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...bring yourself, I'll bring the magic!  Host a party of 5-7 women in your home, I'll bring my camera, lighting, backdrop and gear. 

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PLEASE SEE SAMPLE SHOTS BELOW

thanks for visiting KAT'S BEAUTY TAKEOUT!

Use your own ideas, let's work together in styling a great look! I offer many accessories to help amp up  your photoshoot. Here's a sampling: Full length black gloves, face netting, nerd/trendy glasses, glam sunglasses, retro '50's sunglasses, long strand pearls (black or white), black bowtie, football jersey, baseball hat, bustier, glitter bra (34D - we'll make it work!), lots of earrings, large white teddy bear, men's white oxford shirt, black full length nightgown, red and black vamp bra (36D - yes, we can make it work for you). Use your imagination - Let's play!

Welcome Back Secretary Clinton!  Stay strong - we need you in 2016 - you've got my vote!

Dec. 21, 2012, won't be the end of the world as we know, however, it will be another winter solstice.

Contrary to some of the common beliefs out there, the claims behind the end of the world quickly unravel when pinned down to the 2012 timeline.

Below, NASA Scientists answer several questions that are frequently asked regarding 2012.

Question (Q): Are there any threats to the Earth in 2012? Many Internet websites say the world will end in December 2012.

Answer (A):The world will not end in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.

Q: What is the origin of the prediction that the world will end in 2012?

A: The story started with claims that Nibiru, a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. This catastrophe was initially predicted for May 2003, but when nothing happened the doomsday date was moved forward to December 2012 and linked to the end of one of the cycles in the ancient Mayan calendar at the winter solstice in 2012 -- hence the predicted doomsday date of December 21, 2012.

Q: Does the Mayan calendar end in December 2012?

A: Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012. This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then -- just as your calendar begins again on January 1 -- another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar.

Q: Could planets align in a way that impacts Earth?

A: There are no planetary alignments in the next few decades and even if these alignments were to occur, their effects on the Earth would be negligible. One major alignment occurred in 1962, for example, and two others happened during 1982 and 2000. Each December the Earth and sun align with the approximate center of the Milky Way Galaxy but that is an annual event of no consequence.
› More about alignment

"There apparently is a great deal of interest in celestial bodies, and their locations and trajectories at the end of the calendar year 2012. Now, I for one love a good book or movie as much as the next guy. But the stuff flying around through cyberspace, TV and the movies is not based on science. There is even a fake NASA news release out there..."
- Don Yeomans, NASA senior research scientist Q: Is there a planet or brown dwarf called Nibiru or Planet X or Eris that is approaching the Earth and threatening our planet with widespread destruction?

A: Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist. Eris is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles.

Q: What is the polar shift theory? Is it true that the Earth's crust does a 180-degree rotation around the core in a matter of days if not hours?

A: A reversal in the rotation of Earth is impossible. There are slow movements of the continents (for example Antarctica was near the equator hundreds of millions of years ago), but that is irrelevant to claims of reversal of the rotational poles. However, many of the disaster websites pull a bait-and-switch to fool people. They claim a relationship between the rotation and the magnetic polarity of Earth, which does change irregularly, with a magnetic reversal taking place every 400,000 years on average. As far as we know, such a magnetic reversal doesn’t cause any harm to life on Earth. Scientists believe a magnetic reversal is very unlikely to happen in the next few millennia.
› More about polar shift

Q: Is the Earth in danger of being hit by a meteor in 2012?

A: The Earth has always been subject to impacts by comets and asteroids, although big hits are very rare. The last big impact was 65 million years ago, and that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today NASA astronomers are carrying out a survey called the Spaceguard Survey to find any large near-Earth asteroids long before they hit. We have already determined that there are no threatening asteroids as large as the one that killed the dinosaurs. All this work is done openly with the discoveries posted every day on the NASA Near-Earth Object Program Office website, so you can see for yourself that nothing is predicted to hit in 2012.

Q: How do NASA scientists feel about claims of the world ending in 2012?

A: For any claims of disaster or dramatic changes in 2012, where is the science? Where is the evidence? There is none, and for all the fictional assertions, whether they are made in books, movies, documentaries or over the Internet, we cannot change that simple fact. There is no credible evidence for any of the assertions made in support of unusual events taking place in December 2012.
› Why you need not fear a supernova
› About super volcanoes

Q: Is there a danger from giant solar storms predicted for 2012?

A: Solar activity has a regular cycle, with peaks approximately every 11 years. Near these activity peaks, solar flares can cause some interruption of satellite communications, although engineers are learning how to build electronics that are protected against most solar storms. But there is no special risk associated with 2012. The next solar maximum will occur in the 2012-2014 time frame and is predicted to be an average solar cycle, no different than previous cycles throughout history.
› Video: Solar Storms
› More about solar storms

November 11, 2012, 10:45 pm

The Culture War and the Jobs Crisis

By THOMAS B. EDSALL

Struggling to remain optimistic the day after the election, the anti-abortion activist Charles A. Donovan, president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, argued that the moral collapse he sees in the re-election of President Obama and in Democratic Senate victories is only a temporary setback.

