Merry Christmas

Oh tidings of comfort and joy
Comfort and joy
Oh tidings of comfort and joy

This Summer I Hear The Drumming

These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
-Thomas Paine (1737 - 1809) American political activist, philosopher, political theorist and revolutionary.


I have voted in every city, state, and federal primary and election I have been entitled to since 1972. My mother taught me to never vote a straight ticket but instead to vote for the person who I thought would do the best job.

This advise came from a woman who was a diehard Democrat. I was also a registered Democrat until about 20 years ago when I switched to unaffiliated. Even though I wasn't part of either major political party, I still adhered to my mother's advice. This year will be different. This year I will be voting a straight Democratic ticket since this election is too important to do anything else. Our craven Republican Congress must lose control of both the House and the Senate if we are going to continue as a democratic nation.

This Republican Congress has put their party before country, Donald Trump before national security, law and order before the Constitution, and the rich and corporations before the people. It advocates a Christian form of sharia law and a fascist form of government where the checks and balances written into the Constitution is overridden by presidential executive orders.

It has a Senate leader who quashes any legislation that threatens that power instead of letting the democratic process function the way it is supposed to function. The Republican Party has lost its way and should no longer be a major political party. I am going to do my part in making this happen by using my greatest weapon, my vote. You must do the same.

Vote-let Donald Trump, this Republican administration and this Republican Congress know we reject their cowardly, venal, corrupt, bullying ways.

Vote- no matter what, don't throw away your greatest weapon.

Who Are You? Who, Who, Who, Who?

When Trump went off script during his Naval Academy commencement address, he repeated himself, rambled, bragged about himself, and, unconsciously, told us a lot about his fears and insecurities :

-Thank you. Thank you. Hello, midshipmen, hello ( Let me say to the entire brigade—please be at ease—enjoy yourselves, because we are all here to celebrate the amazing class of 2018.) Amazing job. Thank you. Really something.

-for the record, this year, Navy beat Army 19 times. And I will not mention, I promised, who won the football game. I will not mention it. I refuse to say it. But that is a great achievement.

-And let me take a guess, you are still not tired of winning. Winning is such a great feeling, isn’t it? Winning is such a great feeling.

- Hello, folks, back there.

-(Victory.) A very important word.

- And we are respected again, I can tell you that. We are respected again. A lot of things have happened. We are respected again.

-(Bruce Voorhees.) Well-known all over.

-(he spent most of his time teaching the city slickers from the east the correct pronunciation of Nevada.) And I had to learn that, too, to win the state. Great place.

-(he was just like you in many ways.) Just like you. Not a lot of difference.

-(and 35) very tough, very well conditioned (Navy SEALs.)

-And in case you have not noticed, we have become a lot stronger lately. A lot.

- No money for the military? Those days are over.

-you have read all about it,

-a $700 billion, largest-ever amount of money to support our great war fighters. And I might add that next year—the $700 billion, not million. They’re liking the sound of million, but billion is better-the $700 billion goes to $716 billion,

-and we are going to be stronger than ever before. We will have the strongest military that we have ever had, and it won’t even be close. And when did we need it more than now?

-That means new ships. You like that. We have now the lowest number of ships we have had since World War I. And very soon, we are going to get to 355 beautiful ships. That is almost a couple of hundred more ships. So you will be around for a long time. We are not running out of equipment. We’re not running out of ships. And that has been approved. And we are honored by it.

--(You are going to have new equipment, and well-deserved pay raises. We just got to a big pay raise for the first time in 10 years). We got to a big pay increase, first time in over 10 years. I fought for you. That was the hardest one to get. But you never had a chance of losing.

-We are going to take care of our veterans. We are doing a great job with it. We are taking care, finally, after decades, we are taking care of our veterans.

