID website ChallengeSlavery.org, the C-TIP Campus Challenge is designed to increase global awareness about trafficking, inspire activism among students and scholars at colleges and universities worldwide and generate new, creative ideas and solutions to stop human trafficking and help the 20.9 million people around the world are enslaved in sex or labor exploitation, USAID said.

During the first phase from October 11 to November 28 at ChallengeSlavery.org, students will have the opportunity to participate in discussion groups on various trafficking subtopics, host online conversations, and crowdsourcing issues that will frame the problems to be addressed in the next phase.

The contest phase, from November 28 to January 8, 2013, will be open for applications from U.S. and international students proposing innovative technological solutions to advance trafficking-in-persons prevention and protection.

From January 9, 2013, to January 30, 2013, the ChallengeSlavery.org community will be invited to rate the proposals and provide suggestions on how submissions can be improved.

On February 1, 2013, USAID will announce the semifinalists and in the following three weeks, semifinalist proposals will be judged by an expert C-TIP and technologist panel. The winners will be announced at the end of February and will be invited to share their proposals with donors, C-TIP and technology professionals.

For more information: http://allafrica.com/stories/201210151453.html

Source: (allAfrica.com)

Romney's remarks huge mistake or plain truth?

2012-09-19T18:03:00.000-04:00

David A. Rice feels like Mitt Romney wrote him off.

The 61-year-old has always been a values-based voter, generally votes Republican and could be a key vote in the swing state of Florida. But he’s also among the 47% of Americans that Mitt Romney said don’t pay income tax and rely on government support.

“There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” Romney says in a clip from a secretly filmed private donor meeting in May, which was first posted on Monday afternoon.

I am thinking about John Kerry

2012-09-06T23:46:00.000-04:00

#DNC2012 “Ask Osama bin Laden if he’s better off now than he was four years ago!”

— Senator John Kerry

This was one of the more memorable quotes that Massachusetts Senator John Kerry made during his speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. He gave a speech that called out the former Massachusetts Governor and current Republican Presidential Nominee Mitt Romney on his policies and lack of a clear position and plan for the country. He went as far as to suggest that Romney took his foreign cues from watching the Rocky IV movie.
You know you're in trouble when the person who was charged with being a flip-flopper when he ran for president in 2004, calls you out as being an even worse flip-flopper.
The recurring thought that I had (as I'm sure everyone else had) as I watched Kerry speak was "Where the hell was this guy in 2004?" This guy could have gotten elected to the White House instead of being a bigger punchline than the punchline that got reelected.

Check-in to John Kerry on GetGlue.com

Duran Duran news

2012-08-30T14:54:00.000-04:00

“RT @HuffingtonPost: Duran Duran cancels big show http://huff.to/Pctmmd ”

I am thinking about Anais Nin

2012-08-30T14:46:00.002-04:00

““You cannot save people, you can only love them.” — Anaïs Nin”

Business Blogging: Using a Blog to Generate Business

2012-08-27T23:18:00.001-04:00

Business Blogging: Using a Blog to Generate Business

Evil triumphs when good people do nothing. Period.

2012-08-26T21:06:00.000-04:00

[image description: two Desi women holding up a sign at a demonstration that says,
"Imagine a world free of sexual violence on women. Can you?”
In the middle of the sign is an illustration of a woman.]

(Source: theuntitledmag)

A disturbing, but all too familiar incident that illustrates why the work to stop violence against women is not over by a long shot.

From globalpost on Tumblr:

MUMBIA, India — On July 9, a group of men attacked a girl after she stepped out of a club on a busy street in Guwahati, Assam. A reporter, who was later joined by a cameraman, filmed the entire incident, and a local television channel released the footage the following day.

The girl was molested, burned, and beaten for at least half an hour. The men tried to strip off her clothes. The girl fruitlessly begged bystanders, passersby, and the men filming for help – nobody put a stop to it.

Read more at GlobalPost

From A Swiftly Tilting Planet...

2012-08-26T13:41:00.000-04:00

One of the versions of Patrick’s Rune per Madeleine L’Engle:

“In this fateful hour,
I place all Heaven with its power
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness,
All these I place
Between myself and the powers of darkness!”

Check-in to A Swiftly Tilting Planet on GetGlue.com

I am thinking about Neil Armstrong and I am thinking about Apollo 11

2012-08-25T13:00:00.000-04:00

I am thinking about Neil Armstrong and I am thinking about Apollo 11

“RT @ABCWorldNews: Neil Armstrong, the first astronaut to walk on the moon as commander of Apollo 11, has died. He was 82 years old. http://abcn.ws/RaYbbC”

From discoverynews:

“For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.”

Fellowship Positions | Polaris Project | Combating Human Trafficking and Modern-day Slavery

2012-08-23T13:13:00.000-04:00

Polaris Project offers a wide variety of fellowship positions with a focus on teaching our leaders of tomorrow how to combat the issue of human trafficking:

http://www.polarisproject.org/about-us/careers/fellowship-positions

Nevada Same-Sex Couple Denied Hospital Visitation Despite Domestic Partnership

2012-08-20T14:41:00.001-04:00

A same-sex couple in Nevada is raising awareness about the inequality couples experience without marriage after Spring Valley Hospital refused to recognize their relationship. Brittney Leon and Terri-Ann Simonelli have a domestic partnership, which under Nevada state law grants couples all the same rights as married couples. When Leon checked into the hospital last month [...]

More information at:
Nevada Same-Sex Couple Denied Hospital Visitation Despite Domestic Partnership:

CultureLab: Mathematics is as rich as literature

2012-08-14T19:41:00.001-04:00

CultureLab: Mathematics is as rich as literature