Play this now. Game

Ben should have blogged this way before I did.  He's on level 32 or some craziness.  I'm having trouble with levels that are prime numbers...it's a strange event.

Yes...I'm looking forward to it.  Though I'm really split on the "new" designs.  They look more like Robotech than Autobots.  Soo...who knows.  Here's a link to a site looking over new designs (link)

Optimus Prime looks hot, so that's good. 
What happened to StarScream though?:

I can feel

I can feel:
I can feel Your outstanding love
throughout my out-stretched hands;
Your brilliant love that I see
hidden in sunbeams, creeping slowly over me
until I am wholly engulfed by Your comforting Spirit.
I can feel:
I can feel relief soften
my rough edges, during moments
when I think I can feel
every shard of broken clay
scrape my raw skin, worn thin from
wearily toiling for so long now.
Your Godly love calms the storm I feel
in my soul, and stills the ache,
the knot, the pain.  And once again:
I can feel.  I can feel my own love, rising above
my heart, beyond the lump in my throat, and
emerges as a mighty cry of victory,
praising Your name, Your power, Your love.
I can feel the brilliance of Your Spirit
shine through my once feeble body,
which is now healed and beautiful.
When once I was hurt, once I was torn, once I was numb;
Yet beneath the sutures, your radiant love has shone and healed every wound;
Shone from You, who knew everything I have ever done;
And when the fury of the storm was quieted
by the faith of my outstretched hands:
I can love,
and I can feel.                                                                                                 
 - Tamarah Rockwood  2006

My Father's Tree

In my father’s yard there grows a tree:
it was planted not by hands,
it was planted by the wind,
In my father’s yard there grows a tree
which began its life
nearly hidden in the light
dwarfed by the flowers nearby,
sheltered in the shade of the lazy afternoon.
I watched this tree in my father’s yard
feel the warmth of the sun
it could not see,
and grow so faithfully
into this little tree.
In my father’s yard where the garden grows
The gardener watches the young
who need the generous eye;
when the heat is too much,
when the wind is too rough,
when the solitude is too quiet.
I grow in my father’s yard
with firm roots that hold my ground;
although I am touched by those around me,
It is by my gardeners hand
that I flourish and abound.
There is a righteous tree
that stands by me
when the world shifts from soft to hard
but I am fed by the fathers love
in my father’s yard.

-Tamarah Rockwood, 2007

Yes...I'm looking forward to it.  Though I'm really split on the "new" designs.  They look more like Robotech than Autobots.  Soo...who knows.  Here's a link to a site looking over new designs (link)

Optimus Prime looks hot, so that's good. 
What happened to StarScream though?:

Yes...I'm looking forward to it.  Though I'm really split on the "new" designs.  They look more like Robotech than Autobots.  Soo...who knows.  Here's a link to a site looking over new designs (link)

Optimus Prime looks hot, so that's good. 
What happened to StarScream though?:

Hopefully everyone has found where the picnic will be!  We will have the picnic from 11-6 (or whenever people leave).  Ben and I and the kids will be there the whole day. 

Also: remember to bring $5 for parking, and it would be best if you brought a chair.  We don't have picnic tables, actually I'm hunting for tables right now, and we have quite a few chairs we're going to bring, and blankets, but if you have any chairs, you might want to bring them  :)

We decided to have it catered, because there is an amazing southern bbq place in Fremont, and we figured it would save on time, money...and you guys are going to LOVE it.  We'll also have chips, drinks, cake (I'm making the cake, woot), balloons, harmonicas, paddle balls, contests, sidewalk chalk...no one will be bored :)

We also picked up all the swag from Sun today, so we have tshirts, window clings, shot glasses that light up at the bottom when you put liquid in it...and the pinata is still drying.  But it should be done by tomorrow! 

If anyone has anymore questions you can email me at tamrockwood@yahoo.com, or leave a message here.

I was really hoping they would find the little girl.  I was following the leads the media reported on this.  My heart is breaking reading this.  Please pray for this family.  They will need it at this time.

Letter: Missing Girl Found Buried Under Rocks

MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- Portuguese police are investigating an area nine miles from where a young British girl was abducted after a tip-off to a newspaper in the Netherlands.

An anonymous letter claiming 4-year-old Madeleine McCann's body is buried under rocks in deserted scrubland was sent to newspaper De Telegraaf and passed on to the Portuguese Policia Judiciaria.

A Dutch police spokesman said: "On Monday De Telegraaf received a letter from an anonymous sender which contained information about where Madeleine McCann may be.

"The letter included a map of the area where the sender claims she is. The newspaper handed the letter over to the police on Tuesday and immediate forensic tests were carried out.