- (We passed VA accountability.) Everybody said it could not be done. If you didn’t do a good job, ou could not get fired. Now, you don’t do a good job and take care of our veterans, they will look you in the eye and they say, “Jim, you’re fired! You’re out! Out!” Get him out of here. They all said you could not get it. They tried to get it for 35 years. We will say, “Get him out of here, he doesn’t take care of our vets.”

-And hopefully, we never have to use all of this beautiful, new, powerful equipment. But you know, you are less likely to have to use it if you have it and know how to work it. And nobody knows how to work it like you.

-(Victory, winning,) beautiful words, but that is what it is all about.

-(We are rebuilding our defense industrial base to forge American iron, aluminum, and steel,) which, by the way, we just put tariffs on when it comes in from other countries. Okay? We are taking in a lot of money now, our country. They pay that big, beautiful tariff and it goes right into building new ships.

-(Don’t give up the ship.) Famous phrase. We even use it in business. Things are going bad, you say, “Don’t give up the ship.” Keep fighting. Don’t give up the ship. But it’s really—you guys started it.

- (“Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead.”) Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

- What should I do? What should I do? I’ll stay. I’ll stay. I will stay.

This Little Light Of Mine, I'm Gonna Let It Shine

I followed this car for a couple of miles at lunchtime and we finally got stopped by road construction. Now you know why America is so messed up. It's because we are messed up. Those who love and admire Jesus are aggressive, hateful, and dismissive as hell. The irony is they do not see the irony in that.

Top left- You Give Peace A Chance

               I Will Cover You When It Doesn't Work

Top middle- Do You Follow Jesus This Close ?

Top right- You Have Your Family
                 I Have Mine
(Above a row of assault rifles and handguns)

Bottom left- Get Off My Ass Before I Inflate Your Airbags

Bottom middle- I Miss John Wayne & Real America Values
(With profile of John Wayne in a cowboy hat.)

Bottom right- Box with Cross (Pro God), Box with Gun (Pro Gun), Box with Heart (Pro Life), Box with Obama for President logo and a line drawn through it (Anti-Obama).

Under licence plate- I Miss John Wayne

S'Wonderful

I drove down to Denver today to have lunch with my sister at the Punchbowl Social in the old air traffic control tower at Stapleton. (Tip- if you are a grown up without any children, eat in the bar on the second level.)  After that we went to Rare Finds Warehouse which has furniture and an eclectic bunch of stuff.  We spend almost a couple of hours wandering around looking at everything. And then I saw this:

So now I am a proud owner of my own piece of Denver history.  This five-loaf pan still has bits of crust attached around the top edges.  The darn thing weighs about 10 pounds.

Cosby Found Guilty As Sexual Assault Awareness Month Comes To An End

I know this is a snarky headline but Caitlin Doughty is even better at snark than I am.

Read article about guilty verdict here.

What A Difference A Day Makes

Yesterday with 40 MPH winds and over-tilled soil.

Today.

Every Morning I Make Three Beds

Before

After

Okay, Venus? Okay, Steve. Right, Let's Go!

-Opening lines of Fireball XL5

Why does this supposed high tech spy device that Homeland Security says is being used by bad guys to track phones in Washington DC look like something built by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson for one of their Supermarionation puppet series?

Physical Education

-Systematic instruction in sports, exercises, and hygiene given as part of a school program. (Dictionary.com)

The Internet is a dangerous place. Ran across this photo and had a flashback of myself wearing one of these and standing in the Morey Jr High School gym. The gym had a strip of wood about a foot wide just above our heads that went around three of the walls. There were number painted on it from 1 to  somewhere in the hundreds. After we changed into some version of this lovely garment, we had to line up along the walls and under our assigned number. When the gym teacher blew her whistle we put our hand over our number and she walked by us and marked down any number not cover by a hand. It was a good system but it seemed to take forever. I swear my number was seventy-two. 

Where Have All The Children Gone?

