The power of music: It’s a real heart opener

Playing or listening to music can create a feeling of well being, which affects the vascular system.

(CNN) — If you didn’t catch the white coat and the stethoscope, you might take Dr. Mike Miller for a middle-aged rocker, roaming the halls of the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore.

For years, Miller, a research cardiologist, has been studying the effects of happiness — or things that make people happy — on our hearts. He began his research with laughter, and found watching funny movies and laughing at them could actually open up blood vessels, allowing blood to circulate more freely.

Miller thought, if laughter can do that, why not music? So, he tested the effects of music on the cardiovascular system. “Turns out music may be one of the best de-stressors — either by playing or even listening to music,” said Miller.

Something not for Mother’s Day

From The Melbourne ‘Age’

Too many cooks spoil Mother’s Day breakfast in bed

• Andra Jackson
• May 11, 2009

A LOWER Templestowe woman had a Mother’s Day to remember yesterday.

As she lay in bed waiting for breakfast made by her three children, their culinary skills failed to match their good intentions.

While they were cooking a special treat, the stove caught fire and spread quickly to the ceiling and roof.

Metropolitan Fire Brigade fire services officer Trevor Woodward said: “The mother was sitting in bed waiting for her kids to bring in breakfast when she heard them shouting and yelling — she thought they were having a fight,” he said.

“They were trying to do the right thing and make her breakfast. I am not sure what they were making, but whatever it was, it turned out to be a barbecue.”

When the parents realised their kitchen was on fire, they called the fire brigade while the woman’s husband, aged in his 50s, tried to douse the flames with a blanket he grabbed from the bedroom.

He had to be taken to hospital with burns to his hands, while the eldest of the three aspiring chefs — aged 18, 16 and 10 — was taken to the Austin Hospital with smoke inhalation.

The man was last night reported to be in a stable condition.

Templestowe MFB station officer Rod Lawler said the fire spread quickly from the stove top and rangehood into cupboards and the roof.

It took three fire trucks to put out what he described as “a fairly serious fire”.

“We had to pull off part of the roof,” he said. The family had only moved into the house a couple of months ago, he said.

Although the house had three smoke detector alarms, the batteries had been disconnected so that there was no contact.

Mr Lawler said the injury to the woman’s husband could have been avoided had there been a fire blanket in the house.

Yesterday afternoon, the woman told The Age she was too distressed to talk about the morning’s events.’

Now what could have been going on there, campers?

Official who OK’d Air Force One jet flyover resigns

WASHINGTON (CNN) — President Obama has accepted the resignation of Louis Caldera, the director of the White House Military Office responsible for the controversial low-altitude flyover of New York by a 747 plane used as Air Force One, the White House said Friday.

 

The 747 used as Air Force One flies over the Statue of Liberty in this photo released by the White House.

 

The photo shoot, which President Obama said he was “furious” with, happened on April 27. The image of a low-flying plane accompanied by an F-16 fighter jet sent some New Yorkers into the streets and into a panic — reminding them of the tragic 9/11 attacks on the city.

Building evacuations also took place across the Hudson River in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Caldera later apologized for the flyover.

Something for Mother’s Day

‘DRIVING through a public car park one afternoon nearly 10 years ago, I saw a car pull out suddenly in front of me and I slammed on my brakes. There was a brief silence, during which I bit down on the expletive that had made it almost to my lips, then from behind me a small, clear voice said, “Cheeses Christ!”

There followed another moment of silence as I tried to collect my thoughts, and then my three-year-old son explained brightly: “Excuse me Mummy, but I did not say ‘Cheeses pucking Christ’ because you did not hit that car.”

As Philip Larkin almost wrote: “They puck you up, your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do.” And, as I was undeniably the family garbage mouth, it was, in this instance, I who had done the pucking up. Such is the power, and the burden, of motherhood.’

(more)

Tom Hanks defends new film Angels and Demons against the Vatican [See movie trailer here]

From The Times

May 4, 2009

Tom Hanks defends Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons against the Vatican

(Vittorio Zunino Celoto) Mr Hanks said: "There's no major theological discussion that goes on, other than science versus faith. I just solve the murder"

As the film version of Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons was given its Rome premiere today Tom Hanks, the film’s star, defended the film against Vatican charges that it was sacrilegious.

