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Sleigh riding at Camp Determination

Our grandsons Ethan and Edison came to stay with Papaw and Mamaw for 10 days recently.  I said to my husband Jim when their visit was confirmed, “Great!  Let’s teach the boys determination!!”  We definitely want them to be as stubborn and bull headed as we are.   Oh yes we do.  We definitely do.

You see we were disturbed by their level of follow through when the going gets tough so to speak.  At first, it was an unwillingness to ride a bike if it was physically demanding or there could be a fall of any kind.  Then, it seemed to be snowballing into reports of  ”The boys don’t like to be out in the cold.  They’d rather be snuggled up inside and warm with a cup of hot chocolate.”  and well, you get the idea…

So, hut two three four, to Mamaw and Papaw’s they came.  The boys arrived under the pretense of celebrating a late Christmas due to distance.  When at last we were all together again, little two year old Edison defiantly announced “Santa is fake!   …..  Santa is FAKE!!”  I had already been warned by my daughter Stephany that she felt it important that the boys not become confused about Jesus by believing in Santa.   My grandson “Older than five Ethan” knowingly looked on with approval at his little brothers’ assertion.  Jim and I later tried to present the snowshoes that Santa had left the boys but it was futile.  The bit about Santa being limited to the frigid, winter land of northern Minnesota would have made some inroads with little Edison but not older than five Ethan.   He took two steps back and lifted an eyebrow of disapproval that his grandparents would reach such lows as lie to him and his little brother.  My husband and I looked exasperated at each other knowing it just wasn’t worth sliding further onto this thin ice we found ourselves on.

We had our first instruction the next day with the very un-controversial activity called sleigh riding down the icy, snow covered driveway.  We first versed them in wearing layers for comfort.  They learned the importance of  stuffing their gloves inside coat sleeve elastic, the importance of the northern ‘gator’ for their neck protection, and not just stocking hats but knit hats with tabs down to their collarbones to cover tender ears and cheeks.  Next, came “the hill”.    We focused on form and technique, placement of the rope and it’s use, the wisdom of ‘ditching’ if they slide out of control toward a tree, etc… etc…

They were frustrated at times, Ethan kept forgetting the placement of the rope both up and down hill.  Edison lost patience at all the effort it  took to maneuver uphill.  Once, he almost stormed away sure I had betrayed him by accelerating his fall to the ground in front of the sleigh. Ethan cut through the Dutch language barrier I was experiencing with Edison’s excited scorn,  “He thinks you did it on PURPOSE?!.”   That too became a lesson in “Never give up.”  I coaxed Edison back to the peak of that hill and with determination he once again committed to have fun on the sled.

But then, it all came together when we just wouldn’t accept a failure to have sleigh riding fun.   They were naturals.  Why they flew down the hill.  Older than five Ethan proudly announced his desire to go up and then down the hill again and  little Edison belly laughed all the way down sitting face first into the wind in front of his big brother for added weight and speed. We were pleased that they had completed their first day of Camp Determination.  I smiled to myself  knowing it was on to snowshoes tomorrow…

Kids and Dogs in motion

And so I’ll leave you now to the rest of your day.  The saga of the snowshoes is a whole other story…

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…Mockery, anger, bullying, exclusion and abusive labeling of people that look, think, act, or believe differently is slithering across the air waves…  It’s called neo-fascism.  Yes the Republicans spent their Saturday afternoon listening to Rush Limbaugh’s sermon.  The messiah of the Republican party is preaching that America turn away from religious freedom and choose THEIR way and no other. 

I’m listening to Rush Limbaugh speaking to the Republicans gathered in Washington D.C.   CNN just had to cut him off as his base character came seething through the screen.  He mockingly spoke in a classic stereotypical gay male lisp as he spewed polarizing hate against the Democratic values of religious freedom and equality for all in the United States.

He continues to undermine our founding fathers principals of fighting for religious freedom, life and liberty for all people while seeking to deceive that HE is protecting those values.   Hmmm…  I think the Bible’s Book of Revelations warns us to see him and others like him for what they are – not what they say they are. 

Laissez-faire business practices in the United States is on it’s way out and the Republican Party wealthy elite are turning to their progaganda machine to sway the masses back into line – a pill popping, law breaking, bigoted, fear mongering,  old white male spewing hate to  mobilize the uneducated masses!  This is the Republican party’s ‘best of class’ ?  