I took a bus down to Denver Saturday for the March For Our Lives and the driver on the bus back shared his views on gun control (against) with some of the people on the bus. I was only half listening to him. At one point he started talking about human trafficking and said 1,800 kids a day disappear in Colorado. I got out my phone and did the math: 1,800 kids/day x 365 days/year = 657,000 kids/year. This, according to the US Census Bureau, in a state were the number of children between the ages of birth to 17 is 625,190. If what he said was true, I think we would notice. People have got to start questioning the crap they are being told.

Light Shadows- 35

Get Up, Stand Up

By their silence the Republican Congress is complicit in Donald Trump's blatant attempts to undermine the US Constitution by ignoring the checks and balances written into the Constitution by our founding fathers. These checks and balances are supposed to keep any one branch of the government from becoming more powerful that the other two but, with the help of this Congress, Trump is hammering away at this critical provision. The silence of this quisling Congress is a great danger to our country. Time for them to admit that they do not really believe in democracy but are actually willing to flirt with fascism in order to remain in power.

Th’ Abuse Of Greatness Is When It Disjoins Remorse From Power.

-Brutus in William Shakespeares' Julias Ceasar (Act 2, Scene 1)

You know, Trump is acting like someone about to be evicted from his home-the ones who break everything and pour cement into the toilet. That bastard is doing the same thing to our government & the presidency as the Republican Congress sits on its ass and does nothing to stop him.

Just When You Think It Couldn't Get Any Worse

Gina Haspel, Trump’s pick for CIA director, tied to use of brutal interrogation measures

-Washington Post headline

"Haspel was in charge of one of the CIA’s “black site” prisons where detainees were subjected to waterboarding and other harrowing interrogation measures widely condemned as torture.
When those methods were exposed and their legality came under scrutiny, Haspel was among a group of CIA officials involved in the decision to destroy videotapes of interrogation sessions that left some detainees on the brink of physical collapse."
-Washington Post

If she is confirmed, our country is nothing more than a gigantic Banana Republic- and I am not talking about the clothing store.

"banana republic: a small country , especially in South and Central American, that is poor, corrupt, and badly ruled"
-Online  Cambridge Dictionary

Every Dog Is A Lion At Home

-Henry George Bohn (1797 - 1884)

I have told my husband time and time again that he is a pushover for the dogs. The other night I walked into the kitchen to find my husband wiping down the counter tops and Belle licking the plates in the dishwasher. I pointed out to him that Belle doesn't do this when I'm cleaning up the kitchen, because when I tell her to stay out of the kitchen, she stays out of the kitchen since she knows I mean it.  My husband said Belle does what he tells her to do, too, and then very sternly said, "Belle! Get out of the kitchen!" 

This is the look she gave him. 

I rest my case.

Gone Girl

Bones discovered on a Pacific island belong to Amelia Earhart, a new forensic analysis claims
-Washington Post

Three things you can always count on, (1) someone announcing they know who Jack the Ripper was, (2) someone announcing they know who killed Elizabeth Short (The Black Dahlia), and (3) someone announcing they know what happened to Amelia Earhart.

The most important paragraph in the Washington Post story:

"A new scientific study claims that bones found in 1940 on the Pacific Island of Nikumaroro belong to Earhart, despite a forensic analysis of the remains conducted in 1941 that linked the bones to a man. The bones, revisited in the study “Amelia Earhart and the Nikumaroro Bones” by University of Tennessee professor Richard L. Jantz, were discarded."

This "scientific study" did not examine the bones because there are no bones. Jantz "analyzed measurements taken in1941 by Dr. D. W. Hoodless, principal of the Central Medical School, Fiji." (Quote from the paper written by Richard L. Jantz.)

So, this guy is basing his conclusions on measurement which could be wrong but cannot be verified since there are no bones.  This is not  scientific study; this is wishful thinking.

Drum Roll, Please

I went down to the basement and found Belle's lobster doing a handstand.  Now, is he showing off or is Belle punishing him?

