Downward-facing bore.

A friend of mine started inviting me to this yoga class on Saturdays. And I started going. I have to confess: I’m not much of a yoga girl. I find it impossible to clear my mind, let alone breathe shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip. I plugged my way through some hot yoga a year ago, but everything else has been oh-this-stuff-again.

But you can never step into the same river twice, as some yogi undoubtedly said at some point, and this time, I dunno, it sort of clicked. I couldn’t clear my mind — that is never going to happen, sorry — but the breathing suddenly made sense and I could feel how it’s not just fancy stretchin’ but actual isometric exercise. And then I downloaded Neal Pollack’s book of yoga essays — yep, it’s on the right rail — and long story short, today I ditched Gentle Flow for Power Lunch and oh, I fear I’ve stepped onto a train that is leaving the station and all I can do is hang on and wave until it crashes into Boring Station. It may already be there, in fact. I may be That Person at the party, but if I am, I’d really like to have that incredible posture that person always has. Not there yet.

Yoga is fucking awesome. Let that be the last thing I say about it.

No, this: The other day I was lying in bed, reading, and stretched my leg out at a strange angle, just for the feels, and it not only went there, it went beyond. This is how they hook you, those yoga people.

So, how was everybody’s Tuesday? Mine? Cold and snowy, but I got out in it anyway. The snowfall finally broke the last record and I’ll give it this: It was pretty. But now it should go away. Back in the 60s by Thursday.

One of my neighbors had a pet raccoon. She said the family came down one morning and found the animal had escaped its cage, wrecked the kitchen, and was sitting on its fat ass, legs spread and an open bag of marshmallows between them, dipping them one by one into the canister of sugar. (Not sure if I believe every detail of that.) Anyway, things worked out better for her than it did for this girl. Mauled by a raccoon as a baby, now having her face reconstructed.

Don’t keep raccoons as pets.

I haven’t been watching CNN since the Malaysian plane went down, but apparently they’ve gone mad? New York magazine has a roundup, with video links.

Happy hump day, all. See you tomorrow.

Posted at 12:30 am in Current events, Media, Same ol' same ol' |
 

49 responses to “Downward-facing bore.”

  1. Dexter said on April 16, 2014 at 12:56 am

    nance, your 3 inch snowfall made the NBC Nightly News as it was indeed the deal breaker, 2013-14 is the champ.

    In searching for an army comrade I found his Facebook, we sent a couple hellos back and forth, then silence , then a message from his brother, suicide. That was two years ago and the brother and I have been in touch, just checking in once in a while. He just messaged me a few minutes ago about this same topic: ” I really didn’t work for animal control, just giving a friend some flack over her feeding the raccoons.
    the city of Bremerton [Washington] is thinking of fining people since these raccoons become such a nuisance inside the city limits.”

    Oh, that crown I popped off a molar and had to go today for a re-cementing? Scratch that! Too many years, after the tooth was newly prepped the crown didn’t fit and I had to spring for a new one. bye-bye $$$$

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  2. Dexter said on April 16, 2014 at 1:10 am

    Fargo premiered Tuesday night on FX. It’s centered in Bemidji, Minnesota. Billy Bob plays a villain who resembles the devil himself. I thought it contained a little too much ultra-violence packed into too short a time frame.

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  3. Sherri said on April 16, 2014 at 1:32 am

    Raccoons are nasty creatures. Raccoons lived in the street sewers in my neighborhood in California. One night, a raccoon reached in and opened the magnetic cat door in one of my neighbors’ front door, went into the house, and bit their sleeping 5 year old daughter. Hello, rabies shots!

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  4. alex said on April 16, 2014 at 4:18 am

    Isn’t it illegal to keep raccoons as pets?

    One of my partner’s in-laws nursed an orphaned baby raccoon with a bottle and kept it on their farm. Its mother and siblings were dead in the road after being hit by a car. There’s some concern about getting busted for having a raccoon living in their barn, although it’s unlikely the authorities would ever show up there.