Rush actually tried to deceive Americans into believing that bleeding heart liberals are responsible for the politics of racism in the Republican party.  He would have us believe Democrats are the ones creating cartoons portraying blacks with watermelons, monkeys and lynch ropes.   This hate and anger as contrasted against the audacity of hope… 

Hmmm….  how do I want God to judge me once I take my last breath?  As a Christian woman, how do I want to describe my life to Him?  Did I take personal responsibility for my choices in life or seek to point out others short comings instead?  Did I live peacefully as Jesus instructed me to do with compromise and compassion or did I choose to seek power over others lest they have power over me – the anatomy of every abuser personified? 

Did I fight for life by eliminating ignorance and poverty among young men and women or did I act as the pharisees and preach religious superiority while grinding women into poverty perpetuating unwanted pregnancy, drugs and alcohol, violence and despair.   Did I live by Jesus’s commandment to show love by forgiving trespasses as I pray that God will forgive my own?  

Did I choose peace instead of war, love over hate, my family’s health, the wonder of earth’s creation and childrens rights to clean air and water in place of corporate profits and laissez-faire greed and corruption? Did I choose to shepard the lesser creatures of the world and practice humane animal husbandry as God commanded or did I choose killing for sport and twisted, sick abuse of animals as a God given right of having ‘dominion over’ ?

Faith and class warfare used as a weapon to manipulate and polarize the masses is nothing new – the Crusaders, Klu Klux Klan, Skin Heads, and Hitler have nothing on Rush.  It saddens me so to know many Americans learned nothing from the lessons of the American Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, World War I and World War II.  This hate speak puts America on the wrong side of world history and I pray our great nation will continue to choose religious freedom for all, human rights, our children’s right to clean air and water, the ethical treatment of animals, honesty and integrity in business practices and compassion for all peoples.

There is a center for America and it’s not found in the politics of divide and conquer. You won’t find it by being a ‘sheep – le’ blindly following leaders seeking to overflow their coffers by preaching what divides America from the pulpit.  I choose light over darkness – and yes in the name of God Almighty as I understand Him to be.  Amen.

I grew up listening to Paul Harvey from our farm kitchen window to the world.  Commentators are speaking of Paul Harvey as a conservative – I guess I never thought of him as convervative or liberal – he was someone I knew instinctively I could trust.  I think Paul Harvey and my father would have been great friends.   My father was elected to the ASCS office for 21 years in a row despite being a passionate Democrat in a very Republican county.  

How did he manage that you ask?  He carried out his responsibility of distributing farm grants with fairness, honesty, integrity and honor.  Dad loved people and it showed in his interactions and yet make no mistake he was the epitimy of the Democratic Farm Labor party.  Dad and Paul both lived in the era long past of civility, even handed justice, and steering clear of controversy that would tarnish your good name.  

Paul Harvey was a friend, companion, voice of reason and ray of sunlight during my youth.  I am saddened the country has lost someone so dear to so many but glad he has reunited with his precious “Angel” .  It’s exciting to think that Paul Harvey and his wife ”Angel ” are exploring the next chapter in their lives and together again.  They truly know “the Rest of the Story” now….

Coalbrookdale 1801 Artist: Loutherbourg d. J., Philipp Jakob

Change is coming so we hear in this election.  The world is changing at an accelerated pace over the last 200 years.  It’s amazing really – civilization has been on a colision course toward destroying the world since the first industrial revolution

For sure – things will change but will it be good change?  I say it absolutely HAS to be the change that will save our earth from total destruction.  I know I sound like an alarmist… it’s because I’m alarmed.  How greedy are you?  I mean really…  If you were told your child has 20 years to live unless you change everything you’re doing right now – would you?

Are you concerned for your job?   How about blue collar jobs, small businesses, the credit crisis, the stock market fall, hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, and drought?  Global warming… is man made and we must think about the future of our children and grandchildren.

Make the right choice on November 4th – vote for the candidate that will truly bring change to America and bring us out of this economic disaster.

Vote Obama

The Great Depression

My parents were children during the Great Depression.

