Tag: google research (Page 1 of 2)

Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves – J. Drew Lanham poet, ornithologist

February 28, 2026 / laura bruno lilly / 0 Comments

On this last day of February*, after scrapping several attempts to craft a blog post based upon my own feelings of overwhelm during the relentless escalation of ICE these past months, I received the March newsletter from The Poetry Society of South Carolina** in my email.

Therein I learned of SC native son, J. Drew Lanham – poet, ornithologist and 2022 MacArthur Fellowship recipient who would be leading a workshop and reading sponsored by The Poetry Society of South Carolina in Greenville, SC*** on 3/14/26.

“…any bias is predatory. For us to understand that social justice and environmental justice are inextricably linked is critical. I want my work to inspire – I want it to inspire head, to inspire heart and I want it to inspire some action for a better future.”
J. Drew Lanham

When I began my own research of this new-to-me poet, my eyes quickly landed upon the title of his newest book of poems and prose, Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves.

I did a double take on this title. Did you, too?

It hit me right where I am at in this moment. The joining of the times, emotional exhaustion, living out my values and convictions with empathy, doing what I can, using my (he)art to reach out/speak out, yet vacillating between is it enough? does it really count?

And here was an encouragement offered to me this very day: Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves.

Hoping the book’s title was also in fact the title of a poem contained within its pages, I googled it and was hugely rewarded. Numerous on-line magazines, organizations, poetry reading meetings, and reviewers offer complete versions of the poem – in both written and audio format read by the poet J. Drew Lanham himself.

Excerpts from: Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves by J. Drew Lanham

~
Joy is the truth,
crooked lies hammered straight,
whitewashed myths
wiped away.
Stone Mountain
- just stone.
Rushmore
- no more.
Give the eagles
their mountains back.
~
Joy is the good news,
without new dead names,
no chokeholds or murdering knees.
A night of sleep
in your very own bed
without shots in the dark
- no more not waking up,
full of lead.
~

Little did this poet know how well a stanza of this poem would segue into the ornithological depiction of resistance to the current state of our nation as discussed below. Thank you, sir.

Joy is the murmuration,
then the stillness.

South Carolina Rebel Bird

The Rebel Bird logos**** are based upon the Star Wars Rebel Alliance emblem. They incorporate local state identity & flag symbolism to signal collective strength, opposition, and resistance against the current administration’s sanctioned ICE enforcement violence. In addition, Rebel Birds are a symbol of hope, freedom, and resistance against tyranny.

The Carolina Wren is set against the Palmetto Moon ( SC state bird & flag), standing on a combined Carolina single territory image. I take this as a nod to our Carolina Cousins to the North, although it may have been a designer error! 🙂

SC & NC state shapes — The Carolinas top-bottom: North Carolina, South Carolina

*coincidentally the last day of Black History Month – which was ‘erased’ in 2025 (here & here) and resurrected in 2026 in the context of ‘250 years of American Independence’ celebration.

**an organization of which I recently discovered and joined in January.

***a 2 hour 45 minute drive from where I live – well worth the drive & effort.

****created in January 2026 by Minnesota-based designers as a symbol of resistance in response to ICE activity.

A Roundabout Post for Black History Month

February 17, 2025 / laura bruno lilly

Note: It would not be prudent for me to share how the past 29 days of our lives have been personally & directly changed within our family and friends since 1/20/2025. Or specific instances of how those changes reach farther than just us. Instead, what follows is an attempt at showing in a less threatening context – how
silenced voices can yet speak.

Just a few days ago, as I was “doing what I do” across multiple areas of interest – taking deep dives into satisfying curiosities, researching on-line and hardcopy, expanding my knowledge-base to further enrich my (he)artistic creations, personal enrichment, and ‘growing in knowing’ – I came across yet another disturbing announcement.

