Pray, why are you at the library?!

A 9 yo girl and her friend came up to the desk and asked to use the microfilm reader. Library rules prohibit the unattended use of the microfilm by anyone under 12, and there was no one available to monitor them tonight. So they were told no.

After delivering this unwelcome piece of news, I was subjected to the most intense glare I've received yet working at the library. If looks could kill, I'd be a shriveled heap on the library carpet right now. She tried cajoling and looking cute after that. And then she tried arguing. I was steadfast, which I'm thinking must have been an unusual thing for her to see in an adult.

Because I'm not completely heartless, I tried to get her interested in something else. "There are lots of things to do in the library," I said in a chirpy voice. "No, there aren't," she said in a glumly defiant one. "My mom won't let me get online. I've checked out all the videos I'm allowed to. Now I'm not allowed to use the microfilm reader. And I hate reading."

oy.

Still not ready to concede defeat, I tried other tactics to find something that would interest her. "What are you interested in? You must be interested in something that we have a book on." She impatiently spouted off the name of some person or other (not sure who, but I think it's a teen actress) and finished off by saying in a forceful tone that we didn't own any books on her. What about other things? "I like dogs. But I don't want to read or look at a book about them." I tried a different approach, and then her friend chimed in. "We've been in school reading all day long. We hate reading and we don't want to do it right now."

oy again.

Inwardly I cursed a system that locks children up all day long, forcing them to do so much academic stuff without a decent chance to enjoy the world and actually get curious about something.

Outwardly I tried to be sympathetic. "I've been reading all day today, too. I'm working on a paper for school and so I've been doing a lot of reading for that. I'm working on a paper about Mexico!"
The girls made a face. "I hate Mexico," said She Who Started It All. I asked why... you'll never guess. "It's boring."

Boring?! "Did you know that Mexico has volcanoes?" I asked in a last ditch effort to get the girls to rise above something besides their own boredom. "Yeah. I don't like Mexico. It's boring."

---
I don't remember where, but somewhere in this conversation I very bluntly told them that they were the ones who were choosing to be bored. They were offended: if only they could use the internet, or check out another video, or use the microfilm reader, then they wouldn't be bored. Basically -- if something electronic entertained them, then they'd be happy.

Heartbreaking.

Movie Meme

From here.

1. Name a movie you have seen more than 10 times.

"It's a Wonderful Life," because it's Christmas, dontchya know, so you have to watch it Every Year.

2. Name a movie you've seen multiple times in the theater.

Pirates of the Caribbean 1 and Return of the King

3. Name an actor who would make you more inclined to see a movie.

Cary Grant...

4. Name an actor who would make you less likely to see a movie.

There are a whole lot of those!


5. Name a movie you can and do quote from.

The Princess Bride

6. Name a movie musical in which you know all of the lyrics to all of the songs.

Fiddler on the Roof, Pirates of Penzance (except for the "Modern Major General" song), Phantom of the Opera

7. Name a movie you have been known to sing along with.

Fiddler on the Roof, Pirates of Penzance, Singing in the Rain.

8. Name a movie you would recommend everyone see.

Amazing Grace

9. Name a movie you own.

I own? "Finding Neverland."


10. Name an actor who launched his/her entertainment career in another medium but who has surprised you with his/her acting chops.

Ummmmm.... well, I don't know of any that I knew of before they started acting, but Will Smith is purty good.

11. Have you ever seen a movie in a drive-in?

Yes, I saw the first Pirates of the Caribbean in a drive-in.

13. Name a movie you keep meaning to see but you just haven't gotten around to yet.

Umm... I haven't been able to finish the rest of "War and Peace."

14. Ever walked out of a movie? Which one?

Nope.

15. Name a movie that made you cry in the theater.

I. Don't. Cry. In. Public. Places. (If I can help it.)
But Return of the King made me sniffly.

16. Popcorn?

Yes.

17. How often do you go to the movies (as opposed to renting them or watching them at home)?

4 or 5-ish times a year, I think... it depends on whether there are any good movies.

18. What's the last movie you saw in a movie theater?

Amazing Grace

19. What's your favorite/preferred genre of movie?

Mystery... Historical... Fantasy... Comedy... Action... Spy...

20. What's the first movie you remember seeing in the theater?

Either Ever After or "It Happened One Night," in an dollar theater playing oldies.

21. What movie do you wish you had never seen?

I don't think I've seen any of those yet.

22. What is the weirdest movie you enjoyed?

The Trouble With Harry.

23. What is the scariest movie you've seen?

Scariest... um. The Village or a movie I just saw that I can't remember the name of.

24. What is the funniest movie you've seen?

Hm. That's hard.
Pirates of the Caribbean 1
Princess Bride
My Family and Other Animals
The Man Who Came to Dinner
Monsters Inc.
The Inspector General
And a whole lot more...

The Equuschick was GOING to be organized today.

She set the spare ribs out to thaw hours ahead of time.

She came back an hour before everyone would be ready to eat, quickly and deftly chopped and sauteed an onion, whipped up some barbecue sauce, putting her ingredients away and wiping up anything that spilled or splattered, and then she rinsed her dishes and set them in the sink.

She put the spare ribs in the pans, spread the sauce over them evenly, and covered the pans with tin-foil.

She set the pans in the upper oven.

And then she turned on the lower oven, and came upstairs in something of a pleased and satisfied fashion.

After half an hour or so of web-surfing, she came back down to the kitchen to be shocked and offended by the sight of a warm and glowing empty lower oven, and a cold, dark, and rather sad looking upper oven full of cold and raw spare ribs.

Plans for the Week

We're doing some major rearranging here, or rather, the Progeny are, because around here and especially of late when I say WE that mostly means they because I flatly cannot cope with far too much and it takes far too little to flatten me.

But, as I say, major rearranging is being done. This is because a family of five in our homeschool group put their house on the market and low and behold their house did sell, and it came to pass that it did sell for what they were asking, but the house they hoped to buy also did sell, but woe betide them, not unto them. And so it also came to pass that those who would buy their house besought them to make haste and to be gone with much speed, yea, even tomorrow would not be soon enough for them, and so our friends found themselves with no place to lay their heads, though the foxes have holes, the birds have nests, and paper wasps make those natty little hexagon shaped rooms for their young out of a perfectly disgusting mixture of chewed up wood and spit, and they build a spiffy little sort of apartment which they attach to other things by a stalk of even more masticated bits of wood and plant matter and plenty more spit but humans just haven't the jaws for that sort of thing and so we said unto our friends, "We have much room here and we did builden the house of a greatsome size with the intent to share and be hospitable with what God has so graciously granted us, so if it please you, come and stay with us."

And while it didn't exactly please them, because naturally they would like to be going from their old house directly to their new house, they haven't got the new house yet, and so staying with us seemed preferable to being street people and it did relieve them. That isn't how they put it, of course. They were all graciousness and gratitude and concern but we and logic prevailed and so they will be here on Thursday.

Speaking of graciousness and gratitude, they aren't the same thing and a small pet peeve of mine, a tiny little pet that doesn't take up much space or time but does catch me up short whenever it is arroused is the way people misuse the word graciously when the word gratefully would be better. As in, 'He offered me a million dollars and I thanked him graciously and spent it all on lottery tickets." To portray yourself as the gracious one when you are the recipient of a favor smacks of arrogance and unbecoming overestimation of one's own charms. You may, and should, thank others as graciously as you please, but you had better be grateful, too, and when you tell others about how you did the thanking, don't describe your own grateful thanks as gracious. When sharing with others, the offer was gracious (even if it wasn't) and you are grateful (even if you aren't). And that's manners, oh Best Beloved.

And I am very grateful indeed for my gracious children. For years I used to tell people that we had so many people over all the time because my husband had a gift for hospitalitly and since I was married to him, I had to go alone for the ride. A friend who noted how much my husband cooked (which at the time was not at all) suggested that my husband had a gift for inviting people over while I did the hospitable part, and while that wasn't entirely true- he is a people person and I am not, it was true enough to be funny. And now I do the inviting and the Progeny play Martha, mostly quite graciously, because somebody has to.

Which means my part of the rearranging has largely been limited to the sort of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic that I do best, which means I cleared off the computer desk in my room, straightened and rearranged the piles and piles of books to be read that tower on my desk and the ledge behind the window so they cannot fall on my head anymore and they do look better and I even cataloged two boxes of books we found lurking in the guest room cleverly disguised as boxes of books that had already been sorted and catalogued.

So when I finished rearranging and tidying up the deck chairs (cleverly disguised as books) on my desk and ledge, I looked at it and said something like, "There. And not one more book goes in this pile, NOT ONE, until I've read enough of them to shrink the pile from the size of the Manhattan skyline to something more like Chicago's skyline."

That was Saturday. I said it quite firmly, too. Jenny asked 'Which pile?" but I pretended not to hear her.

Today this came in the mail:

Morning is a Little Child, by Joan Walsh Anglund- I used to own this book, a favorite of my childhood, and it was destroyed when a non-reading member of my household stored it in a mudpuddle.

The Last Gift of Time by Carolyn G. Heilbrun

The 3,000 Mile Garden An Exchange of Letters on Gardening, Food, and The Good Life by Leslie Land and Roger Phillips

Writing a Woman's Life by Carolyn G. HEilbrun

Beds I have Known, Confessions of a Passionate Amateur Gardener by Martha Smith

Marginalia, Readers Writing in Books by H. J. Jackson

Drinks from the Wild by Steven A. Krause (using wild plants for beverages, sauces, and so forth)

Beautiful Joe, by Marshall Saunders, a dog book I shall assume is for Pip or Equuschick and

All HOrses Go To Heaven, which the Equuschick knows is for her.

I don't why it seems relevant, but while Pip was cleaning out the Sunroom, which over the past yeasr (yes, we have now lived one year in this house) has briefly been: a natural history museum of the youngest two children's, a cardroom for some other children, a place to play with trains and blocks for some visiting children, a plant room for me, and for a longer period a sort of limbo or purgatory for everything we aren't quite sure what to do with until it discovers a place where it belongs or completes its penance for not belonging anywhere at all-
I say, while Pip was cleaning that room, she paused to come and speak to me where I was cowering in my room reflecting on the futility of my life, and she came to see me to ask me an important question.
"Mother? How many other weird families do you suppose keep cow skeletons in the sun-room?"`

Traditional Life

I've been a traditional wife and I've always defined traditoinal wife as a woman who puts down whatever she is doing to go to the place she is needed. Then you can go back and entertain yourself.
Mrs. Whaley and her Charleston Garden

Refuge

I'm reading this and this this morning.

Non Sequiter

Yesterday at the church we were visiting we permitted the Boy to sit with an elderly lady who has known my mother since before I was born. They were sitting behind us. At some point in the middle of services the Boy leaned forward and whispered in my ear, "I have a very lose tooth."
I shurgged.
"and I need to cough very badly."
I nodded. Granny Tea, sitting next to me, was at that moment hacking like her own ward of a TB hospital.
"So can I go to the bathroom?"

The answer, if anybody is wondering, was of course no.

Poetry for Poetry Month

Poetry Month is nearly over, which is rather sad. Every month can be poetry month, however, if you just pick up a book of poetry and read a poem a day.

Today we have another old favorite from my old favorite poetry book, The Owl Critic by James Thomas Fields:

"Who stuffed that white owl?" No one spoke in the shop,
The barber was busy, and he couldn't stop;
The customers, waiting their turns, were all reading
The "Daily," the "Herald," the "Post," little heeding
The young man who blurted out such a blunt question;
Not one raised a head, or even made a suggestion;
And the barber kept on shaving.

"Don't you see, Mr. Brown,"
Cried the youth, with a frown,
"How wrong the whole thing is,
How preposterous each wing is,
How flattened the head is, how jammed down the neck is --
In short, the whole owl, what an ignorant wreck 'tis!
I make no apology;
I've learned owl-eology.

I've passed days and nights in a hundred collections,
And cannot be blinded to any deflections
Arising from unskilful fingers that fail
To stuff a bird right, from his beak to his tail.
Mister Brown! Mister Brown!
Do take that bird down,
Or you'll soon be the laughingstock all over town!"
And the barber kept on shaving.

"I've studied owls,
And other night-fowls,
And I tell you
What I know to be true;
An owl cannot roost
With his limbs so unloosed;
No owl in this world
Ever had his claws curled,
Ever had his legs slanted,
Ever had his bill canted,
Ever had his neck screwed
Into that attitude.
He cant do it, because
'Tis against all bird-laws.

Anatomy teaches,
Ornithology preaches,
An owl has a toe
That can't turn out so!
I've made the white owl my study for years,
And to see such a job almost moves me to tears!
Mr. Brown, I'm amazed
You should be so gone crazed
As to put up a bird
In that posture absurd!
To look at that owl really brings on a dizziness;
The man who stuffed him don't half know his business!"
And the barber kept shaving.

"Examine those eyes
I'm filled with surprise
Taxidermists should pass
Off on you such poor glass;
So unnatural they seem
They'd make Audubon scream,
And John Burroughs laugh
To encounter such chaff.
Do take that bird down;
Have him stuffed again, Brown!"
And the barber kept on shaving!

"With some sawdust and bark
I could stuff in the dark
An owl better than that.
I could make an old hat
Look more like an owl
Than that horrid fowl,
Stuck up there so stiff like a side of coarse leather.
In fact, about him there's not one natural feather."

Just then, with a wink and a sly normal lurch,
The owl, very gravely, got down from his perch,
Walked around, and regarded his fault-finding critic
(Who thought he was stuffed) with a glance analytic,
And then fairly hooted, as if he should say:
"Your learning's at fault this time, anyway:
Don't waste it again on a live bird, I pray.
I'm an owl; you're another. Sir Critic, good day!"
And the barber kept on shaving.

The poetry isn't on the same level as a Yeats or a Hopkins, but as you can see, I've had an appreciation for fine satire and sarcasm from my youth.

Glad I'm Not a Fish

One of my favorite examples of the process of making connections in unlikely situations is from a marine zoology class I took many years ago when I was young and more foolish but less of an idiot, and so able to handle that sort of thing. Our professor told us of the deep-sea angler fish which puzzled scientists at first because all the deep-sea angler fish they pulled up from the sea were females. No males were ever observed, and scientists were baffled about why this could be. Then one day somebody discovered that what they had assumed was a parasite peculiar to this species of fish was actually the underdeveloped male of the species. This is how they lived and spawned and had their being. He cannot survive without her, and she cannot ever reproduce without him (finding mates in the deep sea is difficult to do, especially if you're only about five inches long. The deep sea is a large and darksome place.

So when a male does find a female, he bites her, and then fuses together with her, so he actually absorbs nutrition from his blood stream, available for egg fertilization as needed. He never physically develops into anything larger than a parasite, no brain to speak of, and he doesn't even have his own digestive organs, using her blood stream for his nourishment as he does.

The animal kingdom is ripe with metaphors for different sorts of people, isn't it?

Science and Human Values, Common Place Book Entry

The first step in discovery, says Dr. Bronowski, is observation, seeing what is. This is why Charlotte Mason had children sketch nature notebooks- not for the thrill of the artist, although this does happen for some children (only one, and possible a second, of mine, though). It's because trying to draw what you see forces you to slow down and actually see what you only thought you were seeing before. I should point out the obvious here, that all the CM connections are my own, and Bronowski isn't really talking about educating children at all. Most of the time he's talking about loftier, more philosophical ideas than I can grasp. I'd say he's weaving tapestries of velvet with gold and silken threads and I'm darning socks, except I can't darn socks.

I did once make a pair of curtains using staples and masking tape and not a single stitch. They looked lovely, too, and I got many, many compliments. My shame was discovered, however, when I was out of town and a single man who was house-sitting took them down and put my curtains into the wash.
What came out of the wash was two panels of unsewn cloth, fraying, and the handmade, vintage lace I'd taped to the top for trim. The staples disappeared. The masking tape apparently disintegrated.

It probably seems like I'm wandering far afield and maybe I am, but I think those curtains are a metaphor for my book reviews, especially books like this. Those reading my reviews are getting a stapled and taped version of a book review. What Bronowski actually says is much more profound and intellectual than I can write about here (or anywhere, for that matter). I shudder to think of the people who will read my reviews and then read his book and wonder what book I thought I'd read, where I got such bizarre readings, and what kind of postmodern deconstructionist am I, anyway? Those will be the kindest assessments. Others will content themselves with calling me an idiot, which is often how I feel when reading Bronowski.

But anyway, you observe- you observe the natural world I mean, not that you observe I'm an idiot, even if you do and I am. Then you have enough observations under your belt to begin to make connections, which is the next step in science. Sometimes this is as simple as noticing that two sides of a penny are the same penny, or a caterpillar is a butterfly. Sometimes it takes more in depth observation, science, and and deep discovery to make those connections.

But that comes later. After observation and the discovery that the front and back are the same thing comes the symbol or name for the thing. naming things allows the mind to work things when they are absent (isn't it interesting that the first job mentioned in Genesis is the naming of things?).

With names and symbols and the ability to think about a thing when it isn't in sight comes the ability to make judgments of true and false, to discover whether the things we think about the thing are true. If this, then that.

An hypothesis is the creation of the mind based on collected data and an interpretation of that data. Experiments test what the mind has created, conceptualized, created.

So, says Bronowski, science

"begins with a set of appearances. It organizes these into laws. And at the center of the laws it finds a knot, a point at which several laws cross: a symbol which gives unity to the laws themselves...
And we test the concept, as we test the thing, by its implications. That is, when the concept has been built up from some experiences, we reason what behavior in other experiences should logically flow from it. If we find this behavior, we go on holding the concept as it is. If we do not find the behavior which the concept logically implies, then we must go back and correct it. In this way logic and experiment are locked together in the scientific method, in a constant to and fro in which each follows the other."