If I learned anything during my life, it has been don’t live on credit and keep your money in safe vehicles like municipal bonds. 

During the Great Depression, the stock market lost 90% of stock values over several years.  That’s why I’m in the stock market I guess!  But I must tell you that the first good rebound I can catch, I’m bailing…

My mother told the story of her Dad working for $1 a day as a farm hand.  He had found work miraculously with 10 hungry mouths to feed and no money, no food, and no jobs in the country.  She recalled having to sweep the kitchen floor free of snow before they started the woodstove to boil water.

Every day that winter, the children were sent out to the snow covered, windswept cornfield a short distance from the house.  She would tell how they would plunge their bare hands into the ice capped snow in search of corn cobs left behind during harvest.  They collected stripped corn cobs into their shirt coats and then as the oldest child, my mother would lead them all back to the sanctuary of that woodstove warmed kitchen and hand the frozen cobs off to my grandmother.  She would deposit the cobs into the boiling water and they would all wait as the mixture boiled down into a kind of corn cob mush.

Her parents kept them alive that winter with that mush, a little sugar and milk from a cow they were fortunate enough to have for milk.

That’s tough…  People were kinder then in our agricultural society… 

Today our country is being drained of billions of money for a war to secure foreign oil for big oil, hurricanes brought on by global warming continue to devastate our coastlines and contribute to the surge in unemployement and foreclosures further pressuring our strained American economy.

It’s time for pulling in and protecting your family and the best thing you can do right now is get out of debt and save in a FDIC insured bank.  Are you working right now?  Then do what you can while you can…

Find a second source of income and recession proof your life.  We have to quit living beyond our means as Americans.  Each of us must do our part to stop pouring carbon emissions into our atmosphere.  It’s time to help humanity and pull together during the coming days, months, and years.  And please do something new every chance you can to live green…  for the future of our children.

I can help you build a second revenue stream with our green business. People are contacting me faster than I can get back to them since this crisis.  It’s a perfect time to join our team and let’s build a better future together with your own carbon neutral health and wellness business.  We can all do this together.  There is hope for a better future and one thing I know to be true – change is coming.

Unfortunately, I don’t have influence on their weekend diet but my daughter is buying organic foods and we belong to an organic CSA which supply the family with vegetables and fruits.  The boys are thriving on these foods and I have seen the same remarkable changes in my health when I stay away from chemical laden foods.

Please read the article below and get the word out.  If you want to experiment on your own children or grandchildren – I invite you to do so with an open mind and notebook.  Let me know if you see the same positive results when your kids eat organic and live in a non-toxic environment.

ON ALERT Robyn O’Brien, at home with her children in Colorado, advises parents to throw out nonorganic processed foods.

ROBYN O’BRIEN likes to joke that at least she hasn’t started checking the rearview mirror to see if she’s being followed.

But some days, her imagination gets away from her and she wonders if it’s only a matter of time before Big Food tries to stop her from exposing what she sees as a profit-driven global conspiracy whose collateral damage is an alarming increase in childhood food allergies.

Ms. O’Brien has presented her views, albeit in a less radical wrapper, on CNN, CBS and in frequent print interviews. Frontier Airlines and Wild Oats stores distribute the allergy-awareness gear she designed.

Her story is one of several in a new book, “Healthy Child, Healthy World” (Dutton, March 2008), whose contributors include doctors, parents and celebrities like Meryl Streep.

Sitting at the table in her suburban kitchen, with her four young children tumbling in and out, Ms. O’Brien, 36, seems an unlikely candidate to be food’s Erin Brockovich (who, by the way, has taken Ms. O’Brien under her wing).

She grew up in a staunchly Republican family in Houston where lunch at the country club frequented by George and Barbara Bush followed Sunday church services. She was an honors student, earned a master’s degree in business and, like her husband, Jeff, made a living as a financial analyst.

Ms. O’Brien was also the kind of mom who rolled her eyes when the kid with a peanut allergy showed up at the birthday party. Then, about two years ago, she fed her youngest child scrambled eggs. The baby’s face quickly swelled into a grotesque mask. “What did you spray on her?” she screamed at her other children. Little Tory had a severe food allergy, and Ms. O’Brien’s journey had begun.