So much so that I copied and pasted the relevant portions of the National Endowment of the Arts website info to a Word doc in the event original articles would be scrubbed and disappear entirely. What a thing to feel compelled to do. Yet, this was based upon recent blackouts of other websites such as DEI, NIH, USAID, CDC…

The National Endowment for the Arts cancelled its grant program Challenge America for fiscal year 2026. In operation since 2001, the program primarily supports small organizations & individuals that reach “historically underserved communities that have limited access to the arts relative to geography, ethnicity, economics, and/or disability.” *

The National Endowment for the Arts itself is a conduit of support for a myriad of disciplines ranging from scientific research, the arts, and community development through its extensive grant programs.

The artist I was interested in tracking down, Susan Hudson, is a 2024 NEA National Heritage Fellow. She was honored (along with 9 others) just this past September at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts ** and the Library of Congress.

This is how one voice can yet speak

Native American Heritage Month is in November.

November 2024, it was celebrated all out, in full view – integrating past, present and future aspects of this vibrant cultural community and its members.

Black History Month is in February.

Now. This month. This year. February 2025.

It is currently in low gear due to unspecified ‘new guidelines’ yet demanding adherence. In addition, Black History Month, as an “Identity Month” has been declared dead by the DoD.

That said, join me now as I envision a celebration parade headed by my Black History Month honoree of personal choice: Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Need help with that?

Pretend you’re one of the audience here in this vintage footage of Sister Rosetta performing in the rain at the then abandoned (and now non-existent) Chorlton railway station on Wilbraham Road, Manchester, England.

This is how silenced voices can yet speak

As part of the 1964 Blues & Gospel Train Tour through Europe, this all out performance in the rain exemplifies what it means to be a true performing (he)artist.

“The station was dressed up to look like one from the American South, but typically for Manchester, the weather did not echo that area’s dustbowl conditions. Shortly after the train which carried the audience the few miles south from Manchester’s city centre pulled in, a storm lashed the station.

‘Sister Rosetta came to me and asked if she could change her opening number to Didn’t It Rain? … when she strapped on her guitar, it was astounding.’

Mr. Hamp says the downpour would have been his worst memory of the show had it not led to his best.”
a memory from TV producer Johnnie Hamp

I will not elaborate on the impact these current times are making upon everyday Americans – scientists, musicians, academics, researchers, educators, students, health workers, families, farmers, etc – At least not directly.

For now, this is how one voice, my voice, can yet speak.

*from the original website category list description as per my cut and paste Word doc
**Since then, much has changed within the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, making this past event hold even more significance.

wp5.8 upgrade issues

July 31, 2021 / laura bruno lilly

The Fix was Simple. Finding It Was Not.

Consider this a blogger-buddy public service post…A little over a week ago I set up a staging site to make a few changes to my site, perform updates on various plug-ins and to install the new wp5.8 upgrade. I really like that my hosting company offers a fairly easy way for this non-techie to do this task. I’d even go so far as to say, it’s kind of fun to poke around in my cPanel!

That said, after doing a manual backup, then setting up the staging site, I began my task in earnest.

Plug-in updates – piece of cake. A few other minor fixes – done and done.

Now for the biggie – the wp5.8 upgrade.

At first glance, all looked just like it always looked. Upon further perusal, my site appeared to function as usual.

In my giddiness of having triumphed over the ever looming threat of a broken site due to update/upgrade glitches, I was all set to depress the ‘push to live’ button.

But – and I think this is where my maturity and ever nagging sense of doing things ‘right’ kicked in – I decided to check just one more thing. That being, actually writing up a new sample blog post using the extra Gutenberg Blocks that came with the upgrade.

Blithely clicking the ‘add new post’ button on my dashboard, I expected to begin a fun jaunt into exploring the nuances of the newly added Gutenberg Blocks.

What unfolded before my very eyes, however, was far from being anything fun…What unfolded before my very eyes was…

The White Screen of Death

I could easily navigate back and forth from the emptiness of that edit page to my dashboard, but what good is a website/blog if one has no way to write or publish new content?

Oh and, let’s not forget, I discovered this ‘glitch’ as an after thought! I almost nixxed all my hard work in the protected environment of a staging site with the single ‘push to live’ command.

