Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings

Tax the Rich

Knitting Friday

Not a lot of knitting done this week. A lot of knitting reading done and though the needles were in hand as I read I seem to have so little to show for it.

So let me get whatever I did accomplish out of the way first:

#1 Foundation Chain Neckband Front

Remember I mentioned the white cotton top which I had frogged, washed, and hung to dry with weights? Well, the picture on the right shows that "new" yarn I created in yet another white top. Since it was cotton and since I weighted down the drying process, I was able to eliminate all the "hard" kinks and it's knitting up almost like virgin yarn. But the picture is to show the foundation single crochet (FSC) neckband which was the mini-lesson last week. I think it looks more professional than my typical seed stitch neckband. It's only one row so, while crocheting takes more yarn, you're only doing very little crocheting here. The top in #1 is started on an H hook for the 80 foundation-single crochet chain. Then 80 stitches were picked up from the FSC with US 8 needles. Still using US 8, I increased in the next row (Kfb) to 140 stitches. After that I switched to US 10.5 and worked the pattern of 2 rows in K, followed by 1 row in *YO, K2tog*. (See last Friday for more on the FSC.)

#2 Back of Neckband

#2 is the backside of the neckband. The beginning of the FSC is in the middle left and very good eyes may see it but: What Me Worry? 

While I'm at it, here's a picture of the underarm from this top. I've come a long way from the pictures I've posted of underarms with flimsy single strands of yarn. The left side top of the picture is the front of the underarm (the yarn looks bright white), the slightly-more-to-the-left side of the picture (it looks darker white) is the back of the underarm. I can't believe it took me so long to solve this problem.

#3 Underarm

Except for doing a few rows on my orange top and my EZ Bow Tie shawl, that's all my knitting for the week.

I did find an interesting article on Lion Brand:

http://blog.lionbrand.com/2013/05/08/play-nice/?utm_source=20130510_May10&utm_medium=Emails&utm_campaign=Weeklynewsletter&utm_content

The blogger, Franklin Habit, looks into the "rivalry" between knitters and crocheters. (“I don’t crochet,” she said. “I’m a knitter!”) I'm interested in this article (Hope you will be also.) because I do combination crocheting and knitting whenever I can. Though I do admit there are certain items that look more professional with knitting. (Does that make me a craft snob?) But I also think that with certain yarn and hook combinations, you get the same professional look as knitting. For example, lace wool crocheting. Read the article and then read the comments. There are a lot of them.

I'll leave you with some items which made my library at Ravelry this week.

http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/cyrcus-rectangular-lace-shawl

which is knit and:

http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/alita-2

which is crochet. I'm thinking about fingering for the Cyrcus (1st one) and lace for the Alita (2nd one.)

And here's one in knit which I'm looking at from Cascade Yarns and you don't need to join Ravelry to get the pattern:

http://cascadeyarn.com/patterns_SuperwashPaints.asp

It's the first pattern, 220 Superwash Paints Snuggle Bolero. It's a very easy knit and I think you can work a lot of modifications with it.

That's it for today. See you next week. Happy knitting (and crocheting.)

Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings

Tax the Rich 

Website Wednesday

So the best-Supreme-Court-capitalist-money-can-buy gutted the section of the Voting Rights Act which regulates gerrymandering.  But then what do you expect from a bunch of white American capitalists (and wacky Clarence Thomas) facing minority race status in the US in just a few decades. Only the naivest idealist believes human history plays out for the betterment of the species. We're mammals, for crying out loud, and most often nasty, feral ones. Only once and while do the good guys get a victory as with Wendy Davis' filibustering in TX so that a draconian anti-abortion bill could not be voted on until after the deadline.  But this is just a fleeting victory; we're dealing with TX after all. Of which little Phil Sheridan (Union general whose Civil War marches devastated the South) said: If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell. Next time, when they present their anti-abortion bill (and be sure they will) these Yahoos will get enough smarts to turn the clock ahead.