By late that night, she had designed a universal symbol to identify children with food allergies. She now puts the icon, a green stop sign with an exclamation point, on lunch bags, stickers and even the little charms children use to dress up their Crocs. These products and others are sold on her Web site, AllergyKids.com, which she unveiled, strategically, on Mother’s Day in 2006.

The $30,000 Ms. O’Brien made from the products last year is incidental, she said. Working largely from a laptop on her dining room table, she has looked deep into the perplexing world of childhood food allergies and seen a conspiracy that threatens the health of America’s children. And, she profoundly believes, it is up to her and parents everywhere to stop it.

Her theory — that the food supply is being manipulated with additives, genetic modification, hormones and herbicides, causing increases in allergies, autism and other disorders in children — is not supported by leading researchers or the largest allergy advocacy groups.

That only feeds Ms. O’Brien’s conviction that the influence of what she sees as the profit-hungry food industry runs deep. In just a few dizzying steps, she can take you from a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese to Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds to Donald H. Rumsfeld, who once ran the company that created the sweetener aspartame.

Through creative use of e-mail, relentless inquiry and a persona carefully crafted around the protective mother archetype, Ms. O’Brien has emerged as a populist hero among parents who troll the Internet for any hint about why their children have food allergies.

“You have changed my life … my diet … my health … my spirit … and I thank YOU,” a father who had lost his teenage daughter to anaphylactic shock told her by e-mail.

Ms. O’Brien encourages people to do what she did: throw out as much nonorganic processed food as you can afford to. Avoid anything genetically modified, artificially created or raised with hormones. Don’t eat food with ingredients you can’t pronounce.

Once she cleaned out her cupboards, she said, her four children started behaving better. Their health problems, which her doctor attributed to allergies to milk and other foods, cleared up.

“It was absolutely terrifying to unearth this story,” she said over lunch at a restaurant in Boulder, Colo. “These big food companies have an intimate relationship with every household in America, and they are making our children sick. I was rocked. You don’t want to hear that this has actually happened.”

But has it?

Record numbers of parents are heading to doctors concerned that their children are allergic to a long list of foods. States are passing laws requiring schools to have policies protecting children with food allergies. But no one knows why the number of allergies seems to be on the rise, or even if they are rising as fast as some believe.

Ms. O’Brien and leading allergy researchers agree that few reliable studies on food allergies exist. The best estimates suggest that 4 to 8 percent of young children suffer from them, though the reactions tend to grow less serious and less frequent as children grow older.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the number of deaths linked to food allergies at 12 in 2004, the most recent year for which data are available. However, its statisticians point out that such figures are drawn only from doctors’ notations on death certificates.

“It’s a soft number, and it might well be an understatement,” said Arialdi Miniño, a statistician at the agency’s National Center for Health Statistics.

Dr. Elizabeth Gleghorn is the director of pediatric gastroenterology at the Children’s Hospital and Research Center in Oakland, Calif. She has been in practice for 20 years, and has noticed a recent increase in eczema, which can indicate food allergies. But she doesn’t think food allergies are increasing dramatically.

Often, a child might have intolerance to a food and not a true allergy. But the Internet has afforded more ways for parents to inform themselves and do their own diagnosing, which could add to the popular impression that food allergies are rising at alarming rates, Dr. Gleghorn said.

Many health professionals, though, agree that something is changing. Among the amalgam of theories that weigh the effects of genetics and environment, the hygiene hypothesis intrigues many researchers. It holds that children are being exposed to fewer micro-organisms and, as a result, have weaker immune systems.

“But this alone cannot account for the massive relative increase in food allergy compared with other allergic disease such as asthma,” said Dr. Marc E. Rothenberg, the director of allergy and immunology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, the second-largest pediatric research facility in the country.

ROBYN O’BRIEN likes to joke that at least she hasn’t started checking the rearview mirror to see if she’s being followed.

But some days, her imagination gets away from her and she wonders if it’s only a matter of time before Big Food tries to stop her from exposing what she sees as a profit-driven global conspiracy whose collateral damage is an alarming increase in childhood food allergies.

Ms. O’Brien has presented her views, albeit in a less radical wrapper, on CNN, CBS and in frequent print interviews. Frontier Airlines and Wild Oats stores distribute the allergy-awareness gear she designed.