While hugely grateful to my inner OCD self to have diverted such a disaster, I was more than a bit resentful that I had yet another hurdle to jump over just to get my site up and running on a basic wp5.8 upgrade.

WordPress is not for the faint of heart…but I digress…

Thus began my long and arduous deep dive into troubleshooting. I’ll spare you the details of that deep dive, but I do want to point out that for all the ‘help’ offered, there isn’t much related to what I experienced. So I began expanding my search in more obscure reaches of that ‘help’.

Which lead me to the WP.org support forum for the Hemingway Theme, thinking perhaps it all had to do with theme incompatibility (go here to read the rapid unfolding of what became The Simple Fix).

Turns out, Gutenberg Block Editor does not ‘play well’ with my browser of choice, Mozilla Firefox.

The Fix?

Update that darn Browser and make it ‘play nicely’ with my newly upgraded WordPress site.

Open Letter (debut)

July 22, 2020 / laura bruno lilly

Dear Teacher,
You were my very first formal classical guitar instructor…

Thus begins an open letter I wrote years ago.

The new vistas that surfing the ‘net* opened up in the ’90s prompted me to try contacting my first classical guitar teacher to thank her for the role she played in my development as a musician. I posted a copy of my open letter on both** of the forums I was subscribed to at the time in the hopes it would yield a lead towards finding her. As was common in those days, this inadvertently started a new thread on each of those forums…that of honoring those teachers who most influenced the direction of our lives.

However, it did not bring about the desired outcome.

I did not find her.

But I can still honor her***.

I have always wanted to thank-you for all you did to nurture my first forays into the world of classical guitar. I think you’d be proud of me. Not because I am anyone famous or great, but because you’d recognize the method of love I use in teaching others about our common bond: the classical guitar...

*a term bandied about along with riding the internet highway in the earlier days of internet development.

**The original ClassicalGuitarList and the LuteList are both going strong after all these years…

***Please find & read my Open Letter page neatly nestled between the PTM and DMW pages on the menu bar as part of my newly revised website.

G Squared: Gregory & Gavin

March 8, 2020 / laura bruno lilly

– continuing with the musical pokes and prods – re: “…David Olney lead to Gregory Alan Isakov who lead to Gavin Luke” –

After a trip down snowy Raton Pass memories, my musical (re)search landed me at the merging of a folk/classical piece performed by the Colorado Symphony Orchestra in conjunction with contemporary folk-pop artist, Gregory Alan Isakov. Thus introducing me to a new-to-me younger generation of folkies.

Note: the YouTube featured here is the only media readily available on-line with the CSO/GAI arrangement-performance of this piece. That said, watching it isn’t as important as just listening to this IMHO.

Isakov’s The Stable Song, as performed with the CSO is the type of musical collaboration that excites me as a musician.

Performing in and composing for mixed ensembles has been and continues to be one of my deepest passions as a working musician. Back in the day, it was more unusual for instrumentalists of differing genres to play together in performance or to hear ensembles of unlikely instrumentation in concert outside the University music department recital setting.

It appears these types of cross-over collaborations are becoming more mainstream* – to the delight of musicians and audiences alike.
But that has always been my bent. And upon my life’s reflection, I’m thinking I was perhaps even born into it.

My Dad as a professional jazzman on sax and clarinet was always up for a jam session with me, his daughter, on 12-string acoustic and/or classical guitar. For awhile there we even made the rounds in small performance circles as 3D: Dad Daughter Duo. Our set list comprised of standards, show tunes, contemporary pop, Latin, country, classical repertoire – you name it – with my classical guitar solos and/or 12-string acoustic folkie riffs alternating with his show stopping improvised tenor sax and/or clarinet solos dancing rings around my chordal vamps…Yeah I was born into this.

Finding that sweet-spot key where the natural intonation of disparate instruments sound good while playing together is a greatly rewarding endeavor.
I find it deeply satisfying, stretching the sonic boundaries via unconventional instrumentation and encountering others who explore that same territory in myriad ways.