My first pick concerns radios which, while not my first love, are a passion for Phil Nelson and I think we should commend people who have such passions:

http://antiqueradio.org/welcome.htm

Congrats are due Phil just for his 17 years of postings. Great job! And he's current also (last posting for May 2013.) He has pictures of all types of old radios and the early TVs. He has information on how he restores and builds them. He even has directions of making an iPod adapter for antique radios. It's a history lesson for early communications from the last century. Take a look.

Next is a short "upbeat" one-pager: 

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/how-and-when-will-the-world-end/309400/ 

The Atlantic asked famous people how and when the world will end. A lot of short answers, most saying that it will be a long time coming, and Joyce Carol Oates even answered with a poem, which is not bad.

More light summer reading with: 

http://www.popcrunch.com/the-14-best-classic-twilight-zone-episodes/ 

You get the 14 best Twilight Zone episodes. from Pop Crunch. Although I posted Pop Crunch in February, I thought this page was worth a repeat. Since TZ will probably be TV somewhere till the end of time, I can say that I've seen all these episodes and they were among the best. In fact, I still quote that famous line (I won't give it away) in To Serve Man. It's surprising how it fits into a lot of conversations.

If you're looking for "out of the way" books for summer and beyond reading, Book Forum has good reviews for you: 

http://www.bookforum.com/review/ 

You get a blurb and a link to the full review from places like NYT, Slate, London Review of Books, etc. They also post their current issue online with a lot of the articles hyperlinked.

And finally, some pictures: 

http://inktank.fi/28-of-historys-most-fascinating-photos/

I don't know if these pics are really history's most fascinating but they are certainly interesting and worth the scroll. You get the picture and then a click at the bottom will bring to you to the story behind it. And, don't forget to click "Blog" on the top right. There you could get lost for quite some time. 

That's it for this week. See you next Wednesday. 

Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings

Tax the Rich 

Movie Monday

Just a short posting since MM is still, like the bear in winter sleeping in a cozy cave, on hiatus.

Looks like Edward Snowden got away from the the clutches of the US. I wonder what country we will have to invade and/or drone bomb to prove we still have balls.

Saw a delightful movie this weekend, To Rome with Love. It's 2012 Woody Allen and, it was royally panned. (43% on Rotten Tomatoes.) However, I found it charming without the edge of a Cassandra's Dream or Crimes and Misdemeanors but still getting the Allen points across with a sort of Italian ennui.

We get disparate stories which never connect: the Italian "schmuck" who gets instant fame for no reason at all, the young sexually conventionally married couple who unexpectedly get sexual awakenings through unlikely partners, and the neurotic would-be actress who almost steals her best friend's longtime boyfriend. (She's played by Ellen Page, not usually my favorite actress, but here, to use the sports metaphor, she "hits one out of the park.") And then there's the segment containing Allen; it's wacky and self-deprecating.

Allen, especially with his later movies, explores the creative process (Deconstructing Harry) and the unexpected baggage it brings. Adding some twists, he does the same thing here with a solid cast: Alec Baldwin (who is given the first zingers re: Mia Farrow I've heard in an Allen movie), Judy Davis, Ellen Page, Roberto Benigni., Jesse Eisenberg, etc

Watch this movie and I do mean watch it. So much of it is in Italian with subtitles. No closing your eyes with this one. Witty, subtle, touching, charming, never brittle. Quiet satire in beautiful, vibrant Rome. I think you'll like it.

 

 

Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings

Tax the Rich 

Knitting Friday 

So little knitting is being done and apparently so little thinking because I re-knit the white top I mentioned last week, tried it on and noticed another knitting error. This one was just below the neck band where I was working a row of *YO, K2tog* when I must have decided that 12 stitches of just K would look nice. What a dope! Anyway, it went back to the frog pond, was worked into a hank by using the back of a tall chair, was washed in soap and conditioner and is now hanging in the basement with about 10 plastic hangers in the loop of the hank to stretch out the kinks. It's not that this is expensive white/off-white cotton but it is much better quality than a lot of white cotton out there and it's white. I only have about 5 skeins of white yarn in either cotton or wool.

But all these travails bring me to a mini lesson. It's a crochet lesson and I think it's the one crochet technique all knitters should know. It's called the foundation single crochet FSC (I guess you could make it as foundation half-double crochet or foundation double crochet.) and I used it as the neckband in that recently frogged white top and was surprised how nice it looked.