On the National Review web site, Donovan declared:

We may be on the verge of a new Babylonian captivity for religious conservatives. As we know, the story does not end there.

Actually, Donovan and his fellow right-wingers can expect to be living in a Babylonian captivity for quite some time. The right has lost the culture war.

On Nov. 6, voters in three states (Maine, Maryland and Washington) approved same-sex marriage; two states (Colorado and Washington) passed ballot initiatives allowing the recreational use of marijuana; Wisconsin elected the first openly gay Senator, Tammy Baldwin; and Florida voters rejected a ballot initiative prohibiting the use of public funds for abortions by ten points.

In the next Congress, women and minorities will hold a majority of the Democratic Party's House seats - white men, in other words, for the first time in history, will not make up a majority of a party's delegation to the House. Every member of the House and Senate from New Hampshire will be a woman and the total number of female senators will jump from 15 to 20 in 2013.

To the dismay of the conservative movement, on virtually every burning issue that preoccupies the right, the country has moved steadily leftward. Election Day exit polling found, by a margin of 49 to 46, that a plurality of voters supported same-sex marriage. The same survey found that 59 percent of voters believe abortion should be legal in all (29 percent) or most (30 percent) cases, while only 36 percent believe it should be illegal in most (23 percent) or all (13 percent) cases.

The chart, Fig. 1, from Gallup on the "morality" of same-sex "relations" reflects the leftward cultural trend with the percentage ofrespondents saying that homosexual relations are morally acceptable growing from 40 percent in 2001 to 54 percent in 2012:

Similarly, researchers at American National Election Studies have found continuing growth, Fig. 2, in the level of support for the equality of women:

Republicans and conservatives are clearly struggling to come to terms with the changing character of the nation.

From the hard right, Erick Erickson calls for purging the Republican party of moderates in order to achieve ideological purity:

We must lay the groundwork now with fresh ideas embedded with timeless principles sold by voices who understand people forget and must be reminded why America is great and why conservatism helped make it that way. We must continue, as a conservative movement, challenging and ending the political careers of Republicans who carry the banner of conservatism while selling it out.

It is unlikely, however, that bloodletting within the Republican Party will solve its current problems. The roots of the party's dilemma run deeper, with two parallel and mutually reinforcing developments structuring political change

The first is the coalescing of "issue clusters" - particularly on the left.

Throughout much of the period of conservative domination of presidential elections from 1968 to 1988 - and in terms of Congressional power from 1994 to 2006 - the Republican Party had a major election-day edge: there was far more ideological cohesion and less divisive conflict on the right than on the left. Conservatives, from white evangelicals to corporate C.E.O.s, found common ground in their support for an aggressive national defense and in their opposition to what they saw as a coercive, redistributive tax collecting and intrusively regulatory domestic government.

The left was often split: between environmentalists and pro-development unions; between proponents and opponents of affirmative action; between law-and-order whites and liberal advocates of criminal defendants' rights. As a result, the Democratic Party was vulnerable to Republican wedge issue strategies that produced such famous political commercials as Jesse Helms's "Hands" - a k a. "White Hands" - and Ronald Reagan's "Bear"

More recently, there has been a steady diminution of conflict and a growing consensus on the left culminating in the 2008 and 2012 election victories. Issues now linked - clustered - in the minds of many Democratic voters include not only traditional socio-cultural, moral and racial issues like women's, minority and gay rights, abortion and contraception, non-marital child-bearing, and the obligation of government to provide a safety net, but also to matters pertaining to the overarching role of government in generating greater social justice.

In this view, the achievement of a just society requires a government active in pursuing a progressive distribution of income (through the tax code, for example), and the reduction of armed conflict, as well as the active regulation of matters as diverse as sustainable development, environmental protection and consumer-friendly reform of the finance and banking sectors.

Essentially, the new core of the party - minorities, unmarried men and women, young voters and whites with advanced degrees - is in general agreement on this broader spectrum of issues, forming a coalition of shared ideas.

The aggregation of a broad set of issues in forming a left or right political orientation marks a major change in American politics. Philip Converse, of the University of Michigan, studied data from the 1956 and 1960 elections and found that only a small minority of highly educated and well-informed voters viewed politics through what might be called an ideological lens.

But things have really changed since then.

Alan Abramowitz of Emory University has documented a major shift as voters have made decisions based on a collection of variables that once would have been seen as unrelated. In a study based on 2008 polling, Abramowitz found majorities or solid pluralities of voters formed consistently liberal or conservative views - not centrist positions - on a continuum of issues including gay rights and abortion; off-shore oil drilling; the Iraq war; health care; financial regulation; climate change and mortgage assistance to low-income homeowners.