Included with that exploration is my fascination with anything related to ‘prepared’ instruments. A technique I first encountered during my music school days, John Cage‘s forays into this altered soundscape has since given birth to a wide range of instrument manipulation in the name of New Music. Again, there is cutting edge and then there is what is palatable for mainstream.

Enter Gavin Luke, composer. More of a New Age pianist/composer, I stumbled onto his piece, In Search of Home, while perusing a composer website. The main theme of his piece is compelling, but what I found most interesting was the simple use of felt sheets in his ‘prepared’ piano as central to his composition.

Note: the YouTube featured here is a short 2.5 minutes long in which Gavin demonstrates his process in the creation of this piece.

While I appreciate the creative process as shared by compadre (he)artists regardless of genres, the take-away for me in this case was a surprising appearance of my poetic muse…

…to be shared at another time…
😎

*In order to keep this post shorter and to my intended points, I did not go into depth on the well-known, well-received and highly successful collaborations between unlikely genres & musicians over the years such as The Beatles & orchestral musicians/eastern instruments just to name one example.

Snowin' on Raton

February 14, 2020 / laura bruno lilly

One of the things I do on a regular basis is search and discover ‘new’ (to me) music via a myriad of ways…all part of being a working musician – seeking, learning, creating.
A fine example of this occurred recently. As noted in a prior post, CNN’s short video in tribute to David Olney lead me to seek out more of his music. Which lead me to two other seemingly unrelated musicians/composers. I say ‘seemingly’ because I haven’t a clue as to how I arrived at their respective websites/youtube channels/streaming stations but some invisible google-ly algorithm guided me based upon something related to its way of calculating.
I know standard streaming sites routinely offer up an ‘if you like X, then try Y’ approach to new music seekers. However, my pokes and prods seem more organic, focused, personal – with a touch of human (mine) direction in the seeking. In addition, it is not limited to a particular platform.
Anyway, David Olney lead to Gregory Alan Isakov * who lead to Gavin Luke.*
And then I discovered an unexpected related theme – that of home.
David Olney was an itinerant wanderer, Gregory Alan Isakov is a transplanted Boulderite (my hometown) and Gavin Luke is a composer whose style draws deep home yearnings front and center.
Olney’s cover of Snowin’ on Raton** reminds me of all the traveling back and forth between hubby’s and my family homes…driving over Raton Pass in all types of weather from Colorado to New Mexico and back again from New Mexico to Colorado.
Specifically, two significant snow times come to mind.

1977 Cutlass Supreme w T-Tops, image from google

January 1979. Just a little over 6 months into our newlywed-ness, we packed all our belongings in the smallest sized U-Haul trailer and hitched it onto hubby’s 1977 Burnt Orange Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Brougham (complete with T-tops and other extras). Moving in the winter was dicey but needful as hubby was set to resume studies at NMSU that semester requiring our move from Boulder, CO to Las Cruces, NM to begin our new married-student phase of life. He, as an older student to finish his CS degree on the last of his GI Bill (at that time, NMSU was on the cutting edge as one of the few Universities to offer a Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science Program). And me, to forge a more direct relationship with my in-laws in hubby’s hometown while exploring our own new surroundings filled with endless possibilities. On the day of our move, we expertly navigated the increasingly dense low visibility January snow storm conditions. We even managed to slip (pun intended) into the climbing lane as we began the long steep grade over the pass…before CDOT closed I25 behind us. Yep, we were the last vehicle allowed on the road to mount up and over Raton Pass into NM. Suffice it to say, we jackknifed only once on the steady upward climb and managed a controlled descent on the other side of the pass into Raton, NM.
January 1982. After hubby graduated in December and with our firstborn less than 4 weeks old, we packed up that same Cutlass – with more precious cargo this time around. The plan was to move back temporarily to CO to stay with my folks while waiting for more details concerning hubby’s new job at HP in the Silicon Valley to determine exactly where we’d be relocating. Again, a January snowstorm. Again, slipping past the road closure signs as the last vehicle going up and over the pass. Safely strapped into her rear facing car seat, our newborn baby girl who’d been sound asleep for most of the trip opened her eyes with a start and immediately began her screaming cries as we began our ascent. She sensed the tension of our situation – and added to it – all the way up & over Raton Pass. This newborn Mother could not – dared not – pick her up to nurse her back to calm – and was thusly initiated into the lifelong Sturm und Drang slice of what it means to be a Mom.

