Politics in the United States of America has slowed the legislative process to a near stop. I would speculate, without a poll, that most Americans would say, if asked, that there are laws that need fixing and social problems that could be solved only by legislation. American government needs to get to work to fix the things only government can fix, and right away.
Yet what is the problem? Better yet, what are the problems that prevent government from functioning? First of all, there is far too much money involved. Whatever is successfully legislated, creates or costs enormous amounts of money. Corporate America or worldwide corporations are far too large and far too powerful to allow any significant legislation to affect the bottom line.
The second problem is that significant legislation usually affects a large number of people. People are afraid to do this anymore. Even well paid members of Congress refuse to risk this.
Finally, backlash from significant legislation is so huge, mail volume, email volume, media hype and anti-hype, that no one wants to be responsible for it. Congress would much rather leave things as they are. If the government is minimally functional, that is good enough for them. As long as the rocket of government is inching along towards its gantry, it will be a long time before it takes off.
Sunday, December 28, 2014
Sunday, September 28, 2014
The Best People are the Best Americans
It is so easy to post a social or political opinion these days. So many people do it. I am doing it now. But many people exclude or demean groups or individuals they are against. Political foes, other races, and other religions are very common targets of hate, or just being labelled, "other". Is this necessary? If love and happiness are any part of reality, should we all not wish our fellow human beings these states of being, first and foremost? Yes.
If you are, in any way, intelligent, then pointing out the differences between yourself and those who differ from you is unnecessary. If you are smart, you will know that you will be more appealing if you are humble and let your actions speak for you.
If you are, in any way, intelligent, then pointing out the differences between yourself and those who differ from you is unnecessary. If you are smart, you will know that you will be more appealing if you are humble and let your actions speak for you.
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
The Game of Online Genealogy
When I began to look at my family history in 2008 I was earnest about finding accurate records of my relatives as far back as I could. I had many family stories and hundreds of photos with which to begin. Then I found Geni.com. After entering my family's essential information, name, where and when they were born, date of death, and in some cases, a photo, I started to find relatives who I did not enter into the system. My family was growing.
The next six years found me entering an occasional distant relative I had neglected. But more often, I started collecting new relatives that other people had entered. I possess family records that go back six generations in three lines of my family. The other lines were not that extensive. Just for context, six generations got me back to the 17th century, in terms of time. What the millions of people participating on Geni.com did for me was to trace my family back to the 13th century or further.
I learned a few tricks for searching for relatives like Googling possible relatives, then plugging them into Geni. This way I found how I was related to Confucius and even Biblical figures. Let me stop, at this point, and say that not all of Geni's records are accurate. Surprise! Of course many are inaccurate. When I found the first King that was my 21st Great Grandfather, I knew there were inaccuracies. It didn't matter. Searching for interesting relatives like William the Conqueror and Charlemagne became the game and it did not matter how accurate the results were.
Geni made it easy to collect relatives. I stopped collecting 18th Great Grandparents when I had more than eighty. Then I started doing the math. Typically, people have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great grandparents, and on and on. At your tenth great-grandparents, you could potentially have 4096. At eighteenth, the number is 524288. That is, people could have as many as a half million or more eighteenth great grandparents. The real number is impossible to know because at a certain (unknown) point, the same person can be a great grandparent and great great grandparent at the same time from different relative perspectives. It can be extremely complicated. You'll have to trust me, or ask a real genealogist.
Pope Gregory X 1210-1276
The game continued when I found that you could pull up your family tree, horizontally, on Geni.com, and then follow one line as far as there were relatives. It didn't surprise me when I traced my line back to Ostrogotha "The Patient", King of the Goths. My family can be very uncivilized. But when I found I could directly trace myself back to Pope Gregory X, 1210-1274, my 23rd Great Grandfather, then I knew it was all silliness and I had to treat this as a game only. I hope all of the genealogists forgive me.
The next six years found me entering an occasional distant relative I had neglected. But more often, I started collecting new relatives that other people had entered. I possess family records that go back six generations in three lines of my family. The other lines were not that extensive. Just for context, six generations got me back to the 17th century, in terms of time. What the millions of people participating on Geni.com did for me was to trace my family back to the 13th century or further.
I learned a few tricks for searching for relatives like Googling possible relatives, then plugging them into Geni. This way I found how I was related to Confucius and even Biblical figures. Let me stop, at this point, and say that not all of Geni's records are accurate. Surprise! Of course many are inaccurate. When I found the first King that was my 21st Great Grandfather, I knew there were inaccuracies. It didn't matter. Searching for interesting relatives like William the Conqueror and Charlemagne became the game and it did not matter how accurate the results were.
