The Poetry of Dorothea Mackellar

I'm not sure how it happened, but my Australian buddy and I got to talking about poetry the other day. He began quoting a poem he'd learned in school. It's called My Country, and was written by Dorothea Mackellar (1885-1968).

I just had to look her up, and what I found amazed me. Frankly, I'm not much into poetry. I've never really understood it, I guess. I'd rather read good prose anytime. But the poems I read from her were so moving, so touching ... it was obvious that she had worked hard to make sure every word was in just the right place to carry the exact shade of meaning she wanted. Her poems don't just paint pictures, they tug at my heart and pull me into her pictures.

I'll quote a couple of her shorter poems here, and if you want more I'll suggest The Official Dorothea Mackellar Site.

The Waiting Life
Since it befell, with work and strife
I had not time to live my life
I turned away from it until
Work should be done and strife be still.

My hands and head for use are free,
Nor does my own life worry me,
But docile as a spaniel waits
Until this present stress abates.

Tranquil it breathes, and waits, I know,
With all its joy contained. But oh
I hope when I have time to play
My life will not have run away!

This next one really surprised me at how much it touched my emotions.

An Old Song
The almond bloom is overpast, the apple blossoms blow.
I never loved but one man, and I never told him so.

My flowers will never come to fruit, but I have kept my pride -
A little, cold, and lonely thing, and I have naught beside.

The spring-wind caught my flowering dreams, they lightly blew away.
I never had but one true love, and he died yesterday.

If you have no time to read any more of her poetry, I hope you can at least read about "a sunburnt country" in My Country, which is probably her most famous poem.

Movie Review: Dancer, Texas Pop. 81

Dancer, Texas Pop. 81 (1998)

Written and Directed by Tim McCanlies

Rated PG

Starring: Breckin Meyer, Peter Facinelli, Ethan Embry and Eddie Mills

From the DVD Jacket:

"Keller (Breckin Meyer) has wanted to leave Dancer, Texas since he was a child. At 12 he enlisted his best friends, Squirrel (Ethan Embry), Terrell Lee (Peter Facinelli) and John (Eddie Mills) in a solemn oath that they would all ditch Dancer after high school graduation. But when the boys gather on graduation night, each finds his own reasons to reconsider their vow."

The entire movie takes place in a 48-hour span from the Saturday morning of graduation day until Monday morning when the bus leaves town. The setting is Dancer, a very small town in the middle of nowhere, west Texas. It's the largest graduating class in school history, four guys and one girl. As mentioned above, the four guys have made a "solemn oath" that on the Monday following graduation, they would catch the bus for Los Angeles to find their fortunes. They even bought their bus tickets two years earlier.

Keller has lived with his grandpa ever since his parents died. Grandpa isn't getting any younger. Though Keller's dream is to go to LA, perhaps Grandpa needs him more?

Squirrel and his dad "the drunk" live in a trailer house on the outskirts of Dancer. The trailer sits at a precarious tilt. Seems his dad was drunk when he parked it, and never got around to leveling it ... been that way for 12 years. Squirrel can't wait to get out of there, but things may have changed during the weekend?

John is a natural-born rancher. His dad is adamant that at age 18, a boy becomes a man and is on his own. Nothing is handed to him, and dad owes him nothing. He's probably not going to be at home in a city of 13 million, but there's nothing for him on the ranch in Dancer. Or is there?

Terrell Lee's family is in the oil business. His domineering mother is insistent that he's going to go into the oil business with his dad as an executive in a white shirt. He needs to get out of Dancer to see what else there is, but can he stand up to his mother?

As events unfold, the whole town is abuzz with wondering how many (if any) of the boys will actually board the bus come Monday morning. One man even "smells a betting opportunity" and immediately starts taking wagers.

Tim McCanlies develops characters in an amazing way. His knack for that is evident in another of my favorite movies, Secondhand Lions. The one complaint I've read about this movie in online reviews is that "nothing happens". Well, there isn't any gory death, no car chase, no sex. But perhaps "nothing happens" is the very point of the movie? If you grew up in a small town, or care about someone who did, this movie will resonate with you.

The things I read ...

I was studying a manual on SS7*, and came across the following:

If you are one of those people who say that you will call home and let the telephone ring twice when you get to your destination safely, note that you have no guarantee that the telephone will actually ring twice—or even ring at all. You might hear two rings, but that does not mean the called party will hear two, or even any, rings because their power ringing pattern might be in an off period.

This is because the ringtone you hear in your ear when you're calling someone is generated at your local exchange, and is almost certainly out of sequence from the ring generator (called the "power ringing") at the far exchange. The circuit to the phone you're calling isn't completed until (if) someone answers. It's hard to believe, but those few seconds of leaving the circuit free (or not even using it if nobody answers) add up over thousands and millions of calls. Ultimately, it means the phone companies have to build fewer circuits to carry the same number of calls.
None of this is terribly important anymore ... cellphones have made the incremental cost of long distance calls so low (or even free) that we don't hesitate to call across the country to tell loved ones we arrived safely.

*SS7 stands for "Signaling System 7", the system which handles the setup and teardown of circuits for telephone calls. SS7 makes such things as caller ID and cellphone roaming possible. It is a fascinating system. Well, OK ... it is to me.

Thoughts on the election

Now that B. Hussein Obama has completed his purchase of the Presidency, a few thoughts.

I was on the campus of William Jewell College yesterday. Melissa says that there must be a budget line-item in the Obama campaign's books for sidewalk chalk. Sure enough, every few feet on all the sidewalks I was on, there was another "Vote Obama" message. One said, "Want more green cars on the road?" Another, "Worried about finding a job?" And another said, "Want affordable healthcare? Vote Obama."

The problem is, that few people (and least of all college students) stop to consider the cost of those options. Putting more green cars on the road, giving people jobs, paying for healthcare ... they all seem like good ideas, but they all have a cost. By conveniently ignoring the cost, the tax-and-spenders can buy votes with promises of things, and the voters just eat it up and march in lockstep to the polls.

In some ways, the cut-taxes-and-spend crowd is worse, because they want to buy your vote from both ends: What you'll get, and it will even cost less. Every politician tells us they want to cut out the porkbarrel spending, but it's those very porky projects that buy re-election votes. If a Congressperson truly turned down everything of a porcine nature for the home state, he or she would be out of a job come the next election, no question about it.

But giving people who won't work a bunch of freebies paid for by those who will is precisely the wrong way to build or sustain a great nation. It encourages mediocrity, or worse. When asked, "What is wrong with the redistribution of wealth, which Obama talked about as far back as a 2001 interview?", Senator McCain said it very well:

That is a bold, left-wing view of how you help people that's been tried in other countries. In America, you don't take money from one group and give it to another. You create jobs, create opportunities, and give people the ability to accumulate wealth. We have Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance. But to somehow say that when "Joe the Plumber" reaches a certain income level, we're going to take money from him and give it to somebody else, that's a fundamental contradiction of what made this country the strongest and greatest nation in the world.
Business Week November 10, 2008, p.20

Religious Minorities: Muslims in Germany, Christians in Turkey

Another interesting article from the BBC:

Free to believe?

One part that I found particularly interesting is where the Catholic nun said that she has no trouble whatsoever from her Muslim neighbors. Even the mayor of the city would like to turn the church back over to the Christians, but he's prevented by the national government. One assumes that the national government is under pressure from prominent religious figures (what the media likes to call "extremists").

It's a sobering lesson, when we think about the pressures that are exerted on our government by extremists ... and not just those of a religious nature. Do we forgive it when we agree with those exerting the pressure? Should we?