And those are the snowy times when we drove Raton Pass and where listening to Snowin’ on Raton many years hence intersect – hitting squarely through my heart –
Missing home. Missing our baby daughter.

*will discuss these two in a later post
**composer/lyricist: Townes Van Zandt

June 21, 2019 / laura bruno lilly

A quick note here:

Lately my comments on other people’s blogs – even those I’ve followed for years – have not been appearing on their comment page. I’ve attempted to correct that by notifying them individually either using their contact-page-form or by piggy-backing on other comments made on the same article. This has gotten way too complicated so I’m sending out this blog post in the hopes that it will help rectify the situation.

If you are a blogger I follow and/or someone I comment on your posts from time to time, please check your spam folder and Un-Spam Me!

What a pain, right? But thank you in advance…

Meanwhile, I’ve also notified AKISMET* about the problem. Realistically, though, who knows how long it will take for my humble request to be noticed in the reality that is the internet – a place filled with millions of spammers and legitimate commenters all mixed together in the blogosphere and beyond.

Have you ever had this problem, too? Do you have any pointers on how to rectify the problem?

If so, please comment below and if you can’t ‘get through’ then try my contact page form…maybe it’s happening on my site as well. It does need a huge overhaul…sigh.

*While doing a google search I came across this very helpful article and followed the advice given once accessing the AKISMET contact page .

Sixty Pho’ part one

December 3, 2018 / laura bruno lilly

Got this postcard from our son Joe in the snail mail a few days ago.

Welcome to the 21st century, Vietnam and Baby Boomers!

The slogans written on the VW bus are as follows:

Make Pho’ Not War

Draft Beer, Not boys

Peace

all we need is peace

Love

Hoian (Quang Nam Province)

War is expensive, Peace is priceless

And the best for last:

Vietnam against War (using the V and W in the VW logo)

Coming of age during the Vietnam War, the country itself has never held any appeal for me to visit. Dove or Hawk, protester or soldier, the war in Vietnam was complicated. The dread of the draft during wartime isn’t too much understood these days as we have an all-volunteer army which implies a desire to be involved in the military in some form or another during times of war and of peace. Those days, enlisting was an option that meant a guy of draftable age could at least choose a branch of the military in which to serve. Hubby chose the Navy.
As such, while hubby served during the Vietnam War, his assigned job as a naval optical man. He’s very adamant about making the distinction that he’s a Vietnam era Vet, not a Vietnam Veteran in deference to those who did indeed serve their tour of duty in Southeast Asia.
Anyway, I have to admit our son’s month long trip hiking, biking and scootering the entire length of Vietnam starting in the North and ending in the South, opened my eyes to its natural beauty, culture, native coffees & foods, and as a traveler’s destination.
Like many of you, I was first introduced to those fresh Vietnamese Noodle Bowls in the 1990’s and graduated to the more complex flavors of Pho’ in recent years. So now, Joe’s fun postcard entices me further as he wrote on the back –

Move over Pho – here comes Bun Bo Hue!

‘I found a pho-sibling that is equally delicious! Bon Bo has a deeper roast flavor to the broth…other delicious dishes to look out for are Bohn Beo, Bahn Khoai.’
Yum! I’m all in!
Darn – I don’t think those selections are on any menu around here in Florence, SC. I even double checked via google since FloTown has been changing in recent years…to be fair. However, I did find in the google search a single listing of a Vietnamese Restaurant that debuted in 2015 and closed down in the same year.
Just sayin’…I’ll keep a keen eye for these dishes elsewhere.
Meanwhile, as for the use of Pho’ as a word in the blogpost title rather than as the name of a delicious dish – How did you mentally pronounce the word Pho’? Faux or Fuh?
Hint: the correct pronunciation of Pho’ helps one to understand its relationship to the Sixty in the title of this post and will become evident as you continue to read on…next time in part two…

So, how do you pronounce Pho’?