Logic, experiment, and, I think, a knack for making connections, for seeing patterns, for putting all that data together and finding the knot. It seems to me that, as Bronowski says elsewhere, this science stuff has applications to human character and values, too. Because outside of the field of science we might call logic, experience, and a knack for seeing patterns and making connections discernment.

Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden

This is a sweet read for those who like to garden or who like to read about gardening, who love the South, who like salty old ladies, and who like talking to salty old ladies about their remembrances of the past.
Mrs. Whaley is surprisingly salty for an 85 year old lady of the old South (her father-in-law was a Civil War veteran, she says).

Her gardening advice is pretty specific for the Charleston area (no peonies or rhododendrons, which she says is a sad deprivation). Her gardening design tips would work for anybody. She points out that gardening is simply doing pictures with plants. Her discussions about life, living, marriage, and her growing up are delicious. The gardening section is in the first half of the book and mostly what it did for me is make me ache with envy and longing. She has a beautifully proportioned garden, drawn for by a famous garden designer back in the pre-WW2 days. She has a hired man to do the heavy work and daily drudge. She has brick paths and ponds and flowers that won't bloom where I live and a longer growing season. And I have a sinful lack of contentment.

I won't be quoting from the section on gardening.

Her lady mother, a delightful woman by all accounts, who grew up on a plantation in a fairly well to do family. She married a doctor in an era and area where doctors did not make much money. They had some lovely blue chintz curtains that faded as they got older, so she brought the children together one day, gave them crayons and told them to darken the curtains two or three shades of blue. So the children colored the curtains until they were a satisfactory shade, and their mother hung them back up.

Mrs. Whaley says her mother's house was lovely because it was full of things that meant something to them. Mrs. Whaley herself had somebody help sketch out the original plan for her garden, but she never hired a decorator for the house. She says the kind of decorating she does and her mother did is simply "the result of a lot of use and happiness going on."

She talks of growing up in a place with a real sense of community. Two of her aunts or cousins never married but "were the backbone of the Women's Auxiliary and wonderful to the children in the neighborhood. Their summerhouse was always open to children. All the houses were. You would get the simplest of suppers and then play word games on the back porch. It was all such fun."

She says schooling is a disaster for many children, and that what instructors need to get through to children is that what they are doing is teaching self-control, control of the mind. She says she didn't understand that when she was in school, but she does now. She still learns new pieces to play on the piano (in her eighties!) because she wants the exercise.

Mrs. Whaley didn't do well in school. She struggled mightily with the academics, but she did play the piano and sew well. She says she was a 5'9" rail full of doubts and plagued by shyness. She was finally able to earn a music teaching certificate, and then she filled in and blossomed out, developing, she says, "into a viable human being. But let me say right here, the journey from birth to eighteen is no joke!"

Another story I love, similar to the curtain story, is how she found a dress pattern she loved 20 years ago. She has used that pattern and made the dress for winter, summer, cooking, gardening, tea partying, and dancing, varying material according to season or occupation (that's pretty near a complete quote, excepting a few words I omitted without the proper ellipses for time's sake).
She says it saved her oodles of money which she spent in the garden.

She grew up in Pinopolis, and she says that everybody owned a coat, not a party coat, dress coat, work coat, red coat, black coat, school coat, winter coat, next year's coat and last year's coat. You bought a coat and kept it for years. The first new coat she had, she says, was a present when she got married at 23. Her previous coat was a hand-me-down she'd gotten when she was 12.

She tells of the terrible time they had getting her mother to buy a new dress (something she never did) for her first grand-daughter's wedding. She finally did, and then she wore it to every wedding she went to for the rest of her life.

Her husband pretty much gave her free hand in the garden, and doesn't seem to have played the heavy in the financial area either. She writes,

"Now, what can you do for your 'pearl of great price' to make up to him for allowing you all of this freewheeling in your garden? For me it evolved that, amongst other things, he had the privilege of casting my vote, making it two votes for him on a regular basis... he also had his own refrigerator which was his alone. In it there was always custard, made by the best custard maker in town.. ME. I never felt it was an unfair exchange.
This was all back in the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies, however. I have an idea it wouldn't fly so well today. No self-respecting woman, however, uninformed she may be would dream of giving up her personal vote. And, in addition today there is such a flap about eggs and cholesterol that you would be suspected of trying surreptitiously to finish off a husband if you constantly provided custard.

So you will probably have to find a different sort of exchange, one that will be acceptable to both parties in the nineties. But don't get discouraged. there are many ways to share a garden with a mate, to get your interests fitting hand in glove. My parents did it one way. My husband and I did it another."

Her children will probably do it another, and because just as we are all unique personalities, so every marriage has its own unique style and flavor.

Sunday Hymn Post

Teach Me, My God and King
lyrics by George Her­bert, The Tem­ple, 1633; vers­es 2-4 re­cast by John Wes­ley, 1738.

Teach me, my God and King,
In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in anything
To do it as for Thee.

To scorn the senses’ sway,
While still to Thee I tend:
In all I do be Thou the Way,
In all be Thou the End.

All may of Thee partake;
Nothing so small can be
But draws, when acted for Thy sake,
Greatness and worth from Thee.

If done to obey Thy laws,
E’en servile labors shine;
Hallowed is toil, if this the cause,
The meanest work divine.

More at Cyberhymnal

More about George Herbert here, here, and here, where we've posted about him before.

Truth and College degrees.

Marilee Jones, Admissions Dean for MIT, resigned earlier this week. Why? It turns out she falsified information about degrees she held; to put it more bluntly, she lied. She never graduated from the schools she said she did. It appears that she doesn't even have an undergraduate degree.

This is sad. Falsehoods are never good and hurt everybody involved. With that acknowledgment, though, isn't it interesting that she was still able to carry out this job for a decade without any degree? She headed the admissions department at one of the most respected institutions of higher learning in America... and with "just" a high school diploma.

I love where I'm going to school now and I want to earn a degree. But I think America really has to stop and recognize that not having one does not make you unqualified for anything but flipping burgers at a fast food joint. Marilee Jones kept her department running and co-authored a book. Those are no mean accomplishments. And it was not the college degree that enabled her to do them, but only a supposed certification. Maybe we should stop being so hard on people who choose not to go to college and instead pursue their passions another way?

(No, I am not saying that Jones' way of pursuing her passion is acceptable, but that her ability to run a large part of a college process ought help us realize that a person lacking a degree is not a person lacking in initiative and intelligence).

Samantha's Zines

Last year I bought two sets of Samantha's Eclectic Domestic and Bohemian Housewife (two titles I wish I had thought of myself). One was for me, one was for a friend. This year my friend returned the favor and sent it to me as a gift.

It is, once more, a nourishing and lovely treat. You can see a picture and get some ordering information here. HOwever, my cover of Bohemian Housewife is prettier than what you see in that picture. At least on my monitor, the photograph of the cover appears all black and white. My copy has some lovely color tones. Samantha has a sense of color, balance, and design that I'm struggling not to covet. My friend sent me the blank journal along with it, and it's so beautiful I am afraid to defile it by writing anything in it. I've also got the limerick booklet, but to tell the truth, I've been reading and rereading the zine so much that I don't know what I did with the Limericks.

I've been meaning to review this since it arrived, but I just don't know where or how to begin. I am feeling fumbling and stupid and can only think of idiotic things to say like, "I really, really like it." I get frustrated with those sorts of reviews on Amazon, don't you? They don't help me know what's to like about it so that I can figure out if I might like it, too.

She writes about periods of dryness and freshness, both in faith and in the creative process. She speaks of things common to the human experience, but they may not feel like a common human bond until somebody performs the magic of speaking about them with words we can relate to, words we maybe were afraid to use (okay, that use of 'we' is a coward's trick, I mean I, me, myself):

so much about life is just very sad or terrifying, definitely worth repressing if you hope to live a normal life most of the time.
...I don't know how to speak or write of these things that are not only a part of my own life, but something inherent in the human condition.
...the older I get the more I realize that everyone who lives long enough to realize our world is broken has similar things happen to their external and internal experience. But to speak of them without the right words somehow cheapens them, almost renders them meaningless...

Selfishly, I wish Samantha lived next door so I could have her show me how to do some of the lovely art projects she does, cry on her shoulder, and talk about some of these things:

Sometimes during the hymn singing in church, I will look around and know that if I am still alive in 40 years, it will be others who are there with their young... I will have passed that stage in life. Some who are there now will be gone to Glory. The idea of the communion of saints is very powerful at those times
...it is not about death per se, but rather about accepting that life itself is a process of dying all the losses, large and small that we experience very day are part of the letting go process... the loss of a friendship, of our waistline, of small children as they become adults, of our dreams as we realize that God has other plans for our lives..."

But if she did live next door I still wouldn't talk about these things with her because I don't talk about them very well, not with my closest and dearest friends, even those so close they have a very good idea of all the things I am not talking about. In spite of having a blog and telling the world I read Grace Livingston Hill and a few other embarrassments, I am at heart a deeply private and introverted person. I would talk about the weather, the plants, cooking, and the books I'm reading, just like I do here.

There are griefs and inner thoughts and feelings I would no more lay bare to the world than I would flay myself with a vegetable peeler and they actually consume more of my inner life than the things I do talk and write about, but that's where they will probably stay, locked tight in the hot and painful places of my soul. Which is maybe why I find what Samantha calls her 'ansty' issue so intriging and I am hungrily reading and rereading it.

Samantha also asks questions about things I never thought about- would Adam and Eve have had subconscious minds if there had not been a Fall? Was Solomon thinking of one of the wives who cleaned the palace when he said "futility, futility, all is futile?" I deeply appreciate her balanced views on feminism versus hyper-patriarchy. I can relate to the kind of mindset that leads Samantha to read 'zines by people who seem to be totally nuts to me, living lives and having interests that I can't really fathom. But some of them are interesting...' I read some crazy blogs for the same reason. I like learning something about other people's thought processes even when I disagree with them (maybe especially when I do)- it reminds us that we share a common humanity, and it's a great antidote for petty small-mindedness.

I guess I should stop now, because this post is already too long and I could go on quoting indefinitely. I should probably tell you that there is an article you won't want to leave around for your kids to read, and I haven't said anything about the Eclectic Domestic side, which had a wonderful article by Judy Cook, useful information on making breads and noodles, a couple great tips on making art projects, and more cool stuff.

I really, really like it.

Saturday Book Reviews

Up at Semicolon (has another week gone by again? They just don't make time like they used to).

Friday Feast

Appetizer
How fast can you type?

Soup
What is your favorite online game?

Salad
On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 as highest), how intelligent do you think you are?

Main Course
Name three of your best teachers from your school years.

Dessert
What are your plans for this upcoming weekend?

Found here.

Answers:

Appetizer
How fast can you type?

If I am copying from somebody else's text, about 80 wpm (one test I just took said 91, but I think it was wrong). When writing from my own head much faster.

Soup
What is your favorite online game?

Eight Letters in Search of a Word.

Salad
On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 as highest), how intelligent do you think you are?

7, unless we're speaking of math, and then it's a two.

Main Course
Name three of your best teachers from your school years.

Mrs. Kennedy
Mrs. Allen (I didn't appreciate her at all at the time, but I know better now)
Mr. Schmidt (I was a senior and I did appreciate him. He was wonderful. I also had another teacher I'd like to mention here, but I've never been able to remember her name. I only had her for one semester, the same time I had Mr. Schmidt, but what she had us do was the best college prep I had outside of Mr. Schmidt's class. I wish I hadn't forgotten her name).

Dessert
What are your plans for this upcoming weekend?

Tonight we're having a small gathering with my parents and one other family and we'll eat good food and watch Night At The Museum.
Tomorrow? I have no plans other than to recover from tonight.
Sunday, go to church.

Wearing Our Moccasins

Thanks to Mama Squirrel and Firefly who just introduced me to this post at Hen and Chicks. If you know our Cherub, you'll know why this made me laugh:

I love how his face lights up when he sees me. I even love how he can be so focused on an object, usually food, that he will avoid making eye contact with me.

I love how he is soooooo serious and focused -- and when you give him what he wants it's like you tickled him, he is so pleased. I love how he can sit in the tub for- just about -ever and splash and play as long as the shower head is dripping some water. I love how he never meets a stranger. I love the fact that, in his own silent way, he can get what he wants - like refusing to eat the hamburger and fries until he is given some of the milkshake first! (And the little light in his eyes when he knows he has won!)

I love how he thinks he's so sly -- keeping eye contact with you and thinking that you can't see his hand reaching out like an elephant's trunk to grab some of your food!

Don't remember if I shared this before, but The Cherub, a few years ago, used to sit perfectly quietly and demurely in church, eyes straight ahead, never moving her head the slightest. Meanwhile, her little hand would steal quietly over to the sister sitting next to her and pinch. The sister would squeal and jump and The Cherub would continue to sit demurely, never even turning to look. You could just see the glimmer of a smirk on her pleased little face.
We love the Cherub, naturally, and we understand that she's developmentally delayed and we can't expect mature behavior from her (naturally, and we understand this far better than those on the outside looking in), but still, she did know what she was doing was wrong or she wouldn't have been so sneaky about it, would she?
She thought it was funny.

Truth be told, so did I, but still, she couldn't be permitted to think it was okay to pinch people (and she pinches hard).

So we dealt with it as we felt it needed to be dealt with. And here we come to one of the things people find hardest to understand about the Cherub. She functions at about the level of a two year old (some areas more, some areas less). But she doesn't learn like a two year old, and she doesn't get bored like a two year old. So far as I can tell, our Cherub has no capacity for boredom at all, hence her incredible persistance. This also means it takes a very long time to teach her something, and it took us months to convince her that pinching her sisters wasn't going to be acceptable if only she tried long enough. Simply keeping her from sitting with next to a sibling wasn't possible, as DH was active duty military at the time and we had both a nursing baby and an insanely active toddler- so sometimes it was unavoidable.
I'm at least as stubborn as The Cherub, although I'm getting older and tireder now, so we kept on with our quiet little battle in the pews until I had almost won.

And then I learned that a sweet (and she truly was sweet, I'm not being sarcastic) lady behind us, a lady with no children I might add, was sighing every time she saw The Cherub and I do battle over her crab-like ways, and saying to other people, "I think what the Cherub really needs is probably just a hug."

I guess she never noticed that one of the Cherub's other favorite, impish little tricks was to hug me just as tightly and affectionately as she could, and then when I was well and truly distracted by all that 'good sugar' as we say, to reach up and give my hair a yank just as hard as she could, or jerk off the hat I often wear to church. And laugh.

Make It Yourself!

This is Challenge Week at the Make It From Scratch Carnival. Entries are due by Sunday. Stephanie says:

You can enter any from scratch items on any week. Challenge week is just an extra incentive (for me anyway) to try new things.
First time tries will be featured and eligible for a drawing.

Is there something you've wanted to make (soap, yogurt, a card, a pin cushion, a loaf of bread, a dress, a computer graphic image, a.......?) but haven't gotten around to trying yet? It doesn't matter if it's something somebody else has done- it just has to be new to you. This is a good weekend to give it a shot and post about it, sending your post to Stephanie- using the submission form at TLB is easiest. Look over that link to see any other carnivals that interest you.

And, as Stephanie says, you can enter anything you've made from scratch, even if it isn't new.

Crunchy Veggie Wraps

It's 50 degrees, cloudy, windy, and damp here today, but I'm thinking of spring and summer, so I'm pulling out a recipe more suitable to warmer, sun-swept days. There's the original recipe and then there's my short-cut which follows. Original:

Shred in food processer:
1/2 cup each carrot, broccoli, cauliflower
1 cup cheddar cheese
snip 2 green onions with kitchen shears
tear up a cup of lettuce in bitesized pieces.

Combine 1/4 cup ranch salad dressing, 1/2 teaspoon chili powder and mix with all ingredients above.

Spoon about 1/2 cup of vegetable mixture down the center of a tortilla, put about 1/4 cup of lettuce on top of that, wrap tortillas. You can serve these cold, or you can put them on a cookie sheet and bake them just until the cheese melts and while the veggies are still crisp/tender (350 for about 15 minutes).

Short cuts:

Buy a bag of Broccoli Slaw and add a couple sliced green onions or dice a regular onion instead. Combine with a torn lettuce or buy a bag of green salad mix. Mix with ranch dressing, chili powder (to taste) and grated cheddar cheese just until barely moistened.

If you spread this out thin on a flour tortilla and then roll it up pinwheel style they look even prettier. If you like meat, add a strip of bacon or a sliced of lunch meat.

Memory Lane

I originally wrote this around 9 years ago, reposted it two years ago, and figured it was time for a reminder:

Lost, Stolen, And Strayed

Lost: Portable phone
Found: In freezer

Stolen: one package of Starbursts
Found: empty wrapper next to small pair of dirty footprints in bath tub behind shower curtain.

Strayed: Entire contents of my pantry shelves (boxed and canned goods to feed a family of nine for over a week)
Found: Entire contents of pantry utilized to form abstract sculpture on kitchen floor.

Broken: One towel rack
Why? It could not withstand the weight of a thirty pound gymnast, a defect shared also by my quilt rack and the wooden clothes rack.

Furthermore, approximately 412 books have migrated from their assigned shelves to my bed, and for once I didn't do it.
Moreover, the lovely sound of rain I thought I heard this afternoon was instead the distinctly unlovely sound of the toilet rejecting an entire box of tissues.
In addition, I found my sweatshirt wrapped around a half eaten apple long past its prime in the back of the wardrobe, our 13 y.o.'s schedule has some illegible additions made with green rayon, and a missing dishtowel and hotpad were found in the oven (fortunately before we turned it on for lunch).

The Toddler left her fingerprints everywhere today. I mean that literally. You see, she found an inkpad left out from rubber stamping. Those fingerprints were on herself, her clothes, and my leather chair. The Toddler also had indelible marker all over her, her hands, her clothes, the window, the table, and the counter.