In effect, Abramowitz writes, the historical dependence of the Democratic Party on moderate-to-conservative whites

has decreased considerably while the contribution of liberal whites and especially nonwhites has increased. While moderate-to-conservative whites made up a majority of those who voted for Carter, they comprised barely a quarter of those who voted for Obama.

Demographic groups that favor social justice dispute the even-handedness of the marketplace; they often view business and corporations with suspicion; and they believe that the state has an obligation to provide for those struggling in a free market system. These demographic constituencies have grown in numbers, and today form a relatively robust coalition: the Democratic Party.

Single voters are more amenable than are their married counterparts to a government focused on social justice. Unmarried voters are substantially more vulnerable to economic downturns and the loss of a job; they look more favorably on such safety net programs as unemployment benefits, government-sponsored health insurance, and government initiatives to ensure food security. Married couples, on the other hand, are more focused on minimizing their tax burden.

The share of the electorate made up of single voters has been growing steadily. In 1992, 34 percent of voters were unmarried; in 2012, it was 40 percent. In the population as a whole, 72 percent of adults were married in 1972; in 2010, it was just 51 percent.

On a larger scale, the Pew Research Center has produced an analysis, Fig. 3, that shows that minority voters, who backed Obama by an 8-2 margin, will be an absolute majority of the population in 38 years, growing from 15.1 percent in 1960 to 34 percent in 2011 to 51 percent in 2050. Minority voters hold policy and ideological views very similar to those of unmarried men and women - they are in fact an overlapping population because a much lower percentage of African American (at 31 percent) and Hispanic adults (at 48 percent) are married than whites (at 55 percent). Minority voters are noticeably more supportive of activist government policies than the average white voter.

The contrasting issue priorities of Democrats and Republicans ­- marital status aside - were evident in the answer to a particular question the 2012 exit polls asked. When voters were prompted to pick the most important issue facing the country - foreign policy, the federal deficit, the economy or health care - only 15 percent chose the deficit, but those who chose the deficit were overwhelmingly Romney voters by a 2-1 margin, 66-32. A slightly higher percentage, 18 percent, chose health care, and these voters supported Obama voters by a 3-1 margin, 75-24.

An illuminating chart that tracks demographic shifts from 2004 to 2008 to 2012, appropriately headlined "Obama Was Not as Strong as in 2008, but Strong Enough," and a similar graphic presentation by the Washington Post, show that demographic shifts have reached a point at which Democrats have a decisive advantage.

Compared to 2008, Obama's major gains this year were limited to Hispanics, who went from 67-31 Democratic in 2008 to 71-27 in 2008; and Asian-Americans, who went from 62-35 Democratic to 73-26. Those gains were adequate to produce victory by off-setting enough of the decline in support for Obama from many other groups, including men, who went from 48-49 to 45-52; whites, down from 43-55 to 39-59; voters with incomes above $100,000, from 49-49 to 44-54; Jewish voters, from 78-21 to 69-30; independents, from 52-44 to 45-50; and young voters below the age of 30, from 66-32 to 60-37.

In a setback to conservatives, the Nov. 6 exit polls gave strong support to liberalized immigration reform, which is likely to become a top priority for the Obama administration, with 65 percent of respondents agreeing that illegal immigrants should be "offered a chance to apply for legal status," while only 28 percent of those surveyed opposed such reform. Since the election, a number of conservative pundits, including Sean Hannity of Fox News and Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Post columnist, have called on the Republican Party to reevaluate its opposition to comprehensive immigration reform.

Voters gave a more modest boost to the administration's call to raise taxes on those making over $250,000, with a 47 percent plurality backing the proposal, another 13 percent supporting raising everyone's taxes, and 35 percent opposed to any tax hike.

On a more sobering note for Democrats, a slight majority (51 percent) of voters agreed with the statement "Government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals" compared to 43 percent saying "Government should do more to solve problems." This despite the fact that, as The New York Times reported in a Feb. 11, 2012 story, "Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It":

The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007.

The story points out that many people

say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it. They say they want less help for themselves; less help in caring for relatives; less assistance when they reach old age.

In many respects, the growing liberalization of America on social issues has made the culture war an attractive battleground for Democrats - perhaps dangerously attractive. At the moment, in almost every region of the country except the South, the liberal stance is gaining adherents.

Social, cultural and moral issues have become favorable terrain for the Democratic Party, in the way that they once were for the Republicans, but there are economic trends that do not bode so well for core Democratic constituencies, given their disproportionately low income and high-unemployment rates. The issue of mounting salience - unaddressed so far by Democrats and Republicans - is the hollowing out of the job market.