40 years and counting

June 17, 2018 / terry w. lilly

Terry’s take on these 40 years…

June 17, 1978 – June 17, 2018

Many months ago I was rooting around on the internet looking into some music. I happened to come across a young jazz saxophonist named Grace Kelly and was watching her Livestream studio session. I started watching the video and really enjoyed her enthusiasm and music. I thought of our son Joe who is a jazz saxophonist also, but I decided not to send him a link to it as he was off touring New Zealand/Fiji/Australia at that time and wasn’t sure how good his internet was. I also thought of my late father-in-law who had died less than a year and a half before. He also was a jazz saxophonist who played with Benny Goodman and other greats in Chicago and who up to nearly the time that he died was always looking for new trends/music.
On the third song of the Livestream, Grace started explaining how she had come to write the song she was about to play. What she said, and more importantly what she played and sang touched a chord in me. I knew then that the song she wrote was a song that described how I felt about Laura and that that song was going to be our 40^th anniversary theme song (not just our 40^th but our lifelong song). Our anniversary was still many months away, so I tucked this song away so I could share it with Laura during our anniversary.
I started researching Grace Kelly a little more and it turned out that she was going to be playing in Las Cruces, New Mexico on May 27^th. It just so happened that I lived in Las Cruces during high school, went off to serve in the Navy and after the Navy came back to Las Cruces to go to college. While in college on a co-op assignment for NOAA in Boulder, Colorado I met and married Laura and we moved back to Cruces to finish my college education before moving on.
We were planning a trip to Colorado to take care of business in early May and I wanted to go to New Mexico to both see Grace Kelly and to visit my parents’ graves. The timing seemed to be aligning to be able to spring on Laura this song at a Grace Kelly concert. Las Cruces is not a tremendously large town so I even hoped to run into Grace somewhere around town so that I could request that she play the song for Laura (not like trying to find Mr. T on Mulholland Drive or in Bel-Air or Hollywood – inside family story).
Unfortunately, our plans changed and we needed to go to Texas for business purposes before we went to Colorado which meant that we would end up in Las Cruces weeks before Grace Kelly was going to play. Knowing this I sat down with Laura before we left, told her that what she was going to see was the way I felt about her and that it was our anniversary song. I put the Livestream on our TV and jumped to 19:03 for the beginning of the story and the song. We sat there and watched the song (multiple times) trying to hold back the tears of our love for each other.
There are some songs that have a special meaning to me about Laura, like Leon Russell’s “A Song For You” and now Grace Kelly’s “Feels Like Home”.
Our anniversary this year falls on Father’s day and I can’t think of a better Father’s day gift than sharing this song which beautifully expresses the way I feel about Laura.
Laura shortly after found the song (sans Grace’s explanation) which is shown below. The full video is here, start at 19:03 for story before song.
Thank you Grace for this beautiful song and thank you Laura for a lifetime of “Feels Like Home”.

NOMA: what are those round-y, tilted buildings?

December 2, 2017 / laura bruno lilly

Photo seen on my Manc* buddy Andy’s blog
(oh, yes, he’s a published poet, check out his books here – perfect for gift-giving, IMHO)

“Whoa, what are those odd round-y tilted buildings?” I asked him in the comment section.

To which he responded with a link to something called NOMA Earth Tubes.
NOMA? What the heck is that?

He further elaborated,
“The atrium is fundamental to the building’s ventilation strategy. Each of its three corners houses one of the building’s vertical service cores. Some 50m3/s of fresh air is sucked into the building from its landscaped forecourt through three giant earth tubes buried beneath the building; this helps temper the air, cooling it in summer and warming it in winter. Air is heated or cooled in a huge basement plant room before giant fans push it up the service cores to the floor plates.”

Huh?
Sufficiently curious, I clicked on his link reference thus beginning a fun google research journey for this lady on a pleasantly cozy, rainy Saturday afternoon. Continue reading