When In Doubt or Fear Take A Deep Breath

It is the stories that we tell each other. Our life experiences and those of our kind. This is a short story about perception, fear and riding the rails. The Los Angeles Sheriff Department (LASD) patrols the unincorporated areas of Los Angeles. They also have jurisdiction over the jail system and provide security services for our mass transit system.You need to know something about the Sheriff deputies. The deputies do go through a training system...

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Just How Inclusive Do We Want To Be?

I want to talk about about something that is hard for a non-academic person to articulate let alone try to put into a public post. What does inclusive mean anymore in a public space? This posts is not about feminism, Miley Cyrus, Fast Company, Twitter or the patriarchy. They do play a part in this musing but not really what I want to talk about.It is about the audience. We are the audience except when we are not, as in not seen or acknowledge. It...

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Learning Again How to Carrying the Bags Home

Living in the Southland is never constant. Life might seem the same day after day but then the next day does a wooga-wooga on you. You have to re-calibrate.Take plastic shopping bags. South Pasadena say yes, Pasadena say no. Long Beach says no, Los Angeles is thinking about it.Los Angeles is always thinking about stuff. Takes them a good chunk of chew time to do anything and when they do decide it will cost the citizens more in the short, middle...

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Harriet Tubman - Lift Her Up!

It is time for clean up duty. The damage has been done. The Russell Simmons video that was an alleged comedy about Sister Tubman has been pulled from YouTube. I suspect there may be other copies of the video that will be posted again and again.There are people who insist that it is their right to laugh at the video and call it funny. It is their way of fighting political correctness. Those people are not my immediate concern.  There is a problem that we can do something about. Nothing goes away on the Internet. That damn title of the video...

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Not Able to Write the Ballad of Duan Huego

I wish I could write satire. I can see Duan Huego galloping into the village; his steely eyes talking in the droopy draw-ed teenagers as he smiles at the peasant women who light up when they see him. Old spice in the noon day sun.Yes, indeed, it could be a laugh riot. Cept I don't know how to write satire. And I don't do humor well. Still, I would kinda start out with something like: The Ballad of Duan HuegoImaging, if you will, the sound of a galloping...

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Kathleen Sebelius on Preventative Health Care Services - BlogHer 2013

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius spoke at the BlogHer 2013 HealthMinder Day Keynote session. In this clip, Ms. Sebelius talks about some of the preventative services available to women under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act; often referred to as Obamacare.Some of those services are:An annual well-woman preventive care visit for adult women.Contraception and contraceptive counseling: Women with reproductive capacity have access to all Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptive methods, sterilization...

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Waiting for Harlan at the Barbershop

It has been a few weeks since this happened. Maybe I have a better perspective from a distance. I don’t know. To recap, I had an opportunity to see Harlan Ellison in Los Angeles and I took it. This involved trains, Hollywood Boulevard and buses. And my ability to get lost when I think a place is other than where I think it should be.After the tour barker incident and waiting 20+ minutes for the right bus I arrived at the 4300 block of Hollywood Boulevard....

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