Stones From a Zen Garden

Gustav is spinning, but you can counter it

I've been thinking about my friend Donna all morning, since I passed through an Austin hotel lobby with Fox News blaring its guesses about Gustav's path and power and churning the waters of worry. The storm is two days away, but the spin is already thumping at America's right-wing TV nuthouse. "The federal aid is ready," sez the hucksters, with 7,000 National Guard troops "being convoyed in." It sounds like a lot, but that means a bunch of guys riding buses, not bumping along in the back of big trucks like an old WWII movie. Not much help for a swath of LA as big as the target area.

Donna has made a life for herself in Austin after having a beloved multi-generation house swept away during Katrina. Her folks go back many decades in New Orleans, and being a cultural anthropologist and a bang-up writer polishing a book on that storm, I feel as if I know the place she has lost better than anywhere except maybe my hometown of Toledo, right on the shores of Lake Erie. We never got anything but tornadoes up there; scary, but nothing like having the Gulf of Mexico wash ashore, or a lake bust through levees, to destroy so many homes and take so many lives.

Donna has tips on how to counter the Gustav spin. It seems as noble a task as anything electoral. Please consider helping. She says:

Hi Austin Friends:

Well, we’ve got something ugly in the Gulf named Gustav and, unfortunately, it seems to be heading to LA. Austin will likely be seeing evacuees from south Louisiana and possibly even the Texas gulf coast. I’ve gotten involved in volunteering and am sending out the following info for any of ya’ll who might like to help out. I will most likely be working in a Red Cross shelter, as I attended a RC shelter management course this morning.

Here goes:

1. To volunteer for the Red Cross and receive general information about volunteering in Austin, call 512-928-4271 or e-mail Mario Chapa (mchapa@centex.redcross.org) or Kim Landry (klandry@centex.redcross.org)

2. The following info was sent by Amy BeVille Elder, M.Div., Executive Director of the Texas Interagency Interfaith Disaster Response (TIDR). If you know of a church community that would like to get involved, they should contact Amy.

TIDR has a limited list of contacts for Houses of Worship; we need more.  These persons serve as a Point of Contact in times of emergency and disaster.  If Austin should open shelters, and should the shelter manager have a need which the neighborhood faith community might be able to meet, then we need a Disaster Contact Person (DCP) that we can call, day or night.  We would like all Houses of Worship to give us a phone number which we can use should a specific need arise.  The kinds of things we can imagine might be, a battery for a hearing aid, a cot so an older person doesn't have to sleep on the floor, diapers for a little one, etc.

Regards,
Amy
work: 512.458.8848 cell: 512.627.5771

I’m now on Amy’s mailing list, but if the-you-know-what-hits-the-fan in the next few days, I’ll be hard to reach. If so, you could contact the TX Interagency Interfaith Group yourself at the number above, for info on helping.

3. Finally, Donna Bonner, 512-796-3959 — if you give a call, I’ll answer any questions to which I know the answers, although I must warn I’m sort of busy right now taking calls from freaked out Louisians so I may not pick up right away. wesaymerci@yahoo.com is also a good way to reach me.

Tom O'Meara, a writer/rider friend of mine, is working on recruiting volunteers to help in the Gulf Coast diaspora/evacuation. He's at tom.omeara@sbcglobal.net, and says

Our friends from the Gulf Coast are on the move again and will need our help early next week. The local response is well organized by Texas Interfaith Disaster Response and the Red Cross, but I know there will be opportunities for all of us to contribute to the effort.
 
I am also sure that many of you already participate in communities that are planning their own responses. Please let me know about those so I can make a good report tomorrow.
 
I am meeting with some of the community leaders tomorrow morning to find out how different community groups will be called on to respond. If you are interested in participating in this effort, please let me know.

If worry and dread tries to consume you, be still and just let today's moment be with you — not yesterday that is lost and gone, or tomorrow with its uncertain events. We are okay now, and so are our loved ones who aren't on Haiti or in Cuba. I try this power-of-now all the time, since I'm a future-look kind of fellow. (Thus, my futuristic fiction.)

