REDONDOWRITER'S SACRED ORDINARY

Send Your Name to Mars on the Rover

Would you like to send your name to Mars on the next Rover? One of our teachers shared how to go about it. You go to the Mars Science Lab link at the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

You fill in your information and your name will be included with others on a microchip on the Mars Science Laboratory Rover heading to Mars in 2011! And you even get a certificate of participation. This really appealed to the kid in me!

Whether you are interested in science and space or not, the site has an amazing amount of information about it in laymen’s language for adults and kids.

There was a Name the Next Mars Rover contest as well, but that deadline has closed. There is also a link to follow the project on Twitter. So, sign up to send your name to Mars and then look at the participatory chart. We’re all in this together.

The Cradle of Civilization in Jeopardy

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the elder (1525-69). He conceived it as an allegory of pride and human frailty.

In Saturday's Sacred Ordinary entry, I mention that it sounded like the Tower of Babel in Big Lots. I don't know about you, but often when I write or speak something, the actual image or mention of it will manifest somewhere else in my daily life. That was the case when I read an article by Bruce Feiler in the April 25, 2004 Parade Magazine which is inserted in the Los Angeles Times. In his article was a photo of Brueghel's Tower of Babel, which I had never seen before. It looked dream-like to me and pulled me into the article itself. Feiler, also wrote "Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths," and "Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses"; I read the latter and found it very informative. The bottomline is that Feiler decided he had better visit the Cradle of Civilization before there isn't one anymore.

Murdered Child's Family Found

On March 8 I wrote about a slain Jane Doe teenager in Santa Ana whose face and unknown story deeply affected me. My web log has few followers and I never expected any feedback on this particular event. I was doing what journal keepers call a "free write."

As several more weeks have passed, I have watched the media carefully to see if any break had come in the case or her family had been found. Nada. On April 15 I received a disturbing e-mail from a distant relative in Georgia who had somehow tripped across my web log entry and found it offensive. She named the beautiful young girl I named Victoria as Hanna. She took me to task for various things I had said on my web log entry and I immediately e-mailed back and apologized if what I had said had seemed insensitive; I asked if I could write her reply on my web log. It had never been my intent to remotely hurt anyone’s feelings. I felt so compassionate to the situation. I never heard back from her. I debated about taking the entry down, but it honestly expressed how deeply distressed I was and those of us who write are nothing if we are not honest and authentic. Keeping a web log is a risky business for any of us because our words can be perceived so differently than how we meant them to be; lots of loggers get flamed, but my topic, "Sacred Ordinary" is so benign that it rarely happens. In the meantime, I kept searching for evidence that Victoria/Hanna had been found and saw nothing.

Yesterday the Los Angeles Times ran the story that Hanna Denise Montessori’s family had been located; she was Jane Doe no longer. She was a descendent of the founder of the Montessori schools. The media reports that her father lives in Maine with his wife and family and the girl had been living in Peachtree, Georgia with her mother until she went missing. The child's name, for some bizarre reason, had never been submitted to the national registries of missing persons. As it turns out, the girl’s father said the family is planning legal action against the Division of Families and Children Services in Georgia as well as local authorities in that state, as Hanna had somehow or other fallen through the bureaucratic cracks.

This is the Boston Globe’s version of the story.

I still feel so badly about upsetting the girl’s family with my March 8 entry and then to my total amazement, I received another e-mail from a family friend in Maine this morning complimenting me on my compassionate web log entry. Tears streamed down my face as I read this e-mail as Hanna and her family have been so intently on my mind and in my prayers the last few months. Her funeral would take place in Maine today.

My heart continues to break for Hanna’s family and I know that the police nation-wide are diligently searching for the murderer. I hope there is legal justice but I can hear Hanna's father’s voice as he reported to the media, “The system failed so badly and the system cost a 15-year-old girl her life.” Sweet, sweet Hanna, you will not be forgotten by me, a woman who never met you, and you will live on in the heart's of your loved ones all the days of their lives.

Hey, Martha Girlfriend, You Need a New Defense Team

Political cartoon from the Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, March 9, Opinion Section, Michael Ramirez

Yeah, yeah. I'm the first one to make snide remarks about Martha Stewart and her gracious way of living 'cause my own life is about getting through the day any way that I can. But the woman has made life a whole lot more pleasant for a lot of women--and men in spite of my cynicism. I like Martha's bedding and dishes and what-not in K-Mart and wonder if a little of her sophistication will rub off on us--the working class peons of the U.S--if we buy her stuff? I admit that I watched her TV show once and tried to make a little paper basket to put Easter eggs in she was demonstrating. It looked like crap. Martha's got the touch; I don't. I like when they parody Martha on Saturday Night Live--but I like when they parody anybody there. I've never read her magazine, but I do buy it at Friends of the Library sales to rip up for collage projects 'cause the photos are classy.