"Today (Wednesday) the police sent the letter and the forensic report over to the Portuguese Police for immediate investigation. The sender is unknown and there has not been any further correspondence from the sender with the newspaper or the police. We take this case very seriously.''

According to De Telegraaf, the letter said Madeleine was buried "north of the road under branches and rocks, around six to seven meters off the road" in a barren and deserted landscape.

A map came with the letter, with crosses marked on it.

Madeleine disappeared on May 3, when her parents left her and her 2-year-old twin siblings in their hotel room while they dined at a restaurant in their hotel complex in Praia da Luz, a resort town in Portugal's Algarve region.

Since then, parents Kate and Gerry McCann have launched an international campaign with the aid of celebrities such as soccer star David Beckham and J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, in the hope of finding the girl. The couple had a brief meeting with Pope Benedict XVI.

Yes...I'm looking forward to it.  Though I'm really split on the "new" designs.  They look more like Robotech than Autobots.  Soo...who knows.  Here's a link to a site looking over new designs (link)

Optimus Prime looks hot, so that's good. 
What happened to StarScream though?:

Yes...I'm looking forward to it.  Though I'm really split on the "new" designs.  They look more like Robotech than Autobots.  Soo...who knows.  Here's a link to a site looking over new designs (link)

Optimus Prime looks hot, so that's good. 
What happened to StarScream though?:

Yes...I'm looking forward to it.  Though I'm really split on the "new" designs.  They look more like Robotech than Autobots.  Soo...who knows.  Here's a link to a site looking over new designs (link)

Optimus Prime looks hot, so that's good. 
What happened to StarScream though?:

Yes...I'm looking forward to it.  Though I'm really split on the "new" designs.  They look more like Robotech than Autobots.  Soo...who knows.  Here's a link to a site looking over new designs (link)

Optimus Prime looks hot, so that's good. 
What happened to StarScream though?:

Yes...I'm looking forward to it.  Though I'm really split on the "new" designs.  They look more like Robotech than Autobots.  Soo...who knows.  Here's a link to a site looking over new designs (link)

Optimus Prime looks hot, so that's good. 
What happened to StarScream though?:

I just can't get over how awesome this is...so I'm posting the whole thing.   Bradbury is one of my favorite authors, but his short stories were the best.  I never appreciated the beauty of the short story until I read a few books of his just stocked full of them, and they are my favorite literary form now (besides poetry, of course, but that's really more art than writing).  I encourage anyone to read more of his work.  And I completely disagree with Kaufman.  Completely.  I think he is convincing himself that just because they refer to books in TV, or because they make a movie based on a book, that TV has not killed literature. 

What kills me is how long people have been writing...thousands of years.  I believe, and I really truly believe this, that if our society would hunker down and learn the wisdom that was aquired thousands, hundreds of years ago, we would find answers to things.  But we are still asking questions about basic living, and simply reforming society and culture to cover up the fact that we don't know.  Who has read the Bible backwards and forwards?  Don't refer to it...read it.  Uncle Tom's Cabin?  The Jungle Book?  Anything by Toni Morrison?  These are all pieces of our mental collective that define who we are.  And when we aren't interested in who we are, we refer to television characters to define ourselves.  I've seen the Acadamy Awards as a science fiction story just waiting to be written, of normal people reshaping their faces and emaciating themselves in order to walk down one carpet in the world.  This carpet will never cure the broken hearted, will never lead to anything other than a temporary seat in front of food no one else can afford; and yet still thousands of people strive to walk on that revered carpet.  I implore individuals to create their own carpet to walk upon.  It's a postmodernist world...you can do that kind of stuff. 

"When the Pulitzer Prizes were handed out in May during a luncheon at Columbia University, two special citations were given. One went to John Coltrane (who died in 1967), the fourth time a jazz musician has been honored. The other went to Ray Bradbury, the first time a writer of science fiction and fantasy has been honored.

Bradbury, a longtime Los Angeles resident who leads an active civic life and even drops the Los Angeles Times letters to the editor on his views of what ails his town, did not attend, telling the Pulitzer board his doctor did not want him to travel.

But the real reason, he told the L.A. Weekly, had less to do with the infirmities of age (he turns 87 in August) than with the fact that recipients only shake hands with Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia University’s president, and smile for a photograph.

He wanted to give a speech, but no remarks are allowed. “Not even a paragraph,” he says with disdain.

In his pastel-yellow house in upscale Cheviot Hills, where he has lived for more than 50 years, Bradbury greeted me in his sitting room. He wore his now-standard outfit of a blue dress shirt with a white collar and a jack-o’-lantern tie (Halloween is his favorite day) and white socks. This ensemble is in keeping with Bradbury’s arrested development. George Clayton Johnson, who gave us Logan’s Run, says, “Ray has always been 14 going on 15.”