Maybe they can see the real Vista

Windows users who I know are wary of Vista. Some use it because it was on the new laptops or desktops they bought. But there's another option, even if you have a new computer, and lots of people are taking it. They use XP, and "downgrade" off of Vista.

Infoworld has a short story about this (via the Yahoo portal), but you can read about the numbers in lots of places. One in three Vista machines become an XP computer right away.

They can always come back, Microsoft says. Like telling that family member at your sushi restaurant they can always order the sashimi and nigiri if they ever get tired of eating tempura. Here in my house and home office, we use Macs and sometimes, XP on our emulators. We eat the nigiri, sashimi and even ama ebe, with fried shrimp heads included in the last. Tempura? That's an appetizer. Vista? It's in the future, maybe; one IT CEO I know that that it will be replaced by "Windows 7."

But at least Vista is providing interesting stories to hear from friends and read in the trade papers.

It's 1946 again, but it's agin' the GOP this time

Wandering around the Web this morning, Salon.com eventually led me to Blue America, a site for raising money for Democratic candidates. The site is full of reasons for change, including this fun video. This commercial could have been written and aired in 1946. Back then, the GOP was rousting the Democrats from Congress with the ad slogan, "Had Enough? Vote Republican!" (Just one year after WWII ended, a campaign that was shorter than Iraq and changed the face of the world.) The music, the graphics, all circa Film Noir...

Democrats have been no basket of posies this year, either, considering how many of them voted for the new FISA spying bill, the one that lets the US trash our civil rights just like the Nazis and other dictatorships did in the 20th Century. But as the saying goes, if you're not outraged by now, you haven't been paying attention. Blue might not be the only color for Congress, but it doesn't make me see red like the leaders of the last eight years.

An old friend of mine had the scales fall from her eyes this summer, and she says "I don't know what I was thinking, supporting Bush." She's changed her mind, maybe in the wake of the lousy economy. There's no changing what's been done to us all in the name of "feeling safe," but we can make changes in our government, one Congress seat at a time. All to a swinging, 40's jazz beat!

He knew it right after the birthday song

I sang for my brother Bob's 50th birthday last month, a moment of tears and joy. My wife leaned over to me and said, "Out of everybody in this room, you have known him the longest." A happy, proud moment indeed.

I thought of that moment with Bob once again today, while I listened to a podcast about The Last Lecture. The lecture performance by Randy Pausch, the professor dying of cancer, was immortalized by Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow. Zaslow wrote the column the day after the lecture, and within 24 hours, by way of ABC.com, a million people had looked at the WSJ video of the lecure. A book followed, and the lecture has become viral in its Internet penetration (head to thelastlecture.com to get started). Here's the lecture in its fullness if you haven't caught the wave yet — entitled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.

The Last Lecture Video

Zaslow talked with Tara Parker-Pope of the NY Times about the book that resulted from that column, the book Zaslow co-wrote with Randy as the professor was dying. Parker-Pope asked Zaslow in her blog Well how soon he knew that what he'd seen and written about was so special.

Right away, Zaslow said. He'd driven 300 miles to see the lecture, since his WSJ editors were a little leery of the $850 airline ticket the writer would've had to purchase. There were 400 people in the lecture hall at Carnegie Mellon, and "all of us had a feeling we were seeing something astonishing." Randy delivered on the lecture on his wife's birthday, and made it up to her in a grand gesture.

There's the moment when he brings out the cake for his wife, for their last birthday together, and he asks us all to sing to her. I've never had an emotional Happy Birthday sung to equal that. And I think everyone in the room would agree.

Emotion rings in lots of songs delivered to people we love. It took Bob and I 50 years together to get that moment of my own tears. "And many happy returns of the day," is the old saying attached to birthdays, a message that wishes for many more. I wish this for my brother and others I love so long.