Today the 13 y.o. told the little culprit not to hit her, and the culprit glowered fiercely and said,

"I *need* to."


As near as I can tell, *nothing* that is an acceptable toy to me is an acceptable toy to The Toddler. It sounds like she's spending lots of time alone, but she's not. She's simply fast.

Once upon a time my dh wouldn't believe me when we told him how quick she was. Then we left him alone with her. She was standing at the livingroom window, face pressed against the glass, wailing and sobbing as we drove away, so he though it would be safe to make a quick dash to the bathroom to do the necessary. He returned seconds later (he says he didn't even sit down) to find the 2 y.o. child standing on the kitchen counter pulling out a bottle of tylenol from the highest shelf in the uppermost cupboard. We didn't even realize she knew it was there. We bought a fishing tackle box with a lock and key for the medicines.

But we can't lock up everything in the house. At this point, the best solution I have is to lock up The Toddler.

I've tried letting her help. She only wants to do the dangerous jobs. If it is safe, it has no interest for her. If it carries a risk of burning, cutting, dismembering or death, that's the job she wants. If it's safe for a toddler, that's a job utterly beneath her.

I've tried 'filling her bucket first' i.e. making sure I do special things with her first. We start our mornings with her snuggling with me in bed while I read her a book. Then I do a puzzle with her after breakfast, and other togetherness activities follow- but it doesn't matter. As soon as I have to go do something else, she's either demanding the personal attention of whoever is the busiest, most pre-occupied person in the house, or she's wreaking havoc.

It's a good thing she's so perfectly adorable.

Counting Back Change

One of the Progeny, who shall be nameless, had trouble learning how to count back change, big trouble, serious confusion, and frustration.

I tried teaching this several times, but it was an exercise in futility, if our goal was to learn to count back change. If our goal was to end up in tears and irritation, then we were more than successful. This particular Progeny simply couldn't grasp the concept, found it entirely confusing and I could not get it to make sense for said Progeny.

We had used money, both real and play, but this didn't work. Progeny always wanted to give back too much. We had reminded Progeny of place values and tried reviewing this idea. We had a board game where the entire object is to count by change and make change (Presto Change-o, which worked very well for two of the other Progeny) Then it occurred to me to use a number line. I printed out one that went from 0-100 (unfortunately, it counted by fives, but we could work with that). With the number line in hand I pointed out that if somebody bought something for, say, .28 cents at a yard sale and paid for it with a dollar, then we would start counting on the number line at 28, counting our way up to a dollar, trying to use as few coins as possible, starting with the smallest coins.

We worked through this two or three times using the number line to illustrate it, and suddenly, daylight! I love it when that happens.

Do you have any tricks and approaches you've used to teach some math concepts your progeny found difficult to grasp?

An Unknown Tree or Shrub

These are the trees/shrubs Muvver posted about here. Click to enlarge them.

Get The Most For Your Vegetables

I read once that most of the vitamins in many root vegetables are just beneath the skin and we peel them away when we pare our vegetables. I don't know if that's where the vitamins are, but I do know that the potato peelings for a family of nine would make an extra meal.

Instead of peeling your carrots and potatoes, and instead of buying a vegetable brush which hardly ever works and the bristles get all mooshed down anyway, use an ordinary plastic scrubby- either one of the plain green rough pads or an orange and yellow sort (a copper scrubby works great, too, but it rusts so quickly). Any heavy-duty, soap free, nylon kitchen scrubber ought to work.

The vegetables are easier to scrub clean if they are wet. Put the vegetables in bowl of water, then pull out one at a time and scrub the skin clean. Rinse it and put it aside (in another bowl of clean water if you like and start with the next one. Once they are all scrubbed clean, rinse your scrubber and leave it to dry, then slice, dice, and otherwise prepare the veggies as needed and cook as desired. We have even left potato peels in our mashed potatoes for a more 'rugged,' 'whole foods' mashed potato, but mostly I like to scrub our taters this way for soups, stews, and pot roasts.

For more Frugal Friday tips, see Biblical Womanhood's Frugal Fridays Linky

Tree Identification

More fences going up. I'm going to lose the view from my window which makes me sadder than it should, but we have to separate the dogs from the goats.

The HM brought in two small tree branches, asking me to identify them. He says there are several in his way and he wants to know if he can cut them down or should he try to transplant. I can't tell what they are (one has no leaves yet, only buds, and I'm simply not that knowledgable). But I did find this site which other homeschoolers might enjoy and find useful. This is another, using photographs instead of drawings.

Poetry for Poetry Month

Make your way slowly through this one, if you've not seen it before but I hope you have. Take time to feel the sense of rhythm and picture the images, absorbing the meaning. I love the surprise ending.

Go and catch a falling star
by John Donne


GO and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet,
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.


John Donne was a cynic about women, having spent most of his inheritance on wine and women, and you don't find constant women that way and in the sorts of places he frequented. But then he got a respectable job, fell in love with the boss's neice-in-law and married her secretly. Upon discovery he lost his job and they lived in poverty through 13 years and 12 children. Shortly after all was forgiven, his wife received her dowry and he got another respectable job, his wife died, which plunged him into grief.

During those years he had a conversion of a different sort and went on to write some of the most beautiful religions poetry ever penned (Batter my heart, three person'd God...). You can read more about him here.

Snips, Snails, and Puppy Dog Tales

Snips: I found that moths had at some point been into a couple tablecloths, vintage ones with lovely material, and I think I threw them out. But if I didn't, I think the scraps of material would make lovely pincushions, and I like the pattern I just saw at The Homespun Heart. Once when I was much younger I saved a bunch of hair from my hair brush and used it to fill a pin cushion I made for diaper pins. Hair is, obviously, a natural fiber, and it is wonderful stuff for keeping pins sharp.

Snails: We once had a snail we named Mr. Collins because of his slime trail and we thought we were clever. MaddieLynn at SmockityFrocks has a whole walk of snails (I just looked it up to discover the collective noun for snail and one site said 'walk,' and another said escargatoire). Great pictures!
Incidentally, if you are interested in collective nouns (a murder of crows, a battery of baracuda, a pitying of turtledoves, that sort of thing), try this site or this one.

Puppy Dog Tales: The Donovan Dog includes among his annoying and ill bred tricks a propensity to make mad dashes for freedom the moment anybody has an outside door open so much as a crack. I'm not sure why, since the outside is fenced now and he can't really get anywhere exciting. And there is that goat out there, which goat Donovan is still not entirely convinced is Safe. But he does. Trying to reason out the reasons a dog of practically no brain at all is surely an exercise more suited to the brainless dog than the humans, after all.
So last night he did it again- only this time he regretted it the instant he found himself outside because it was pelting down cold, hard, great drops of rain. So he dashed out, made a u-turn and fetched up against the door which the Equuschick had closed in his face. He sat there and whined a while before she let him return from the outer darkness, and I wish I could say that he returned a sadder and wiser animal. Unfortunately, in order to learn from such experiences one must have more than two brain cells to rub together, and we begin to think that if the Donovan Dog had twice as much brains as he does now, he'd still barely be a half-wit.

Things To Do Instead of Television

Pray for those who have no freedom to worship as their consciences dictates, who,in fact, die for worshipping as their consciences dictate.

Go for a walk.

Pray.

Write a real old fashioned letter.

Pray.

Play some games with your children.

Pray.

Clean a room

Pray.

Study a language

Pray.

Learn a song

Pray.

Sing together

Pray.

Bake something new

Pray.

Catch up on projects

Pray.

garden

Pray.

memorize scripture

Pray.

memorize a poem

Pray.

call somebody who would like to hear from you

Pray.

Read a book

Pray.

Read another book

Pray.

Read some more books

Pray.

paint a picture

Pray.

make some play dough

Pray.

ride a bike

Pray.

listen to a new piece of music

Pray.

refinish a piece of furniture

Horse Carnival

For those horsey folks among us, the Horse Lovers Carnival is up.

Science and Human Values, a Commonplace Book Entry

From part 2, 'The Habit of Truth'

In 'The Creative Mind' I set out to show that there exists a single creative activity, which is displayed alike in th earts and in the sciences. It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind.

The act of appreciation re-enacts the act of creation, and we are (each of us) actors, we are interpreters of it.

He says he chose examples from physics and poetry because this is what he knows best, but that 'what is great in these is common to all great works.' He points out an example from the art world, The Lady with a Stoat (or Ermine), by Da Vinci. Da Vinci makes us see the similarities between that woman and her stoat, in her pointed chin, her claw-like hand. I don't think Da Vinci admired his sitter very much. Bronowski says 'The Lady with a Stoat is as much a research into man and animal, and a creation of unity, as is Darwin's Origin of Species," and I think he overstates the case here. I'm not sure Da Vinci is creating a unity or discovery between mankind and animals as much as he's suggesting that the lady is a bit of a weasel.

While there are similarities between art and science in the creative act, 'there must be a difference as well as a likeness' because the artist has more freedom than the scientist does. The scientist may do more than record facts, but he must "conform to the facts," to the truth, and this passion for truth is a major strength of Western Civilization.

Bronowski says we can see one model for truth in the accounts of westerners who have climbed in the Himalayas. Several of them came back to tell of the trouble some of their guides had with recognizing a different view of a mountain as the same mountain. They may know the features of the north view as well as the backs of their hands, and they may know the features of the south view as well as the front of their hand, but they have never put the two views together to make the same mountain. The 'inquisitive strangers,' at that time more at 'home with compass and map projection' point this out, and 'the parts begin to fit together, the... man's mind begins to build a map...'

All acts of recognition are of this kind. Teh girl met on the beach, the man known long ago, puzzle us for amoment and then fall into place; the new face fits on to and enlarges the old. WE are used to make these connections in time; and like the climbers on Everest we make them also in space. If we did not, our minds would contain only a clutter of isolated experiences. By making such connections we find in our experiences the maps of things."

emphasis mine.

As Charlotte Mason said, Education is the science of relations, and we need to permit the children to make those connections.

Poetry for Poetry Month

This morning I asked the FYB if he had a favorite poem he liked to think about, and he said, "Yes, that one we said for Grandma last fall, the one where the leaves are skirts and the wind plays."

I think he meant this one:
COME LITTLE LEAVES
by George Cooper

"Come, little leaves" said the wind one day,
"Come over the meadows with me, and play;
Put on your dresses of red and gold;
Summer is gone, and the days grow cold."

Soon as the leaves heard the wind's loud call,
Down they came fluttering, one and all;
Over the brown fields they danced and flew,
Singing the soft little songs they knew.

"Cricket, good-bye, we've been friends so long;
Little brook, sing us your farewell song-
Say you're sorry to see us go;
Ah! you are sorry, right well we know.

"Dear little lambs, in your fleecy fold,
Mother will keep you from harm and cold;
Fondly we've watched you in vale and glade;
Say, will you dream of our loving shade?"

Dancing and whirling the little leaves went;
Winter had called them and they were content-
Soon fast asleep in their earthly beds,
The snow laid a soft mantle over their heads.

We've posted it here before, and there's a little more about it in that post.

The one I was thinking of this morning is Thomas Hood's "I Remember, I Remember." I even remember the page it's on in my childhood poetry book and what illustration accompanied it. I loved it when I was ten, I love it but with a bittersweet love, now:

I REMEMBER, I remember
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon,
Nor brought too long a day:
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away.

I remember, I remember
The roses, red and white,
The violets, and the lily-cups—
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday,—
The tree is living yet!

I remember, I remember
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing;
My spirit flew in feathers then
That is so heavy now,
And summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow.

I remember, I remember
The fir trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance;
But now 'tis little joy
To know I'm farther off from heaven
Than when I was a boy.

Word-Spotting

Some of these are words I've run across many times before and had enough of a sense of their meaning and help from context to glide over them without a bump. I could get these definitions correct on a multiple choice test, but lately I've decided I want to be able to define them without the help of multiple choice or contextual clues. Which is all well and good, but I'll probably forget this a week or so from now:

rebarbative

ament

thurible

stridulation

hendiadys


thaumaturgical

terrine

whilom

Scybalium

aposiopesis

Most of these gleaned from Glimpses of the Moon, by Edmund Crispin, which was rather a gruesome and macabre Crispin and I don't recommend it to those, like me, who prefer their mysteries to be cozy, with all gruesome details tidied away.

Knowledge

Studies, said Charlotte Mason, are a delight. We do not ask ourselves of what use is this delight or another. While there is a place and purpose for utilitarian education (reading, writing, arithmetic, computer skills), you don't always know what use you may have for every single jewel of knowledge until you have need for it. You gather the jewels along the way because individually they are delightsome and lovely- to know is a delight.

As you collect your little gems here and there, the more you attain, the more you can discern the pattern that they make and see how they fit together upon the string of history. You do not ask for the pattern to be proven first before you will accept another gem of knowledge. You accept the beads, polish them, keep them, and think about them, look them over, asking the right questions (and plenty of the wrong questions, and that's okay, too), and some day you pick up just the right bead and ask just the right question to allow you complete some lovely pattern. You don't know yet which bead that will be.

You do not need to know ahead of time. You just have to be the jewel collector. Those who discard or ignore jewels along the way because they think they do not need to know this are those whose strings of knowledge will have more skimpy string than glowing jewels.

Gather ye knowledge while ye may.

Turn Off the Television

If you haven't already. Because it's Turn Off the T.V. Week. Try a month.

The Zeus Dog & the Donovan James

Donovan, it so happens, was up there first and was not very keen on giving way when The Equuschick invited Zeus up. He resented the intrusion immensely, but The Equuschick feels that his intelligence is not that of a reliable leader, so she usually prefers to vote for Zeus.

As you can see though, by the fact that Zeus is practically falling of, Zeus doesn't always rise to the occasion and assert himself the way The Equuschick would like him too.

From The Protestant Church of Smyrna

From The Persecution Times comes this horrific reading. I have done what I can to sensitize it for a family blog where (especially of late) I would much rather spend my time talking about books, flowers, cooking, and soft little kittens, where I do not really enjoy exposing our inner griefs and outer terrors on a blog that other people's children as well as my own read, but, as we have said here before:

Certain vitally important current events simply are the stuff that nightmares are made of and they cannot be cleaned up. Many of our readers, including my children, trust us not to direct them to stuff that will give their young students nightmares.

But this particular class of current events is something our young people must be aware of for their own protection. These events are shaping and creating the world they will grow up to inherit. These events are, I believe, the most important issues in the news today, and yet, we hardly ever give them the space they deserve here because they are so horrible they are usually outside the parameters we have placed upon ourselves.

...We do not wish our children to reach their majority without some idea of exactly what kind of war is going on around them and what the stakes are. We are not certain of how to address this without frightening some of them beyond the point of usefulness. We are also not sure that not scaring them to death ought to be quite the priority that it has been in view of the present emergency.

For those and other reasons that should shortly be obvious, we are posting the following, but recommend it largely for mature readers:

By Dan Wooding, Founder of ASSIST Ministries

SMYRNA, TURKEY - Smyrna is an ancient city today known as Izmir in Turkey that was founded at a very early period at a central and strategic point on the Aegean coast of Anatolia.

It was the second city to receive a letter from the apostle John in the book of Revelation. Acts 19:10 suggests that the church there was founded during Paul’s third missionary journey. Due to the fact that the port city of Izmir houses the second largest population in Turkey today, the site of ancient Smyrna has been little excavated. Excepting the agora, theater, and sections of the Roman aqueduct, little remains of the ancient city.

But there is a protestant church in there that calls itself “The Protestant Church of Smyrna” and it has issued the following letter to the Global Church which was sent to ANS....

Dear friends,

This past week has been filled with much sorrow. Many of you have heard by now of our devastating loss here in an event that took place in Malatya, a Turkish province 300 miles northeast of Antioch, the city where believers were first called Christians (Acts 11:26).

On Wednesday morning, April 18, 2007, 46 year old German missionary and father of three Tilman Geske prepared to go to his office, kissing his wife goodbye taking a moment to hug his son and give him the priceless memory, “Goodbye, son. I love you.”

Tilman rented an office space from Zirve Publishing where he was preparing notes for the new Turkish Study Bible. Zirve was also the location of the Malatya Evangelist Church office. A ministry of the church, Zirve prints and distributes Christian literature to Malatya and nearby cities in Eastern Turkey. In another area of town, 35 year old Pastor Necati Aydin, father of two, said goodbye to his wife, leaving for the office as well. They had a morning Bible Study and prayer meeting that some other believers in town would also be attending. Ugur Yuksel likewise made his way to the Bible study.

None of these three men knew that what awaited them at the Bible study was the ultimate testing and application of their faith, which would conclude with their entrance into glory to receive their crown of righteousness from Christ and honor from all the saints awaiting them in the Lord’s presence.

On the other side of town, ten young men all under 20 years old put into place final arrangements for their ultimate act of faith, living out their love for Allah and hatred of infidels who they felt undermined Islam.

On Resurrection Sunday, five of these men had been to a by-invitation-only evangelistic service that Pastor Necati and his men had arranged at a hotel conference room in the city. The men were known to the believers as “seekers.” No one knows what happened in the hearts of those men as they listened to the gospel. Were they touched by the Holy Spirit? Were they convicted of sin? Did they hear the gospel in their heart of hearts? Today we only have the beginning of their story.

These young men, one of whom is the son of a mayor in the Province of Malatya, are part of a tarikat, or a group of “faithful believers” in Islam. Tarikat membership is highly respected here; it’s like a fraternity membership. In fact, it is said that no one can get into public office without membership in a tarikat. These young men all lived in the same dorm, all preparing for university entrance exams.

The young men got guns, bread knives, ropes and towels ready for their final act of service to Allah. They knew there would be a lot of blood. They arrived in time for the Bible Study, around 10 o’clock.