And then comes the insider trading charges, the long trial at the tax payer's expense, and the fashion parade of Martha and her lawyers going in and out of the Manhattan courthouse. None of us thought she would be convicted, and the backlash is coming for an unfair verdict. Are we so bored in our mundane lives that we get off on someone else's mistakes? Hey, Martha, I'm no legal eagle, but your defense team screwed you, girl, for not putting you on the stand. You would have said you were sorry, gotten a handslap, and you'd be back on the palatial farm. I never thought I'd say this, but I'm pissed off that she might do jail-time when Ken Lay and the other Enronners, and the guys at Adelphia, Tyco, HealthSouth and World Com get off entirely or are given country club sentences. I do not look forward to seeing Martha do the perp walk. And I hope Martha is out shopping for a new legal team to file the appeal.

Here are a few of this morning's letters to The Times--which say exactly what I would have said if I was clever, insightful and funny enough.

Two words about Martha: Kenneth Lay. Plus, this guy does not even have a decent chicken pot pie recipe. -- Joanne C. Murray, Santa Barbara.

One of the jurors in the Stewart trial is quoted as saying the guilty verdicts were "a victory for the little guys." In my opinion, that statement should be sufficient to have the verdicts thrown out. Sounds like "get evenism" to me. Truth is, it's the little guys who have invested money in Stewart's company who potentially will lose their savings.--Donald Herbert, Lomita.

--Terrence Beasor, Santa Monica.

I wonder how many people would not sell a stock if their broker called and said, "Hey, I just heard from down the pipeline that this security is going to drop like a rock. You' better sell." Let he who would not jump ship cast the first stone--or maybe they need to see Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ."--Arthur Senzy, Santa Monica

And here's my favorite! Stewart is found guilty of conspiracy and obstruction of justice because she tried to cover up what, in essence, was a misdeameanor. So, when will we see George W. Bush in the dock for his own crony capitalist crime? Harken Energy Corp.'s sham sale in 1989 of its own Aloha Petroleum subsidiary propped up Harken's share value long enough for Bush to cash ou $848,560 (nt disclosing the sale to the SEC until later). The remaining stockholders' shares eventually bottomed out at 22 cents a share. Enron writ small?--Michael Fawcett, Los Osos.

Hey, thanks, Michael, for new info to stash in my Dubya arsenal. Here I thought it was just Dick Chaney and Halliburton. By the way, does anyone know if Martha is a Democrat or Republican?

Weighing in on Gay Marriage

Two weekends ago, a friend of mine, a woman my age, married her partner in San Francisco. When I was told, and later hugged her to say how happy I was, she smiled from ear to ear and told me what it had been like to be up there during all the hoopla. She has children and grandchildren so I asked her how her kids were taking it. She again grinned and she's got two of the most enchanting dimples I've ever seen on a woman or a man, and said they have agreed that if she is happy, they are happy. It was a magical story as far as I was concerned. I have been hetero all my life and have often joked that perhaps my life would have been less complicated if I had been a lesbian, but--just no leanings that way. It's lifestyles that harm others that I abhor. A lot of man-woman marriages I have observed over the years, which are supposedly morally right, have been total disasters for them--and for their kids. So who is to say what is "right" and what is "wrong?"

I've been listening to all the debate going on back and forth about gay marriage and weighing what my own, deep-down personal take is on all this. I am admittedly liberal politically, emotionally and spiritually, so it has seemed to me to be a tempest in a tea kettle. I suppose it is the religious right who are predominately opposed.

Quite my accident I tripped across a site a few months back of a young medical student in the Bronx. His name is Tuan and he writes at As I Please: Random Musings from A Troubled Medical Student. His header says: sometimes amusing, often perverse, and always pointless. Yesterday Tuan wrote about gay marriage at his site and I wish I had written what he wrote. His opinion is identical to mine though we are decades apart in age and profession. His opinion on Janet Jackson and the Super Bowl fiasco matched mine, but mostly he is frank, perverse--and damned funny. Check him out and let me know how you weight in on this topic.