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  5. Basset said on April 16, 2014 at 6:54 am

    Meanwhile, Big Gubmint oppresses Real Americans once again – getting between a man and his raccoon, the people are gonna straighten that out come Election Day:

    http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/04/coonrippy-for-governor-mark-brown-tennessee-105313.html#.U05gFym9K0c

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  6. beb said on April 16, 2014 at 8:19 am

    Read a couple articles yesterday that sort of mirror-image each other. First was word that Microsoft has announced that it will no longer support Windows 8.1. This was a little confusing because I thought 8.1 was the newest version of Windows but apparently they a version beyond that (8.1.1?) that Microsoft wants everyone to up-grade to. Only, the article continued, MS has been having trouble with the up-grade failing to install. I’m beginning to think MS ought to just offer a free down-grade to 7 until they get the bugs out of 8 and jump ahead to 9. Or something.

    The other story was about a bunch of hobbyists who are working to create an emulator for the Commodore 64 on the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is a computer on a card that retails for like $35. It’s been wildly successful among hobbyists because you can do just about anything with it. The thought of emulating an 8-bit computer from the 80s, though, seems a bit extreme. It’s hard to imagine anything about the Commodore worth emulating. But there you are. If people clinging to their ten year old XP computers are crazy, what about people still wanting to play with their 30 year old Commodores?

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  7. Julie Robinson said on April 16, 2014 at 8:23 am

    We used to have trouble with raccoons getting into our trash, and you only have to clean-up that up once to despise them. A pet? Crazy. They probably never lived in the country, where you develop a healthy respect for wildlife and learn to keep your distance.

    The PT I do for my feet is yoga under another name, and if I skip more than a day they let me know.

    From my facebook feed, Finns break new ground on stamps: http://time.com/63463/this-is-the-worlds-most-homoerotic-stamp/. Possibly NSFW as there is a bare bum.

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  8. Dorothy said on April 16, 2014 at 8:32 am

    Had a delicious dinner at Elevator Brewery last night with husband, son and d-i-l, and then we all commenced to Nationwide Arena to listen to Bruce Springsteen rock. It was a great night, but I confess I like his younger, wilder self better. I saw him twice before and his hijinks from 29 years ago were such fun. Still, it was a terrific concert. Some of favorite times were when he backed himself up to the audience on several strolls he took along the edges of the stage. Women kissed him and stroked his head and hugged every whichaway. And when he invited two young girls up on stage to sing (handed them the mic and everything, while he bemusedly watched from behind them), one of the girls gestured to her dad (I could read her lips cuz they had such great camera work on the big screens) and asked if he could come up, too. And of course Bruce said okay. Then the four of them finished up the song. But the best time of all was when I got to sing Born to Run with my youngest belting it out along side me!

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  9. Ann said on April 16, 2014 at 9:06 am

    Thanks for the Finnish stamp lead, now on my own FB page. Turns out there’s a new problem in philately–how do you get self-adhesive stamps off envelopes? Apparently you can’t just soak them off like you used to. http://stamporama.com/discboard/disc_main.php?action=20&id=5306

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  10. coozledad said on April 16, 2014 at 9:12 am

    In the runup to the May 6 primary in NC, our Democratic Women’s group has been meeting at a Chinese restaurant that has a couple of big screen TVs going all the time, one tuned to ESPN and the other to CNN. We’ve been there three times since the airliner went missing, and every time you look up at the CNN TV it’s a goddamn submersible, or Wolf Blitzer talking to a guy about a submersible.

    There’s been a domestic right-wing terror attack this week, and a bunch of fat Mormons have shat on the constitution and are getting the pee-pees licked by the right wing media. Nothing on CNN about it.

    I’m surprised they haven’t worked in a segment about the American Airlines tweet with the woman with a model airliner in her snatch. It’s content, it’s an airplane, and it’s a snatch. Win!