They arrived, and apparently the Bible Study began. Reportedly, after Necati read a chapter from the Bible the assault began. The boys tied Ugur, Necati, and Tilman’s hands and feet to chairs and as they videoed their work on their cellphones, they tortured our brothers for almost three hours*

[Details of the torture–[the DHM omits these, but if you wish to read them click on the link above]
Neighbors in workplaces near the print house said later they had heard yelling, but assumed the owners were having a domestic argument so they did not respond.

Meanwhile, another believer Gokhan and his wife had a leisurely morning. He slept in till 10, ate a long breakfast and finally around 12:30 he and his wife arrived at the office. The door was locked from the inside, and his key would not work. He phoned and though it had connection on his end he did not hear the phone ringing inside. He called cell phones of his brothers and finally Ugur answered his phone. “We are not at the office. Go to the hotel meeting. We are there. We will come there,” he said cryptically. As Ugur spoke Gokhan heard in the telephone’s background weeping and a strange snarling sound.

He phoned the police, and the nearest officer arrived in about five minutes. He pounded on the door, “Police, open up!” Initially the officer thought it was a domestic disturbance. At that point they heard another snarl and a gurgling moan. The police understood that sound as human suffering, prepared the clip in his gun and tried over and over again to burst through the door. One of the frightened assailants unlocked the door for the policeman, who entered to find a grisly scene.

Tilman and Necati [were dead. Ugur’s was barely alive.]

Three assailants in front of the policeman dropped their weapons.

Meanwhile Gokhan heard a sound of yelling in the street. Someone had fallen from their third story office. Running down, he found a man on the ground, whom he later recognized, named Emre Gunaydin. He had massive head trauma and, strangely, was snarling. He had tried to climb down the drainpipe to escape, and losing his balance had plummeted to the ground. It seems that he was the main leader of the attackers. Another assailant was found hiding on a lower balcony.

To untangle the web we need to back up six years. In April 2001, the National Security Council of Turkey (Milli Guvenlik Kurulu) began to consider evangelical Christians as a threat to national security, on equal footing as Al Quaida and PKK terrorism. Statements made in the press by political leaders, columnists and commentators have fueled a hatred against missionaries who they claim bribe young people to change their religion.

After that decision in 2001, attacks and threats on churches, pastors and Christians began. Bombings, physical attacks, verbal and written abuse are only some of the ways Christians are being targeted. Most significant is the use of media propaganda.

From December 2005, after having a long meeting regarding the Christian threat, the wife of Former Prime Minister Ecevit, historian Ilber Ortayli, Professor Hasan Unsal, Politician Ahmet Tan and writer/propogandist Aytunc Altindal, each in their own profession began a campaign to bring the public’s attention to the looming threat of Christians who sought to “buy their children’s souls”. Hidden cameras in churches have taken church service footage and used it sensationally to promote fear and antagonism toward Christianity.

In an official televised response from Ankara, the Interior Minister of Turkey smirked as he spoke of the attacks on our brothers. Amid public outrage and protests against the event and in favor of freedom of religion and freedom of thought, media and official comments ring with the same message, “We hope you have learned your lesson. We do not want Christians here.”

It appears that this was an organized attack initiated by an unknown adult tarikat leader. As in the Hrant Dink murder in January 2007, and a Catholic priest Andrea Santoro in February 2006, minors are being used to commit religious murders because public sympathy for youth is strong and they face lower penalties than an adult convicted of the same crime. Even the parents of these children are in favor of the acts. The mother of the 16 year old boy who killed the Catholic priest Andrea Santoro looked at the cameras as her son was going to prison and said, “He will serve time for Allah.”

The young men involved in the killing are currently in custody. Today news reported that they would be tried as terrorists, so their age would not affect the strict penalty. Assailant Emre Gunaydin is still in intensive care. The investigation centers around him and his contacts and they say will fall apart if he does not recover.

The Church in Turkey responded in a way that honored God as hundreds of believers and dozens of pastors flew in as fast as they could to stand by the small church of Malatya and encourage the believers, take care of legal issues, and represent Christians to the media.

When Susanne Tilman expressed her wish to bury her husband in Malatya, the Governor tried to stop it, and when he realized he could not stop it, a rumor was spread that “it is a sin to dig a grave for a Christian.” In the end, in an undertaking that should be remembered in Christian history forever, the men from the church in Adana (near Tarsus), grabbed shovels and dug a grave for their slain brother in an un-tended hundred year old Armenian graveyard.

Ugur was buried by his family in an Alevi Muslim ceremony in his hometown of Elazig, his believing fiancé watching from the shadows as his family and friends refused to accept in death the faith Ugur had so long professed and died for.

Necati’s funeral took place in his hometown of Izmir, the city where he came to faith. The darkness does not understand the light. Though the churches expressed their forgiveness for the event, Christians were not to be trusted. Before they would load the coffin onto the plane from Malatya, it went through two separate xray exams to make sure it was not loaded with explosives. This is not a usual procedure for Muslim coffins.

Necati’s funeral was a beautiful event. Like a glimpse of heaven, thousands of Turkish Christians and missionaries came to show their love for Christ, and their honor for this man chosen to die for Christ. Necati’s wife Shemsa told the world, “His death was full of meaning, because he died for Christ and he lived for Christ… Necati was a gift from God. I feel honored that he was in my life, I feel crowned with honor. I want to be worthy of that honor.”

Boldly the believers took their stand at Necati’s funeral, facing the risks of being seen publicly and likewise becoming targets. As expected, the anti-terror police attended and videotaped everyone attending the funeral for their future use. The service took place outside at Buca Baptist church, and he was buried in a small Christian graveyard in the outskirts of Izmir.

Two assistant Governors of Izmir were there solemnly watching the event from the front row. Dozens of news agencies were there documenting the events with live news and photographs. Who knows the impact the funeral had on those watching? This is the beginning of their story as well. Pray for them.

In an act that hit front pages in the largest newspapers in Turkey, Susanne Tilman in a television interview expressed her forgiveness. She did not want revenge, she told reporters. “Oh God, forgive them for they know not what they do,” she said, wholeheartedly agreeing with the words of Christ on Calvary (Luke 23:34).

In a country where blood-for-blood revenge is as normal as breathing, many many reports have come to the attention of the church of how this comment of Susanne Tilman has changed lives. One columnist wrote of her comment, “She said in one sentence what 1000 missionaries in 1000 years could never do.”

The missionaries in Malatya will most likely move out, as their families and children have become publicly identified as targets to the hostile city. The remaining 10 believers are in hiding. What will happen to this church, this light in the darkness? Most likely it will go underground. Pray for wisdom, that Turkish brothers from other cities will go to lead the leaderless church. Should we not be concerned for that great city of Malatya, a city that does not know what it is doing? (Jonah 4:11)

When our Pastor Fikret Bocek went with a brother to give a statement to the Security Directorate on Monday they were ushered into the Anti-Terror Department. On the wall was a huge chart covering the whole wall listing all the terrorist cells in Izmir, categorized. In one prominent column were listed all the evangelical churches in Izmir. The darkness does not understand the light. “These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also.” (Acts 17:6)

Please pray for the Church in Turkey. “Don’t pray against persecution, pray for perseverance,” urges Pastor Fikret Bocek.

The Church is better having lost our brothers; the fruit in our lives, the renewed faith, the burning desire to spread the gospel to quench more darkness in Malatya …all these are not to be regretted. Pray that we stand strong against external opposition and especially pray that we stand strong against internal struggles with sin, our true debilitating weakness.

This we know. Christ Jesus was there when our brothers were giving their lives for Him. He was there, like He was when Stephen was being stoned in the sight of Saul of Tarsus.

Someday the video of the deaths of our brothers may reveal more to us about the strength that we know Christ gave them to endure their last cross, about the peace the Spirit of God endowed them with to suffer for their beloved Savior. But we know He did not leave their side. We know their minds were full of Scripture strengthening them to endure, as darkness tried to subdue the un-subduable Light of the Gospel. We know, in whatever way they were able, with a look or a word, they encouraged one another to stand strong. We know they knew they would soon be with Christ.

We don’t know the details. We don’t know the kind of justice that will or will not be served on this earth.

But we pray– and urge you to pray– that someday at least one of those five boys will come to faith because of the testimony in death of Tilman Geske, who gave his life as a missionary to his beloved Turks, and the testimonies in death of Necati Aydin and Ugur Yuksel, the first martyrs for Christ out of the Turkish Church.

Reported by Darlene N. Bocek (24 April 2007)

Note from the church: Please pass this on to as many praying Christians as you can, in as many countries as you can. Please always keep the heading as “From the Protestant Church of Smyrna” with this contact information:
izmirprotestan@gmail.com http://www.izmirprotestan.org

Praying indeed for the gospel message to go out everywhere, changing hearts and minds.

Headers.

If you want to know how to actually make a header graphic, you'll have to go here, because all I did was find a picture that I thought was the right sort of size.
If you want to know how to add the header to your blog, it's actually pretty easy, if you're using Blogger. If you're not, I don't know how to add it, either.
First off, you have to switch to Blogger Layouts. Directions for doing that are here. After you've done that, go to your dashboard, click on "layout," and then click on the "edit HTML" tab. Find the part of the HTML that says maxwidgets='1' showaddelement='no'. Change the 1 to 4, or leave it blank so that there is no limit, and change the no to yes. Save your changes, and go back to the Page Elements tab, where you should find a whole lot more "add a page element" buttons. Clicky on the one at the top, and then add what you want up there. I just added a picture because that seemed the quickest way to go about it. That's a not very professional way to do it, but it seems to have worked all right, so there you have it.

What Does It Mean To Be a Man?

Cobb has some thoughts on that well worth reading. Here's a small excerpt:

I have come to accept something about my civil duty and responsibility to the public to my fellow countrymen. In dropping the persona of my bohemian self, in becoming a husband and father, in becoming a middle aged man, I had to acknowledge my own power to be an example, more than I ever thought I'd have to be. Way deep down inside I knew the truth of the phrase 'civilization is where you put it', but I always thought when it came down to it, it would fall to the professionals and experts. I should have known better. It takes all of us, not just rhetorically, but really.

I couldn't say I wanted to be a police officer. I wanted to be a 'bhuddist cop'. I didn't want to disturb my inner peace through the action of bringing peace into the world. I was a bumpersticker pacifist. And because of that I inverted that latent desire in people I didn't respect from courage to cowardice.

He got over it. It makes grim reading in the wake of the VT tragedy, which is the context for his post, but important reading.

He reminds me of somethign I've seen and shaken my head over before. There are principled pacifists, and then there are pacifists who impugn the motives of those who feel a greater sense of personal responsiblity to and for others. I have no quarrel with pacifists who want to be pacifists for themselves. But I have no respect for the 'principles' that allow, say, a 250 pound, 6'3" pacifist to criticize the courageous who believe they have a responsibility to protect smaller, weaker, and more vulnerable others. Would there had been more of the second sort at VT last week.

Viva la Anchoress, who links to many such thought provoking reads.

The Shepherd of the Hills

When I began this book (online here) it irritated me. There is a faint tinge, but visible enough, of that form of eugenics so popular and taken for granted at the beginning of the 20th century. The emphasis placed on good bloodlines and family breeding was irksome and distracting to me until I remembered what C.S. Lewis said about reading older books:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.
...We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?"—lies where we have never suspected it
...None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books.
...The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

The errors of the past are certainly in high relief in The Shepherd of the Hills, but once I looked behind that curtain, so were the errors of the present. The former was easy to dismiss, the latter important to learn from.

My mother tells me that when she was a child her mother read this book aloud to them at night as they lay in bed, and there was a chapter where she turned her face to the wall and quietly cried.

As briefly as possible (and there are spoilers here), "Daniel Howitt," a proud pastor who truly discovers his faith after losing his family and leaving the pastorate, finds himself providentially washed up in the mountain country where his famous painter son (believed to have gone insane and killed himself) painted his greatest picture, a picture that disappeared at his death. He also learns that this is where his dead son committed what everybody at the time the book was written considered a great crime, and what we today generally consider a common enough occurrence. His great painting was of a young mountain girl with whom he had an affair and abandoned because he thought his father's pride of family and social position would forbid a marriage. Unbeknownst to him, he left her pregnant. She subsequently dies of a broken heart, leaving behind a son they call Pete. The girl is buried beneath a 'dark clump of pines on the hill' that can be seen from her parents' front porch. Pete is never quite right, but is a little bit 'fey.'

Mr. Howitt, who has not been using his true last name because of his great fame, learns this story from the father of the wronged girl, Mr. Matthews. Mr. Matthews, whose only daughter has died in disgrace and whose grandson is mad all because of the weak pride and selfishness of the painter son and his unknown father, has sworn vengeance on them both should he ever meet them. He is an angry father with a righteous and just anger, and the former Pastor cannot bear to tell him that he is that man. Instead, he determines to live the rest of his life in that area, doing what he can for the family and people of the area, helping his grandson as best he can, and atoning for his son's crime and his own pride that drove his son to think it better to abandon the wronged girl than to confess his actions to his father.

He becomes the Shepherd of the Hills, teaching people about the true Shepherd, representing that Shepherd on earth, and showing His love to others. The people love him, and he loves them. After the fashion of the mountain people, they call him Dad Howitt. He admires and respects the mountaineer family his son has wronged.

And then one day he learns that his son is not dead, but has been hiding in these same hills for many years. He returned to seek the wronged girl's forgiveness and learned too late of her pregnancy and subsequent death in childbirth. In secret he has done what he can for his son Pete, as well as for the girl's parents. He is now dying and wants to beg forgiveness from them.

His father goes to Mr. Matthews and tells him the story, revealing his identity for the first time in what, to me, is the most moving chapter of the entire book. The Shepherd, coming to seek that forgiveness, explains that the mountaineer's threat to kill off this proud family and blot out their proud name has actually come true- that he and his son were the last of the proud family name and since he dropped that proud name years before, it has truly been blotted out, especially since the moment he learned from Matthew's own lips of his son's great betrayal and has grieved and attempted to atone for this ever since. This is the place where I turned my face to the wall and cried:

"Is that all?" growled the mountaineer.

"All! God, no! I--I must go on. I must tell you how the man you
killed staid in the hills and was born again. There was nothing
else for him to do but stay in the hills. With the shame and
horror of his boy's disgrace on his heart, he could not go back--
back to the city, his friends and his church--to the old life. He
knew that he could not hope to deceive them. He was not skilled in
hiding things. Every kind word in praise of himself, or in praise
of his son, would have been keenest torture. He was a coward; he
dared not go back. His secret would have driven him mad, and he
would have ended it all as his son had done. His only hope for
peace was to stay here; here on the very spot where the wrong was
done, and to do what little he could to atone for the crime.

"At first it was terrible; the long, lonely nights with no human
friend near; the weight of shame; the memories; and the lonely
wind--always the wind--in the trees--her voice, Pete said, calling
for him to come. God, sir, I wonder the man did not die under his
punishment!

"But God is good, Mr. Matthews. God is good and merciful. Every
day out on the range with the sheep, the man felt the spirit of
the hills, and little by little their strength and their peace
entered into his life. The minister learned here, sir, what he had
not learned in all his theological studies. He learned to know
God, the God of these mountains. The hills taught him, and they
came at last to stand between him and the trouble from which he
had fled. The nights were no longer weary and long. He was never
alone. The voices in the wilderness became friendly voices, for he
learned their speech, and the poor girl ceased to call in the
wailing wind. Then Dr. Coughlan came, and--"

Again the shepherd stopped. He could not go on. The light was gone
from the sky and he felt the blackness of the night. But against
the stars he could still see the crown of the mountain where his
son lay. When he had gathered strength, he continued, saying
simply, "Dr. Coughlan came, and--last night we learned that my son
was not dead but living."

Again that growl like the growl of a wild beast came from the
mountaineer. Silently Mr. Howitt prayed. "Go on," came the command
in hoarse tones.

In halting, broken words, the shepherd faltered through the rest
of his story as he told how, while using the cabin under the cliff
as a studio, the artist had discovered the passage to the old
Dewey cave; how, since his supposed death, he had spent the
summers at the scene of his former happiness; how he had met his
son roaming the hills at night, and had been able to have the boy
with him much of the time; how he had been wounded the night Jim
Lane was killed; and finally how Pete had led them to his bedside.

"He is dying yonder. Dr. Coughlan is with him--and Pete--Pete is
there, too. I--I came for you. He is calling for you. I came to
tell you. All that a man may suffer here, he has suffered, sir.
Your prayer has been doubly answered, Mr. Matthews. Both father
and son are dead. The name--the old name is perished from the face
of the earth. For Christ's dear sake, forgive my boy, and let him
go. For my sake, sir, I--I can bear no more."

Who but He that looketh upon the heart of man could know the
battle that was fought in the soul of that giant of the hills? He
uttered no sound. He sat in his seat as if made of stone; save
once, when he walked to the end of the porch to stand with
clenched hands and passion shaken frame, facing the dark clump of
pines on the hill.

Slowly the moon climbed over the ridge and lighted the scene. The
mountaineer returned to his chair. All at once he raised his head,
and, leaning forward, looked long and earnestly at the old
shepherd, where he sat crouching like a convict awaiting sentence.

From down the mill road came voices and the sound of horses' feet.
Old Matt started, turning his head a moment to listen. The horses
stopped at the lower gate.

"The children," said Aunt Mollie softly. "The children. Grant, Oh,
Grant! Sammy and our boy."

Then the shepherd felt a heavy hand on his shoulder, and a voice,
that had in it something new and strange, said, "Dad,--my
brother,--Daniel, I--I ain't got no education, an' I--don't know
rightly how to say it--but, Daniel, what these hills have been to
you, you--you have been to me. It's sure God's way, Daniel. Let's-
-let's go to the boy."