Her story is one of several in a new book, “Healthy Child, Healthy World” (Dutton, March 2008), whose contributors include doctors, parents and celebrities like Meryl Streep.

Sitting at the table in her suburban kitchen, with her four young children tumbling in and out, Ms. O’Brien, 36, seems an unlikely candidate to be food’s Erin Brockovich (who, by the way, has taken Ms. O’Brien under her wing).

She grew up in a staunchly Republican family in Houston where lunch at the country club frequented by George and Barbara Bush followed Sunday church services. She was an honors student, earned a master’s degree in business and, like her husband, Jeff, made a living as a financial analyst.

Ms. O’Brien was also the kind of mom who rolled her eyes when the kid with a peanut allergy showed up at the birthday party. Then, about two years ago, she fed her youngest child scrambled eggs. The baby’s face quickly swelled into a grotesque mask. “What did you spray on her?” she screamed at her other children. Little Tory had a severe food allergy, and Ms. O’Brien’s journey had begun.

By late that night, she had designed a universal symbol to identify children with food allergies. She now puts the icon, a green stop sign with an exclamation point, on lunch bags, stickers and even the little charms children use to dress up their Crocs. These products and others are sold on her Web site, AllergyKids.com, which she unveiled, strategically, on Mother’s Day in 2006.

The $30,000 Ms. O’Brien made from the products last year is incidental, she said. Working largely from a laptop on her dining room table, she has looked deep into the perplexing world of childhood food allergies and seen a conspiracy that threatens the health of America’s children. And, she profoundly believes, it is up to her and parents everywhere to stop it.

Her theory — that the food supply is being manipulated with additives, genetic modification, hormones and herbicides, causing increases in allergies, autism and other disorders in children — is not supported by leading researchers or the largest allergy advocacy groups.

That only feeds Ms. O’Brien’s conviction that the influence of what she sees as the profit-hungry food industry runs deep. In just a few dizzying steps, she can take you from a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese to Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds to Donald H. Rumsfeld, who once ran the company that created the sweetener aspartame.

Through creative use of e-mail, relentless inquiry and a persona carefully crafted around the protective mother archetype, Ms. O’Brien has emerged as a populist hero among parents who troll the Internet for any hint about why their children have food allergies.

“You have changed my life … my diet … my health … my spirit … and I thank YOU,” a father who had lost his teenage daughter to anaphylactic shock told her by e-mail.

Ms. O’Brien encourages people to do what she did: throw out as much nonorganic processed food as you can afford to. Avoid anything genetically modified, artificially created or raised with hormones. Don’t eat food with ingredients you can’t pronounce.

Once she cleaned out her cupboards, she said, her four children started behaving better. Their health problems, which her doctor attributed to allergies to milk and other foods, cleared up.

“It was absolutely terrifying to unearth this story,” she said over lunch at a restaurant in Boulder, Colo. “These big food companies have an intimate relationship with every household in America, and they are making our children sick. I was rocked. You don’t want to hear that this has actually happened.”

But has it?

Record numbers of parents are heading to doctors concerned that their children are allergic to a long list of foods. States are passing laws requiring schools to have policies protecting children with food allergies. But no one knows why the number of allergies seems to be on the rise, or even if they are rising as fast as some believe.

Ms. O’Brien and leading allergy researchers agree that few reliable studies on food allergies exist. The best estimates suggest that 4 to 8 percent of young children suffer from them, though the reactions tend to grow less serious and less frequent as children grow older.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the number of deaths linked to food allergies at 12 in 2004, the most recent year for which data are available. However, its statisticians point out that such figures are drawn only from doctors’ notations on death certificates.

“It’s a soft number, and it might well be an understatement,” said Arialdi Miniño, a statistician at the agency’s National Center for Health Statistics.

Dr. Elizabeth Gleghorn is the director of pediatric gastroenterology at the Children’s Hospital and Research Center in Oakland, Calif. She has been in practice for 20 years, and has noticed a recent increase in eczema, which can indicate food allergies. But she doesn’t think food allergies are increasing dramatically.

Often, a child might have intolerance to a food and not a true allergy. But the Internet has afforded more ways for parents to inform themselves and do their own diagnosing, which could add to the popular impression that food allergies are rising at alarming rates, Dr. Gleghorn said.

