So I called my cousin's land line but ended up with his voice mail, and I didn't have his current cell number, his old one now belonging to some guy at the Tampa BMW dealership. I assumed that he was on his way to the airport to get them, but just to be sure I called another cousin (his sister) in Carlsbad, CA to have her call her brother and let them know that his aunt and uncle were waiting for him.

But the three cell numbers she had for him weren't any good any more, one was for same BMW guy and the other two were disconnected. (A good lesson to us all here: The data and information we have is only good to us if it's presently up to date.)

So she called her mother (my aunt) who's currently up in Sacramento visiting a friend, and my aunt called her son, who said that he and his wife had already been at TPA for the better part of an hour, but couldn't find my mother and uncle. So she gave him my cell number and he called me, and I gave him my mother's cell number.

Anyway, my cousin in Tampa just called me back to let me know that he finally found my mother and uncle, because he and his wife had been patiently awaiting their arrival at the wrong terminal -- they had arrived on American Airlines from Miami, while my cousin was waiting over at the Southwest baggage claim, thinking they were coming from Ft. Lauderdale -- and that they're all on their way back to the house.

I don't know where he got the idea that they were flying on Southwest, because I distinctly e-mailed him two days ago and said they they were arriving on American from MIA, having made those reservations myself. Anyway, whew! Glad that's resolved. I just called my cousin in Carlsbad and aunt in Sacramento to let them know that everyone is safe and sound. I was getting concerned there, because my mother is 80 and my uncle is 88, and here I am, over 5,000 miles away in Honolulu and unable to do much more than make phone calls.

But I do find it wondrous to consider that 30 years ago, we never would have been able to accomplish what we just did with one another, communications-wise -- even if we did somehow manage to make things a wee bit more complicated than they really needed to be. Nor would I have been able to simply go online and tell you all about it.

They said they were now going to "make it right".

How are they going to do that?
Bring the dead back to life?

How is this different from a youth in a hoodie stabbing someone to death and stealing his wallet?

But you know that all the folks at GM will get off scott free.
Those white collar folks can sell you a piece of sh-t car which you have the option to keep at your own risk, or let them recall and have no car. In any case, they get to keep your money and you're lucky to get away with your life.

No jail for those bozos.

It's good to be super-rich in our elitist nation.
You can get away with murder.

Behind the curtain, though, federal prosecutors say, Mr. Bergantiños was engaged in a very different sort of enterprise, a daring forgery swindle that fooled the art world and led collectors to spend more than $80 million on dozens of phony masterworks.

The marketing of these forgeries, many of them sold through the offices of what was once New York's oldest gallery, Knoedler & Company, has been among the most stunning art market scandals of the last decade. But little of the focus has been on Mr. Bergantiños, who is identified in court papers only as CC-1 -- or co-conspirator 1.

Most of the attention has been trained instead on his girlfriend, Ms. Rosales. She is the only person to be arrested in the case and in September pleaded guilty to the fraud.

But now, Ms. Rosales, 57, is cooperating with federal prosecutors and the authorities are focusing more intently on the role they say Mr. Bergantiños played.

Carter was originally convicted by an all-white jury in 1966 of shooting three white people to death in a Paterson, NJ bar, on the strength of some very dubious eyewitness evidence offered by two white guys who had been attempting to commit a burglary nearby at the time of the murders. They were offered a sweetheart deal in exchange for their testimony.

Carter subsequently served a total of 29 years in prison for it. His cause subsequently was taken up by numerous people, including Bob Dylan, whose 1976 protest song "Hurricane" became one of the bigger hits in his career and sparked renewed public interest in the case.

After those two white witnesses recanted their statements, Carter's conviction was set aside and he was retried on the same charges in 1977, Amazingly, he was re-convicted when one of those witnesses recanted his recantation.

However, in 1985 Federal Judge H. Lee Sarokin cited prosecutorial misconduct in his decision to overturn Carter's conviction, stating that the prosecution's entire case had been "predicated on an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure[.]"

