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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, March 18, 2006

Local Girl Does Good 

...last year, I wrote about this remarkable young lady, on the advent of her first attempt to be the first blind person to finish the famed Itidarod sled dog race in Alaska. Today, on her second attempt, Rachael Scdoris crossed the finish line during the frozen wee hours morning in Nome. She didn't finish near the front of the pack, there weren't screaming throngs and the man-made heat lightning of a hundred cameras adding their instantaneous bluish surreality to the moment, and she didn't win $60 K or a new pickup like the guy who crossed the finish line first over a day ago. But she did something that has never been done before, and now there can never be a "first time" again because it is her's to keep forever...

Sled dog racing isn't much of a spectator sport; it is a competition that melds a musher and a gaggle of dogs into one functioning biological machine that launches itself against the desolate cold loneliness of the northern winter. The Iditarod is the grueling crown jewel of the sport, in which only a few women have entered and fewer yet have been successful. None of those contestants were young and vision-impaired. Rachael Scdoris won't be showing up on the Letterman Show or get a mention on Keith Olbermann's "Countdown", but what she has accomplished is far more important than anything happening in the runup to the NFL draft or what's happening in the NBA right now. It would, in fact, be difficult to drum up some drama out of the current NCAA mens' basketball tournament that could compete with the simple raw story that is being told by Rachael's competition. Her's is the poster parents should want to be sneaking onto the walls of their children's bedrooms, and her dedication represents the sorts of values that people want to instill in those children. Whether or not that ever comes to pass, at least we in Central Oregon can be proud of the local girl who done good...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:23 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

...so here I sit in a posh hotel in the Greater Portland Metropolitan Area (marvelling at the actually sight of real grass and daffodils so different from the two feet of snow in my Central Oregon front yard), having spent a day cut off from the outside world, trapped in a room full of people who - when drinking - can be more fun than...well, never mind that, but they can be a lot of fun, but unfortunately this is a non-drinking work setting dealing with issues grim enough to encourage reliance on strong drink. High-speed internet, a delightful change from my normal dial-up life, is my pleasant diversion on this visit to the big city, except it offers such an odd gaggle of news to further jangle the nerves...

While flipping through the unfamiliar cable channels on the TV, I find Katherine Harris, strangely missing her sumptious coat of puppy fur, telling some strange untelegenic brace of Fox News talking heads (Not being a Faux-watcher, I naturally assigned them the names "Dumb and Dumber" before finding out that they were actually "Hannity and Colmes") telling whoever the hell watches this sort of nonsense that she's going to stay in the race against Bill Nelson for US Senator of Florida. Why this is a matter of national importance - other than the natural fascination with watching to see if her face fractures into hundreds of tiny pieces that fall of the front of her head when she attempts too many facial expressions - does escape me. I do know, however, that had my late father left me 10 million dollars, I too would have honored him, although I would more likely have done so by sacrifically purchasing that Ferrari F430 that I know he would have wanted to own, even though it would rob my valuable time mentoring disadvantaged children and volunteering at the soup kitchen in order to find long complicated highway stretches. There's not a chance in the world I'd blow it on a political campaign; my dad would come back from the dead to dope-slap me if I were that stupid...

In what can only be described as "The Battle of The Celebrity Lefties", Arianna Huffington and George Clooney are going at it because Huffington gathered a bunch of his interview answers to craft a product that she apparently represented as a blog post by Clooney. While it was a clear misrepresentation, suggesting that a collection of excerpts from two different interviews was something he actually wrote for posting on The Huffington Post, Clooney's objection has been met with an unapologetic unapology by Ms. Huffington and an equally strange misunderstanding about the concept of blogging by Jane Hamsher of firedoglake. It's a bizarre little teacup in the much larger tempest (OK, so that was going to be my original oh-so-clever little post title about this issue), because Clooney doesn't object to any of the statements, but does take issue with the suggestion that he actually wrote them as an original composition to THP. One can only assume that things work differently down there in the strange planet of Hollywood where folks like Clooney, Huffington, and Hamsher live. Out here in the real world of blogging that so many of us have been living for the past few years, people who write posts put a name to them, whether that name be what is listed on a birth record or some nom de plume created for whatever reason. In this case, however, what everybody seems to agree is little more than a collection of quotes is being represented as some sort of original composition. Aside from not being the way that blogging works, it's silly to suggest that Clooney somehow was cowed by attention by Fox News, given that he has never shied away from his comments and has frequently and openly made connections between his recent work and his concerns about the path the political world is currently taking...

On the pop literature front, Dan Brown did/didn't (circle one) copied/adapted (circle one) text from other previous books in the writing of his mega-best-seller "The Da Vinci Code". Aside from almost guaranteeing a future that features being horse-whipped by Oprah Winfrey live on national television, this damning revelation/notional information (circle one) may prove to be the only situation in the world that could prevent Tom Hanks from taking one more major Oscar-nominating step away from that horrific Bosum Buddies thing that we persons of a more mature persuasion (OK, us middle-aged types...is that better?) can't quite drink heavily enough to get out of our minds...

There's more; Lordy gosh amighty, how there's more. But after a brutally grim day like this one, a fellow just can't even wrap his mind around all of it. And we haven't even touched on George W. Bush's relentless plodding progress toward "Tricky Dick" Nixon approval ratings, which is nearly the same thing as piping in sunshine to offset the grim rainy gloom that is so typical of the northern Willamette Valley this time of year...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:05 PM 0 comments

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