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  11. mark said on April 16, 2014 at 9:42 am

    “…when silly takes over, you stop being a news outlet.”

    CNN passed that milestone a long time ago.

    The NYT has a higher regard for the two dozen people that used to watch CNN news than they do for the four dozen that watch it now.

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  12. Peter said on April 16, 2014 at 9:43 am

    Our neighborhood used to have a terrific raccoon problem – attacking dogs and going through the cloth tops cars – but now I miss them.

    The skunks have muscled them off the turf, and, oy, the stench!

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  13. Gena Taylor said on April 16, 2014 at 9:45 am

    Thanks for the yoga inspiration. Hate it so much, I forget that I love it. Ok, fine. I’ll go tonight.

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  14. Jolene said on April 16, 2014 at 9:45 am

    CNN’s constant focus on the missing plane has been the subject of much hilarity on Twitter and elsewhere online. Nothing funny about the missing plane, of course, but the constant presence of six experts, none of whom have information to impart, is pretty ridiculous.

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  15. Jolene said on April 16, 2014 at 9:51 am

    On the other hand, I saw a really interesting interview with the CEO of the company that manufactured the submersible machine that is capturing sonar images of the ocean floor. Very cool to learn a bit about how it works, what its constraints are, etc. Made me appreciate, once again, engineers who can do things that would never even have occurred to me.

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  16. Deborah said on April 16, 2014 at 10:34 am

    Peter, I wondered why we don’t see raccoons around, of course it’s the skunks. In the early morning we used to see a cute raccoon family that had a regular commute over the garden shed roof, then along the back fence, there were 4 or 5 of them in a row. I’ve said this before that Santa Fe occasionally has bears that come into town, some were spotted not too far from us, we are about a block from the river

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  17. Charlotte said on April 16, 2014 at 10:44 am

    I’ll keep my skunks if they’re the ones keeping the raccoons at bay. Raccoons are nasty creatures, and I’m sure my backyard chickens would be toast if we had them around here.

    Nance — I’m with you on the late-to-the-party yoga thing. I’m still in the DVD in my living room stage, but finding it quite interesting …

    We had an animal control brouhaha here last week. An ailing moose bedded down in the town park, and FWP shot it in the heart and lungs (so they could test the head for Wasting Disease). Much hysteria ensued. Even here, where people should know that you can’t just lead the dying moose off to a secluded area before killing the poor thing. Our militarized police didn’t help either — yelling at the upset people. A real scene.

    Okay, off for my morning rendezvous with Rodney Yee …

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  18. Heather said on April 16, 2014 at 10:48 am

    Thanks for all the condolences about my cat yesterday–they definitely helped. It was a sad day but I am comforted that his suffering is over.

    I actually know Neal Pollack from college. He is quite a character, and not someone who I would ever peg as getting into yoga, but that is the beauty of people. His books seem to be making a fairly good splash in that niche. I think he writes yoga mysteries too! I liked yoga a lot, and experienced the same kind of euphoria, but the time commitment is too much for me. Classes are typically an hour and half long and by the time you go there and back and shower etc–it’s half the day gone. I take it the lunch yoga is shorter.

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  19. Sue said on April 16, 2014 at 11:08 am

    My lunchtime yoga, 10 minutes and a perfect all-over stretch.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4U_Hvhekmo

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  20. Deborah said on April 16, 2014 at 11:14 am

    Some former office mates took a lunch yoga class, when they came back they told how the female instructor kept queefing while demonstrating the positions. She told the students that it was an occupational hazard that you will queef if you are properly relaxed. That was the end of me wanting to learn yoga in a public setting.

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  21. Colleen said on April 16, 2014 at 11:31 am

    I took yoga years ago and loved it, once I got into the flow of things. I should take it again, the on my feet nature of my current job has me all stove up. Somewhere is my “Yoga for Inflexible People” DVD, which I should probably dig out and start using…

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  22. brian stouder said on April 16, 2014 at 11:31 am

    And we have a winner!