Crocheting takes more yarn than knitting (I knitted my Mario blanket because a crocheted square vs. a knitted square was crochet = x yards and knit = x yards minus 1/3) but you can make the foundation single crochet as the entire neckband. That is, you work just one row and then change to knitting and work the yoke.

Definitions:
 YOH - Yarn over hook
double loops - these are the front and back loops at the top (and bottom) of every crochet stitch. When I say "Work in the double loops." I mean work your stitch as you would regularly work a crochet stitch and not as "Work back loop only." or "Work front loop only."
foundation single crochet FSC - is a crochet technique where you work your foundation chain and the next row of single crochet at the same time. A FSC is really a series of extended single crochets. 
extended single crochet, ESC - While a FSC is made with ESCs, ESCs are usually worked as a regular row in a crochet pattern and you might see directions like: Work *1 row double crochet, 1 row half-double crochet, 1 row ESC*.  Before you start your FSC, it's good to know how to make an ESC.
1. With one loop already on your hook, put hook through a chain or a stitch.
2. YOH and pull the loop through so there are now two loops on your hook. 
3. YOH and draw loop through the first loop only on your hook. (Two loops still on your hook.)
4. YOH and draw loop through the two loops on your hook. (One loop remains on your hook.)
5. Your ESC is made and you're ready to work your second ESC. 

Equipment:

Crochet hook which matches the size of the knitting needle you would use for your neckband. (Use any needle gauge to find your fit. I used an H hook which = US 8.)
Yarn you are using for the garment (that is, not waste yarn)

#1 chain 2

How To: With a FSC, you will be creating your chain at the same time you are creating a row of  single crochet so you chain as you go, not beforehand like in "Chain 302."

1. Chain 2 for the your 1st stitch.
2. Put your hook through second chain from hook (In pic #1, it's the chain loop just to the past the strand of yarn on the left.)
3. YOH and pull 1 loop through chain (2 loops on hook)
4. Work an ESC as above starting with #3 in the ESC directions.

#2

Now, I'm going to try and walk you through this with my not-very-good pictures. I'm doing this because while making your first ESC is easy, where to place all the rest as you work your FSC may be tricky.
1. In pic #2, I have drawn through that loop in the 2nd chain from the hook. (2 loops on hook.)
2. In pic #3, I have started the ESC by yarning over the hook and drawing through the only the 1st loop on the hook. Still 2 loops on the hook.

#3

3.In pic #4, I have completed 1 ESC by YOH and drawing a loop through both loops on the hook (1 loop on hook now) and I'm ready to start my second ESC.
4. Here's the tricky part: Once you complete your 1st ESC, turn the top of your work slightly towards you so you can see the loops you are working into. 
5. You will be working your next ESC into both loops of the stitch just past the stitch on your hook.
6. As you work along, these loops become easy to see and will look like a pair of horizontal brackets. However, to me, this 1st double loop always look like the figure 8.

#4

7. In pic #4, I've tried to show the 1st top double loops you'll be working in but I don't think it's a good picture.
8. Anyway, just remember that an ESC is worked in the 1st double loops (or 1st stitch) from the hook until you make a FSC as long as you need to get around your head and as wide as you want for a neckband. (Longer FSC for a lower, dropped neck, shorter FSC for a jewel neck.. The advantage is that you try it on as you go.)
9. Pic #5 shows part of my FSC neckband. I find that 80 ESCs in a FSC makes a neckband just a little more snug than 80 knitting stitches would make.

#5

A note about your FSC. I hope you can see from #5 that a FSC has a top and bottom. While you are working your ESCs in the double loops on the top, there are also bottom loops for each ESC. When you get the FSC as long as you want, you're going to pick up 1 knitting stitch in the double loops of each ESC in the FSC. You can use the double loops on the top or the bottom however, I like to pick up the bottom loops (the ones you are not working on) because the top loops are more even and make for a nicer neckband since a FSC seems to curve with the top loops curving inward as a neckband should. But it's your choice.