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that jobs that provide mid-range incomes are disappearing, but just as important, the kinds of jobs that have long served as stepping-stones up the ladder of opportunity are disappearing too. One recent contribution to this literature, "Jobless Recoveries and the Disappearance of Routine Occupations" by Henry Siu, an economist at the University of British Columbia, and Nir Jaimovich, an economist at Duke, reports that there is job growth at the top and bottom of the payscale, but declining employment throughout the mid-pay range. The technical term is job polarization:

The fact that polarization is occurring should not surprise anyone who understands the influence of robotics and automation on machinists and machine operators in manufacturing. Indeed, the influence of robotics is increasingly being felt on routine occupations in transportation and warehousing. Of equal importance is the disappearance of routine employment in "white-collar" occupations - think bank tellers being replaced by ATMs, or secretarial work being replaced by personal computers and Siri, Apple's iPhone-integrated "intelligent personal assistant."

In the authors' view, past trends suggest a worsening future:

Thus, all of the per capita employment growth of the past 30 years has either been in 'non-routine' occupations located at the high-end of the wage distribution, such as software engineers and economists, or in low-paying jobs, such as service occupations like restaurant waiters and janitors. For this last set of occupations, this has been especially true in the past decade.

Siu and Jaimovich find that the decline in routine middle-income jobs that lend themselves to mechanization and automation occurs during recessions, and, most importantly, does not reverse itself in periods of subsequent recovery. This chart, Fig. 4, in which the pink areas represent economic recessions, demonstrates how, starting during the recession of 1991, recoveries do not lead to revived job markets:

The conclusions reached by Siu and Jaimovich are pessimistic:

Automation and the adoption of computing technology are leading to the decline of middle-wage jobs of many stripes, both blue-collar jobs in production and maintenance occupations and white-collar jobs in office and administrative support. It is affecting both male- and female-dominated professions and it is happening broadly across industries -manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, financial services, and even public administration.

The authors offer scant hope for the future.

The pace of job polarization was greatly accelerated in this last recession, and the pace of automation and progress in robotics and computing technology is not slowing down either. If the past 30 years is any guide, we should expect future recessions to continue to spur job polarization. Jobless recoveries may be the new norm.

Should it continue, lack of economic opportunity is likely to undermine the workings of American democratic capitalism: the willingness of the have-nots and have-lesses to tolerate high levels of inequality in the belief that everyone has a shot at making it into the middle class.

The forces driving the evisceration of middle-income jobs - global production and automation - threaten the newly acquired rights of recently enfranchised populations. The "perennial gale of creative destruction" may be so powerful and inexorable that the political system cannot provide a remedy. Even so, if the Democrats fail to take on the issue, they will leave their party open to challenge as discontent over employment stagnation mounts.

An alternative strategy would be for Democrats to unilaterally declare victory in the culture war - allowing Republicans to waste time on futile rear guard actions - and to shift the political agenda to the jobs crisis. The question is: Does the new and enlarged Democratic coalition have the capacity to re-engineer capitalism to produce sustained economic growth while working toward social justice?

An earlier version of this column gave the correct figures for the percentage of whites, Hispanics and African-Americans who are married, but by reversing the terms lower and higher and single and married made it sound like the numbers referred to the percentage of singles in those groups.

Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book "The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics," which was published earlier this year.

From The New York Times, October 5th

A day after the first debate, in which Mr. Obama was almost universally judged to have underperformed and Mr. Romney to have seized his opportunity, the president resolved to do what he did not do the night before: He went straight at the challenger, arguing forcefully that Mr. Romney’s moderate words masked extreme conservative policies.

“The man onstage last night, he does not want to be held accountable for the real Mitt Romney’s decisions and what he’s been saying for the last year,” the president said at a rally, looking more energetic than he was at his lectern Wednesday night. ………..

Mr. Obama’s aides said he knew he had had a bad night as soon as he came off the stage at the University of Denver. “I’m sure he drew some lessons from it,” said David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser.

Advisers, many of whom viewed him as distracted and nervous from the beginning, said the president had approached the debate practice sessions without enough urgency and focus. He has told friends that he respected Mr. Romney’s intellect, but had come to view his rival as a less formidable adversary as he learned more about him from reading research books and watching his campaign.

Hours before the debate, advisers said they were worried that during his preparation sessions in a financially distressed resort in Nevada he was frequently interrupted by his presidential duties, and they indicated that they were nervous that he was underprepared. What seemed like an exercise in lowering expectations appeared to be reality at the end of the debate night.

Mr. Axelrod said the president was prepared to talk about what was viewed as Mr. Obama’s biggest omission on Wednesday, Mr. Romney’s secretly recorded comments at a closed-door fund-raising event about the “47 percent” of Americans he described as too reliant on government. While Mr. Axelrod said Mr. Obama simply never found an opportunity, another aide offered another suggestion: To have done so would have given Mr. Romney an opening to undo the political damage of the remarks with a certain, planned answer before a huge television audience of 67.2 million

In an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News late Thursday, Mr. Romney said he would have said, “I said something that’s just completely wrong.” He had previously stood by the substance of the remarks, which he said were stated inelegantly. …….