The plot of Angels & Demons involves a secret brotherhood called the Illuminati and a conspiracy to destroy the Vatican during a papal conclave.

I say Tomatoe, you say Tomato. Is Waterboarding Torture??

Op-Ed Columnist

How Character Corrodes

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By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: May 2, 2009

WASHINGTON

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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

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How quaint.

The Republicans are concerned about checks and balances.

The specter of Specter helping the president have his way with Congress has actually made conservatives remember why they respected the Constitution in the first place. Senator Mitch McConnell, the leader of the shrinking Republican minority, fretted that there was a “threat to the country” and wondered if people would want the majority to rule “without a check or a balance.”

Senator John Thune worried that Democrats would run “roughshod” and argued that Americans wanted checks and balances. Senator Judd Gregg mourned that “there’s no checks and balances on this massive expansion on the size of government.”

Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, tried to put the best face on it, noting, “This will make it easier for G.O.P. candidates in 2010 to ask to be elected to help restore some checks and balances in Washington.”

This is quite touching, given that the start of the 21st century will be remembered as the harrowing era when an arrogant Republican administration did its best to undermine checks and balances. (Maybe when your reign begins with Bush v. Gore, a Supreme heist that kissed off checks and balances, you feel no need to follow the founding fathers’ lead.)

After so many years of watching a White House upend laws, I now listen raptly when President Obama plays the constitutional law professor. He was asked at his news conference Wednesday night about the Republican fear that he will “ride roughshod over any opposition” and establish one-party rule.

“I’ve got Democrats who don’t agree with me on everything,” he said. “And that’s how it should be. Congress is a coequal branch of government.” You almost thought the professor in chief was going to ask the assembled students to please turn to page 317 in their Con Law book.

He went on to reassure Republicans that his vision of the presidency is very different from the imperial view held by the Boy Emperor and his regents.

“I do think that, to my Republican friends, I want them to realize that me reaching out to them has been genuine,” the president said, adding, “The majority will probably be determinative when it comes to resolving just hard-core differences that we can’t resolve, but there is a whole host of other areas where we can work together” and “make progress.”

The officials who actually represented a threat to the country while they were running the country are continuing to defend themselves. But they just end up further implicating themselves.

Condi Rice, who plans to go back to being a professor of political science at Stanford, got grilled by a student at a reception at a dorm there on Monday.

I’ve often wondered why students haven’t been more vocal in questioning the architects of the Iraq war and “legal” torture who landed plum spots at prestigious universities. Probably because it would have taken the draft, like the guillotine, to concentrate the mind. But finally, the young man at Stanford spoke up. Saying he had read that Ms. Rice authorized waterboarding, he asked her, “Is waterboarding torture?”

She replied: “The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against Torture. So that’s — and by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency.”

This was precisely Condi’s problem. She simply relayed. She never stood up against Cheney and Rummy for either what was morally right or what was smart in terms of our national security.

The student pressed again about whether waterboarding was torture.

“By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture,” Ms. Rice said, almost quoting Nixon’s logic: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

She also stressed that, “Unless you were there in a position of responsibility after Sept. 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans.”

Reyna Garcia, a Stanford sophomore who videotaped the exchange, said of Condi’s aria, “I wasn’t completely satisfied with her answers, to be honest,” adding that “President Obama went ahead and called it torture and she did everything she could not to do that.”

As Mr. Obama said in his news conference, it is in moments of crisis that a country must cleave to its principles. Asserting that “waterboarding violates our ideals,” he said he had been struck by an article describing how Churchill would not torture prisoners even when “London was being bombed to smithereens.”

“And the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts and over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people,” he said. “It corrodes the character of a country.”

Class dismissed.

The Republicans’ newfound concern about checks and balances is touching, given what the Bush administration did to undermine the process.

How Character Corrodes

By MAUREEN DOWD

Op-Ed Columnist The New York Times

Published: May 2, 2009 Washington

Maureen Dowd

How quaint

The Republicans are concerned about checks and balances.

The specter of Specter helping the president have his way with Congress has actually made conservatives remember why they respected the Constitution in the first place. Senator Mitch McConnell, the leader of the shrinking Republican minority, fretted that there was a “threat to the country” and wondered if people would want the majority to rule “without a check or a balance.”

photo by Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

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