# 7 FSC on 16" US 8

Once you have finished your FSC, take your knitting needles (US 8) and pick up one double loop from each ESC. In #7, I've picked up 80 ESCs with my 16" needles. As you can see, the needles are too short for them. That's because 80 ESCs are thicker than 80 cast-on knitting stitches. So I just switched them to 24" US 8 for a better fit. (#8) The rest is pretty easy. Next row and working in the round (it's so much easier to join a FSC than a cast-on knit row) increase every stitch (Kfb) around.

#8 ESC on 24" US 8

#9 1 increase row done

Picture #9 shows this one increase row. I'm still working on 24" US 8 here but now I'll change to my yoke/body needles, US 10.5. I decided to work in a pattern of 2 rounds YO, K2tog, 2 rounds K. I like to start with the pattern row (YO, K2tog) after the FSC because that seems to keep it from curling.

#10 Yoke w/ESC neckband

And finally, here's a few rows of the yoke with the 1 row FSC as the neckband in the center. I found that an FSC neckband looks more professional (finished) than my regular seed stitch neckbands.

So, if you just want to learn one procedure in crocheting, this is the one I would suggest. It's a fast, on-the-fly, yet professional looking neckband and it's a try-on-as-you-go one also.

Hope this mini-lesson was helpful. See you next week. Happy knitting!

 Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings

Tax the Rich

 

Website Wednesday

 

I had good intentions of getting a Movie Monday up this week; that didn't happen. But I do hope you tried the chocolate pudding cake with the peanut butter and pretzel crust which I posted on Friday. A hint I forgot to add to it: cut back drastically on the milk in the pudding mix (like by at least a 1/3) for a much darker, denser chocolate.

 

Which leads me right into my first pick today:

 

http://www.yummly.com/

 

I really don't have to hype this site since it says up front: Search every recipe in the world. And, I bet you can. Scroll down and click on About and learn how Yummly got started. (Hint: Mustard was involved tangentially.) To get the complete recipe, you're sent to the site where it appears. So you can do a lot of diverse recipe/food reading with just a few clicks. Enjoy your visit(s) here.

 

That I missed this next site is weird since it has all the features I love: trivia, words and pictures.

 

http://twentytwowords.com/ 

 

22 Words says of itself:  22 Words collects and shares a blend of everything from the serious and creative to the silly and absurd. As your source for the crazy, curious, and comical side of the web, 22 Words can be counted on to share funny and fascinating viral content as well as more obscure (but equally interesting) pictures, videos, and more....Our goal is to inspire daily doses of WTF, OMG, LOL, and Awwwwww… I think you'll enjoy this site. 

 

The following site I have picked before but I wanted to show you this article:

 

http://www.mnn.com/food/healthy-eating/stories/what-a-grocery-store-without-bees-looks-like 

 

It talks about and shows you what grocery stores would look like without bees. I started following the mysterious deaths among world bees some years ago (my former dentist alerted me to it) but I had thought the cause had been found and the problem solved. Apparently not, as this June 17, 2013 article says. Take a look at it. The bee may be the canary in the mines.

 

Another "my kind of site" is Interesting History:

 

http://www.interestingushistory.com/ 

 

so much so that I just bookmarked it and made a mental memo to check it each day. Why? Because it presents short "This day in history" events. You get US and world history events and, with world history you get to click again for some serious reading. But you get to choose. One click for water cooler chatter: Say, did you know that Wallis Simpson was born on June 19th. Or two clicks for all you want to know about Maximilian I of Mexico who was executed today. Oh, and don't forget to click the left bar for more interesting history facts and myths.

You've probably seen some of the pictures at Bookshelf Porn in other website picks but this is a big collection of book storage sites:

http://bookshelfporn.com/?63c2cf08

 

Some of the bookshelves are from stores and libraries but there are ideas for home book storage. However, I do think the kid lying on the pillow in the middle of the book shelves is working his iPod/iPad. That kid is not reading.