Mr. Obama’s aides said if there was one silver lining in the night it was that they could seize on what they called inconsistencies between Mr. Romney’s stances during the primaries and those of this late campaign period.

Mr. Obama’s campaign made an early decision, however, to campaign against Mr. Romney as a conservative, wary that attacking him as equivocal would create an impression with more centrist independent voters that he did not truly hold the right-leaning positions he espoused during the primaries. So several officials
suggested they would approach his new tone by suggesting he was not being honest about his plans. (emphasis added by Kathleen)

“He may win the Oscar for his performance last night, but he’s not going to win the presidency,” Mr. Axelrod said. But, he conceded, what Mr. Obama really needs to do is deliver a better debate effort when the two meet next, on Oct. 16, at Hofstra University in New York. “It’s like a playoff in sports,” he said. “You evaluate after every contest and make adjustments.”

i'm so bored i'm going to explode. i need a job. i am too smart to be idle. i am going insane.

New Yorkers will be treated to a special sight Thursday evening (July 12): It's one of two days a year when the setting sun aligns perfectly with Manhattan's street grid. As the sun sets on the Big Apple, it will light up both the north and south sides of every cross street.  The event has been dubbed "Manhattanhenge" for the way it turns New York City into a Stonehenge-like sun dial.  The sun sets perfectly in line with the Manhattan street grid twice a year, explains astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Hayden Planetarium website.

The best viewing time for Manhattanhenge 2012 is 8:25 p.m. EDT

The best way to watch Manhattanhenge, Tyson says, is to get as far east as possible on one of the city's major cross streets, such as 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd or 57th streets, and look west toward New Jersey. (The streets immediately adjacent to these wide cross streets will work fine, too, but the view won't be quite as stunning.) Standing on 34th or 42nd street provides a particularly nice view, as the views include the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. It's a good idea to get to your spot 30 minutes early, so you can beat out the other sun worshippers.

FROM NY TIMES, Friday, July 06, 2012

THE 61 SECOND MINUTE:

LONDON — The world’s timekeepers were preparing to adjust their clocks at midnight on Saturday to add an extra
second to the day.  If there is something slightly unsettling about the concept of a 61-second minute, that is probably because it inserts an element of cosmic uncertainty into the popular notion of measuring time.

Some governments and scientists do not like the concept of “leap seconds” either — this will be the 25th since the system was introduced in 1972 — but their objections are entirely rational.  They argue that these sporadic adjustments to the clock present a potential source of catastrophic failure for the world’s computer networks.

The adjustment is needed to reflect a slowing in the Earth’s rotation which gradually prolongs the solar day. The day has not been exactly 24 hours long since 1820. When dinosaurs roamed the planet, the day was only 23 hours long.

The slowing of the earth did not matter much as long as time was measured in accordance with the average rotation of the Earth relative to other celestial bodies. Modern atomic clocks, however, are based on a consistent signal emitted by electrons within an atom. They are accurate to within about one second in 200 million years. That gave rise to two systems of timekeeping: International Atomic Time (TAI), defined by an international network of atomic clocks; and Universal Time 1 (UT1), successor of Greenwich Mean Time, an astronomical definition of time based on the position of the Sun in the sky.

Under an internationally recognized system, determined by scientists at the Paris Observatory, atomic clocks are adjusted every 18 months or so to keep the two measuring systems from diverging more than one second. That prevents the time on atomic clocks from eventually moving ahead of the perceived pattern of night and day.

One challenge is that the slowing of the Earth is irregular, influenced as it is by the gravitational pull of the
sun and the moon and by unpredictable changes in the atmosphere and in the planet’s molten core.

As a consequence, the scientists charged with measuring the Earth’s rotation determine the timing of leap seconds only six months in advance.

It is a system that may not survive over time. As my colleague Kenneth Chang has written, the United States is the primary proponent for doing away with the leap second.

U.S. experts argue that “the sporadic adjustments, if botched or overlooked, could lead to major foul-ups if electronic systems that depend on the precise time — including computer and cellphone networks, air traffic control and financial trading markets — do not agree on the time.”

Reporting on an international conference of the United Nations’ telecommunications agency, Ken wrote, “Britain, along with Canada and China, would like to keep the current system, arguing that, in the 40 years that leap seconds have been gracefully inserted in our midst…there have been no problems to speak of, and the worriers have greatly exaggerated the potential for havoc.”

For the average clock-watcher, there’s not much to worry about. On social media sites, most posters were
offering humorous suggestions about what to do with the extra second.