It is a moving story of repentance, forgiveness, atonement and redemption.

Too Much Winnie the Pooh?

The other night the FYG was rummaging about in the pantry getting the dustpan and dustbroom. The kitchen was lit but dimly, if at all.

The FYB wandered in, unaware that anybody else was in the room. For reasons that elude the rest of us, he decided that there was a burglar in our kitchen pantry, seeking to steal our honey.

Our raw honey, he assures me. This is a distinction of great import.

Naturally, he responded by yelling at the (raw) honey thief with great ferociousness, and equally naturally, the startled FYG was jumped, screamed, and swung around all in a picosecond.

Unfortunately for the Boy, she had just laid hands on the dustpan and dust broom, so she caught him across the face with them as she whirled around to see what the screaming was about. And then, of course, it was about something else altogether.

The Politics of Housework and Barn Building

*The POlitics of Housework was an important article in the feminist movement of the mid-20th century. The author talks about the importance of shared chores and the excuses men make to get out a full egalitarian sharing of those household chores. These three in particular caught my attention:

"I don' t mind sharing the work, but you'll have to show me how to do it."

"We have different standards, and why should I have to work to your standards? That's unfair."

"I've got nothing against sharing the housework, but you can' t make me do it on your schedule."

Each of them were included in a long list of male excuses with feminist translations which were most uncomplimentary to the men. And the reason they particularly caught my attention is because each of these are turned around and used by women against men in Country Women.
The women want to share equally in the physical work of building up their homesteads, which, if that's what they want is fair enough. And in several instances they make the same remarks and complaints as above- it's not fair, the male oppressive patriarchy continues because the men expect the women to work to their standards, on their schedule, and sometimes the men are in a hurry and don't take time to teach the women how to do what they are doing and they would only do more if the men would take time to teach them instead of hanging on the 'power of their expertise.'

Never mind that teaching somebody else how to do something you take for granted is a draining task requiring patience and some skill in communication that not everybody possesses- no, it's deliberate oppression as they try to hang on to their power. At least, when a woman asks for help and the men don't give it to their satisfaction that's what it is. When a man asks for the same thing, the act of asking is the deliberate act of oppression. It's the old 'if a tree falls in the forest and nobody sees it, is it still the man's fault?' Well, yes, it seems it is.

Likewise, it's only oppressive and unreasonable patriarchy if the men prefer that the women put together a shed at least as well as they do. If the women expect the men to work to their specifications around the house, that's only reasonable, and it's only their patriarchal chauvinism that makes them suggest that the floors don't really need to be mopped and waxed weekly.

But read the whole article for yourself (it isn't long and it does have historical significance) and then see what you think of the following excerpt from the journal entry portions of Country Women, where the above article was highly recommended. I have italicized the bits that really stood out to me:

Peter and I have finally finished the bathhouse after months of talking about it. It took his being home for me to actually work on it. Somewhere in the middle of it I remembered that two years ago we started as quals, unskilled ex-urbanites. Now when we build, he directs, I follow; he takes the measurement, I hold the tape; he saws, I steady the board; he hammers, I hold....
While we were framing the third wall, I realized what was happening and asked if we could formally organize it so I hit half the nails, saw half the boards. He said it wouldn't be "efficient" with fishing season about to start [Peter works on a fishing boat and during fishing season he is out on the boat for weeks at a time, and they were supposed to finish this project earlier, but, as she inadvertently admits here, it's her fault they didn't get it started on time] he can build better and quicker. After a long argument he agreed. When I went to nail my studs, he stood right behind me, watching and offering me advice.
...the plumbing was supposed to be my job, but I put it off until there was nothing left to do...
I was here [at the plumbing store] about three hours, looking at everything so I wouldn't have to ask for help....
I got in an argument with the clerk about the drain pipes; he said they wouldn't drain, but all he's ever seen are the code sizes [my note: and the customers who come back in to get the right sizes of pipes when they've made mistakes...]
Dan offered to come teach me how to solder when I put it all together. We were almost finished before I realized all I'd learned was how to stand there and hand him things. He gets so much support from being able to do things for people, he doesn't want to give up the power of his expertise...
I've been doing the shingling all alone... Sometimes I miss the extra energy of someone else to work with, when I have to climb down the ladder for each new bundle of shakes. But I think I can only work with someone as unskilled as I, from whom I can get courage, not a sense of my limitations...

Poor Dan. I hope he never offers to help her again. Let the selfish beast keep the power of his expertise to himself, and let the pipes go unsoldered. That'll teach him.

The Larger Picture

-- We wish to place before the child open doors to many avenues of instruction and delight, in each one of which he should find quickening thoughts.

We cannot expect a school to be manned by a dozen master-minds, and even if it were, and the scholar were taught by each in turn, it would be much to his disadvantage. What he wants of his teacher is moral and mental discipline, sympathy and direction; and it is better, on the whole, that the training of the pupil should be undertaken by one wise teacher than that he should be passed from hand to hand for this subject and that.

Our aim in Education is to give a Full Life.
-- We begin to see what we want. Children make large demands upon us. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. Thou hast set my feet in a large room; should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking -- the strain would be too great -- but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest.

We cannot give the children these interests; we prefer that they should never say they have learned botany or conchology, geology or astronomy. The question is not, -- how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education -- but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?

School Education, by Charlotte Mason, page 170-1

Science and Human Values, Common Place Book Entry

Less of my confusing ramblings this time, more of Dr. Bronowski's clear prose:

The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations- more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness.

Appreciation is part of that creative discovery process:

In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness.

At bottom, there is no satisfying likeness there until we too have seized it, we too have made it for ourselves.

Obviously, both art and science are about far more than simply copying nature:

If the task of the painter were to copy for men what they see, the critic could make only a single judgment: either that the copy is right or that it is wrong.


Reality is not an exhibit for man's inspection, labelled 'Do not touch.' ... We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorum.

...in the instant when the mind seizes this [some aspect of unity in variety, some connection] for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.

IN volume 6 of Charlotte Mason's series on education we read:

...the principles which underlie science are at the same time so simple, so profound and so far-reaching that the due setting forth of these provokes what is almost an emotional response.

Miss Mason commends to our attention these words of "Sir Richard Gregory in his Presidential Address in the Education Science Section of the British Association:"

The essential mission of school science was to prepare pupils for civilised citizenship by revealing to them something of the beauty and the power of the world in which they lived, as well as introducing them to the methods by which the boundaries of natural knowledge had been extended. School science, therefore, was not intended to prepare for vocations, but to equip pupils for life....
There was very special need for the reminder that science was not all measurement, nor all measurement science."

And, of course, this quote from Miss Mason is a favorite among her readers:

Where science does not teach a child to wonder and admire it has perhaps no educative value.

Poetry for Poetry Month

In Time of Silver Rain
By Langston Hughes


In time of silver rain
The earth
Puts forth new life again,
Green grasses grow
And flowers lift their heads,
And over all the plain
The wonder spreads
Of life,
of life,
of life!
In time of silver rain
The butterflies
Lift silken wings
To catch a rainbow cry,
And trees put forth
New leaves to sing
In joy beneath the sky
As down the roadway
Passing boys and girls
Go singing, too,
In time of silver rain
When spring
And life
Are new.

This is the poem that came to mine this morning. Can you guess what the weather is like?

Yes, It's Still Us

Pipsqueak was messing about with a tutorial on making your own blog headers (at my request) and she added the new picture (from one of our old books). I like it, but I didn't like the old template with it. I like the new template better with the picture, but it seems that the page is narrower, and I don't like that.

So this won't be the last change you see. After all, my family knows how much I like rearranging things.

Whoops, edited once again. This time with a newer, plainer, and- hooray!!- wider post style.

Science and Human Values, A Commonplace Book Entry

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge is supposed to have defined beauty as unity in variety.
"Science," says Bronowski, "is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,—or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge’s phrase, for unity in variety."

"What is a poetic image but the seizing and the exploration of a hidden likeness, in holding together two parts of a comparison which are to give depth each to the other?"

Bronowski loses me somewhat in this next idea. I either disagree with him or I do not understand him. He says there is a clash

'of two conceptions of life... In his later poems W. B. Yeats was troubled by the feeling that in hsutting himself up to write, he was missing the active pleasures of life; and yet it seemed to him certain that the man who lives for these pleasures will leave no lasting work behind him. He said this at times very simply, too:

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work.

This problem, whether a man fulfills himself in work or in play, is of course more common than Yeats allowed..."

But I don't think that's what Yeats said. Perfection of the life is hardly 'play,' and the poem that Bronowski chooses to illustrate this choice between play and work is Vacillation, which is not about the choice between work or play, but about the choice between faith and unbelief, soul and heart:

I
Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath.
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night;
The body calls it death,
The heart remorse.
But if these be right
What is joy?

II
A tree there is that from its topmost bough
Is half all glittering flame and half all green
Abounding foliage moistened with the dew;
And half is half and yet is all the scene;
And half and half consume what they renew,
And he that Attis' image hangs between
That staring fury and the blind lush leaf
May know not what he knows, but knows not grief

III
Get all the gold and silver that you can,
Satisfy ambition, or animate
The trivial days and ram them with the sun,
And yet upon these maxims meditate:
All women dote upon an idle man
Although their children need a rich estate;
No man has ever lived that had enough
Of children's gratitude or woman's love.
No longer in Lethean foliage caught
Begin the preparation for your death
And from the fortieth winter by that thought
Test every work of intellect or faith,
And everything that your own hands have wrought
And call those works extravagance of breath
That are not suited for such men as come
proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

IV
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
Although the summer Sunlight gild
Cloudy leafage of the sky,
Or wintry moonlight sink the field
In storm-scattered intricacy,
I cannot look thereon,
Responsibility so weighs me down.
Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.
A rivery field spread out below,
An odour of the new-mown hay
In his nostrils, the great lord of Chou
Cried, casting off the mountain snow,
"Let all things pass away.'
Wheels by milk-white asses drawn
Where Babylon or Nineveh
Rose; some conquer drew rein
And cried to battle-weary men,
"Let all things pass away.'
From man's blood-sodden heart are sprung
Those branches of the night and day
Where the gaudy moon is hung.
What's the meaning of all song?
"Let all things pass away.'

VII
The Soul. Seek out reality, leave things that seem.
The Heart. What, be a singer born and lack a theme?
The Soul. Isaiah's coal, what more can man desire?
The Heart. Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire!
The Soul. Look on that fire, salvation walks within.
The Heart. What theme had Homer but original sin?

VIII
Must we part, Von Hugel, though much alike, for we
Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity?
The body of Saint Teresa lies undecayed in tomb,
Bathed in miraculous oil, sweet odours from it come,
Healing from its lettered slab. Those self-same hands
perchance
Eternalised the body of a modern saint that once
Had scooped out pharaoh's mummy. I -- though heart
might find relief
Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief
What seems most welcome in the tomb -- play a pre-
destined part.
Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.
The lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture said?
So get you gone, Von Hugel, though with blessings on
your head.

Bronowski only quotes part of this, the part that I have italicized. This contextual wrenching still does not seem to me to support the dichotomy he refers to as between work and play, but rather one between work and family relationships.

And it is true enough that by making some choices, we are by default unmaking other choices. I am choosing to write this post. This menas that during this time I am not taking a walk in the woods, playing a game or reading a story to my children, talking to a friend on the phone, cooking our lunch, reading my Bible, or doing my laundry. All of these things are worthy things, some worthier than others. I may be able to do many of these things later, but probably some of them I won't get to (somebody else will make lunch while I type, it may rain and I may find another reason not to go for a walk, the house may burn, the Lord may return).
But I do not see the choices Yeats makes as between work and play. It is also true that there have been great men who did great things abroad and were a great blessing to thousands of strangers, and yet failed their own children and blighted their lives. This wasn't because their fathers chose between work and play, but chose public work over private (and more anonymous) work in the home circle. It seems churlish to condemn when I may have benefitted from their public work, but surely we all know men and women whose work we admire, respect and benefit from while acknowledging that we would hate to be their spouses or their children.

And so I am lost in Bronowki's point. And what has all this to do with science, anyway?

And here we see the (very personal) value of these sorts of Commonplace book entries or narrations, because in my ramblings and contendings with myself and Bronowski I believe I have argued myself into understanding. I believe I have chased a rabbit trail and I am quibbling over details. He is talking largely of metaphors, of the creative mind's need to find unity, make comparisons and contrasts in order to discover things, to make sense of them, to draw conclusions, and I have focused on one of several examples he gives, because I disagree with him so much, that it has distracted me from his larger point (and perhaps greatly annoyed what few readers I may have left).

These analogies, metaphors, similes, these images

"...are tools of creative thought, as coherent and as exact as the conceptual images with shich science works: as time and space, or as the proton and the neutron."

The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations- more, are explosions of a hidden likeness.

What It Takes to Win a Pulitzer

The New York Times won a Pulitzer for its sweet, warm, fuzzy little piece about Sheik Reda Shata of the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, N.Y. I blogged about the original story way back when (back when I was whole, back when I didn't live and move and have my being in a black cloud, back when I was still poliblogging), only I played a little trick on our faithful readers.

They neglected to mention this Society's links to hate speech, terrorism, and the murder of a 16 year old Jewish boy. The boy's grieving mother called the reporter to ask why she had omitted this connection from her story about the mosque. The intrepid journalist replied that she didn't know anything about it. And this is Pulitzer prize winning journalism.

Heard on the Radio

The HM and I were driving home last night and we had the radio on, primarily as background. We were talking about something else and not really paying attention to the talk show on the radio. Then some note caught our attention and we started listening intently.

What I thought we were hearing was somebody calling in to the talk show, and this person was frightening. We started paying attention somewhere in the middle of the hatefilled rant, so we didn't hear the beginning. His rage, fury, and hatred just spewed forth- and it was that hate filled tone that had caught our attention. He sounded unstable, insane, dangerous. He made thinly, very thinly, veiled threats. He promised to get on a plane and come teach the person he was speaking to a lesson. The talk show host was commenting from time to time (furthing my impression that he was talking to a caller), and I remember thinking, "Stop it! This man is psychotic. You need the police to meet this man when he steps off the plane because he doesn't sound like your typical loony caller. He sounds like he means it, and your life could be in danger."

The hatred in this man's voice was chilling as anything I've ever heard. And then we learned that this wasn't somebody calling in to the talk show. This was a recording of a telephone message actor Alec Baldwin left for his 11 year old daughter. The words he spoke to her will be burned into her soul for the rest of her life. Nobody can hear such vile hatred spewing from her own father and not be scarred from it, especially not an 11 year old child. You can google for it if you like and read a transcript or hear the awful thing, but I don't recommend it.

Has this blog suddenly become celebrity gossip? I don't think so.

I came home and looked around on google and technorati, hoping it was a hoax or some misunderstanding. This was the best post I found on it. He begins by saying,

As always with these humble ramblings, my intent is not to demonize the principles of this story, but to seek broader lessons for all of us.

And that's exactly what he does. Highly recommended.

Teen Brains

Have you heard the research claiming the teenaged brain is underdeveloped and this is responsible for risky behavior in teens today? And that these brains don't fully become adult until around 21 years of age?

Is it the brain that makes the teen, or the culture that makes the brain that makes the teen? According to Dr. Robert Epstein the research we've been reading about could best be described as fraud. You can read about it here, listen to a podcast here.

Of course, John Taylor Gatto and other homeschooling advocates have been saying this for ages:

During the post-Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years. Later, a special label was created to describe very old children. It was called adolescence, a phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race. The infantilization of young people didn’t stop at the beginning of the twentieth century; child labor laws were extended to cover more and more kinds of work, the age of school leaving set higher and higher. The greatest victory for this utopian project was making school the only avenue to certain occupations. The intention was ultimately to draw all work into the school net. By the 1950s it wasn’t unusual to find graduate students well into their thirties, running errands, waiting to start their lives.

Here's more from Robert Epstein:

Anthropologists have identified more than 100 contemporary societies in which teenage turmoil is completely absent; most of these societies don’t even have terms for adolescence. Even more compelling, long-term anthropological studies initiated at Harvard in the 1980s show that teenage turmoil begins to appear in societies within a few years after those societies adopt Western schooling practices and are exposed to Western media.

The idea of a teenager has a sullen, immature, irresponsible, uncooperative and foolish twerp is a cultural creation. Yes, some teens are like this, because they live down to our expectations.

The HM and I are no parenting experts. We have no significant degrees, and we are far from perfect people. We are deeply flawed human beings. And our fifth child is now 16 years old. We have had four teenagers at once- and we have never experienced the sort of cultural behavior that we are told is 'typical.' Granny Tea once visited us when the FYG was just two years old. The FYG was going through a 'phase' where she was slamming doors, telling us we were 'mean' and rolling her cute little eyes in her head when she didn't get her way (and we handled this as it required). Granny Tea remarked one evening, "Isn't it interesting that the only child in your household who acts like a 'typical teen' is the two year old?"

I think it's shameful that we have taught our children so little and required even less in the way of self-control, self discipline, and maturity that this is surprising.

More Consciousness Raising

Country Women is a very practical book for those wanting to try their hands at homesteading. The journal entries I'm excerpting are only a small part of the book, and the rest of it is filled with truly useful, important information. Actually, even the journals provide some interesting information, albeit not always as the author intended.

At this point in my excerpts, our fictional journalist has separated from her husband. She is frustrated with her woman friends who haven't left their husbands- Sarah, she says, is tense

"because her time is spent providing meals, buying the food, doing the dishes with 'help' but no relief from the responsibility....
...Sarah, Kathy, Lynda, Holly, all admit the pain of isolated incidents in their lives, but they are afraid to generalize to see the whole pattern and what they're doing to themselves. I share all the fears of loneliness and alienation but I have no choice except to struggle for my own liberation. I have to find out who I am and I can't do that if my focus is on someone else.