Yaaaa, Spring Is Almost Here

The Red-winged Blackbirds are back. (Photo from the Audubon Society.)

You don't have to be a member of the NRA to be a law-abiding gun owner. Or is that the NRA's plan- get the government to make sure anyone who owns a gun has to join the NRA? Now that's a scary thought, the NRA as gun registration site for the government. A Second amendment gun right fanatic's worst nightmare.

(Whew) It's Finally Over

The National Rifle Association's America

Light Shadows-34

Making the bed.

Bread And Water Can So Easily Be Toast And Tea

- Celestial Seasonings Tea  saying

I've been eating Dave's Killer Bread for about a year now. My favorite is the thin-sliced Powerseed. I like the way the bread taste and I like the way it toasts, very crunchy. My only problem is with one of the different types of seeds they sprinkle on the top of the bread before they bake it. I don't know what type of seed it is but it falls off the toast and onto the plate while you are buttering it. Well, actually, the problem isn't the seeds falling off the toast. The problem is those seeds look just like baby cockroaches. I'm getting used to that but it's still jolt when I notice the seeds have fallen on the kitchen floor.

"Ahhh, cockroaches! No, wait, they're just bread seeds."

The Adventures Of Rin Tin Tin (Yo Rinny!)

I am reading this right now.

Which got me thinking of this show, The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin from my childhood.






What have I learned so far from reading Rinny's biography? Well, the first Rinny was brought back from France as a pup, along with Rinny's sister Nanette, by a soldier named Lee Duncan at the end of World War I. Want to know where Lee Duncan got the names? Go here.

17 killed in shooting at South Florida high school

-Washington Post

My Senator's tweet and my response to it. 

Practicing The Meditative Art Of Levitation While Pretending To Ski

Francisco Tamagno (1851 - 1933), ca. 1900

Book Room

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty.


Call me weird but I loved this book. It got me thinking about life, death, our healthcare system, and our "I want to live forever," youth obsessed, death denying society. Meet Caitlin in the video below.

They Paved Paradise To Put Up A Parking Lot

I was walking down an aisle at the Goodwill in Fort Collins when I looked up and saw this hanging from the ceiling.  It stopped me in my tracks.  I remember this building. It was one of the Goodwill stores that my mother bought our clothes from when I was a child.  It was also the first Goodwill store in Denver.  I loved that building.  It was big and old with creaky wooden floors and smelled of  wool clothing that had been on the hangers too long mixed in with the smell of dust and old books.  I am not sure when they tore this building down but the land is now a parking lot.  So much of old Denver gone now just so developers could make money.  It breaks my heart.

Belle, Queen Of The Serengeti Plain

SOTU

Trump clapping for himself after SOTU speech.

Well, damn, I missed Trump's State of the Union speech but I did read it online this morning and I see it was the usual Trump lies and the usual attacks on people who aren't white or Christian.

(BTW, did you know that every time a racist says, "God Bless America," he spends another 1,000 years in hell.)

WOOF!

Yesterday morning, Belle is sitting it the front window barking at something I couldn't see.

Loudly, "WOOF!"

"Belle, no."

Loudly, "WOOF!"

"Belle, no."

Loudly, "WOOF!"

"Belle. No!"

(Silence for 10 seconds.)

Softly, "Woof."

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

115th US Congress

It's A Hard Knock Live- Part 2

Deja vu all over again.

Poor Belle was at the vet again. I noticed two side by side what looked like infection bubbles on the inside of her mouth above her lip a week ago Tuesday. Got her back into the vet on Friday. They said if it got any bigger to give them a call.  Sunday night when I looked under her lip I could see that one bubble was a bit larger and a third bubble had formed. So Monday morning I made sure not to feed her and had my husband take a photo of the whatever it was and we  e-mailed it to the vet's office. They said to bring her in. Once they looked at it they agreed it had to come out and we left her there. The doctor said that she is optimist about Belle's surgery because the margins looked good. Next is the pathology report.

