I'm trying to learn the stock market. Don't ask me why, after all these years, I've finally taken an interest in investing when I'm approaching 60 and my best years for making money are behind me. I thought making money was unbecoming of a saint. But it turns out that the same intellect that serves me well in theology serves me pretty well learning about the ins and outs of money, its creation, saving and management.

So, I'm reading and researching. Hence my interest in John Bogle. He wrote an essay that I really liked in a book I stumbled across in my bookmobile.

So now I'm going to read John C. Bogle. If anyone can point me to other folks to read, or has anything to say about John C. Bogle, by all means let me know!

Fascinating bit of academic study - a history of science prof in New Jersey argues that our fear of werewolves mutated into a fear of Big Foot after Darwinian evolution theory made human-wolf hybrids implausible.

I think I'd like a copy of that paper. I wonder if the current vogue for creating human-animal chimeras in the lab will revive interest in Island of Dr. Moreau type tales.

-tip of the hat to Mary Christine Erikson

At Dover I introduced myself to Emily Knearl, whose face I see every Friday when I come out to protest abortion at the Planned Parenthood clinic at 7th and Shipley in Wilmington. Ms. Knearl is Vice President for Public Affairs at Planned Parenthood of Delaware. She had come out to Dover, as I had, because of her interest in SB169, only from the other side of the fence. The bill would restrict the activity of pro-life protesters within 100 feet of "health care clinics" beyond the limits of existing law in other states or in federal law.

She gave me a somewhat chilly reception, which is what I have come to expect when I try to make nice with philosophical foes. I don't know why folks on opposite sides don't like to talk. I love discourse, especially with antagonists. I guess it is the nature of warfare, although in the movies primary foes tend to be quite loquacious with one another. Captain Kirk and Khan. Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd.

Here's a poem I wrote years ago. I call it The Abortion Poem. Somehow I was reminded of it by my encounter in Dover.

The Abortion Poem, by Rae Stabosz

or: Mother Earth Plans, Men and Women Fight, and the Wounded Fall

When I was a hippie,
we ate brown rice
and soya beans
(soy beans rice & onions
make my tongue hard still)
we were natural
oh so natural naked brown rice in the sun
but we took our Pill
oh yes we took our Pill.

Now I am a yuppie
we eat pasta
(not spaghetti, not the homemade sticks of duram
that my grandmom made)
we eat pasta
and love whales and seals and dolphins
and get mad
when polyestered men and women
speak repressive stupid slogans
"save the baby humans".
We get mad.

The tuna men
are pigs
for killing dophins
for their paychecks
but we women
soar like eagles
on the bodies of our young.

So our spirits
can soar chainless
so our lives
can whole
our bodies
build our minds
for our own betterment:
we kill.

I am woman,
(watch me sore)
I am trapped and caught
by no man
but i will not let my spirit
soar
o'er the backs
of the unplanned dead

Unplanned and unprovided for
unwanted and unnourished,
bread that you and i could knead
if only we did not elaborate
our interest
in ecology
so poorly.

I once carried to term
a night
that was unplanned;
the lightning shook me open
rolled me badly
hurt me sore.
That night
I woke up scarred
forever.
That night
I knew how to end the hunger.
That night
I left the front lines retching.
Of the war of men and women
I will fight no more forever,
that night.
Since then
I've been living by the night
and feeding empty bellies one by one
that night, unplanned.
Unplanned is not
uncared for
unwanted not a fatal state;
the night cares for its own.

Oh. And SB169?

The legislature did not work the bill on Tuesday, and so it will be left until the next session convenes in January of 2010 for the bill to be resurrected and voted on.

If it is enacted, it will immediately be contested in court. If it reaches the Supreme Court, it will most likely be ruled unconstitutional, as the Court has previously ruled that it is unconstitutional for a state to enact laws restricting first amendment rights around a "floating buffer zone", ie. an object in transit such as a car or a person. The state of Delaware taxpayers are not going to want to pay out the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars that will be necessary to litigate a bill that should never have been passed from the get-go, as its constitutionality is extremely suspicious. I have confidence that the people of Delaware, regardless of their stand on abortion, will not allow their legislators to pass a bill that will cause so much money to be diverted from more necessary tasks, in this time of economic recession.