Geni made it easy to collect relatives. I stopped collecting 18th Great Grandparents when I had more than eighty. Then I started doing the math. Typically, people have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great grandparents, and on and on. At your tenth great-grandparents, you could potentially have 4096. At eighteenth, the number is 524288. That is, people could have as many as a half million or more eighteenth great grandparents. The real number is impossible to know because at a certain (unknown) point, the same person can be a great grandparent and great great grandparent at the same time from different relative perspectives. It can be extremely complicated. You'll have to trust me, or ask a real genealogist.
The game continued when I found that you could pull up your family tree, horizontally, on Geni.com, and then follow one line as far as there were relatives. It didn't surprise me when I traced my line back to Ostrogotha "The Patient", King of the Goths. My family can be very uncivilized. But when I found I could directly trace myself back to Pope Gregory X, 1210-1274, my 23rd Great Grandfather, then I knew it was all silliness and I had to treat this as a game only. I hope all of the genealogists forgive me.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Opinion without Education
If you are not educated enough, you are not going to learn anything from me. I will write my opinions each month, but do not make the mistake of thinking that I will teach you anything. Teaching was never going to be one of my objectives. If you need more education and you know it, you are my kind of reader. One can never have enough education. Learning must continue ad infinitum. Unfortunately, this forum, "Wading Into the Stream", is not educational and will never seek to educate its readers. Those who came here for that will just have to try somewhere else. May I suggest Khan Academy.
My writing is expression of thoughts, opinions, ideas, and just-plain statements that occur to me, that I suppose you may have not verbalized for yourself. You may have come close to thinking the same thing yourself, but not quite. If you say to yourself, "I always thought that, but I've never seen it in print before," then I am on the right track. Many people have said I have a knack for stating the obvious. Wait a second. That is not a compliment, is it?
While studying English Literature at the University of Cincinnati, many years ago, I decided that pursuing teaching as a profession that English majors fell back upon when real jobs could not be found, was not a place I ever wanted to be. And I have not been able to land a full time job for seventeen months, now. Nevertheless, I'm sticking to my guns and will not pursue teaching unless faced with homelessness and starvation. Thanks for supporting me, Suzie. You are the real teacher.
_________________________________________________________________________________ March will bring my one thousandth blog view. Thank you to all of my readers. You guys are the best. But you didn't know you were exclusive. Most worthwhile bloggers celebrate their one millionth or ten millionth readers. Not me. Very few people have read this blog. I do not market this blog. I do not collect any revenue from it, at all. (And I have no income, at the moment.) Finally, I have only mentioned it to a few people. It is, more or less, a secret. No need to forward this to anyone. It is not funny, and definitely not educational.
So those of you who are reading this and those of you who have read more than one posting must really want to be here. I salute you!
My writing is expression of thoughts, opinions, ideas, and just-plain statements that occur to me, that I suppose you may have not verbalized for yourself. You may have come close to thinking the same thing yourself, but not quite. If you say to yourself, "I always thought that, but I've never seen it in print before," then I am on the right track. Many people have said I have a knack for stating the obvious. Wait a second. That is not a compliment, is it?
While studying English Literature at the University of Cincinnati, many years ago, I decided that pursuing teaching as a profession that English majors fell back upon when real jobs could not be found, was not a place I ever wanted to be. And I have not been able to land a full time job for seventeen months, now. Nevertheless, I'm sticking to my guns and will not pursue teaching unless faced with homelessness and starvation. Thanks for supporting me, Suzie. You are the real teacher.
_________________________________________________________________________________ March will bring my one thousandth blog view. Thank you to all of my readers. You guys are the best. But you didn't know you were exclusive. Most worthwhile bloggers celebrate their one millionth or ten millionth readers. Not me. Very few people have read this blog. I do not market this blog. I do not collect any revenue from it, at all. (And I have no income, at the moment.) Finally, I have only mentioned it to a few people. It is, more or less, a secret. No need to forward this to anyone. It is not funny, and definitely not educational.
So those of you who are reading this and those of you who have read more than one posting must really want to be here. I salute you!