    Deborah, that is an excellent ‘word of the day’

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  23. brian stouder said on April 16, 2014 at 12:14 pm

    …And, I (for one) will offer two cheers to CNN on the missing-plane thing. Like most of us, this story has turned my head. It is both terrible and fearsome – Boeing 777’s don’t just fly off the grid and disappear without a trace, right? This is more or less impossible, isn’t it? While I subscribe to the (current) conventional wisdom that the plane was flown into the Indian Ocean west of Australia (for whatever reason), I have the unsettling feeling that the tin-foil-hat club view – that the plane was landed somewhere, and the disappearance was only the opening act – has at least a scintilla (plus or minus a scosh) of a chance of actually being true…which would be catastrophically bad for civilization in general, and big cities/sky scrapers specifically.

    By way of saying – not altogether sarcastically – I like that I can pop to CNN at any time, and hear if there’s anything new that we know. I suspect that whoever runs CNN made the same decision that Perry White of the Daily Planet (think Superman!) made, when he saw the caped crusader (or whatever) and told his people that he wanted to OWN that story

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  24. alex said on April 16, 2014 at 1:41 pm

    My fave new drag queen name:

    Queef Latina!

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  25. brian stouder said on April 16, 2014 at 1:45 pm

    …and she ain’t just ‘puttin’ on airs’!

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  26. Dexter said on April 16, 2014 at 3:44 pm

    alex ,you just knocked me off my swivel chair a-laffin’! 🙂

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  27. ROGirl said on April 16, 2014 at 6:29 pm

    Last spring a skunk took up residence close to my house, and it sprayed the area a number of times. I called a guy to bring in a trap. He left a can of cat food in it and caught a raccoon. I had him take the raccoon away, he said he lets them go on a piece of property he owns. He brought back the trap and caught another raccoon. The skunk went back to the woods and I was rid of 2 raccoons. They come up to the house at night and when I turn on the light they just stand there looking at me with their beady eyes, then they turn around slowly and go up a tree. One time I found a dead one by the house. I have always suspected that my neighbor threw it over the fence — I found used pregnancy tests on my side of the fence when there were teenage girls living there.

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  28. Sherri said on April 16, 2014 at 7:55 pm

    This is the company that Washington just gave a $9 billion tax break to: http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2023383110_boeingbrtxml.html

    This is the same company that had $6 billion in profit last year while getting a federal tax refund of $199 million: http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2023383110_boeingbrtxml.html

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  29. Dexter said on April 16, 2014 at 8:09 pm

    A much younger friend recently took up-hooked up with a much younger (to him) lady friend who among other things instructs a spinning class. My poor old (relatively) friend almost died after his first class. It really “did him in” and scared him when his heart wouldn’t slow down after the session. Finally he calmed down and relaxed and limped home where he had to apply frozen vegetable packs to aching legs. For me, a spinning class would surely finish me off pronto.

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  30. Dexter said on April 17, 2014 at 5:14 am

    blog.sfgate.com/chronstyle/2014/04/16/coachella-style-body-paint-fanny-packs-and-crop-tops/#22429101=0

    So this is what Coachella is all about. I DAMN-sure wouldn’t fit in..you?

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  31. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on April 17, 2014 at 7:05 am

    beb @ #6 — you’d do it so you can run “Telengard”!

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  32. brian stouder said on April 17, 2014 at 9:24 am

    Further to our earlier discussion about how the Midwest has fresh water, and the west has a looming fresh water problem, there’s this –

    http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/17/us/oregon-teen-urinates-into-water-supply/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

    an amazing article. Leaving aside the lunk-head who literally possed away 50 million gallons of drinking water(!) – how can this be so easy to do?

    Is this not the post-9/11 America security state?

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  33. brian stouder said on April 17, 2014 at 9:26 am

    (make that “pissed”!)

