For reasons nobody really knows the climate on this island is quite tropical and the family that owns it has turned it into a garden paradise.


I will show more of the island, but first some German butterflies and a bee

I went to get my flu shot today, and a black pharmacist with an interesting accent in his impeccable English did the deed.
I asked him where he is from, and he said "Kenya".
"Well", I said, "that's where many say our President was born. When you still lived there did you ever run into him? Any opinion on the issue".

He pulled back from having almost just inserted the needle and laughed uproariously. "In Kenya, when a child is born it belongs to everybody. And if the child makes good then everybody wants a piece of that, it's what happens in poor countries.
No, President Obama was not born in Kenya. I know that as sure as I'm about to stick you with this needle."

Not only was he dark and handsome, he was witty, too.

Out of the window in the car, driving to the Säntis mountain in Switzerland



Coming around the bend at the Säntis, you can see the cables for the cable car to the top



This one is the facade of the "Red Ox" - a five hundred year old (I think I remember this correctly) tavern in "Stein am Rhein" in Switzerland



This is a rainbow on the waters of the Rhein river



A simple snapshot of a town, the phenomenal castle on top I may show in a separate thread.



And lastly, a photo in a church

Meet One of America's Worst Election 2012 Hack Reporters
AlterNet/By Ian Murphy


The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza has a problem. He's the type who unironically referred to Bush's plan to let Wall Street pillage Social Security as “reform.” He now says [3] that Paul Ryan's mission to replace Medicare with coupons-of-lesser-value is a “plan to reinvigorate [3]” the program. On MSNBC, he said the probably-won't-be Veep's now-infamous slew of RNC lies were merely facts “out of context.” All the tragic, familiar signs are there. Hell, even his blog is called The Fix. Like so many poor souls of his lost journalistic generation, Chris Cillizza is addicted to bullshit. 

So how does Chris Cillizza stack up as a journalist? Well, he's about 6'3”. 



You see, Cillizza's “How President Obama’s acceptance speech stacked up — in 1 chart [4]” rates Barry's performance in minutes and seconds (38:23), so you may now guffaw. Sure, charts are fun, and the duration of past convention speeches is harmless trivia, so it may seem to the casual news consumer that I'm picking nits. But the misleading title, innocuous in this case, is typical of Cillizza's depraved MO. Though he writes, “There seems to be little correlation between speech length and victory,” he simply cannot resist disingenuously framing the data in terms of its potential electoral impact. Advertise one thing, fail to deliver, and churn out content while imparting nothing of use: This is why Cillizza earns the big bucks.

Earlier this year, the Times then Public Editor, Arthur Brisbane, asked [5] whether reporters should be “truth vigilantes,” rather than professional regurgitators. The common sense chorus answered: “Duh!” Paul Ryan's epic RNC dishonesty forced the national press to, yet again, reexamine what their job actually entails. That this phony objectivity vs. real objectivity “debate” endures explains so much—why civilization is screwed, for example. Real Americans™ understand that the news media's sole duty should be sorting fact from fiction, not acting as shameless stenographers. Cillizza represents a class of elitist wankers who're so far up their own asses that they'd rather wax epistemological than actually subject themselves to the lowly task of journalism.

Here's what he told [6] Howard Kurtz at The Daily Beast (Tina Brown's most productive hack-factory):“What’s hard is that people, particularly partisans, assume that there is a white and a black on everything, that the ‘truth,’ the ‘fact,’ is crystal clear—when in fact even with facts, there are gray areas…You’ve seen fact-checkers actually come under scrutiny.”

the whole piece:
http://www.alternet.org/media/meet-one-americas-worst-election-2012-hack-reporters?akid=9462.254620.RekT0A&rd=1&src=newsletter718206&t=11

but Rachel just said NC is up by 2 points - Obama is now leading.

Hallelujah.
More hard work ahead, but we are going in the right direction finally.

The bike is a 5 Euro trinket I picked up at a Bazaar, and now it's on my antenna to remind me to use my bike more

Should I claim they turned me into a statue?
No, I better not. It would be wrong.

This is at the Lake of Constance, which is also called the "Bodensee".

I was only there for one leisurely stroll of a couple of hours. It's near the border to Germany, all but in Mom's back yard. We drove through Alsace-Lorraine.
My favorite thing is to travel with natives .

To celebrate being in France for a little while it was imperative to eat snails.
Also, they were cheap.

I'm checking in with a few shots from my recent travels. Did not want you to think I got lost or something...

As I begin to look at my photos on a screen other than the little bitty netbook, I see there are some worth sharing.
It's impossible to chose subjects, so this one lent itself - they are from a side trip to a small town in France my brother and his family took me to.