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Woodchurch to Cincinnati in 579 Years
In the village of Woodchurch, in the county of Kent, in the country that called itself England was born a girl named Katherina to the wife of Richard Endingham. The year was 1435. She may be my 16th great grandmother.She married a man named Robert Clarke. One of their sons was named William Clarke. William married a woman named Benedicta Ashburnham. They had a son named Richard. The year adult Richard's wife had a daughter named after her mother was 1504. The place was called Wellbourne, in Lincolnshire.When Margaret Thomas Clarke grew up she married a man who was made a Knight of the Realm, Sir Richard Smith. Together, they produced thirteen children, the eldest of whom was born William, in 1518. His daughter Eleanor, grew up and married Alexander White. Sometime around 1546 or so, they had a daughter named Frances.They also had a daughter named Katherine, who would grow up to travel with her husband, John Carver across the English Channel to Holland. A couple of years later, they would take a small ship across the Atlantic with a group of religious dissenters to start a new life in a wild land near the James River in the New World. That trip would be interrupted by bad weather and that group of Protestant dissenters, later referred to as Pilgrims, landed and named Plymouth in 1620. Frances did not follow her sister. Instead she stayed behind in England and grew up to marry another Francis.Frances and Francis also followed her sister to Leiden, Holland, but at some point, they ended up going back to England. Their son, John, was born in Leiden in 1602. Sometime after 1620, John made his way across the Atlantic in the great Puritan migration, and ended up in Connecticut. He married a woman name Johanna Whitmore. Their daughter, as was the custom at the time, was also named Johanna.When little Johanna became a young woman, she married a man named John Burrows. To them was born another John Burrows in 1671 in Groton, New London. Young John married a woman with a name typical of the time and place, Patience. Patience later gave birth to Eunice.Eunice grew up to marry a man named Jonas Curtis. Jonas and Eunice lived for time in Stratford, Connecticut, where their daughter, Hannah, was born in 1739. Hannah grew up and married my fifth great grandfather, Henricus, known also as Henry. Henry Ellsworth saw action as volunteer for the Revolutionary militia. He had a famous lawyer for a cousin by the name of Oliver Ellsworth. Oliver would become the third Chief Justice of the Supreme Court a few years after helping to write part of the Constitution of the United States. Oliver was also a friend of George Washington.Much more ordinary Henry and Hanna raised a family containing one son named John. John became a man and married Mary Whitney, probably in New York state. They had two sons, one of whom fought for the Union in the American Civil War. His name was Freeman.Before going off to war, Freeman married young Scottish immigrant, Jane Smith. They had several children before Freeman's unit went to Murfreesboro, Tennessee in 1863. This was where Freeman probably died of dysentery.Jane had to raise the younger children, the last of whom was a spunky but mildly deformed girl named, Marilla. Not one to let a little deformity deter her, Marilla met young Orlando Richmond, whose family was also from New York.They married and had three children. Their son, Harry was born in Ohio in 1875. He grew up in North Baltimore, Ohio. Harry met and married a young Pennsylvanian girl named Ninetta, who insisted on being called Nina. Nina rhymed with china. In North Baltimore, Nina gave birth to Gladys, Grace, and Harold. Gladys was born in 1903, the year those Dayton boys, the Wright brothers, flew a motorized vehicle in North Carolina. Early in the 1920's, Gladys, having gone to the teacher's college in Bowling Green, married a man who towered almost a foot over her five foot, one inch height.His name was Forest Borough. Being from Weston, Ohio, Forest and Gladys bought a house half way to North Baltimore, in the village of Deshler. Gladys and Forest had only one daughter. Her name was Roberta, but like her grandmother Nina, she insisted on being called by her nickname, Bobbie. Bobbie grew up to become a nurse and married my father in Cincinnati, in 1951. I was born in 1958, third of four children. Cincinnati was a long way from fifteenth century Woodchurch in Kent. By the records written and maintained by many other people, I found my way there in 2013.
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
January One is an Excuse to Produce
How many hundred 750 Words writers are starting today's writing mentioning the date. Yes, it is the beginning of the year. Yes, it is the first of the month. And yes, it is a beginning. That is okay. Beginnings are a good place to start. Start your week, your month, your year of writing, today. Yes, start. That is what is important. Is writing necessary to you? Do you have things to say? Is expression vital to you? By all means, start writing!
Personally, I would like to invite everyone I know, who has any interest in writing, to use New Year's Day as an excuse to begin writing as a habit. It will take about thirty or more days for it to begin the habit of writing. There is a website called 750words.com. It is a convenient place to start that habit. Whether you want to write a journal, a novel, some poetry, an article, or maybe a wikipedia article, 750words.com is a good place to begin those pieces. You can store the writing, here. It will count your words for you. It gives you an automatic community of writers, where you can be a member.
You, who may never have been published. You, who may have never belonged to any writing group. Or, on the other hand, you, who have written three novels that you cannot get published. Or you, who write in your journal every day since you were ten years old, may need some encouragement. Or, as I implied above, you, who have something to say, can and should say it here.
Today, I write. Today, I tell myself, I will begin to write everyday, for a week, month, or, if I am disciplined, a year. Yes, I will write 750 words or more, every day that I can, for as many days in a row that I can. Yes, I will. I have that many thoughts and words inside me, that are bubbling to the surface, daily, for many days in a row. The row is not important. How many is not important. Those percolating thoughts put into words are what need to be put down for whoever might read them. It might only be you. It might be 500,000 reading it online.