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  34. mark said on April 17, 2014 at 9:44 am

    Flushing (or retreating)38 million gallons of clean water over a few ounces of urine makes a mockery of all the in-home conservation efforts discussed here the last couple of days. Good call, City of Portland.

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  35. nancy said on April 17, 2014 at 9:49 am

    Especially considering urine is sterile and won’t hurt you to drink it. Sailors and others have sustained hydration on pee for short periods countless times in the past.

    Sorry no entry today. I was at a journalism banquet last night, and you know how those things go.

    (Won a couple of awards, as did my colleagues. More tomorrow.)

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  36. brian stouder said on April 17, 2014 at 9:54 am

    Well, y’know – tomorrow’s post will be doubly good (making up for today) if it has a photo or two, too…

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  37. brian stouder said on April 17, 2014 at 12:01 pm

    we will also mention that friend-of-nn.c Mark GiaQuinta, who is the president of the Board of Trustees of our superb Fort Wayne Community Schools, was on fire at the last meeting, with an impassioned defense of our teachers, and a scathing denunciation of a state legislator who impugned them all, by denigrating Indiana’s high teacher-ratings, and concurrent low standardized test scores.

    The legislator basically said our teachers must be over-rated – and GQ absolutely flattened the faulty logic in that guy’s attempted tarring of our public school teachers, and it was very like a revival meeting, by the end of his statement.

    All across Fort Wayne, parents and students and teachers and administrators do what needs done – every day – and indeed go above and beyond that as a matter of course.

    I really do see this issue – public common schools versus publically funded “private” schools – as the one issue that could make me march in the street

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  38. brian stouder said on April 17, 2014 at 12:02 pm

    make that ‘president of the FWCS board of trustees‘…

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  39. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on April 17, 2014 at 12:23 pm

    Was it . . . a *major* award?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzht2_41caU

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  40. MichaelG said on April 17, 2014 at 1:18 pm

    Sounds like congrats are in order, Nancy.

    Here’s a good story. Especially for all you Ohio folks:
    http://www.buzzfeed.com/amyksaunders/the-untold-story-of-the-first-woman-to-fly-around-the-world

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  41. Kirk said on April 17, 2014 at 3:12 pm

    Amy, writer of the Jerrie Mock story, is late of the Columbus Dispatch. I remember following Mock’s exploits in the Columbus papers as a young feller.

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  42. Dave said on April 17, 2014 at 3:25 pm

    The disappearance of Flight 370 reminds me of when Jimmy Hoffa disappeared over forty years ago. Always another new lead.

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  43. Joe Kobiela said on April 17, 2014 at 4:30 pm

    Amazing what she did, now you can’t get new pilots to go 50 miles without gps. She went around the world.
    Pilot Joe

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  44. Dave said on April 17, 2014 at 4:42 pm

    Yes, I remember reading about Jerrie Mock, too, need to read that story to find out the real story.

    Other poster Dave, who’s been Dave on here (and elsewhere) for always.

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  45. Little Bird said on April 17, 2014 at 4:42 pm

    RIP Gabriél Garcia Marquez.
    http://www.buzzfeed.com/adriancarrasquillo/famed-novelist-gabriel-garcia-marquez-has-died?s=mobile

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  46. brian stouder said on April 17, 2014 at 5:53 pm

    MichaelG – great link!

    And indeed, that woman should have been a rock-star (her watch would be right in 2014 style!); maybe the space program made the 1964 crowd overlook her astounding accomplishment.

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  47. LAMary said on April 17, 2014 at 10:48 pm

    I don’t think skunks and raccoons are mutually exclusive. I have both of them abundantly. Also coyotes and possums.

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  48. alex said on April 17, 2014 at 11:20 pm

    Dude looks like a lady.

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  49. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on April 17, 2014 at 11:36 pm

    Y’all need to follow my friend & parishoner @Fly38Charlie on Twitter! She republished Jerrie’s book last year, giving us the final push to put up her statue here in Newark OH, which got a copy placed today at Port Columbus. Wendy did great work on this.

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