 

And finally for some light summer reading from TED speakers, Tedsters, here's a long list of suggestions:

 

http://blog.ted.com/2013/05/31/your-mega-summer-reading-list-180-books-recommended-by-tedsters/ 

 

A lot of interesting choices here, one being Classics: A Very Short Introduction by Mary Beard. Click on the books and you'll go to Amazon (have they cornered the market on all book selling?) and get even more info. I like to read Amazon book reviews and try and pick out "friends of the author" reviews.

 

That's it for today. See you next week.

 

 

 Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings

Tax the Rich

 

Knitting Friday - and a recipe

 

My knitting has been pretty disastrous in the last week but I do have a recipe. Trying to get a nutritious breakfast meal which, with milk and juice, is a fast school day energy boost, I've been experimenting with cereals and peanut butter for months. I finally got peanut balls ready to go and the kids seem to like them, especially drizzled with dark chocolate (which is also not too shabby in the nutrient area.) However, I was starring at a big jar of mini pretzel sticks last week thinking: These are going to go rancid if we don't start making a serious dent in them. And, that's how this came about:

 

#1  Chocolate Pudding Pie

Chocolate Pudding Pie: a make-ahead, no-bake treat

You will need as ingredients:

1. 2 cups of crushed pretzels

2. 1 cup of peanut butter, not the natural stuff, you need the Skippy/Jiffy type

3. 2 packages of chocolate pudding (not instant)

4. 4 cups of milk

5. 1 cup real whipping cream (enough to cover the pie but you can use as much as you like)

6. powdered sugar (to taste)

 

You will need as equipment: 

1. regular sized pie plate

2. saucepan to cook pudding

3. bowl and beaters to whip cream

4. Cuisinart to chop pretzels (While you can mash cereal by hand, you need a machine for pretzels unless you want to go the plastic bag and hammer route.)

5. Cooking oil spray for the pie plate.

 

First steps in prep:

1. Crush pretzels to make 2 cups of crumbs.

2. Add 1 cup of peanut butter to it.

3. Mix to form dough consistency. (You can add a little more/less PB.)

4. Put the dough in a plastic container and put in the fridge overnight, or until cold.

5, Make the pudding as directed and cool slightly (I think the directions for pies and puddings are the same now.)

6. Whip the cream.

 

Second steps in prep:

1. Spray your pie plate with cooking oil.

2. Dump the dough in the plate and press into a pie crust. (You can use less dough for a thinner crust. The left-over dough is good to eat.)

3. Spread the cooled pudding over the dough.

4. Spread the whipped cream over the pudding.

You are done! And ready for your next pie using your own variations. (Ice cream instead of pudding? Crushed cereal instead of pretzels?)

#2 This is no more

And now on to knitting. What you see in picture #2 is the beginning of my second knit of this really, really nice cotton yarn. The first top I made from this yarn (as I mentioned last week) was frogged after I found an error which was not repairable. (Well, it was really easily repairable but I had no idea what size needles I had used originally so I had to frog.) Now, the top on the right has also been frogged also because the increase area, just below the top ribbing, just doesn't look right. I'm going to tackle this baby again with just a few rows of garter neck ribbing and see how that works.

What I didn't show in pic #2 are the needles I'm using. I was out of all my "go-to" interchangeable US 10 needles so I turned to my Boye Needlemaster set. You know that cheap interchangeable needle set which has been around for the millennium and everyone looks down on. (Oh, Dyakcraft are the best! Oh, I love my Hiya Hiya!) Well, I am knitting along very happily with my newish (Amazon last year, $32) Needlemaster US 10s. The joins are fine for this weight yarn and are staying joined. The cables are definitely stiff but they're working for me. (I think that many people use their interchangeables for magic looping in sock knitting. There Needlemaster cables would be a problem.)

This has been the week of complete or partial frogging since my Bowtie Pi:

http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/bowtie-pi

 

got a major rip out as you can see in picture #3. Last week, this shawl was practically finished until I saw a large hole section on a increase row which was midway in the pattern.

#3 Bow Tie Pi

I always knew that "hole" was there but I had thought I could spread out the surrounding double crochets to shrink it. I couldn't. The up side is that I'm much happier with the look now but I'm in for at least another week of crocheting.

