The Frozen Logger

As I sat down one evening within a small café,
A forty year old waitress, to me these words did say.
“I see that your a logger and not just a common bum.
Cause’ nobody but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb.
My lover was a logger, there’s none like him today.
If you’d pour whisky on it, he would eat a bale of hay.
Well, he never shaved his whiskers from off of his horny hide,
He’s just drive them in with a hammer and bite them off inside.

“My lover came to see me upon a freezing day.
He held me in a fond embrace which broke three vertebrae.
Well, he kissed me when we parted, so hard he broke my jaw.
I could not speak to tell him he forgot his mackinaw.”

“I saw my logger leaving, saunt’ring through the snow.
Going bravely homeward at forty-eight below.
The weather it tried to freeze him; it tried its level best.
At a hundred degrees below zero he buttoned up his vest.”

“It froze clear through to China; it froze to the stars above.
At a thousand degrees below zero, it froze my logger love.
They tried in vain to thaw him and if you’ll believe me, sir,
They made him into ax blades to chop the Douglas fir.”

“And so I lost my lover, and to this café I come,
And here I wait till someone stirs his coffee with his thumb.
And then I tell my story, of my love they could not thaw,
Who kissed me when we parted, so hard he broke my jaw.”


The Frozen Logger: Words and Music by James Stevens
TRO 1951 renewed 1979 Folkways Music Publishers Inc. New York, NY International copyright secured.

A Small Thing (well, not so small, lol!)

If, as Kung Fu Tse said, each journey begins with the first step, this is step two. . . . I think of a couple of Great Aunts who hauled handcarts across the plains. Carts containing all they owned. In search of a new world. This purchase is not unrelated.

And I did good: suggested retail price is $74.95. Was selling on-line for $49.95, with a liner. I walked it home from the Shopping Bazaar for $17.95. This is truly the Mercedes of shopping/laundry carts (made, of course, in China. . . . ).

Sun Pillars. . . .

Thanks John ♥

Danziger

clicky

Thanks Renee, jc! ♥s!

Children In coal mines; and Now. . . .

The 1819 Factory Act : no children under 9 to work in factories. Children from 9 to 16 allowed to work a maximum of 72 hours per week with one and a half hours a day for meals.

1833 Althorp`s Factory Act : children from 9 to 13 to work a maximum of 42 hours per week; also children aged 13 to 16 to work a maximum of 69 hours a week. No night work for anybody under the age of 18.

1842 Mines and Colleries Act : banned all women and children under 10 from working underground. No-one under 15 years was to work winding gear in mines.

1844 Graham`s Factory Act : minimum age for working in factories reduced to 8 years old. 8 to 13 years old to work a maximum of six and a half hours a day. 13 to 18 year olds to work a maximum of 12 hours a day and the same applied to women. Safety guards had to be fitted to all machines.

1847 Fielder`s Factory Act : 10 hour day introduced for under 18's and for women.

There were factory inspectors to 'enforce' these laws but they were so poorly paid, they were easily bribed. Also many working parents were desperate for money and they lied about the ages of their children to get them work in factories and mines. So the laws may have been good in theory, they were very difficult to enforce.

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/law.htm

Administration Neglected Coal Mining Safety
Bloomberg reveals:

Federal authorities issued 21 citations last year for a build-up of combustible materials at the West Virginia mine where 12 men died, according to U.S. Labor Department statistics.

The mining explosion should call attention to the Bush administration’s inadequate enforcement of federal mining safety regulations. Mining safety in the U.S. has improved dramatically since the Mining Safety and Health Act was signed in 1977. By the time that President Clinton signed the International Labor Organization’s Convention 176 concerning safety and health in mines, mining deaths dropped from 425 in 1970 to 85 in 2000.

Phil Smith, the communications director for the United Mine Workers of America, said that while citations have been issued, the fines assessed for safety violations are too small to force large corporations to make improvements. “The problem with the current laws is enforcement.” According to an AFL-CIO analysis, the Bush administration cut 170 positions from federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and has not proposed a single new mine-safety standard or rule during its tenure.