TIME TO GET BACK TO WORK!!!?? What? Well, of
course I've been working every day of my life but it's time to get back to the
office.  I'm ready, willing and able. Please take a look at some of the things
I've done and what I can do for YOU!

The following Op-Ed from today's Sunday NY Times is good reading but, for me, being "busy" is a good thing. I have an active mind - even on vacation, I'm active! But I do like to sit and read a good book.

========================================== 
NYTimes Op-Ed:
If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably
had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the
default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.”
“Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint.
And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to
have,” or “Better than the opposite.”

It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this; it’s something we collectively
force one another to do.  Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts
in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how
busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead
on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely
self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and
activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy
because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to
busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t
either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time
with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for
community service because it looks good on their college applications. I
recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he
answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let
him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify
that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation;
this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning
noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout
back over it.

Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the
half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the
end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation
and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every
afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book
Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the
woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which
provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this
day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my
life.

The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable
condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to
it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high
rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France.
She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She
still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She
says it feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to
the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully
summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they
can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven,
cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her
environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than
any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the
hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one
another to do.

Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness.  Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a
hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she
wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some
reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated
when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of
indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion.
More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if
your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry
book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all
this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of
what we do doesn’t matter.

I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know.
Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any
day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to
earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my
life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the
afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it
seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and
ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at
the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty
cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?

But just in the last few months, I’ve insidiously started,
because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was
able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do this or
that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint;
it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. Except that I hate
actually being busy. Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to
do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to
solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the
Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this.

Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV.
To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without
seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the
stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first
time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing
yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what
it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it
is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of
it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet
that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and
seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild
summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to
getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,”
wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath,
Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of
stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes
you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for
more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the
hardworking.

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can
play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This
may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was
actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball
games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. My old
colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income
from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the
kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a
century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The
Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it
as a punishment.

Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone
behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere
between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic
hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the
classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once
make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own resolute
idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a
conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve
always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to
spend it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed
regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say, but I
think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris,
another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too
short to be busy.

(Anxiety welcomes submissions at anxiety@nytimes.com.)

Tim Kreider is the author of “We Learn Nothing,” a collection of essays and
cartoons. His cartoon, “The Pain — When Will It End?” has been collected in
three books by Fantagraphics.

Recommended Reading!!!

Review by Kirkus:
From one of the world's leading economists, a political call to action in defense of equality and human rights. Nobel laureate Stiglitz (Economics/Columbia Univ.; Freefall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy, 2010, etc.) insists that increasing inequality in the United States stems from a breakdown of the country's political and economic systems. The failure to hold any banker accountable for actions that contributed to the recent economic crisis is a prime symptom of the case. The current level of inequality, writes the author, "increases instability, reduces productivity, and undermines democracy." Stiglitz concedes that there is merit in the arguments of those who point to the effects of technology, greed or the absence of bank regulation as contributing factors, and he agrees that corrective measures are needed. He goes further, arguing that inequality is a by-product of the ability to exploit consumers through monopoly power, and borrowers through shady practices. He shows that the consequences include a monopolistic redistribution powerful enough to have caused massive distortions in the U.S. financial system. This is still not the deeper problem, however. More fundamentally, people underestimate the problem of inequality; as a result, they fail to perceive the changes that are already underway. Stiglitz presents the situation as "the bigger battle over perceptions and over big ideas," a battle being fought through persuasion, framing, misrepresentation and obfuscation. Changing course requires winning this battle for truth. In this way, he argues, equality, the rule of law and accountability can be reestablished. An impassioned argument backed by rigorous economic analysis

                                                CONGRATULATIONS CLASS OF 2012!!!!

Adapted from "10½ Things No Commencement Speaker Has Ever Said," by Charles Wheelan. To be published May 7 by W.W.
Norton & Co.

Class of 2012,
I became sick of commencement speeches at
about your age. My first job out of college was writing speeches for the
governor of Maine. Every spring, I would offer extraordinary tidbits of wisdom
to 22-year-olds—which was quite a feat given that I was 23 at the time. In the
decades since, I've spent most of my career teaching economics and public policy.
In particular, I've studied happiness and well-being, about which we now know a
great deal. And I've found that the saccharine and over-optimistic words of the
typical commencement address hold few of the lessons young people really need
to hear about what lies ahead. Here, then, is what I wish someone had told the
Class of 1988:

1. Your time in fraternity basements was well spent.

The same goes for the time you spent playing intramural sports, working on the school
newspaper or just hanging with friends. Research tells us that one of the most
important causal factors associated with happiness and well-being is your
meaningful connections with other human beings. Look around today. Certainly
one benchmark of your postgraduation success should be how many of these people
are still your close friends in 10 or 20 years.