Belle is doing great and  wakes up full of energy and demanding her breakfast each morning. The only post surgery limit on her has been to feed her soft food only. I've been putting boiling water in her dry food and the wait for it to soften and cool down drives her crazy. She can smell the kibble and cannot understand why I am not giving it to her right away. In  four days we can go back to normal meals. Hopefully, everything goes back to normal then.

Why Does Marie Callender's Think It Needs To Put The Words "MADE WITH REAL PUMPKIN" On The Box?

Have I been naive thinking store bought pumpkin pie is made with real pumpkin all these years?


Maybe not.

This is the list of ingredients for Blue Bell's Pistachio Almond ice cream:

Milk, Cream, Sugar, Buttermilk, Almonds (Almonds, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Butter, Salt), Corn Syrup, Natural Pistachio Flavor With Other Natural Flavors, Carob Bean Gum, Guar Gum, Mono & Diglycerides, Carrageenan, Blue 1, Yellow 5.


I do not see pistachios on that list that list, only 'natural pistachio flavor" and blue and yellow dye to  make the ice cream green. Not the same thing at all.

I Vote And I Do Jury Duty

Thank God It's Friday

Love and Kisses (1978)

It's A Hard Knock Life

This is Belle tucked into bed with a small goose down blanket wrapped around her on Monday night.  Right before this she had gone potty, finished eating a little chicken and rice with her meds hidden it, and enjoyed some comfort scratches and words.   She had received her second set of PRP  injections at the vet that day and was still recovering from both the shots and the anesthetic.  The  anesthetic was the reason for the down blanket  since she was still cold.  That blanket worked well and she was  toasty warm an hour later.

If you haven't heard of Platelet Rich Plasma injections, they are used to help with severe osteoarthritis.  The first injections she  had done two month ago helped a bit so I am amazed by how much the second ones have helped her already.  The Doctor said she wouldn't show any real improvement until a week had past.  I was rubbing her belly and it finally dawned on me that she was lying in a position where both legs were wide open just like a puppy sleeping on its back.   She is feeling so much better today it is getting hard to keep her as quiet as the vet  wants her to be until Sunday.  So she is on leash walks only, not allowed to go out into the backyard to go potty without being on a leash, and not allowed to go downstairs.  On Sunday we are all free to get on with our normal lives.

And,,,,Done

Finally finished  Doris Goodwin's book , Team Of Rivals, today. I've been reading it at bedtime for the last 6 months and  was about halfway through it when I realized I needed to up my game.  Today I finished the last 100 pages.  This is a book you are either going to love or hate.  It's long, it's detailed, it's well researched, and it's a fascinating story.  It is the story of Abraham Lincoln and the cabinet he put together consisting of  his political rivals.  Men he felt could help him  grow into the job of President  and run a war.  I did not know  anything about the men Lincoln picked and, after reading the book, I also see that I did not understand just how great a president Abraham Lincoln  really was. Doris Goodwin brought them all to life.

Things Go Better With Coca-Cola, Things Go Better With Coke!

Me (left) and my sister (right) before the Blondie concert at the Hollywood Bowl, July 9, 2017.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2018

Martin Luther King Jr.  (1929 - 1968)

WOW!

The New York Daily News has never pulled its punches.  The front page today.

Sewing Book

I found this book the same day I found Ready Set Sew.  When I pulled it out from between two other book and first set eyes on the cover I thought, "Wow, how dated."

Then I found the photo of the author inside, a nice white-haired grandmotherly type, and thought... actually, nothing. My brain could not connect the face in the photo with the illustration on the front cover and the photos on the back cover.  Who was Ann Person and how did she produce such a  incongruous book?