But I do have one project which is moving along nicely:

#4 Orange Top

This is the top I showed last week in "how to prevent underarm holes." It's taking forever because the yarn splits (cotton/acrylic from Smiley's; very nice feel but a bear to knit) and I have to be careful to pick up the whole stitch.

Of course, with the wacky rainy, cool weather which seems to be starting the summer, I wonder how often I'm going to be wearing camis and these tops.

Well, that's it for knitting but I do have an announcement: On July 9th, we will be getting our third Seeing Eye dog for training. Everyone is very excited. You can be sure that pictures will follow.

See you next week. Happy knitting.

 

 

 

 Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings

Tax the Rich 

Website Wednesday 

I must have been thinking, since I had time to get a Movie Monday up this week, that life was getting predictable around here. It isn't. Yesterday was tough because we are probably moving into a different stage of this disease. I think I mentioned that only 18% of heart failure cases are in hospice (probably because most people have that one last operation to "cure" them and that's how they die)  so the paradigm is still being filled in. (Looks like the Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine published its first study on heart failure and hospice this year.) Anyway, yesterday was pretty dicey while today surprisingly may be halcyon, in about an hour I'll know.

Keeping the conversation on the human body, my first pick is:

http://www.livescience.com/34095-biggest-mysteries-human-body.html 

You get their 7 biggest mysteries of the human body like why most people are right-handed and why we have hair in certain places. Quick, interesting slideshows with words. Be sure to click around the top bar and don't miss the Image of the Day. The site is current and I like their "credo": LiveScience, launched in 2004, is the trusted and provocative source for highly accessible science, health and technology news for people who are curious about their minds, bodies, and the world around them. A very good way for adults and kids to get a wide variation of science/nature knowledge in an enjoyable fashion.

OK, this next one is getting in because it makes me happy: 

http://1x.com/photo/35193/ 

Not to put too much of a metaphoric meaning to it but this puffin lifts my heart. The joy of that next step to be taken. Click around for more photos but I'm sticking with the happy puffin.

I usually wind up just goggling my immediate research hot interests, like: Who the hell is Krishna? But this site: 

http://timelineindex.com/content/home.php 

is worth the bookmark for a one-stop click to answer such questions. For example: click "People, Personalities, Heroes" under "Who" and there is Krishna staring right at you with a short blurb, a picture and a hyperlink to more info on the dude. I can't find the authors behind the entries on this site but the one on Krisha looks fine as does the one on Pericles which I chose randomly. What I like about this site is that the information presented has that touch of "I may like to look further into this guy/gal." which, starting in my childhood, was always the hook I needed to spent hours in researching new things.

And now on for some more reading with: 

http://www.lettersofnote.com/ 

Letters of Note is: an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos. Scans/photos where possible. Fakes will be sneered at. Updated as often as possible; usually each weekday. 

You have one from Charles Bukowski thanking the man who took him from mundane employment into full-time writing. (Interesting story and read.) You have one from a daughter to her mom ten years after the mom's death from breast cancer. You have the correspondence from a "lowly" school teacher to Frances Ford Coppola which was the genesis of his movie of The Outsider. There's something for everyone here. Take a look.

And finally:

http://totallycoolpix.com/2011/02/world-press-photo-of-the-year-2010/

OK, these are from 2010 but they are "must see." These are not your "June, moon, spoon" photos and a lot of the comments reflect that their audience understands how important these images are. Then go to:

http://totallycoolpix.com/

for current pictures. They call themselves: Totally Cool Pix. They are also Totally Important.

That's it for this week. See you next Wednesday.

 Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings

Tax the Rich

 Movie Monday

(Although life is pretty hectic around here and Movie Monday is still on hiatus, I found the time to write the following [in 2 sittings]  so I thought I would share it. Sorry for the length.)

Helped the girl get her bibliography and footnotes in order for her last advanced history essay of the year: Did antisemitism cause the Holocaust? This will be the last of the much too-nuanced essay questions given to 9th graders who are in advanced history and not AP history for this school year. But I think she’s made her case as I looked through her back-up evidence.