2. Some of your worst days lie ahead. Graduation is a happy day. But my job is to tell you
that if you are going to do anything worthwhile, you will face periods of
grinding self-doubt and failure. Be prepared to work through them. I'll spare
you my personal details, other than to say that one year after college
graduation I had no job, less than $500 in assets, and I was living with an
elderly retired couple. The only difference between when I graduated and today
is that now no one can afford to retire.

3. Don't make the world worse. I know that I'm supposed to tell you to aspire to great
things. But I'm going to lower the bar here: Just don't use your prodigious
talents to mess things up. Too many smart people are doing that already. And if
you really want to cause social mayhem, it helps to have an Ivy League degree.
You are smart and motivated and creative. Everyone will tell you that you can
change the world. They are right, but remember that "changing the
world" also can include things like skirting financial regulations and
selling unhealthy foods to increasingly obese children. I am not asking you to
cure cancer. I am just asking you not to spread it.

4. Marry someone smarter than you are. When I was getting a Ph.D., my wife Leah had a
steady income. When she wanted to start a software company, I had a job with
health benefits. (To clarify, having a "spouse with benefits" is
different from having a "friend with benefits.") You will do better
in life if you have a second economic oar in the water. I also want to alert
you to the fact that commencement is like shooting smart fish in a barrel. The
Phi Beta Kappa members will have pink-and-blue ribbons on their gowns. The
summa cum laude graduates have their names printed in the program. Seize the
opportunity! Successful people are often asked to deliver
a university or college's graduation speech, Here are some words of wisdom
offered in commencement speeches over the last few years from President Obama,
Conan O'Brien, Hillary Clinton, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Carter.

5.  Help stop the Little League arms race. Kids' sports are becoming ridiculously structured
and competitive. What happened to playing baseball because it's fun? We are
systematically creating races out of things that ought to be a journey. We know
that success isn't about simply running faster than everyone else in some
predetermined direction. Yet the message we are sending from birth is that if
you don't make the traveling soccer team or get into the "right"
school, then you will somehow finish life with fewer points than everyone else.
That's not right. You'll never read the following obituary: "Bob Smith
died yesterday at the age of 74. He finished life in 186th place."

6.  Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that
interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.

7.  Your parents don't want what is best for you. They want what is good for you, which
isn't always the same thing. There is a natural instinct to protect our
children from risk and discomfort, and therefore to urge safe choices. Theodore
Roosevelt—soldier, explorer, president—once remarked, "It is hard to fail,
but it is worse never to have tried to succeed." Great quote, but I am
willing to bet that Teddy's mother wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer.

8. Don't model your life after a circus animal. Performing animals do tricks because
their trainers throw them peanuts or small fish for doing so. You should aspire
to do better. You will be a friend, a parent, a coach, an employee—and so on.
But only in your job will you be explicitly evaluated and rewarded for your
performance. Don't let your life decisions be distorted by the fact that your
boss is the only one tossing you peanuts. If you leave a work task undone in
order to meet a friend for dinner, then you are "shirking" your work.
But it's also true that if you cancel dinner to finish your work, then you are
shirking your friendship. That's just not how we usually think of it.

9.  It's all borrowed time. You shouldn't take anything for granted, not even tomorrow. I
offer you the "hit by a bus" rule. Would I regret spending my life
this way if I were to get hit by a bus next week or next year? And the
important corollary: Does this path lead to a life I will be happy with and
proud of in 10 or 20 years if I don't get hit by a bus.

10. Don't try to be great. Being great involves luck and other circumstances beyond your
control. The less you think about being great, the more likely it is to happen.
And if it doesn't, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being solid.

Good luck and congratulations.

From National Geographic:

This Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on where you
live, sky-watchers around the world will be able to see a cosmic spectacle
known as a transit of Venus. The events are so rare that only six
Venus transits have been observed since the invention of the telescope more
than 400 years ago. Transits
happen when a planet crosses between Earth and the sun. Only Mercury and Venus,
which are closer to the sun than Earth, can undergo this unusual alignment.

The last Venus transit was in
2004—above, the planet glides across the rising sun in a picture taken during
the event from the North Carolina coastline. After 2012, we won't see another
transit of Venus until 2117.

"People
watching this event through some form of safe solar viewer will see the small,
dark silhouette of Venus crossing the sun's face over the course of about six
hours," said Jay Pasachoff, an
astronomer at Williams College in Massachusetts. (Read a Q&A with Pasachoff about
Venus transits.) "The effect won't be visually impressive, but
that black dot against the sun is a remarkable thing to see."

                                   If you enjoy having a Big Gulp along with your burger and
fries, you’d better drink up fast if you live in New York City: do-gooder Mayor
Michael Bloomberg thinks you are too irresponsible to know what’s good for you.
He believes super-large sugary drinks contribute to all sorts of bad health
issues, so he’s determined to make you downsize whether you like it or not.