Ann Person is actually a big name in the home sewing field and the author of many books. She started in the late 1960s when she opened a sewing store and started teaching her new knit-sewing technique, Stretch & Sew, to other women. By the  mid 1970s  there were 350 Stretch & Sew stores across the globe.   In 2004 she was inducted into the American Sewing Guild's  Hall of Fame.   

Now back to this book.  After reading the Sewing Guild's Hall of Fame article, I learned that Ann Person's daughter and granddaughter were running the business around this time and that the granddaughter is the model on the back cover of the book.  Incongruity explained.

Sew Splashy, Ann Person (1990)

Hola Amigos!

Estoy aprendiendo español. No hay tiempo para bloguear hoy.
(I am learning Spanish.  No time for blogging today.)

Sewing Book

I'm still collecting vintage sewing books and this is one of my latest.

"The name of the game is fashion sewing-with Butterick on you side, how can you possibly lose?"
-Ready Set Sew by Butterick  (1971) 

Sewing books during this time period seemed to favor  whimsical drawings. 

Speaking Your Truth

"Recy Taylor died ten days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up."
-Oprah Winfrey, Golden Globes, 2018





Oprah Winfrey's speech at the Golden Globes; the Republican Party's worst nightmare.

Listen up GOP. We are coming for you- you who dismiss us, you who demean us, you who patronize us, you who try to control us, and you who undervalue our worth. You, who helped put a bigoted, sexist, racist, demented man into the White House. You, who enable said man in a desperate attempt to hang on to your power over us. We are coming for you.

Yippee, They Made It!

I can take down my Christmas decorations tomorrow.  It was difficult this year to get into Christmas decorating which means I never strung Christmas lights inside my house like I usually do. I did put up my pre-lit Christmas tree and plugged it in but  I did not put any ornaments on the tree except for the Angel on top.  The Christmas spirit did not show up for me this year, too much dark in the world right now.  I guess you could say I had a Blue Christmas without it.





Carrie Rodriguez

First You Draw A Picture

I found this book (All 668 pages of it.) at ARC the other day and have been working my way through it. I must say Walt Kelly's  POGO is one of my favorite comic strips- right up there with George Herriman's  Krazy Kat. He was both a great political satirist and a great cartoonist. He took on Senator Joe McCarthy in the early 1950s and turned him into wildcat named Simple J. Malarkey.

Now I can't help wondering what he would have done with Donald Trump.

Stop Hunting? Never!

My husband took our dogs to a hunting preserve Tuesday and let them each hunt one bird.  Then he staked them out by his guide's truck and hunted some more with the guide's dogs.  After they finished they came back to the truck and put their guns in the back.  That is when the guide's dogs went on point almost right next to the truck.  The guide hesitated, saying, "I think I know what this is about," pulled his gun out of of the truck and walked over to where his dogs were pointing.  He found nothing.  When he came back to the truck he told my husband that sometimes his dogs do not want to stop looking for birds so they pretend there birds hiding in the grass near the truck just so they can continue hunting.  Those dogs sure love their job.

Donald Trump's Statement About Steve Bannon, Former Chief Executive Officer Of His 2016 Campaign; Former Chief Strategist And Senior Counselor In His Administration

Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn't as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn't represent my base—he's only in it for himself.

Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.

We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.
-Donald Trump

Short version:

"We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates....helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down."
-Donald "Nero" Trump, right before he and GOP Congressmen started to spontaneously ignite.

Twitter Wars

Trump has, so far, sent out nine tweets this morning filled with lies and insults.   I sent one back:

You are a busy little bee this morning with all the insults and lies. What is it you are trying to divert everyone's attention from now? Russia? Special Counsel Mueller? The travesty that is your presidency?

Ring Out The False, Ring In The True

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

   The flying cloud, the frosty light:

   The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

   The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind

   For those that here we see no more;

   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

   And ancient forms of party strife;

   Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

   The faithless coldness of the times;

   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

   The civic slander and the spite;

   Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;

   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

   Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,

   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

   Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring the Christ that is to be.
-Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)