But her focus is on somebody else, isn't it? She's busy watching all those other women, critical of the choices they are making, angry that they aren't making the choices she's made, even while she's not sure how well they're going to work out for her. So the next phase is not much of a surprise:

The women's group is ending. At least, I am not going any more. For weeks now the meetings have been painful, if only in their emptiness and repetition. The women who helped me grow the most... have already quit.... I am tired of helping release the pain of Sarah, Carol, and Kathy's relationships with their men so that they can go on living with them. I'm angry that they only seem to remember me when they have a problem. Their lives are so bound up in their lovers that they have little time for their friends....

I'm quitting is characterized as the whole group ending. I'm not being helped anymore, so I'm leaving because they are selfish (and anyway, the ones who helped me are gone). How dare they care more about their families than me, after all. How dare they desire to work most on the relationship they hope to make lifelong, the father of their children, instead of a friendship with me? How dare they act as though their husbands are more important to them than me? How dare they betray me by acting as though they can be friends with their husbands?

There is some small spark of self-awareness in another journal entry where she talks about riding home from the movies in a car full of laughing, talking women, she starts to cry because she's so lonely and all alone. She admits that she is so consumed by dislike for Sarah and Kathy that she can't even stay in the same room with them, and she admits that she shouldn't feel this way but does. She acknowledges that her 'resentment and anger... is a reflection of' her own need (I would say wants). She admits she dislikes them for not being what "I want them to be for me."

I shared portions of this with a friend of mine who suggested that maybe this era is where the notion that women can't be friends really got started.
"Maybe so," I pondered, "I suppose if everybody in your consciousness raising group is working hard at putting herself first, then-"

"Oh, my! How unpleasant!"

Poetry for Poetry Month

Today I asked myself what poem I wanted to share, and my Self said, "Why are you asking? You know what poem has been running through your head for the last 16 hours."

"But I'm posting older poems, familiar poems, poems I've known nearly all my life," I objected. "I just learned of that poem yesterday, and I can't remember that I'd ever even heard of that poet until Francis posted the poem in response to the post on what's blooming."

Self tapped her foot impatiently and gave me that look, you know the one. There really isn't anything to say in response to that look, so here's the poem:


If I should ever by chance grow rich
I'll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater,
And let them all to my elder daughter.

The rent I shall ask of her will be only
Each year's first violets, white and lonely,
The first primroses and orchises
She must find them before I do, that is.

But if she finds a blossom on furze
Without rent they shall all for ever be hers,
Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo and Lapwater,
I shall give them all to my elder daughter.

Edward Thomas. 1878-1917


You may read more about this remarkable poet here. There is more here. This site also was lovely to look at.

Briefly, he wrote prose for a living and to support his family, largely book reviews, essays, biographies. He wrote so much that he called himself a writing animal and claimed he could write something salable about a broomstick on a moment's notice, if so required. In 1911 he had some sort of nervous breakdown. In 1913 he met Robert Frost, who encouraged him to try poetry. The two men were such good friends that Thomas said Frost was the only brother he'd ever had.
Edward Thomas took his advice, and in 1914, when he was 36 years old he began to write poetry. Over the next two years he would write 142 poems, which he published under a pseudonymn.

Here's another of his that I found particularly haunting:

This is no case of petty right and wrong
That politicians or philosophers
Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.
Beside my hate for one fat patriot
My hatred of the Kaiser is love true:-
A kind of god he is, banging a gong.
But I have not to choose between the two,
Or between justice and injustice. Dinned
With war and argument I read no more
Than in the storm smoking along the wind
Athwart the wood. Two witches' cauldrons roar.
From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;
Out of the other an England beautiful
And like her mother that died yesterday.
Little I know or care if, being dull,
I shall miss something that historians
Can rake out of the ashes when perchance
The phoenix broods serene above their ken.
But with the best and meanest Englishmen
I am one in crying, God save England, lest
We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.
The ages made her that made us from the dust:
She is all we know and live by, and we trust
She is good and must endure, loving her so:
And as we love ourselves we hate her foe.

He enlisted in the British Army during WWI, in 1915. In 1917 he was sent overseas. He wrote to his wife nearly every day, until, as we read from this more extensive biographical account:

On Easter Monday (April 9) 1917 the first day of the Battle of Arras opened with a huge artillery bombardment. At 7.30 am Edward Thomas, who was standing at the Beaurains Observation Post, was killed by the blast of a shell which exploded nearby.

He never saw his poetry published under his own name.

Francis, thank-you so much for the gift of a new poem and poet!

More on German Kidnappings of Homeschooled Children

REfused permission to visit her family on her birthday, 16 year old Melissa packed her belongings, wrote her foster family a thank-you note, and at 3 a.m. slipped out the window of the foster home to go home. She spent her birthday with her family as she (and they) desired.
So far as I know, at the moment of this writing she is still at home, but this may change.
For more information see Dana's post at Principled Discovery
See also Diary of 1, where I found the very chilling quote from Michael Farris:

The philosophy that the government knows best how to raise children is really becoming a worldwide phenomenon. I think Germany represents the edge of the night that’s coming.

The philosophy that government knows best about almost anything is a dangerous and foolish one, but the idea that the government knows best about families is threatening and dangerous.

Carnival of Homeschooling, The Bee Edition

Sprittibee is our lovely host his week, and she has done a Beeeutiful job. Plenty of good reading, thought provoking ideas, and interesting information about bees, too. You can tell she worked especially hard on this!

Consciousness Raising

Several years ago I picked up a book called Country Women at a library booksale. It was published in the 1970's, a response to the back-to-the-land movement. It grew out of a group of women in that movement who lived near each other and who added to homesteading group meetings for 'consciousness raising.' They started writing articles for a small magazine, and later that became this book.

This is a very practical book for those wanting to try their hands at homesteading. It's excellent for flabby beginners, raw novices, and even those with a little bit of experience. It's also historically interesting.

Sprinkled through-out the chapters on such things as organic gardening, spinning yarn, raising hens, delivering goats, skinning sheep, buying land, digging ditches, and laying fence are excerpts from a hypothetical journal. The journal is written by Sherry Thomas, and is supposed to chronicle the lives of Jennifer and Peter, as written by Jennifer. 'Jennifer' is a sort of composite of all the women in the project, a reflection of their growth and changes through feminism. 'Peter,' poor fellow, is a bit of cardboard at fault, it seems, largely because he's male.

This journal explains why most of their marriages failed. There are other inadvertent revelations as well:

These last two years, Peter has been my only nearby friend, but there is still so much he doesn't understand, so many spaces between us.
Yet even here in this circle of women, I feel separate, and I wonder what is wrong with me that I can't accept things, that I am not contented. Today I was talking to Sarah about the Politics of Housework* which I had just read and about hassles with Peter over the shopping. She gave me the blankest look, as though I were speaking Turkish. There are no politics to housework here, the roles are so completely set! Women talk of gardens, goats, crochet, and canning. Carol has even wallpapered her outhouse!...
Alice just sent Sisterhood is Powerful and some magazines about the women's movement to me from the city. It helps a lot to know there are other women out there somewhere who want to share their lives equally with the men they live with, who are exploring the subtleties of equality: such as who cleans the toilet or makes the shopping list, not how to divide the dishwashing. It's so hard, trying to learn and grow in a vacuum- especially when every man and most of the women Peter meets tell him that he's crazy ' to put up with' my demands at all!"

If most people who know you and see you on a regular basis characterize you as demanding, then there probably is something amiss either with your demands or how you present them.

*The POlitics of Housework is, I feel sure, this article

I've joined a women's group... Going to the first one I felt excited, shy, and aggressively defensive, wary of starting all over again with women who have never questioned anything...

Is it likely they have truly never questioned anything? Or is it possible they just found different answers?

Carnival of Family Life

Up here, arranged alphabetically- what a lot of work! Great job!

Recipe Carnival, Italia!

Delicous Italian themed recipes are up here. Looks like a great carnival!

Science and Human Values, a Commonplace Book Entry

Good humdrum work, says Bronowski, is done every day by everybody- scientists, artists, writers, truck drivers, bank clerks, and though he doesn't mention them, by housewives as well. However, in every profession, 'the sense of personal exploration' is also necessary (and delightful).

If the practical scientist is 'to break out of what has been done before, he must bring to his own tools the same sense of pride and discovery which the poet brings to words.' He must be radical in conception and creative in design- even with practical things.

It matters more in some fields than others, I suppose, that those in those fields 'break out of what has been done before.' But even when breaking new ground isn't as important as covering old ground well, that sense of pride, discovery, passion, and delight surely oils our wheels and makes our progress more of joy and less of a drudgery. I'm wandering far afield here from Bronowki's topic, but I'm thinking of my life and hard-won ideas and thoughts that come to me only after much pain, sorrow, and laborious toiling of the soul and mind, and then I discover my halting thoughts put into nearly perfect words by some writer dead these thousand years or more. I might have learned the same thing by reading that dead writer first, but then again, I would not have learned so well, or recognized the power and truth of those words so sharply.

To return to science, it is the supposedly impractical love of thinking, the delight in speculation that results in many practical discoveries. "Man," says Bronowski, "does not invent by following eihter use or tradition."

"Man masters nature not by force but by understanding..."
Nature "cannot be mastered by a device which outrages her laws..." "...we gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws... we must be content that power is the byproduct of understanding."

Understanding, it seems to me, begins with listening, observing, watching quietly and learning from what we see. I once heard a scientist talking about science in the public schools, and he thought nearly all of it before about junior high was a waste of the students' time. He suggested that grade school children should spend less time on what amounted to parlour tricks masquerading as 'experiments' and more time out and about, observing nature in the raw, making collections, watching bugs and birds, growing things, sorting and categorizing rocks and seashells. In other words, a Charlotte Mason education.

Bronowski says:

"I have had of all people a historian tell me that science is a collection of facts, and his voice had not even the ironic rasp of one filing cabinet reproving another."

If science were merely a collecting of facts, every computer would be a scientist.
Thinking people really cannot help but make connections from one topic to another, and "science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses" both grand and small. "The scientist looks for order in the appearances of nature by exploring such likenesses," or, in other words, thinking by analogy (see also here).

Science grows from a comparison, says Bronowski. And in order to compare one thing to another, we must have a stock of things to compare- hence a childhood spent in observing, sketching, watching, collecting, exploring, and thinking is childhood spent storing up a rich stockpile of information.

The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike.

And since new discoveries are made by comparing things that long seemed unlike, it is particularly shortsighted to dismiss fields of study solely on the grounds of their practicality.

Small, mundane, humdrum, and practical domestic discoveries also grow from noticing likenesses between one thing and another. IN fact, this is an important part of creativity and flexibility in any field. This noticing of likenesses between unlike things is what makes one housekeeper able to discover on her own that in a pinch half a paper plate works as a substitute dustpan. Inability (or lack of practice) in this area is what forces a less imaginitive (and less scientific, and also less creative) housekeeper to leave her pile of sweepings and run to the store to buy a new dustpan when the old one is missing.

Noticing likenesses between one thing and another makes possible many domestic substitutions, medical discoveries, artistic creations, poems, and memorable sermons, among a thousand and one other possiblities.

Head-Scratcher

This was the headline:

"Glycemic load" of diet has no effect on weight loss

But there were the last two paragraphs:

This doesn't mean, however, that there's no place for diets that focus on glycemic load, according to the researcher. Some studies, for example, have found that low-glycemic index foods might help control blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes.

And in their own research, Roberts said she and her colleagues have found that

low-glycemic index diets do seem more effective for overweight people who naturally secrete high levels of the hormone insulin, which regulates blood sugar

.

Which is kind of what most of the low-carb diets I've seen say.

Poetry for Poetry Month

This morning I asked the FYG if there were any poems she especially liked. Without any hesitation at all, her instantaneous answer was:

The Raggedy Man
by James Whitcomb Riley

O the Raggedy Man! He works fer Pa;
An' he's the goodest man ever you saw!
He comes to our house every day,
An' waters the horses, an' feeds 'em hay;
An' he opens the shed -- an' we all ist laugh
When he drives out our little old wobble-ly calf;
An' nen -- ef our hired girl says he can --
He milks the cow fer 'Lizabuth Ann. --
Ain't he a' awful good Raggedy Man?
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!


W'y, The Raggedy Man -- he's ist so good,
He splits the kindlin' an' chops the wood;
An' nen he spades in our garden, too,
An' does most things 'at boys can't do. --
He clumbed clean up in our big tree
An' shooked a' apple down fer me --
An' 'nother 'n', too, fer 'Lizabuth Ann --
An' 'nother 'n', too, fer The Raggedy Man. --
Ain't he a' awful kind Raggedy Man?
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!


An' The Raggedy Man one time say he
Pick' roast' rambos from a' orchurd-tree,
An' et 'em -- all ist roast' an' hot! --
An' it's so, too! -- 'cause a corn-crib got
Afire one time an' all burn' down
On "The Smoot Farm," 'bout four mile from town --
On "The Smoot Farm"! Yes -- an' the hired han'
'At worked there nen 'uz The Raggedy Man! --
Ain't he the beatin'est Raggedy Man?
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!


The Raggedy Man's so good an' kind
He'll be our "horsey," an' "haw" an' mind
Ever'thing 'at you make him do --
An' won't run off -- 'less you want him to!
I drived him wunst way down our lane
An' he got skeered, when it 'menced to rain,
An' ist rared up an' squealed and run
Purt' nigh away! -- an' it's all in fun!
Nen he skeered ag'in at a' old tin can ...
Whoa! y' old runaway Raggedy Man!
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!


An' The Raggedy Man, he knows most rhymes,
An' tells 'em, ef I be good, sometimes:
Knows 'bout Giunts, an' Griffuns, an' Elves,
An' the Squidgicum-Squees 'at swallers the'rselves:
An', wite by the pump in our pasture-lot,
He showed me the hole 'at the Wunks is got,
'At lives 'way deep in the ground, an' can
Turn into me, er 'Lizabuth Ann!
Er Ma, er Pa, er The Raggedy Man!
Ain't he a funny old Raggedy Man?
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!


An' wunst, when The Raggedy Man come late,
An' pigs ist root' thue the garden-gate,
He 'tend like the pigs 'uz bears an' said,
"Old Bear-shooter'll shoot 'em dead!"
An' race' an' chase' 'em, an' they'd ist run
When he pint his hoe at 'em like it's a gun
An' go "Bang! -- Bang!" nen 'tend he stan'
An' load up his gun ag'in! Raggedy Man!
He's an old Bear-shooter Raggedy Man!
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!


An' sometimes The Raggedy Man lets on
We're little prince-children, an' old King's gone
To git more money, an' lef' us there --
And Robbers is ist thick ever'where;
An' nen -- ef we all won't cry, fer shore --
The Raggedy Man he'll come and "'splore
The Castul-halls," an' steal the "gold" --
An' steal us, too, an' grab an' hold
An' pack us off to his old "Cave"! -- An'
Haymow's the "cave" o' The Raggedy Man! --
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!


The Raggedy Man -- one time, when he
Wuz makin' a little bow-'n'-orry fer me,
Says "When you're big like your Pa is,
Air you go' to keep a fine store like his --
An' be a rich merchunt -- an' wear fine clothes? --
Er what air you go' to be, goodness knows?"
An' nen he laughed at 'Lizabuth Ann,
An' I says "'M go' to be a Raggedy Man! --
I'm ist go' to be a nice Raggedy Man!"
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!

I know dialect poetry is a terrible burden for many people to read, and it mostly is to me, too, if it's a poem I've not heard before. I believe the key to liking dialect poetry is that you have to have heard it done right long before you read it. And since all of us have heard JWR's poetry (done right) long before we could make out the shapes of our letters, we know how it is supposed to sound, and the written poems are really only cue cards, to help our halting memory along.

Blooming

Jenny went for a walk in the woods yesterday and came back with:

White Trout Lilies or Dogtooth violets I do not know why they are called dogtooth violets, they are six petaled lilies, not violets.

Regular purple, yellow, and white violets. There are always fewest of the yellow violets. William Cullen Bryant wrote a poem about them, which you can read here and copy into your nature journal or commonplace book.

Trillium- just buds at the moment, but there should be blooms any day now. I believe we have the toadshade and perhaps one of the less showy wakerobins.

She didn't bring back Mayflowers, and they aren't even budding yet, but their lovely umbrellas are unfurling and soon they'll be putting out buds. I mainly know this because I can see a group of Mayflowers from my window, not because I've gone walking outside myself yet. I mean to, though, I really do. Soon.

Your basic common buttercup

I still have some daffodils and tulips in bloom, and the dandelions, of course, are everywhere.

Sunday Hymn Post

Psalm 6
To the chief Musician on Neginoth upon Sheminith, A Psalm of David.



6:1 O LORD, rebuke me not in thine anger, neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure.
6:2 Have mercy upon me, O LORD; for I am weak: O LORD, heal me; for my bones are vexed.
6:3 My soul is also sore vexed: but thou, O LORD, how long?
6:4 Return, O LORD, deliver my soul: oh save me for thy mercies’ sake.
6:5 For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks?
6:6 I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears.
6:7 Mine eye is consumed because of grief; it waxeth old because of all mine enemies.
6:8 Depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity; for the LORD hath heard the voice of my weeping.
6:9 The LORD hath heard my supplication; the LORD will receive my prayer.
6:10 Let all mine enemies be ashamed and sore vexed: let them return and be ashamed suddenly.

Mp3 file here

Who's Reading What To Whom?

Find out this week at Semicolon's weekly Saturday Review of Books.