The mayor’s ban on these drinks could go into effect as soon
as early next year, and would affect drinks larger than 16 ounces. Bloomberg’s
ban is aimed at drinks sold only at movie theaters, restaurants, or from street
carts, meaning you could still get your large-sized drink fix at convenience
stores, supermarkets, or other retail sellers.

This isn’t Bloomberg’s first foray into the “nanny state,”
or employing excessive state action to protect people from themselves by
restricting freedom. Under Bloomberg’s leadership — and via an equally
meddlesome and liberal city council — the city has banned trans fats from food
preparations in restaurants (the ingredient that makes french fries, doughnuts,
and other deep-fried foods taste so yummy) and has forced chain restaurants to
post calorie counts on their menus.

Bloomberg, in one of his most Orwellian moves, even banned
donations of food to the homeless because the city didn’t have the ability to
monitor these much-needed and welcomed gifts for things like fat, salt, or
fiber content — a concern not typically voiced by individuals desperate for a
meal.

Of course, the mayor’s rationale is the protection of public
health. After all, there is an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. However, who among us really believes
regularly downing upwards of 32 ounces of soft drink is a healthy thing to do?
And since anyone addicted to gigantic-sized soft drinks can easily ask for a
second 16-ounce drink or find a nearby retail outlet, is this ban likely to
impact obesity among people already making unhealthy decisions?

For libertarians and conservatives, the far more greater
concern is government intrusion into our private lives. There can be no
confusion about this: controlling the intake of food and drink is simply not a
function of good government as outlined by the framers of our Constitution.
(David Harsanyi’s excellent book probed exactly this issue. Nanny
State: How Fast Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and
other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America into a Nation of Children
spotlighted politicians like Bloomberg.)

The problem of meddling, “I-know-best” bureaucrats obviously
isn’t just an affliction local to New York City. In 2008, Los Angeles City
Council member Jan Perry succeeded in imposing a resolution banning any new fast
food restaurants in a 32 square-mile area of South L.A. Like Bloomberg, her
rationale was the disproportionate rates of obesity and diabetes among the
largely poor, black, and Latino residents of her district. The racist,
infantilizing message: poor minorities living in South L.A. are too stupid to
make their own food choices. Her patronizing solution: experiment with their
lives by forcing them to eat what she wants them to eat.

All of this obviously ignores longstanding cultural habits
that might cause residents of poor neighborhoods to engage in unhealthy
behaviors of all sorts. It’s one thing for bureaucrats to engage in public
education campaigns in an effort to steer people away from unhealthy behavior,
but another thing entirely to insult them and to argue that government must
force them into making approved choices.

And people do already have choices. Even fast food
restaurants now offer a variety of food, including salads, fruit, and yogurt,
as well as soft drinks that come in a variety of sizes.

If government bureaucrats can ban the types of fast food
outlets available, manipulate the size and types of drinks we can consume, and
regulate every aspect of food preparation, what couldn’t they attempt to ban?
Some studies have suggested that red meat is “unhealthy.” Will Bloomberg next
propose a measure limiting red meat intake to one steak per month? Will the
nanny state do-gooders ban hot dogs, or force Americans to take part in
government exercise programs like those promoted by the first lady?

On the same day that Bloomberg was touting his ban on
oversized sugary soft drinks, he was taken to task by a typically compliant
member of the media. It seems that the mayor was also taking part in National
Doughnut Day, causing even Matt Lauer, NBC’s consistently liberal host, to
appear incredulous. He stated that Bloomberg’s support for a day celebrating
doughnuts “sounds ridiculous,” as it coincided with his proposed drink ban.

There are far more pressing civic matters. Rather than have
food fascists obsess over what we eat or drink, we should force a city
bureaucrat like Bloomberg to concentrate on relieving taxation, to provide
public schools that actually work, to deal with crime and violence, and to
solve his city’s paralyzing traffic jams. Instead, he took us further down the
slippery slope of infantilization.

Joe R. Hicks is a political commentator and the vice
president of Community Advocates.

A magnificent moment yet even with the space shuttle riding piggy back ... in a post 911 world it is difficult to stand, wait and watch the sky as a large jet is set against the NYC landscape without stirring up images of horrific memories.  Credits to Jay Fine for the photo.

Saturday, April 14th I had a Photo Op Tour of the Central Park Zoo Birdhouse. What a great experience. I LOVE NEW YORK. Get out and enjoy everything life is and has to offer including YOURSELF! 

TIME TO GET BACK TO WORK!!!?? What? Well, of course I've been working every day of my life but it's time to get back to the office.  I'm ready, willing and able. Please take a look at some of the things I've done and what I can do for YOU!

Every day is a new day - you might find talk about politics, climate issues, business, employment, trending, fashion, activities and just fun stuff. Pop in from time to time...there's always something new!