Today, legit internet sites can be referenced and R. J. Rummels at:

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NAZIS.CHAP1.HTM

has the first chapter of his book: Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder there and she’s citing this section: Most Nazis were absolute racists, especially among the top echelon; they believed utterly in the superiority of the "Aryan" race..... But many other regimes have also killed opponents and critics, or used reprisals to maintain power. What distinguished the Nazis above virtually all others was their staggering genocide: people were machine gunned in batches, shot in the head at the edge of trenches, burned alive while crowded into churches, gassed in vans or fake shower rooms, starved or frozen to death, worked to death in camps, or beaten or tortured to death simply because of their race, religion, handicap, or sexual preference.

Which got me thinking about the peoples of today, many of whom  truly believe they, their country, their race is superior to others and easily slip into a mind set that invading random countries or dropping bombs randomly from the sky on a peaceful countryside with drones and killing innocent bystanders is OK. We’re not unique in our times; it’s all happened before in other variations. Then, like now, many humans oppose these evils and some have the courage to act (Ellsberg with Vietnam, now Assange, Manning, and Snowden) never knowing if they will be vindicated for their actions or condemned. Man seems to work the circle from redemption to evil over and over . If he is ready to move away from the darkness (such as, acceptance of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, acceptance of false charges for the invasion of Iraq, almost unquestioning support of the Patriot Act) and into the light these "whistleblowers" may become modern heroes; if not.........

Which brings me to the id and my movie review for today. It was written before the latest revelation about the NSA leaks but I hope you’ll see a connection:

Id, ego and super-ego. Sex, violence and sublimation. Paging Freud. He's been relegated to the background of our modern day "Dr. Phil" feel good psychology but way back in the nascent days of psychiatry, Freud nailed it. Using our brand of sublimation, we may suppress Freud but he's always there and relevant.

I intended to review Prometheus for my next Movie Monday but then, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, TCM was showing Crumb, a 1994 documentary on controversial cartoonist, Robert Crumb. And I mean controversial in its most uncomfortable meaning. Like Swift's A Modest Proposal, Crumb drew cartoon obscenities to hold a mirror to all our hidden, never-talked-of, warts and he didn't blink.

But what brings me to Crumb today is not the entire documentary of his life and times (though I do think it should be watched) but a small segment of it where he and his older brother, Charles, discuss Charles' dark desires for pedophilia (which were never satisfied) and his descent from an accomplished, quirky cartoonist to a producer of compulsively repetitive  artistic drawings and script. (The pages and pages of words from Charles' notebook are so reminiscent of the protagonist's descent into madness in The Shining.)

This segment with Robert and Charles took me from passive watching to "Wow" when Charles starts talking about the id. It was like a blast from the past because I haven't heard the id discussed as part of the human personality since college! And, until last night, I didn't realize how successfully that part of human behavior had been removed from modern conversation. Like "bad" sex which was removed for almost 30 years from the movies starting in the early 1930s when the Hollywood Code of Conduct finally kicked in, I must have blinked because the id, that unrestrained part of the human where every desire must be fulfilled, has also left the room. (As Wikipedia says so well: The id is the unorganized part of the personality structure that contains a human's basic, instinctual drives.)

We don't talk about the id today. In fact, I don't think we've given it much thought in decades. It was probably up and running during WWII with the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco but once "democracy" kicked in post-WWII, bad stuff if it were done by "good" people was always given a lofty causation. The good guys might have ego and super-ego but base instinctual drives? No way! Every thing we did, even horrors, were done for lofty ideals.

We have artificially removed ourselves, the good guys, from the human dynamic. That is, from that part of the human dynamic which deals with our baser nature. Our enemies, sub-human as they must be, have this thing called id, not we.

We can't possibly possess what Freud describes as: "It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learned from our study of the Dreamwork and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations.... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle." Wikipedia.

That's why, watching Crumb and hearing the id mentioned was like a family member, and a potentially very destructive one to be sure, returning to sit at the dinner table. It was like the final missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle of human behavior clicked back in.

Watch Crumb. It's disturbing and not in a good way. He messed up lives but I have a lot of leeway for greatly creative people. Unfortunately, their families often pay the price for their take on the world and how they are compelled to express it.