So far we have:
1. Carrie (Marley and Me)
2. Krakovianka (Lost in Translation)
3. Carrie K. (A Tale of Two Cities)
4. Stephen (The Interpretation of Murder)
5. Kevin (Quotes about books and reading)
6. Nina(Audio Kids Material)
7. Sage (Austerlitz)
8. 3M (The Princess and the Goblin)
9. CoversGirl (North and South)
10. Deliciously Clean Reads (Letters for Emily by Camron Wright)
11. Brown bear (Bella at Midnight by Diane Stanley)
12. Brown bear (Bella at Midnight by Diane Stanley)
13. Quixotic (A Game of Thrones)
14. Quixotic (The Land of Laughs)
15. Quixotic (Heart-Shaped Box)
As well as a couple by yours, truly.

Add one of your own if you like (click on the link to Semi-Colon at the start of this post to find the links to all these).

A Ballad for Poetry Month

This is a longer one, and some people struggle with the odd spellings of a few words. It was originally a folk ballad, and it still makes the folk at our house laugh.

Wicked King John, who does little right and great wrong, casts covetous eyes upon the wealth and property of the good Abbot of Canterbury. After the fashion of the duplicitous wicked we find in all times and places large and small, he wants to so arrange events that he can blame the Abbot himself for the punishment he pre-determined to inflict upon him.

King John accuses the man of treason, based only on the fact that the Abbot is very wealthy, and tells him that unless he can answer three impossible questions by an arbitrarily imposed deadline, his life and goods are forfeit to the crown.

The Abbot, a good, honest, and law-abiding man, sees nothing for it except he must die. Read on to discover the impossible questions and the surprising answers.

King John and the Abbot of Canterbury


I

AN ancient story I’ll tell you anon
Of a notable prince, that was callèd King John;
And he rulèd England with maine and with might,
For he did great wrong, and maintein’d little right.

II

And I’ll tell you a story, a story so merrye,
Concerning the Abbot of Canterbùrye;
How, for his house-keeping and high renowne,
They rode poste for him to fair London towne.

III

An hundred men, the King did heare say,
The Abbot kept in his house every day;
And fifty golde chaynes, without any doubt,
In velvet coates waited the Abbot about.

IV

‘How now, Father Abbot, I heare it of thee
Thou keepest a farre better house than mee,
And for thy house-keeping and high renowne,
I feare thou work’st treason against my crown.’—

V

‘My liege,’ quo’ the Abbot, ‘I would it were knowne,
Nothing I spend but what is my owne;
And I trust your Grace will doe me no deere
For spending of my owne true-gotten geere.’

VI

‘Yes, yes, Father Abbot, thy fault it is highe,
And now for the same thou needest must dye;
For except thou canst answer me questions three,
Thy head shall be smitten from thy bodìe.

VII

‘And first,’ quo’ the King, ‘when I’m in this stead,
With my crowne of golde so faire on my head,
Among all my liege-men so noble of birthe,
Thou must tell me to one penny what I am worthe.

VIII

‘Secondlye, tell me, without any doubt,
How soone I may ride the whole worlde about.
And at the third question thou must not shrinke,
But tell me here truly what I do thinke.’—

IX

‘O, these are hard questions for my shallow witt,
Nor I cannot answer your Grace as yet:
But if you will give me but three weekes space,
I’ll do my endeavour to answer your Grace.

X

‘Now three weekes space to thee will I give,
And that is the longest time thou hast to live;
For if thou dost not answer my questions three,
Thy lands and thy livings are forfeit to mee.’

XI

Away rode the Abbot all sad at that word,
And he rode to Cambridge, and Oxenford;
But never a doctor there was so wise,
That could with his learning an answer devise.

XII

Then home rode the Abbot of comfort so cold,
And he mett with his shepheard a-going to fold:
‘How now, my lord Abbot, you are welcome home;
What newes do you bring us from good King John?’—

XIII

‘Sad newes, sad newes, shepheard, I must give;
That I have but three days more to live:
For if I do not answer him questions three,
My head will be smitten from my bodìe.

XIV

‘The first is to tell him there in that stead,
With his crowne of golde so fair on his head,
Among all his liege-men so noble of birthe,
To within one penny of what he is worthe.

XV

‘The seconde, to tell him, without any doubt,
How soone he may ride this whole worlde about:
And at the third question I must not shrinke,
But tell him there truly what he does thinke.’—

XVI

‘Now cheare up, sire Abbot, did you never hear yet,
That a fool he may learn a wise man witt?
Lend me horse, and serving-men, and your apparel,
And I’ll ride to London to answere your quarrel.

XVII

‘Nay frowne not, if it hath bin told unto mee,
I am like your lordship, as ever may bee:
And if you will but lend me your gowne,
There is none shall knowe us at fair London towne.’—

XVIII

‘Now horses and serving-men thou shalt have,
With sumptuous array most gallant and brave,
With crozier, and miter, and rochet, and cope,
Fit to appeare ’fore our Father the Pope.’—

XIX

‘Now welcome, sire Abbot,’ the King he did say,
‘’Tis well thou’rt come back to keepe thy day;
For and if thou canst answer my questions three,
Thy life and thy living both savèd shall bee.

XX

‘And first, when thou seest me here in this stead,
With my crown of golde so fair on my head,
Among all my liege-men so noble of birthe,
Tell me to one penny what I am worthe.’—

XXI

‘For thirty pence our Saviour was sold
Amonge the false Jewes, as I have bin told;
And twenty-nine is the worthe of thee,
For I thinke thou art one penny worser than hee.’

XXII

The King he laughed, and swore by St. Bittel,
‘I did not thinke I had been worthe so littel!
—Now secondly tell me, without any doubt,
How soone I may ride this whole world about.’—

XXIII

‘You must rise with the sun, and ride with the same,
Until the next morning he riseth againe;
And then your Grace need not make any doubt,
But in twenty-four hours you’ll ride it about.’

XXIV

The King he laughed, and swore by St. Jone,
‘I did not think it could be gone so soone!
—Now from the third question thou must not shrinke,
But tell me here truly what I do thinke.’—

XXV

‘Yea, that shall I do, and make your Grace merry:
You thinke I’m the Abbot of Canterbùrye;
But I’m his poor shepheard, as plain you may see,
That am come to beg pardon for him and for mee.’

XXVI

The King he laughed, and swore by the Masse,
‘I’ll make thee Lord Abbot this day in his place!’—
‘Now naye, my liege, be not in such speede,
For alacke I can neither write, ne reade.’—

XXVII

‘Four nobles a weeke, then, I will give thee
For this merry jest thou hast showne unto mee;
And tell the old Abbot when thou comest home,
Thou hast brought him a pardon from good King John.

Anthologized by the wonderful Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his Oxford Anthology of Ballads.

Equine Eye Candy. :-D

The Equuschick knows good marketing when she sees it and deeply despises herself when she falls for it, but it is all so PRETTY!

Midomi

Supposedly, at the site linked to in the title, you can search for songs by humming or singing part of the song into a microphone. I haven't tried it myself, because I cannot find our microphone, but it sounds cool. :-)

Science and Human Values, a Commonplace Book Entry

"There is a likeness between the creative acts of the mind in art and in science."

That's the opening line of section 3 from the chapter titled The Creative Mind. It reminded me, by contradictions, of an interview with an artist I watched once. The artist had helped out with a science fiction movie once, and he was rather pompous about it. He talked at great length about the contributions art could make to science, about how important it was for scientists to broaden their horizons by listening to the artists, and about how only through listening to the artistic community could scientists ever really be complete. I wondered how much he would welcome the input of scientists into his next art project. I wondered if it occurred to him that that artists might broaden their horizons by listening to a few scientists and mathematicians.
He seemed to see science as a crippled, incomplete discipline, a hollow stainless steel man without a heart, without the civilizing and humanizing influence of art- and perhaps this is true. I suspect, however, in our time it's more likely that the scientists are already interested in art, while artists like this one have little understanding or desire to understand science.

Science, says Bronowski,

is the orgnaization of our knowledge in such a way that it commands more of the hidden potential in nature... it reaches from the kinetic theory of gases to the telephone and the suspension bridge and medicated toothpaste. It admits no sharp boundary between knowledge and use.

Insisting on such a boundary line is to put blinders on the sense of wonder that is behind both great artists and great scientists.

Art, language, science, and their tools all have practical, utilitarian purposes as well as aesthetic ones, and so

"you cannot have a man handle paints or language or the symbolic concepts of physics, you cannot even have him stain a microscope slide, without instantly waking in him a pleasure in teh very language, a sense of exploring his own activity. This sense lies at the heart of creation."

Studies, said Charlotte Mason, are a delight. Delights may well have a utilitarian result, but like happiness, this is often the byproduct, rather than the goal.

And I'm still shocked.

Here's something I wrote a few years ago:
Heard on the radio today that 75% of Americans think TV-Turn-off week is a good idea. Only about a quarter of them do it, the rest of them would do it if they had "more affordable forms of entertainment open to them."

Hhm. Books from the library are free, a pack of cards is two bucks, visiting a nature center takes a tiny bit of gas, going for a walk is free, putting in a CD and dancing to it is free, every true-blue American ought to have a copy of Monopoly (albeit a dusty one, if they think they can't afford it) in their house somewhere and to finish this rant: what about good old conversation?

Isn't that disturbing? We have lost the ability to entertain ourselves, and then have the compunction to blame it on money woes. As if a TV didn't cost anything. As if cable plans didn't cost money. As if TiVo machines were freely handed out to the public. As if the batteries for the remote controls just fell from the sky.
Do people ever stop and think about how much television is really costing them?

---
In other news, a big festival is going on at my school this week-end, and I cannot tell you how many students I heard describing their plans for going out and getting drunk. It was probably just a little bit less than the students I heard describing their past experiences with drunkenness, or episodes with roommates who were drunk (ewww).
I'm *quite* happy to be sitting at home quietly plugging away on my research paper, thank you very much. Well, doing that and wondering what kind of flat existence you must have if your idea of fun is to get so drunk you're sick the next day. Wow. Sounds like a blast to me.

Frugal Fridays

Don't forget (even though I have been) to visit Frugal Fridays at Biblical Womanhood!

From Spice Rack to....

I have three wooden spice racks. The new kitchen has a built in spice cupboard with pull out shelves. It also has almost no wall space, ever spare inch being devoted to cupboard, doors, windows, or hooks to hang aprons.

Looking them over today I realized that these make perfect shelves for the craft area. They are just the right size for holding jars of glitter and little bottles of craft paints. They may also work for rubber stamps, especially the shelves with small rails across the front. The rubber stamps would fit in nice rows, standing up so I could see the backs at a glance.

Wee Gillis

Wee Gillis by Munro Leaf is a picture book for every family, but especially for those with an interest in Scotland.

Wee Gillis must choose between his Scottish Lowlander and Highlander relatives. He spends time with each side before deciding which side he best suits. They each have special traits and gifts and he needs to find his place. In the end, of course, Wee Gillis doesn't have to choose at all. He finds something he can do better than anyone on either side and he lives comfortably with both sides of his family.

Black and white illustrations are detailed and informative. Kilts, bagpipes, Scottish homes and customs (at least as they appeared in 1938 when the book was first published), portrayed with charm and interest.

Children reading this book will enjoy listening to bagpipes, eating porridge (at least once), and finding pictures of Scotland (there are some good travel magazines) and making a collage.

To the Man at the Yard Sale

Your professions of sincere Christianity, strong faith, and evangelistic fervor such that you never, ever, talk to anybody without telling them 'the word,' whatever that means to you, might ring stronger and truer were the following things not also true:

*You were smoking like a chimney which isn't completely conclusive, but it did put a bad taste in my mouth, not to mention a bad smell in my hair.

*You were trying to talk me into selling you collectible records you imagined I possessed, but at yard sale prices, pretending they were of no value to you except sentimental.

*You lied and told me you were new to the area. You forget this is a small town and I've seen you at every yard sale I've been to for the last three years, and talked to you once or twice at the antique mall where you have a booth (and you did not try to tell me 'the word')

*At that booth you sell collectible records, but not at yard sale prices, and most telling of all:

*I've been there when you were caught trying to slip something out of somebody else's booth without paying for it.

Don't use my faith as your marketing tool. It never works.

Poetry for Poetry Month

Two poems again, because they both run through my head, albeit for altogether different reasons. I like to quote the first when any of the Progeny of the female persuasion are, well, sweeping the floor:

When Young Melissa Sweeps

When young Melissa sweeps a room
I vow she dances with a broom!

She curtsies in a corner brightly
And leads her partner forth politely.

Then up and down in jigs and reels,
With gold dust flying at their heels,

They caper. With a whirl or two
They make the wainscot shine like new;

They waltz beside the hearth, and quick
It brightens, shabby brick by brick.

A gay gavotte across the floor,
A Highland fling from door to door.

And every crack and corner's clean
Enough to suit a dainty queen.

If ever you are full of gloom,
Just watch Melissa sweep a room!

Nancy Byrd Turner

I quote it not because they actually do sweep as though doing a higland fling from door to door, but by way of encouragement to pick up their feet and approach their chores with greater cheer.

Fragments of the second poem wander through my head from time to time because, well, how could they not?

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

-- William Butler Yeats

How does Yeats do this? The perfection of his words, his metre, his poetic images all conspire together to make me ache with the sheer beauty of it.

Did You Celebrate Today?

It's National High Five Day.

No, really.

It's not too late.

The Harp and the Laurel Wreath

I looked this book over a few years ago, so it's possible a revision has added the poems I missed, but I wasn't as excited by this anthology as most of my homeschooling friends.

There's no Elliot, Pound, Dylan Thomas, only one Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923. The WWI poets are largely missing (for some excellent reading on these, visit Gates of Vienna. The series begins here- the rest are linked in the side bar). The only Frost is Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, which is lovely, but that one poem is hardly an adequate representation of him. Only two Hopkins, two of Houseman's. Masefield, Poet Laureate for longer than anybody except Tennyson, Masefield, whose works span an incredible length of time because he wrote all his long, long, life, which lasted well into this middle of this century, is only represented by Sea-Fever. Phyllis McGinley won a Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for her poetry volume Times Three, and she's not in here at all.

I know this was a lont list of negatives, which is hardly fair and makes this look like a more negative review than the Harp and the Laurel leaf deserves. Very likely these shortcomings were due to copyright issues. This is a nice anthology for a family to own, but I don't think it should be the only poetry anthology a homeschooling family owns. As I recall, there were other disappointments as well, but it's completely inadequate for the 20th century poets.

Poetry for Poetry Month

Once more, the poetry I'm choosing for this cycle of poetry posts is chosen for no better reason than that it's poetry I like, poetry that comes to mind when I'm thinking of poems I like, poetry that comes to mind when I'm ponder about what poems I want to make sure the Progeny have met before they leave my tutelage and take complete charge of their own education (the HG and the Equuschick have already done this).

It's not because I'm setting myself up as any sort of authority or expert on poetry. It's not because I imagine my tastes reflect anything other than my tastes. It's precisely because that is what my tastes reflect, and this is just, after all, our Family Blog.

So this morning I asked myself, in the cool morning air with a touch of rain to it, what poem I felt like today, and below are the two that came to mind. They really need to be read aloud.

The Fairy Folk
by William Allingham

Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And grey cock's feather!

Down along the rocky shore,
Some make their home,
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain-lake,
With frogs for their watch-dogs,
All night awake.

High on the hill-top
The old king sits;
He is now so old and grey
He's nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
Columbkille he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieve League to Rosses;
Or going up with music
On cold starry nights,
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay Northern Lights.

They stole little Bridget
For seven years long.
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back,
Between the night and morrow;
They thought that she was fast asleep,
But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
Deep within the lake,
On a bed of flag-leaves,
Watching till she wake.

By the craggy hill-side,
Through the mosses bare
They have planted thorn trees
For pleasure here and there.
Is any man so daring
To dig up one in spite,
He shall find the thorns set
In his bed at night.

Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl's feather!


Sea Fever
by John Masefield

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
All I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the seagulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trip's over.

John Masefield, incidentally, wrote poetry all of his life, much of it about the sea. Since he was born in 1878 and he died in 1967, that's a lot of poetry. He was only 24 when the first collection of his poems was published- that was Saltwater Ballads and it included Sea Fever. He was appointed Poet Laureate after World War I, and he continued in that post until his death, publishing his last poetry in the early 1960s.

Cutting Our Losses

Daring, daring, daring. That's how I felt this week. Some of the Progeny and I were sorting out our winter clothes for packing away until next winter. We did this even though it snowed just a day or two before I started, but that's not why I feel daring.

In case you're wondering, the boots, coats, hats, scarves, mittens for a family of nine grown or nearly grown people take up three very large totes, even when all that stuff is pared down to a minimum. Jenny matched gloves and mittens for me and we ended up with about a dozen single, handloose and fancy free. One of those I kept because I know I've worn it in the last month, so I am sure it's around here somewhere. The others?

I boldly threw them into the large garbage bag we were using as we also sorted through boxes under the stairs and from the garage in a great purge. They ended up in the bottom of the bag as we continued our sorting and tossing. I even got rid of all but about half a dozen of my last baby clothes. I threw away baby shoes and socks for which I could find no matches. I put the rest in a pile for a yard sale at a friend's house. But that's not why I feel so daring.

Naturally, the next day, when that garbage bag was all but full, we came across another pile of winter clothing out in the mud-room, and it included another half dozen unmatched gloves and mittens. None of them, of course, were the match to the one lone unmatched glove I'd kepts. At least four of them were, I knew, matches to the gloves and mittens in the very bottom of that huge garbage sack.

And I tossed them into that garbage bag anyway.