Many health professionals, though, agree that something is changing. Among the amalgam of theories that weigh the effects of genetics and environment, the hygiene hypothesis intrigues many researchers. It holds that children are being exposed to fewer micro-organisms and, as a result, have weaker immune systems.

“But this alone cannot account for the massive relative increase in food allergy compared with other allergic disease such as asthma,” said Dr. Marc E. Rothenberg, the director of allergy and immunology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, the second-largest pediatric research facility in the country.

Could it be that a toxic food environment has made children’s immune systems go haywire? It’s hard to find an expert in the field who supports Ms. O’Brien’s theory. “I don’t think it can be proven, so I can’t say scientifically one way or the other,” Dr. Gleghorn said.

Mix the lack of hard data with an increasingly complex food landscape, and you’ve got Robyn O’Brien.

“Food allergies just become a focus for a broader fear about the food system,” said the author Michael Pollan, a contributor to The New York Times Magazine.

Mr. Pollan, in both “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and his new book, “In Defense of Food” (January, Penguin), shares many of Ms. O’Brien’s views about industrialized agriculture. He also has a niece with a peanut allergy. So Ms. O’Brien sent him an e-mail message, and a correspondence began.

Ms. O’Brien took his responses as an endorsement of her work, and then mentioned his support in messages to other people. Mr. Pollan, who said he has no idea if her theories are accurate, asked her to stop telling people he was working with her.

Leveraging brief e-mail exchanges with notable people is an important method that Ms. O’Brien uses to build her universe. The unlikely mix includes members of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s staff; Mary Alice Stephenson, a host of “America’s Most Smartest Model”; and, recently, Dr. Mehmet Oz, a regular on Oprah Winfrey’s show.

“The fact that people like him and Malcolm Gladwell, presidential campaigns, celebs take the time to reply means a lot as it gives me hope that people are still engaged,” she said in an e-mail message to this reporter.

While some of her contacts, like Mr. Gladwell, an author and a writer for The New Yorker, don’t remember her, the strategy has worked. Nell Newman, who runs the organic arm of Newman’s Own products, spoke up on her behalf on the national news. Deborah Koons Garcia, the widow of Jerry Garcia and director of the documentary “The Future of Food,” invited her to lunch.

But her biggest asset might be a relentless drive to wind together obscure health theories, blog postings and corporate financial statements. She then posts her analyses on her Web site.

She chides top allergy doctors who are connected to Monsanto, the producer of herbicides and genetically modified seeds. She asserts that the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, the nation’s leading food allergy advocacy group, is tainted by the money it receives from food manufacturers and peanut growers.

Anne Muñoz-Furlong founded the network in 1991 after her daughter was found to have milk and egg allergies. She said the group now has 30,000 members and a $5.6 million budget.

Although Kraft did help the organization start its Web site and other food manufacturing companies and trade groups sponsor some of its programs, that support has amounted to about $100,000. Mrs. Muñoz-Furlong said that she and doctors on her medical board do not believe that genetically modified foods cause food allergies because most children with allergies react to specific foods, like eggs or milk.

And, she said, communicating regularly with industry can help get the word to parents about potential allergens in products, and supporting research to identify causes of allergies helps consumers more than companies.

She also cautioned against taking the advice of people who have no medical training or run Web sites not certified to have reliable medical information. “She’s a dot-com,” Mrs. Muñoz-Furlong said of Ms. O’Brien. “It’s completely different than a dot-org. From the very beginning our intent was education.”

(Ms. O’Brien did recently start a nonprofit foundation to support research that is not tied to the food industry.)

On the days when Ms. O’Brien grows discouraged at being David against the Goliath of Big Food, she turns to the people who believe her.

Erin Brockovich, whose brother died of a food allergy years ago, was a legal file clerk who helped land a record judgment against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company for contaminating drinking water. She is an environmental consultant who is popular on the inspirational lecture circuit.

Ms. Brockovich said her new friend does a great job of arming everyday people with facts, so they can take a stand.

“You don’t have to be a doctor or a scientist to look into whether our food supply is safe,” she said. “Being obsessed doesn’t mean she’s crazy. Frankly, I think it takes a little bit of being crazy to make a difference in this world.”