Yeah, it's a little blurry, but that's because I can't figure out how to get an enlarged image to show up nicely in blogger. I don't know who took this picture of Wade, Amelia and Zeke playing in the water tower sprinkler with Moby the Great White Dog in the background, but I love everything about it. Colors, action, composition, tilt. Grandkids. Never tire of 'em.

Is it true blondes have more fun? If you're old enough to remember that line, you're old enough to appreciate this pic of me & my good buddies, "The Pious Ladies." In cruising my hard drive this morning, I found the remnants of my UD website that I spent 20 years building and had to take down in one crushing moment of persecution for being "too Catholic" (this too Catholic woman has since retired, which I never would have done if my persecutors hadn't turned my once-gloriously fun job into a nightmare, and being retired is SO DANGED COOL IT ROCKS JOY TO THE MAX that I owe Nancy Nobile, Lisa Thibault and the others a debt of gratitude forever...)

So here's my long-lost explanation of Who The Pious Ladies Are. And, oh yeah, I spent my 40's as a blonde but I'm having more fun as an almost-60 brunette-over-silver than I ever had in my wild 40's, so I guess Miss Clairol was wrong...

Who are the Pious Ladies?

In 1983, Rae Stabosz was pregnant with her seventh child, Eric. An ultrasound in the seventh month of pregnancy revealed a problem with the baby -- his limbs were not developed, and he had difficulty swallowing. Her doctor told her to expect a "thalidomide-type" baby, ie. one with flippers instead of arms and legs.

Rae was devastated by that prognosis. A group of women from Rae's then-parish, Holy Angels Catholic church in Newark, Delaware, threw a birthday party for her in the hopes of cheering her up. She did not know these women well at all, and was both surprised and touched by their action. She felt at the time as if she were carrying a monster within her, not a child. These women reached out to her at a time when horror and isolation threatened to engulf her. The birthday party allowed her to experience the connection between women who were different from her and from one another in personality and background, but similar in sharing a common bond of discipleship in Christ. It was, for Rae, the Communion of Saints come to life.

.[Skip forward in time to Eric's birth and short life: As it turned out, Eric did have arms and legs, not flippers, but they were foreshortened, as is typical for a dwarf, which Eric turned out to be. He suffered from thanatophoric dwarfism, which is always fatal. He lived just 100 days. Rae has written about him elsewhere.]

That was the first Pious Ladies Meeting. Later Rae, Debora and Diane from the original group hooked up with Ellen from the parish library and began to meet once a month. Two things are always a given at a Pious Ladies meeting: food and wine. Beyond that, the evening's festivities might include praying, baring our hearts to one another, telling dirty jokes, singing, dancing or even howling at the moon as happened on one occasion. Each month the Pious Ladies meet at a different member's house, and the hostess' family clears out and leaves the whole house to the "goofy women".

The name "Pious Ladies" was coined by Rae's daughter Reetie. Reetie came home one night from wherever it was that Bill would take the kids when Rae hosted PiLadies meetings, and smelled a lingering fragrance of cologne. "What's that? Pious Ladies smell!" she said, and the name stuck

What brought us all together to begin with was that we were all "Father Goldstein groupies". Father Gershon Goldstein, of blessed memory, was an oblate of Mary Immaculate who served as Director of Religious Education at Holy Angels Parish for many years. All four of us Pious Ladies either taught or were grade level principals under Fr. Goldstein. We all loved him. He came to one Pious Ladies meeting, with Thelma Hollender. He hoped to join our group and be an honorary Pious Lady, or a Pious Man but he never passed the rigorous entrance exam.

The official roll call of Pious Ladies is as follows:
Debora Hosey
Ellen Lafferty
Diane Naylor
Rae Stabosz

Above you will find named those members of the Delaware legislature deserving to be on the:

Thanks to Andy at White Oak Books, I now have a web site of my own for Pious Ladies Bookmobile! It links directly into my Amazon listings and provides a much classier storefront than Amazon allows.

My good buddy, Curt Wayne, aka C.S. Wayne Famous Local Artist, was working on a storefront for me when he got sidetracked by his battle with cancer, which he fought with valor until the day it carried him away. Curt created the logo for my new store.


