"Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia" , or" Curse of the Golden Flower"

Is there someone out there who has seen this movie besides me? I hope so.

Gong Li/Li Gong is beautiful, and I think Chow Yun Fat/Yun Fat Chow is not so bad himself.

The White Man's Burden

I have the first stanza of this poem posted over my desk, and read it every day....I printed it off the day before George W. Bush started the Iraq war, back so many years ago. Here's the whole poem, by Rudyard Kipling. It's still controversial to this day.....I consider it timeless.

It fascinates me.

The White Man's Burden

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to naught.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humor
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.

2008 Garden Experiment

Thanks to my sister Becky's idea, I started lettuce, mesclun, radishes and spinach in Miracle Grow bags. I found some metal sawhorses and grates up at the barn, so the bags would be about waist high, well-drained and out of doggie danger. Here's what they look like today, April 17, 2008. I planted them last Tuesday. I'll be doing an herb garden this week, after the wind stops blowing so hard.



I also have onions, corn, okra, cukes, various peppers and tomatoes in the traditional garden. Some things got kind of frozen last week, but appear to be coming around quite well.

I'm Startin' to Get the Feeling That

Spring is just around the corner. I'm psyching myself up to put in a good garden this year. I haven't done that in a while. Here's a picture of my second garden attempt. (Pardon the poor resolution - I didn't have a good digital camera back then, in 2002.) I love how the plants blend in to the oak trees in the background - that must have been a good year for rain, because it looks like a jungle!



That same year, one of our friends gave us some calabash seeds, and I planted LOTS of them.........OMG! They ended up taking the whole place over. We picked a ton of the small ones, and they made nice squash bread. These pictured went in the dumpster, along with many, many other wheelbarrows full. I'll never do that again!



My first garden was totally ground-based, and it nearly broke our backs, so I decided the next year to experiment with container gardening. Here's a picture of my lettuce bed - I scarfed a broken liquid feed liner (we do cows) and planted lettuce in it. It was perfect, and I still use it to this day. In fact, I have two of them. I think of them as giant flower pots. You should have seen this bed when all the salad greens were fully filled out and ready to cut - it was beautiful, except for the nut grass. Darned nut grass! Oh well, I could easily separate it from the salad greens.



A dear friend who owns a fertilizer company saw my liquid feed liner-planters and brought over some big, freaking HUGE tractor tires that we modified to plant taters in. We currently have two, but I'll take all he'll bring me. Taters love 'em!



I'm glad I live way out in the country, so I don't have to worry about what my neighbors think of all my backyard gardening experiments! It all looks pretty wacky right now, two liquid feeder tubs, two giant tractor tires, a couple of wooden raised beds..........but when our garden is growing in all it's Spring glory, it looks quite righteous! I need to stop blogging and get to tilling! Here's the rest of my back yard.........



which makes it all worth it!

I Love Pictures of Dogs, Especially Funny Pictures of Dogs

First, here's my dogger, Roxie - the day we got this picture, she heard Dad yelling at the baseball mens on TV, and she thought she had been bad, so she got in her basket. We told her she was a good girl, and hadn't done anything wrong, so she eventually got out of the tub. We gave her a puppy biscuit for doing such a good job pressing the clothes!




I scarfed this one from BON - I love the little brown pibble puppy baby that looks like my dogger, Roxie.



I have been an evil doer several times, when I bought my dog costumes. I got Roxie one of these - a hula skirt, complete with lei and coconut bra, but she broke the lei immediately. I have a picture somewhere, but this will have to do. I am sure you get the idea. She really doesn't mind the coconut bra, but the grass skirt gets in her way sometimes.



I really want to make Roxie be a lion for next Halloween..........



Roxie also loves to ride in Dad's truck, so I think she might like to fly someday.....



And, since we live on a farm, and she goes with Dad every morning to feed the cows, she might consider wearing this costume someday, although she is not spotted, and we don't have any dairy cows, but we do have some brown ones.....



Roxie has a few other costumes: a shark, batman and a pumpkin. She doesn't like any of those, so I think I will quit wasting my money and just get more puppy biscuits for her!

Want

I Love This Song

"Little Boxes" by Malvina Reynolds. Have you heard it?