New Year's Day is a fine day to start anything. Maybe I will take one or more photographs, everyday for the next year as well. I could be quite busy. Write 750 words, minimally, daily, and take a photo or more, daily, everyday, from now until January 1, 2015. It sounds very doable. Looking back over the last year, 365 days will go by in a flurry, and next year will be here in a couple of shakes of the head.
What will I have accomplished. If nobody notices, nobody reads what I've written, nobody sees my photos, did I do anything? Perhaps, but that would be the most negative and discouraging way of looking at it. Minimally, if I write and photograph daily, for hundreds of days, I will have much more experience in both. Anybody doing something like writing or taking photos daily, for any prolonged period, is going to get better at it, if only by doing it slightly faster. Any awareness of increasing quality while performing regularly, will produce increased quality.
I would invite anybody, who practices any skill, to begin to practice it with more regularity, today, January 1, 2014. Then continue on January 2nd, 3rd, and continue. If you have not shown yourself as much discipline as you know you need to accomplish your goals, start practicing today. Then do it again, tomorrow. Is it important to you to get better? Do a third day. Do you really want to get good. Do it a twelfth day. How expert do you want to be? Do it a thirtieth day. Go. Be you. Develop your skill. Make it yours.
That's it. I am not going to encourage you more. It really has to come from within you. If it does not, you may quit on day six. Ask yourself, how important is what you want. For someone to give it to you is just not as important as you conceiving of it, thinking about it, and making it come to pass. To not do it is failure.
These are really my words to myself. I write to myself. Write more. Write more frequently. Write more originally. Write more imaginatively. Write more tightly, more efficiently. Be more interesting. Be more compelling. Write like your life depends on it.
Personally, I would like to invite everyone I know, who has any interest in writing, to use New Year's Day as an excuse to begin writing as a habit. It will take about thirty or more days for it to begin the habit of writing. There is a website called 750words.com. It is a convenient place to start that habit. Whether you want to write a journal, a novel, some poetry, an article, or maybe a wikipedia article, 750words.com is a good place to begin those pieces. You can store the writing, here. It will count your words for you. It gives you an automatic community of writers, where you can be a member.
You, who may never have been published. You, who may have never belonged to any writing group. Or, on the other hand, you, who have written three novels that you cannot get published. Or you, who write in your journal every day since you were ten years old, may need some encouragement. Or, as I implied above, you, who have something to say, can and should say it here.
Today, I write. Today, I tell myself, I will begin to write everyday, for a week, month, or, if I am disciplined, a year. Yes, I will write 750 words or more, every day that I can, for as many days in a row that I can. Yes, I will. I have that many thoughts and words inside me, that are bubbling to the surface, daily, for many days in a row. The row is not important. How many is not important. Those percolating thoughts put into words are what need to be put down for whoever might read them. It might only be you. It might be 500,000 reading it online.
New Year's Day is a fine day to start anything. Maybe I will take one or more photographs, everyday for the next year as well. I could be quite busy. Write 750 words, minimally, daily, and take a photo or more, daily, everyday, from now until January 1, 2015. It sounds very doable. Looking back over the last year, 365 days will go by in a flurry, and next year will be here in a couple of shakes of the head.
What will I have accomplished. If nobody notices, nobody reads what I've written, nobody sees my photos, did I do anything? Perhaps, but that would be the most negative and discouraging way of looking at it. Minimally, if I write and photograph daily, for hundreds of days, I will have much more experience in both. Anybody doing something like writing or taking photos daily, for any prolonged period, is going to get better at it, if only by doing it slightly faster. Any awareness of increasing quality while performing regularly, will produce increased quality.
I would invite anybody, who practices any skill, to begin to practice it with more regularity, today, January 1, 2014. Then continue on January 2nd, 3rd, and continue. If you have not shown yourself as much discipline as you know you need to accomplish your goals, start practicing today. Then do it again, tomorrow. Is it important to you to get better? Do a third day. Do you really want to get good. Do it a twelfth day. How expert do you want to be? Do it a thirtieth day. Go. Be you. Develop your skill. Make it yours.
That's it. I am not going to encourage you more. It really has to come from within you. If it does not, you may quit on day six. Ask yourself, how important is what you want. For someone to give it to you is just not as important as you conceiving of it, thinking about it, and making it come to pass. To not do it is failure.
These are really my words to myself. I write to myself. Write more. Write more frequently. Write more originally. Write more imaginatively. Write more tightly, more efficiently. Be more interesting. Be more compelling. Write like your life depends on it.
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