Buddy, this one's for you!! And how about them Phils?????

Oh. My. Gosh. {uncontrollable belly laugh}

What did Obama's Friday Facebook feed look like?

Apparently these Slate guys have done more than one of these.

Tip of the hat to Deb Durant!

Catholic Writers Conference in NJ, August 5 - 7

The slideshow you NEED to SEE -- How to survive the coming Apocalypse, Terminator style!

Thanks, Television Without Pity!

I took my coffee this morning on my beautiful front patio, with a cool May breeze ruffling the delicate pink roses that Bill suggests I might want to prune ("It's the kind of thing a retired person might do. You can find information on the Internet on when and how to prune").

I don't actually have a front patio. I am extending my newly discovered sunroom/foyer to the outside, which feels a lot like creating outdoor housing with my sister Marguerite when I was a kid. So I drag my UD rocking chair outside to the sidewalk leading up to the front stoop. I'm thinking a cafe bistro set might be just the ticket for spring-a-fying my oratory.

My reading material today was Martin Buber's Ten Rungs: Hasidic Sayings. I was listing the book for Pious Ladies Bookmobile. What a wonderful find!

Why do we say "Our God and the God of our fathers?"

There are 2 kinds of people who believe in God. One believes because he has taken over the faith of his fathers, and his faith is strong. The other has arrived at faith through thinking and studying. The difference between them is this:

The advantage of the first is, that no matter what arguments may be brought against it, his faith cannot be shaken; his faith is firm because it was taken over from his fathers. But there is a flaw. He has faith only in response to the command of a man, and he has acquired it without studying and thinking for himself.

The advantage of the second is that, because he found God through much thinking, he has arrived at a faith of his own. But here too there is a flaw: it is easy to shake his faith by refuting it through evidence.

But the person who invites both kinds of faith is invincible. And so we say "Our God" with reference to our studies, and "God of our fathers" with an eye toward tradition.

The same interpretation has been given to our saying, "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob," and not "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," for this indicates that Isaac and Jacob did not merely take over the tradition of Abraham, they themselves searched for God.
- The rung of God and man

This one goes out to all my kids (yeah, that means you, Walter!), grandkids, and young people all over this world that brings us such sorrow and such joy.

"The Blessed Virgin Mary -- the go-to girl for 2000 years!"

I found the following in an Amazon review of Catholic Latin Classics, a CD I just acquired. The reviewer was 16 years old when she wrote it in 2002. We baby boomer Catholics are the ones who lived through the times she writes about. Unlike some of my peers, I love both the traditional Catholic music and the "guitar Mass" style music that was almost all that was played for 30+ years after Vatican II. But I was quite taken with this review, and the light it shed on the differences between generations. I love that the Catholic culture of my childhood is being embraced again by my children and grandchildren's generation.

81 of 86 people found the following review helpful: Aaaaaah... that's better! ;-), September 30, 2002 By Teresa Alantua, 16 Not that they didn't perhaps have good intentions, but I often feel as though those '60's generation Catholics quietly disposed of the rich and all-embracing ("catholic"!) Faith that was to be my birthright, and, beaming, set a big ol' mess of steaming pottage in front of me instead. They told me how lucky I was not to have grown up being forced to listen to Latin, be taught by real live nuns, or shock my poor tender eyes on statues or ornate high altars. Instead, I would have the privelige of attending guitar-and-maraca Masses, where the priest warbled the words of consecration in a sort of blues tune, and-... Ai! Is this really about the God "who gives joy to my youth"? Then why did they, ahem, cut that line? Trying to reconcile all this relentlessly chirpy weirdness with the Holy And Awesome Sacrifice that IS going on - it always deals me Kafka-esque trauma and a headache. My fellow reviewer from Connecticut, you are so lucky... I can attend the Old Latin Mass only once a month. When I get out of college, I want to move somewhere where I can go every day and live a NORMAL Catholic life! Man, I must be the weirdest teenager in the Valley... ::sighs:: Eek! It's hard not to start using this thing as a message board... Anyway, keep the Music alive in your hearts with this CD until we can bring it back to the sanctuaries! The day will come... ::smiles tearfully:: Ostende nobis, Domine, misericordiam tuam.