Posts by Sharon Mahoney

In the cancer ward.

October 16, 2003, by No comments yet

A memory from January 2001.

Hospital RoomI flailed to consciousness, the way a submerged and drowning person reaches for the surface. Or at least it felt that way—the involuntary and instinctive struggle toward light and air and voices. Then a second or two of surprise as I realized that I wasn’t immersed in a cold tide but lying in a hospital bed, tied down by sheet, blanket and tubes going into almost every orifice. The rhythmic distant roar of the surf I had heard in my disoriented state was the hiss and sigh of the little motor inflating and deflating the anti-embolism cuffs on my calves. A nurse bent over me, and offered me ice chips. I sucked at them eagerly—I was parched, for all my dreams of water—and tried to focus my eyes as I took stock. Continued…

Summer’s over.

September 3, 2003, by No comments yet

Prayer at church Sunday: Oh, Lord, please restore my sense of humor. Too much concentration upon politics recently, like a steady diet of Romaine lettuce, has left me bitter and cynical. Time to switch gears.

Temperatures this past week have abruptly dipped into the low sixties in the evening and have hovered around seventy during the day. Compared to the unrelenting humidity and heat of these past three months it is as if we’ve been suddenly transported to a different hemisphere, house and all. School started again today, and I’m in the middle of the last-minute enrollment minuet. I didn’t get half the things done on my summer to-do list that I hoped to accomplish, and as usual I’m kicking myself for the ways I managed to waste time. Continued…

Perle: Finding Iraqi WMD may take 200 years

July 28, 2003, by No comments yet
Richard Perle

Dark Lord of the Neocons

From Middle East Online:

Perle added that “we are absolutely certain” that weapons of mass destruction are hidden in Iraq – Washington’s motive for launching the offensive against Baghdad – but that it may take dozens of years to find them.

“We don’t know where to look for them and we never did know where to look for them,” he admitted.

Asked by a reporter when he thought the evidence of those weapons may be found, Perle joked: “I hope this will take less than 200 years.”

Mother of God.

We have young men and women dying for a pack of lies, and this scum has the temerity to joke about it.

And meanwhile, all three networks lead tonight with “the death of a beloved figure in America”–Bob Hope. The press lionize a has-been “comedian” who was a willing tool for legitimizing another immoral war. This while families mourn their dead sons and daughters or fall apart with worry about their well-being. Continued…

Life is full of mysteries.

July 21, 2003, by No comments yet

So I’m sitting here working and UPS comes up the driveway to make a delivery, and I notice from my second-floor window that the roof of the UPS truck has a large white rectangle painted on it.

Is there a reason for this? Is it part of some weird GPS thing? Has Homeland Security Guy Tom Ridge mandated this in an effort to track packages from subversives (or to subversives, as the case may be)? Do UPS drivers use the roof of their brown vans as a suntanning spot inbetween deliveries? Is God playing a huge video game with UPS trucks and needs an easier way to identify them from on high?

Inquiring minds want to know. Any UPS guys or gals out there, tell us the scoop. FedEx folks, too (although your inherent biases will be taken into account). I’ll post any responses that seem plausible.

Asking For It Dept.

July 18, 2003, by No comments yet

Added a “comments” feature to my blog. Now all you multitudes who slavishly lap up my every word can slather on the fulsome praise. Or not.

Soli Dei Gloria, indeed.

July 16, 2003, by No comments yet

I was ready to turn off NPR this morning and begin work, when the familiar flute movement from Bach’s Orchestral Suite #2 tripped and bubbled from my radio speaker. I expected the announcer to cut in, the way announcers do during the transitional music between news stories, but the melody went on for what must have been a full twenty seconds. At length Bob Edwards introduced a story about the long-delayed restoration of Bach’s original manuscripts in Leipzig. The manuscripts had lain off-limits in the German National Library in Berlin for decades, with not even basic efforts attempted at preservation. But now, with the fragile papers near a state of complete disintergration, a team is finally hard at work preserving them for future study.

According to the report, one of the tasks in which the restoration team at the Bach Library in Leipzig is engaged is to digitally photograph every one of the manuscript pages and make them available online for music historians all over the world to study. The museum official commented on the quality of the digital images, their level of detail, and the information that the erasures, word transpositions, and margin notes could provide to those looking to reconstruct the life and creative mind of Bach. Continued…