Bradbury still has a lot to say, especially about how people do not understand his most literary work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953. It is widely taught in junior high and high schools and is for many students the first time they learn the names Aristotle, Dickens and Tolstoy.

Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

“Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point.

“Useless,” Bradbury says. “They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.” He bristles when others tell him what his stories mean, and once walked out of a class at UCLA where students insisted his book was about government censorship. He’s now bucking the widespread conventional wisdom with a video clip on his Web site (http://www.raybradbury.com/at_home_clips.html), titled “Bradbury on censorship/television.”

As early as 1951, Bradbury presaged his fears about TV, in a letter about the dangers of radio, written to fantasy and science-fiction writer Richard Matheson. Bradbury wrote that “Radio has contributed to our ‘growing lack of attention.’... This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people.”


He says the culprit in Fahrenheit 451 is not the state — it is the people. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, in which the government uses television screens to indoctrinate citizens, Bradbury envisioned television as an opiate. In the book, Bradbury refers to televisions as “walls” and its actors as “family,” a truth evident to anyone who has heard a recap of network shows in which a fan refers to the characters by first name, as if they were relatives or friends.

The book’s story centers on Guy Montag, a California fireman who begins to question why he burns books for a living. Montag eventually rejects his authoritarian culture to join a community of individuals who memorize entire books so they will endure until society once again is willing to read.

Bradbury imagined a democratic society whose diverse population turns against books: Whites reject Uncle Tom’s Cabin and blacks disapprove of Little Black Sambo. He imagined not just political correctness, but a society so diverse that all groups were “minorities.” He wrote that at first they condensed the books, stripping out more and more offending passages until ultimately all that remained were footnotes, which hardly anyone read. Only after people stopped reading did the state employ firemen to burn books.

Most Americans did not have televisions when Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, and those who did watched 7-inch screens in black and white. Interestingly, his book imagined a future of giant color sets — flat panels that hung on walls like moving paintings. And television was used to broadcast meaningless drivel to divert attention, and thought, away from an impending war.

Bradbury’s latest revelations might not sit well in L.A.’s television industry, where Scott Kaufer, a longtime television writer and producer, argues, “Television is good for books and has gotten more people to read them simply by promoting them,” via shows like This Week and Nightline.

Kaufer says he hopes Bradbury “will be good enough in hindsight to see that instead of killing off literature, [TV] has given it an entire boost.” He points to the success of fantasy author Stephen King in television and film, noting that when Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, another unfounded fear was also taking hold — that television would destroy the film industry.

And in fact, Bradbury became famous because his stories were translated for television, beginning in 1951 for the show Out There. Eventually he had his own program, The Ray Bradbury Theater, on HBO.


Bradbury spends most of his time now in a small space on the second floor of his home that contains books and mementos. There is his Emmy from The Halloween Tree, an Oscar that belonged to a friend who died, a sculpture of a dinosaur and various Halloween decorations. Bradbury, before a stroke left him in a wheelchair, typed in the basement, which is filled with stuffed animals, toys, fireman hats and bottles of dandelion wine. He referred to these props as “metaphors,” totems he drew on to spark his imagination and drive away the demons of the blank page.

Beginning in Arizona when his parents bought him a toy typewriter, Bradbury has written a short story a week since the 1930s. Now he dictates his tales over the phone, each weekday between 9 a.m. and noon, to his daughter Alexandria.

Bradbury has always been a fan, and advocate, of popular culture despite his criticisms of it. Yet he harbors a distrust of “intellectuals.” Without defining the term, he says another reason why he rarely leaves L.A. to travel to New York is “their intellectuals.”

Dana Gioia, a poet who is chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and who wrote a letter in support of granting Bradbury a Pulitzer honor, compared him to J.D. Salinger, Jack London and Edgar Allan Poe. Another supporter wrote that Bradbury’s works “have become the sort of classics that kids read for fun and adults reread for their wisdom and artistry.”

In June, Gauntlet Press will release Match to Flame, a collection of 20 short stories by Bradbury that led up to Fahrenheit 451. Pointing to his unpublished proofreading version of the upcoming collection, Bradbury says that rereading his stories made him cry. “It’s hard to believe I wrote such stories when I was younger,” he says.

His book still stands as a classic. But one of L.A.’s best-known residents wants it understood that when he wrote it he was far more concerned with the dulling effects of TV on people than he was on the silencing effect of a heavy-handed government. While television has in fact superseded reading for some, at least we can be grateful that firemen still put out fires instead of start them."

Everything I've been writing just disappeared...I'll try to figure out what happened

-tamr