And there’s a reason for that. The Washington Post reported that West Virginia coal firms raised $275,000 for Bush.

Last September, Bush rewarded the coal industry by placing coal industry veteran Richard Stickler in charge of MSHA. Stickler spent about 30 years as a coal company manager with Beth Energy. Mines managed by Stickler were marked by worker injury rates that were double the national average, according to government data cited by the United Mine Workers union.

UPDATE:

Confined Space has this interesting analysis:

The fact is that President Bush has not requested budgets for OSHA or MSHA that even keep up with the rate of inflation and mandatory pay increases over the past several years while penalties for OSHA or MSHA violations remain laughably low. The highest penalty of the more than 200 citations received last year by the Sago mine was $878. But that was the exception. Most of the others were $250 or $60. At that rate, it’s hardly a good business decision to even bother fixing anything. And the administration has shut down any new worker protection standards in OSHA and MSHA.

Live links at the original: http://thinkprogress.org/2006/01/04/coal-mining/

A Coal Miner's Daughter

I was startled to discover in my middle age that my grandfather had owned a coal mine in Utah. It was a rather small coal mine, comprised of one wide vein of black diamonds, mined by my grandfather, father and uncles as young men. Evidently it was the family income for a number of years. Then they hit a fault, the vein disappeared, and they searched the face in a number of feet in all directions. Probably a wider search than was safe. They never found the vein, and that was the end of mining. Grandpa before and after did many other things including farming, innkeeping and shipbuilding.

When I first came to West Virginia, I "kept company" for a couple of years with a former coal miner (disabled). He gave me a poster very similar to the picture above, though it was darker, and the wall was to the right, not the left, and the wall face was much bigger. His eyes would like up when he looked at the poster. It really broke his heart that he was no longer able to be a miner. I'd always thought of coal mining as a necessary, but unloved profession. What Michael made clear to me is that there are men who love it, with a love totally unreasonable (to my mind) ~~ with a pure passion. It is their choice, not a "job."

Today I am sending light to those men and their families, just a couple of counties over from mine. They'll need it. Join me, please.

Just because she's lovely. . . .

Queen of Hearts

http://nationalcatholicreporter.org/fwis/

One woman put it this way: "Where is Monica Lewinsky when we need her?" Nobody laughed. The comment made the point: There are scandals and then there are scandals.

It's one kind of scandal when a president cannot control a need for sexual satisfaction. What the moral theologians have traditionally called "the sins of the flesh" -- as in "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" -- most often carries an overtone of human weakness, a lack of personal discipline or emotional maturity or psychological control of sexual impulses.

It's another kind of scandal when a president cannot control a need for power. Deceit, spuriousness, pride and calculated dishonesty fall into the category of "sins of the spirit." These are not confined to private or personal sexual behaviors. "Sins of the spirit" have to do with intellectual malice, with the cultivation of behavior and attitudes that attack the very ideals of the human community and pollute a whole way of being alive. This day's scandal yielded no ordinary political conversation. The group wrestled with the problem. Didn't the attack on the World Trade Center demand a more intense kind of intelligence gathering? Didn't the president have the responsibility to do this? Wasn't it imperative that it be done?

Yes, yes, and yes. The answers came easily, it seemed. Then what was the problem? A continuing discomfort hung in the air; something begged to be said yet. People put their eyes down and bit at the inside of their lips.

Then a woman dared the breach: "We may need to do this kind of thing -- but not like this. Not without legal permission, not without the approval of the Congress. Not in the United States of America. We elected a president. Not a king."

The idea may bear remembering.

~~ Sister Joan Chittister, OSB

There's more, click title.

Thanks, Alan ♥

new year's babe

Don't know why I love this, but I do. The hat?

The Constitution in Crisis

FYI: How did it come to this?
----------------------------

The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes
and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and
Coverups in the Iraq War
(the Investigative Status Report of the House
Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff)
http://tinyurl.com/dynyt (This link will download/open
a PDF file) (click title of post for live link)

** THOUGHTS **

This report was released last week by Congressman John
Conyers' office and has not received much media
attention. Why not?


From Rapid Response. Thanks, Edwin ♥

Harold's Angels?