After his release, Carter moved to Toronto, where he soon began a campaign on behalf of the wrongfully accused and convicted. "If I find a heaven after this life, I'll be quite surprised," he wrote in 2004. "In my own years on this planet, though, I lived in hell for the first 49 years, and have been in heaven for the past 28 years. To live in a world where truth matters and justice, however late, really happens, that world would be heaven enough for us all."

Being grandparents is about the best thing there is, so we can't wait to welcome the newest member of the family!  And our older daughter can't wait for her little boy to have a cousin.

The back yard smells loverley

and a burning bush

That always has the red blooms on the inside.

Every single scene started, and then ended without having gone anywhere.

"If we think of the Crucifixion only in historical terms, we lose the symbol's immediate reference to ourselves. Jesus left his mortal body on the cross, the sign of earth, to go to the Father, with whom he was one. We, similarly, are to identify with the eternal life within us. The symbol also tells us of God's willing acceptance of the cross, that is to say, of his participation in the trials and sorrows of human life in the world, so that he is here within us, not by way of a fall or mistake, but with rapture and joy. Thus the cross has dual sense: one, of our going to the divine; the other, of the coming of the divine to us. It is a true crossing.

"In the Christian tradition, Christ's crucifixion is a major problem: Why could the savior not have just come? Why did he have to be crucified?

"Well, various theological explanations have come down to us, but I think an adequate and proper one can be found in Paul's Epistle to the Philippians, where he writes in chapter 2 that Christ did not think that God-hood was something to be held to--which is to say, neither should you--but rather, yielding, he took the form of a servant even to death on the cross. This is joyful affirmation of the sufferings of the world. The imitation of Christ, then, is participating in the suffering and joys of the world, all the while seeing through them the radiance of the divine presence. That's operating from the heart cakra, where the two triangles are joined together.

"That's what I see in the Crucifixion. Of all the explanations I've read, it is the only one that makes, what I would call, respectable sense. The others are all concerned with a wrathful god who has to be appeased by the sacrifice of his son. What do you do with a thing like that? It is a translation of the sacrifice into a very crude image. The idea of God being entity that has to be appeased is just too nasty a concretion."

North Korea?
Please.

Iran?
Boring.

Syria?
Zzzzz.

But here comes Russia!
A new cold war with a bunch who have lots and lots of hydrogen bombs and lots and lots of missiles and submarines with which to send them on their merry way in our direction.

v. 332
v. 331

In LA for the last few days, sitting in gridlock for too many hours, but that's my glorious home town. Missing Mrs. Dadler and Dadler Jr. something fierce as always. I'm such a pitiful creature of home. Makes sense tho, fractured phuck that I am.

Airline employees discovered him wandering around the Kahului Airport tarmac shortly after the flight landed at 11:00 a.m. He was questioned by the FBI but will not be charged with a crime, and is currently in the custody of Hawaii Child Protective Services pending an investigation of his home situation by that agency's California counterparts.

I freely admit that I didn't care for Inglourious Basterds, and I don't mind saying what I didn't like about it. But were I an acclaimed and successful filmmaker like Schrader, I would never criticize Tarantino on the basis of what I'd do were Basterds my film, for the simple fact that it's his work and not mine. Further, I also recognize that my personal opinion is squarely in the minority, particularly given that film's accolades, and it would be highly presumptuous and self-absorbed of me to insist or even hint that I could somehow do it better.

But to address Tarantino's point about David Bowie's song, my opinion only, but had that song been employed in the film Cat People in the manner which Tarantino appears to suggest, its effect would frankly have been the equivalent of someone dropping a full tray of drink glasses on the floor in the middle of a violin concerto.

The song was written specifically to be Cat People's title track. It was never meant to become part of the film's main musical score, by which director Schrader endeavored to enhance the dark and foreboding mood of the story, and not slap both the film's plot and its audience upside the head simultaneously with a highly inappropriate pop culture musical placement. And if ever you see Cat People, you'll know what I mean.