Caspar Weinberger Dead at Age 88

Woke this morning to the usual rain; the climate here in Santa Cruz is beginning to resemble the weather in the movie Seven: incessant rain. I know this means lots of wildflowers and a very happy garden for me this summer..but still, sun would be nice.
I have sweet peas and poppies already planted, and hope they haven't been drowned out.

I saw on the news today that Caspar Weinberger died--CNN has the story today. Weinberger spoke at my graduation from the University of San Diego in 1981. It capped off quite a year for me. I have no love lost on the institution where I got my bachelor's degree--when I went there in the late 1970s/early 1980s, some perfectly awful things happened to students which the university did nothing whatsoever about (as a Catholic institution, it seemed to hold itself to a different standard, protecting those who should never be protected). One of these incidents involved a friend of mine who had--let's just say--for the purpose of privacy and safety, so as not to rile the blogtattlers--an altercation with a priest that wasn't just a friendly discussion about transubstantiation. The priest was a very popular guy, extremely handsome (all the women wanted to go to him for confession)--and when I heard about what he did, a couple of years later, and how there were no repercussions on him, but plenty on my friend, I was shocked, but not surprised due to something in my own experience with the university that year (an experience during which many of my friends were unbelievably unsupportive, and that's being extraordinarily generous--in many of my friendships then, I was "going to the hardware store for milk," as they say in recovery, but still). Capping off a year of bizarreness was Weinberger delivering a speech at my graduation (the protesters were much more interesting). Seems that time was the start of a very long string of both political and personal chaos. Cap's joining of the Choir Invisible brings a lot of it back to me today.

Instead of going on a rant about Iran-Contra, the Catholic Church, the Reagan administration, and all that jazz, I've decided to link to an interesting blog today. I won't be following this philosophy, nor do I advocate it--but I wanted to link to something today that wasn't a news article. I like the part about the Bush bobblehead figure.