Lost

I was forwarded the following earlier today and found "Lost" profound enough to post posthaste:

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him,

"Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, "You're in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

"She rolled her eyes and said, "You must be an Obama Democrat."

"I am,"replied the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct. But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help to me."

The man smiled and responded, "You must be a Republican."

"I am," replied the balloonist. "How did you know?"

"Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You've risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it's my fault. "

*Cagle | i + ii

The Blessings Of Dumb Childlike Wonder

Cartoon by David Fitzsimmons Comment on the cartoon

Donny Hathaway: This Christmas (courtesy of Soul Sides)
Donny Hathaway (ATCO, 1971/1993)

From the bowels of Cagle by Garrison Keillor:

It is the blessed Christmas season. But of course you know that. Unless you live ten miles up a box canyon deep in the Wasatch Range with only your dog Boomer and are demented from drinking bad water, you are inhaling Christmas night and day and "Adeste Fideles" is stuck in your head like a five-inch nail.

This Christmas I am in New York for the general dazzlement and variety. On Sunday St. Patrick's was packed to the rafters for 4 p.m. Mass in Spanish, the name "Jesucristo" drifting around the battlements, and a few blocks south the Jane Austen Society was meeting to discuss Christmas in Olde England, and in between, I stopped in a men's store and bought six pairs of red socks. For myself.

Down deep I am selfish and don't like to feel obliged to do what other people are doing -- dancing, leaping, piping, drumming, welcoming the Christ Child with joyful hearts, etc. -- at the times when other people are doing them. This city enables one to leap or pipe pretty much whenever you feel like it, even after 10 p.m. on weekdays.

Yesterday I took my sandy-haired bright-faced daughter to dinner at 9 p.m., which is late for a 10-year-old, and introduced her to the idea of Ordering Whatever You Want, No Matter What Others May Think, and she got the chicken Kiev and for dessert an apple tart as big as a Gideon Bible. She is a good eater. She approached her meal with the quiet devotion that a chicken deserves. She loved the candles, the linen, the silver, the formality. I enjoyed a tiny quail egg poached in a toasted brioche with a dollop of caviar, though, thanks to my upbringing ... READ MORE



+ Christmas Nativity

Cagle: Jesse Jackson's Obama Trauma

Cartoon by Pat Bagley - Comment on the cartoon

The Pharcyde: If I Were President
Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde (Delicious Vinyl, 1992)

Jesse Jackson's Obama Trauma
by Clarence Page - Comment on the column

What did the Rev. Jesse Jackson mean when he accused Barack Obama of "talking down to black people"? That was the second question on my mind in a telephone interview with Jackson. My first was something like this: "Did you really say you wanted to castrate Obama?"

As the world knows by now, Jackson says he didn't know he was wearing a "hot mic," a turned-on microphone, on the set of a Fox News program when he made what one newspaper headline called his "cutting remark."

Remember the old saying about how character is what you do when nobody's looking? Jackson's inflammatory whispers suggest a new twist: Character is what you do when you don't know that the world may be listening.

If so, his whispers about America's first likely black Democratic presidential nominee reveal Jackson at his worst. He sound frustrated, marginalized and left by the side of the road in the rising glow of a younger star.

Jackson did not dispute that he made the vulgar remark in angry whispers to another show guest about Obama's recent call to expand President Bush's faith-based initiatives. Twice he complained that Obama has been "talking down to black people."

That was a reference, Jackson says, to speeches like Obama's Father's Day address at the predominantly black Apostolic Church of God in Chicago.

It was a speech in which Obama revealed his inner Bill Cosby. He called for more parental responsibility, whether it was assisted by government help or not.

"Any fool can have a child," Obama preached. "That doesn't make you a father. It's the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.

Jackson, too, has called for parental responsibility. I was part of the national media that gave glowing coverage to his PUSH for Excellence drive in the 1970s. Across the country he preached to black youths: READ MORE