Monday, November 27, 2006

Sadness and Happiness

College Football as sad this weekend as Notre Dame lost to USC and Maryland fell to Wake Forest. Sadness prevailed in DC and in Bowie.

Sunday brought happiness in Bowie at least as the Bills won and the Redskins eked out a win also.

May Nanny's remain open forever!!

Sunday, November 19, 2006

WOP is back...

Thanksgiving is coming and so is my whole family. I am very excited to have them here for the holiday. There will be 21 people at the Italian's Thanksgiving table which should make for wonderful conversation, bold extravagant aruguments and general good cheer. My daughter was in the the middle of the shooting at Annapolis Mall on Saturday night. She is alright but she will never forget it I am sure. Makes me wonder why we expect Iragi youth to forget the American soldiers, tanks and planes shooting up their country. Scares me to death what revenge motives we must be conjuring up in their hearts. George Bush is the worst President the republic has ever had to endure.

Even though Steny Hoyer is my local Congressman, I am still upset that John Murtha did become the majority leader. He is the reason that the democrats are back in control and deserved to be majority leader. Rep. Hoyer supported the war right from day 1. The sad thing about Hoyer is that he didnt even have any opposition. The republicans don't even put up a candidate against him. Somebody needs to.

Saturday, November 11, 2006

THANK YOU AMERICA!

Thursday November 9, 2006The Guardian

For six years, latterly with the backing of both houses of a markedly conservative Republican Congress, George Bush has led an American administration that has played an unprecedentedly negative and polarising role in the world's affairs. On Tuesday, in the midterm US congressional elections, American voters rebuffed Mr Bush in spectacular style and with both instant and lasting political consequences. By large numbers and across almost every state of the union, the voters defeated Republican candidates and put the opposition Democrats back in charge of the House of Representatives for the first time in a dozen years.

In US domestic terms, the 2006 midterms bring to an end the 12 intensely divisive years of Republican House rule that began under Newt Gingrich in 1994. These have been years of zealously and confrontational conservative politics that have shocked the world and, under Mr Bush, have sent America's global standing plummeting. That long political hurricane has now at last blown itself out for a while, but not before leaving America with a terrible legacy that includes climate-change denial, the end of biological stem-cell research, an aid programme tied to abortion bans, a shockingly permissive gun culture, an embrace of capital punishment equalled only by some of the world's worst tyrannies, the impeachment of Bill Clinton and his replacement by a president who does not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution. The approval by voters in at least five more states of same-sex marriage bans - on top of 13 similar votes in 2004 - shows that culture-war politics are far from over.

But at least the passing of Mr Rumsfeld shows that someone in the White House now recognises that things cannot go on as before. Business as usual will not do, either in general or over Iraq. Mr Bush's remarks last night showed that on Iraq he has now put himself in the hands of the Iraq Study Group, chaired by his father's consigliere James Baker, one of whose members, Robert Gates, an ex-CIA chief, was last night appointed to succeed the unlamented Mr Rumsfeld. Maybe the more pragmatic Republican old guard can come to the rescue of this disastrous presidency in its most catastrophic adventure. But it has been the American voters who have at last made this possible. For that alone the entire world owes them its deep gratitude today.

Monday, November 06, 2006

THE FIRE

THANKS SASHA - The lamb was delish !








"This is the part I like the best;
This is the wettest part
of the quest..."

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Samhain '06






Saturday, November 04, 2006

What may we wish for now as the autumn light ebbs and with the passing of Samhain the ensuing darkness of another encroaching winter threatens. What more exists to light and enlighten? Yeats wrote that the grey morning melancholy runs through all the legends of the Celtic people, and so it is there I shall seek. It is there where, on our isolated isle at least, fallen angles too good to be lost and too bad to be saved work out there time; where all life past and present walk unknowingly side by side: where souls seek solace. Waning light gives way to a waxing soul, and the grey dawn gives life and hope to any who will open their hearts to it. They are the magic hours on this rock and it is in the waters that hold the grey dawn up where I shall bathe my Celtic soul in search of repose from the infinite Celtic melancholy.

Friday, November 03, 2006

On SAMHAIN'S Eve



Tis the night before Samhain and all through the house,
All the creaures are stirring, while Sasha dresses the grouse.
The pentagrams are hung from the tree-limbs with care,
In the hopes that Carnunnos soon will be there.
The initiates are fretting all freaked-out and more,
While visions of terror into their brains bore;
And Asbill in his sporran, and Wolfe in his kilt,
Have just come to terms with the blood that they spill't.
When out in the forest there arises such a clatter,
That I flee from the graveyard to avoid the whole matter.
On towards the firelight I fly like a flash,
Tear open the mullien leaf and start humming The Clash.


The moon through the gaps of the boughs ever shifting ,
Gave an eerie dull glow to the headstones I'm lifting.
When what to my bloodshot eyes should appear,
But the hulk of a man with the head of a deer.
With a pack of hellhounds from regions afar,
I recall in a flash that its FĂ©ile na Marbh.

More dreadful than Balor onward he comes,
In a low gutteral voice, a kind of keening he hums.
"To Alban, and Breacan, and Cairneach, and Damhan,
To Eochai, and Failbhe, and Iarlugh and Garbhan.
As the veil slowly lifts and the two worlds combine,
I command you to rise and get behind me in line."

And then, from the dead-wood, I hear a low wail
And the scratching and clawing of each fingernail.
As I suck in my breath, and start turning around,
The Cailleach Bheur rises up from the ground.
She is dressed in dark blankets from head to the feet
And carried with her an odor that smelled faintly of peat.

A magical hammer, the Blue Hag carries by her side,
And her arms when held out stretch nearly 15 feet wide!
Her eyesockets hollow, she's long lost the eyes,
And the vegetation as she passes simply shrivels up an dies.
She speaks not a word, but goes straight down the drive,
And after her passing I doublecheck that I'm alive.

The dark side and I on Samhain are one.
What's left when its over is the devastation she's done.
The Tree of Life till Beltane sleeps
And this is the tradition, this Hibernian keeps.



GOOD LUCK TO ALL HIBEE INITIATES '06 -- YOU'LL NEED IT!