Science and Human Values, a Commonplace Book Entry, III

I am only on page 6 (in my Common Place notes, I'm further ahead in my reading), and in this very small book Dr. Bronoski says he hopes to address:
*a study of the nature of the scientific activity, and with it of- *all those imaginative acts of understanding which exercise 'The Creative Mind.' He hopes also-
*to ask what is the nature of the truth as we seek it in science and in social life
*to trace the influence which this search for empirical truth has had on conduct, to examine as well-
*the conditions for the success of science, which conditions require-
*certain human values that science would have had to invent if man hadn't otherwise known them, and these values make up what he will write about in the essay, "The SEnse of Human Dignity."

He will dispute the anti-science prejudice of some humanists as well as the 'petty view which many scientitst take of thie rown activity and that of others. When men misunderstand their own work, they cannot understand the work of others.'

I think he does it, too.

One of the first things we must understand is that Science has a greater value than what is practical or utilitarian. There is no sharp boundary, he says, between knowledge and use. But that is rushing ahead to page 7.

The Lost Prince, Review

Five Hundred years ago Prince Ivor of Samavia disappeared. The little country has never been the same since.

Young Marco Loristan, himself an exiled Samavian and his friend, a crippled London street child known as 'the Rat' are dispatched on a secret mission by Marco's father, a strong Samavian Patriot. They travel across Europe delivering secret messages for the secret society devoted to retunring the heirs of the lost Prince Ivor to the Samavian throne. They have several quite exciting adventures as they travel through Europe, making this a much more interesting 'boy's book' than Little Lord Fauntleroy, by the same author. She also wrote The SEcret Garden, of course.

Marco's father has promised him that they will be reunited at some point in his travels, and that perhaps he will get to meet the lost heir. Will they succeed? Will they see Marco's father again? Is there an heir? Can they find him and see him on his rightful throne again?

Well, that would be telling, wouldn't it?

Readers may find the characters of Marco and his father just a little too noble and good to be true, but I enjoyed them. The book was written before Patriot was a disturbing word with troubling connotations. The admiration and affection both boys feel for Marco's father is touching, and their dedication to a higher cause is also very moving, albeit altogether Victorian. I still think it's a fun and exotic read, and the patina of age does not decrease the allure of the alien setting- both chronological and geographical.

The copy I read was 342 pages long, suitable for independent readers at roughly 5th through 8th grade, earlier for a read aloud. The copy I read was published in 1943 by the J.B. Lippincott Company. Amazon carries several editions.
It's also online in several different e-text collections, including this one at Gutenberg.

More Favorite POems for Poetry Month

Probably my two favorite 'grown up' poems are this one and The Lake Isle of Innisfree:

A. E. Housman (1859–1936). A Shropshire Lad. 1896.

II. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now


LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Word-Spotting

stammagasted

Confloption

gomeril

skilly

slummock

douce and decent

girning

stite

hantle

And from the same book, this delightful reference to 'visual education:'
Miss Strachan... has her letters from Edinburgh University... and yet pleased with herself she is: at Edinburgh she wrote a bit paper - thesis, she calls it- on The Cinema as an Aid in Visual Education, and her as proud as if she'd written Bain's Logic or the Rhetoric of Dr. Hugh Blair. I mind Rob Yule asking once: "And what is Visual Education?" and before the woman could reply Will Saunders cutting in sharp: "It's what Susannah afforded the elders."

Slow Down, You Move Too Fast....

Via Dominion Family comes this incredible story about a remarkable public performance by Joshua Bell.

He performed publicly, with no fanfare, no charge, no publicity, as a street musician at L'Enfant Metro station in D.C. I've been there. I can picture it, and it makes me ache. It's a long story, but I really think it's worth reading.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

Although I think I'm right when I say that we have always taken the time to stop and listen to street musicians, so I am sure we would have done it in this case too (I also always buy lemonade from children who have lemon-ade stands), I can't feel too complacent about it. There are far too many other times and occasions when I know I am guilty of rushing my children past things that matter to do things that don't.

Cindy's post is also worth your time. So many things we don't take time for are, after all, worth our time.

Science and Human Values, a Commonplace Book Entry, II

Dr. Bronowski was confronted with the physical reality of Nagasaki while being transported from an airstrip to a ship in Nagasaki Harbor. It was a warm night, and the sudden realization that he was already in Nagasaki was accompanied by music playing from the ship he was to join. The song was 'Is you Is Or Is You Ain't Ma Baby?' Suddenly what he had seen by moonlight as broken rocks and natural landscape features were factory buildings pushed aside and toppled over like so many blocks, piles of rubble, ash heaps, and a desolation as foreign to anything he'd ever seen before, he says, as though he'd been set down on the moon.

As personal as his description is, he points out that his experience is also universal. In 1945, he says, all mankind

'in his own way learned that his imagination had been dwarfed. We looked up and saw the power of which we had been proud loom over us like the ruins of Nagasaki.
The power of science for good and for evil has troubled other minds than ours. We are not here fumbling with a new dilemma; our subject and our fears are as old as the tool-making civilizations. Men have been killed with weapons before now: what happened at Nagasaki was only more massive....
...Nothing happened in 1945 except that we changed the scale of our indifference to man...

At the time he wrote, the Nagasaki death toll was around 40,000. It's since been revised to somewhere between 38,000 and 108,000. It's hard to think about such numbers as anything but numbers, and we can say that everyone was somebody's wife, husband, child, parent, friend, uncle, aunt, cousin, neighbor, somebody like you or me with hopes, dreams, regrets, plans, meaning and value. But it's been said so often before it's a cliché, and the mind glides over it without stopping to consider the impact. Perhaps it's just as well. I'm not sure we could go on functioning if we daily lived under a full conception of the reality those numbers represent.
The horror is even greater than those numbers and that incident, however. You see, what happened at Nagasaki wasn't really more massive than anything that went before- it was only quicker. Wikipedia has a grim little page ranking wars and disasters by death toll. Nagasaki is listed under the category "Individual massacres, air raids, and concentration camps." Here are those events 'more massive' than Nagasaki (counting, I think, the immediate deaths at Nagasaki, rather than including those who died much later from radiation sickness and related causes):

1,000,000-1,400,000[1] - Treblinka extermination camp, (by Nazi Germany, located in Treblinka, Poland, 1942-1943)
800,000-5,000,000[2] - Auschwitz extermination camp (by Nazi-Germany, located in Oświęcim, Poland, 1940-1945)
480,000-600,000[3][4][5] - Belzec extermination camp, (by Nazi Germany, located in Belzec Poland, 1942-1943)
350,000 - Majdanek extermination camp, (by Nazi Germany, located in Lublin Poland, 1942-1944)
300,000 - Chelmno extermination camp, (by Nazi Germany, located in Chelmno Poland, 1941-1943)
260,000 - Sobibór extermination camp, (by Nazi Germany, located in Sobibor Poland, 1942-1943)
250,000–800,000 - Sack of Baghdad by Hulagu Khan (1258)
220,000 - Massacre of the Helvetii (by Roman Empire 58 BC)
200,000+ - Sack of Moscow (by Crimean Tatars, 1571)
200,000–400,000 - Rape of Nanking (by Imperial Japan, in China, 1937)
100,000–300,000 - Jews massacred in Poland by the Cossacks led by Chmielnicki, (1648 - 1649)
100,000 - Massacre of Romans by Mithridates VI Eupator (Anatolia, 88 BC)
100,000-300,000 United States' Tokyo firebombing,1945
100,000 - Manila Massacre (Manila, Philippines, 1945)
100,000-150,000 - Sack of Carthage, (146BC)
90,000 - Operation Rolling Thunder Bombing of North Vietnam, (1966-1968)
70,000 - Sack of Merv by Genghis Khan (1221)
70,000 - St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (France, 1572)
66,000–237,062 - Hiroshima Bombing (Japan, 1945)
60,000–100,000 - Sack of Jerusalem, First Crusade (1099)
50,000 - Bombing of Hamburg in World War II (Germany, 1943)
43,000 - The Blitz (London, 1940 - 1941)

On a page reporting 'natural disasters by death toll,' we find Stalin's not very natural famine in the Ukraine listed as causing five million deaths. For sheer speed as well as horrific numbers, I am sure the volcanic eruption of Mt. Tambora (Indonesia) in 1815, which killed over 90 million people eclipses everything on the 'massacres' page, but then, 'we' didn't do that.

Nonetheless, many of us who cried over the Columbine Shootings of a few years ago found we had fewer tears available for the Va Tech horror of this week. Some of us who cried over the thought of a thousand people who could walk past Joshua Bell romancing the air of L'Enfant Plaza without a second glance can read the statistics above with a dry eye- or even skim impatiently over too much data in what ought by rights to be a short blogpost.

I'm one of them. But what did bring a lump to my throat was Dr. Bronowski's misplaced optimism, writing so soon after Nagasaki:

"Before this immediacy fades in a sequence of televised atomic tests, let us acknowledge our subject for what it is: civilization face to face with its own implications. The implications are both the industrial slum which Nagasaki was before it was bombed, and the ashy desolation which the bomb made of the slum. And civilisation asks of both ruins, 'Is You Is Or Is You Ain't Ma Baby?'"

But I am afraid mankind (and by this term I include myself, Gentle Readers, and yourselves as well), is like Mr. Bennet, whose complacence has been responsible for the disgrace and disaster one of his daughters has brought upon herself and her family. His favorite, Lizzy, attempts to comfort and encourage him by telling him not to be too severe with himself. Mr. Bennet replies,

"You may well warn me against such an evil. Human nature is so prone to fall into it! No, Lizzy, let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame. I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression. It will pass away soon enough."

Partially, perhaps largely, this is just sheer self protection. Who can live, who can even stand upright, under the constant awareness, reproach, and rebuke of such suffering? The mind, faced with such sere and blighted realities, either skitters away and buries itself in more mundane matters (or books), or skitters into dark and private holes and refuses to get out of bed in the morning.

Or the mind reacts like Adam of old, thus, as Dr. B. says,

"It is of course more usual for each member of civilization to take flight from its consequences by protesting that others have failed him....
...Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world that is penetrated through and through by science, and which is both whole and real."

We must go beyond, says Dr. B., thinking of science 'as a set of special tricks,' and the 'scientist as the manipulator of outlandish skills.' We absolve ourselves of

'the responsibility for making the decisions of our society by passing it to a few scientists armored with a special magic.'

We worship at the cult of the expert, giving over responsibility, authority, and then blame to those in the white coats. In small areas (I gnash my teeth when I hear young mothers advised to respond to interfering busy bodies with the mantra, "My doctor says...") and large (raise any concern about global warming as conceived in the popular press and listen to those who tell you to let the scientists do the thinking).

We create this new feudalism both by deferring always to scientists because they are scientists and by abstaining from scientific learning because we are not.

The society where the this priesthood rules, even if it is a priesthood of benevolent scientists who only gained this position by our own apathy

'is the picture of a slave society, and should make us shiver whenever we hear a man of sensibility dismiss science as someone else's concern.... for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.'

My favorite educator considered that those of us who considered "the scientific work of the day... only slightly interesting" were as surely crippled and disabled as though who were missing an arm or a leg. If we ourselves are so disabled, let us at least labor not to pass this on to our children.

Not that a better and more human and humane appreciation of science will solve the problems raised by Nagasaki. It wasn't a surfeit of science that caused Nagasake, and it wasn't a lack of science responsible for the Sack of Merv.

As Dr. Bronowki says, "...[T]he parts of civilization make a whole..."

Tentative Rejoicings

As most of our readers who have been here for any length of time know, Life has not been all a bed of thornless roses here at the Common Room, and no, this isn't the post where I explain why. There will never be such a post.

This is the post where I share that one of our 'lesser' burdens that I also haven't mentioned here before was removed today.

By smaller, please understand I only mean lesser in relative terms.

So understanding this particular instance of relativity, our very huge sigh of relief and relaxation of tensed muscles I didn't even know existed- the Cherub had some medical testing done recently and according to the results we've gotten so far, our next step with her will NOT be to a heart surgeon. We need to look into some other medical issues for her, but none of them are anything near as zero at the bone as the dread words 'heart surgeon.'

Note, too, that this is our second child in the last few months to demonstrate symptoms that sent us for heart related medical tests (the other child's results were even better)

The sighs of relief over the Cherub's good results are so increasingly great that I may well hyperventilate.

"Parents teach hate."

- And other such platitudes from today's Jewish Studies class.

We were supposed to be discussing the lessons to learn from the holocaust. How can we prevent something like that from happening?

The class consensus seemed to be education, education, and education. Until we are familiar with other cultures and people, posited more than one student, than we are in danger of assenting to mass murder. According to this mindset, once we are educated enough then we'll stop killing people for no reason at all. If only the German and Poles had known more about Jewish culture, then the holocaust wouldn't have happened.

I am a fan of education. I love to learn about other cultures. But I am deeply suspicious of the notion that simply being educated enough somehow enlightens you as to the wrongness of mass murder.
Germany was one of the most educated nations in Europe. France was one of the most egalitarian nations in Europe. Poland had a very thorough knowledge of Jewish culture: Polish Gentiles and Polish Jews had been together for centuries. Before the Nazis, schools in Germany weren't segregated.
And in these countries thousands and millions of Jews were killed.

So much for education. So much for being familiar with Jewish culture.

Cultural appreciation is a great thing and all that, but what happens when a country decides a certain culture isn't welcome anymore? If we only protect the Jews because they happen to have a neat culture, what happens if we stop liking their culture? Using the argument for education, how do we protect the disabled?

If we use cultural/racial education as a "fix" for genocide, then can the perpetrators of genocide use the excuse that they were simply not educated enough? "Oh, man, I can't believe I killed those millions of people. If I'd only known more about them, I wouldn't have done it."

Can't we see how sick this is? And how unattainable?

If I hear of Jews being killed, I need to try and stop it -- not because they are Jews, but because they are people. If I hear about Africans being killed, I need to try and stop it -- not because they are Africans, but because they are people. Education should not say, "These people are special so we need to save them." Education should not say, "These people aren't really that culturally different, so we should save them." Education should say: "These are PEOPLE." That should be enough for us.

This individual method seemed to have escaped most (though not all) of the students in the class. When talking about the holocaust and why more wasn't done to stop it, the answers revolved around the pressure involved when you've got a gun held to your head. The Professor pointed out that Hitler had been legally elected initially and that there weren't many guns involved then. I mentioned the 450 edicts dealing with Jews that the Nazis had established. What would have happened if at edict number 1, I asked, people had stopped to ask themselves if it was right or not? Edict No. 2? No. 3? I concluded by saying that had to avoid complacency. That's when a student behind me whispered, "That's scary.." Yes & no. Being vigilant is not always easy, but it is much easier than looking back upon the graves of millions.

---
Back to the education thing. The quote in the subject line came from a member of another "minority group" near the end of the hour. She said she and her son battle prejudice daily, and that more education needs to be instituted at earlier levels... she thought preschool was best. Then she uttered that rich and powerful sentence: "Parents teach hate." It seems like this is an untouchable sentence. If someone says that, we're all supposed to nod our heads and make concerned noises. Isn't it sad, all these kids learning prejudice at home? Let's not worry, though -- school will enlighten them! While I've seen enough to know that there are indeed parents who teach prejudice at home, I think statements like hers need to stop being uttered. In Nazi Germany it was actually the teachers who taught hate. Many teachers are parents, too -- are these parents safe from such aspersions? Are ALL teachers that enlightened? Enlightened according to what standards?
(Ok... and this is quite minor, but it has always bugged me: if parents teach hate, where did they get it from? Their parents must obviously be the answer, and if we go back like that 'til the beginning of time, then what answer are we to get? Did two cavemen dislike each other and then start teaching their children in perpetuity to hate everyone resembling the Jones clan?)

If anything, parents need to stop giving so much educational control to the state. We are in desperate need of individuals who will recognize life's intrinsic sanctity, who will not succumb to the state mandated form of enlightenment, and who are willing to consider consequences long before a gun is put to their head.

Note from the DHM: Your classmates ill informed assumption reminds me of this post.

Dickens and the FYG's Moral Character

Pipsqueak finished Charles Dickens' Bleak House recently, and as a reward to herself she promised herself she needn't read another Dickens novel for a full year and she would watch the BBC special. The BBC version is some 8 hours long, but then, Bleak House is probably the longest Dickens novel there is.

Contrary to usual practice, I did not make everybody else read the book before viewing it with her, because Bleak House is, well, Bleak House. I didn't read it either, but I did listen to the whole thing on tape a few years back.

Anyway, all the female members of the household watched it, and I was most surprised at how quickly the FYG grasped what was going on, figured out mysteries small and large, and was able to separate the sheep from the goats, so to speak.

She did have a few questions, but surprisingly few. She needed a brief run down on Chancery court and lawsuits, wills, and wards. She needed a bit of a primer on opium use, smallpox, and the teaching of deportment (a la Turvydrop's establishment).

The main character of the story gets smallpox while performing acts of charity. She nearly dies, and when she recovers her face is badly scarred for a time. This made a dramatic impact on our young girl. One night she fell asleep during the movie and she was sleeping so soundly I didn't make her get up and go to bed. I left her covered up, sleeping on the couch. IN the morning, however, the HG found the FYG curled up with her in the HG's bed.

The HG asked FYG what she was doing in her bed, and the FYG replied languidly, "I have the smallpox."

FYG does not remember getting into bed with her sister, nor does she remember the above exchange. She does remember that, like Caddy, she'd like to cook Mr. Turvydrop, and the vengeful little thing isn't at all sorry that Mr. Tulkinghorn came to such a nasty end.

Winners of the 2006 Homeschool Blog Awards

Announcements here. Be sure to congratulate the winners!

Favorite Poems

Once again, the only criteria for this month's small anthology of poetry (in honor of National Poetry Month) is that it must be a poem that comes to mind when I ask myself what some of my favorite poems are. It's not surprise that the first that come to mind are the ones with which I have the longest acquaintance.

The Puffin
by Florence Jacques

There once was a puffin just the shape of a muffin,
And he lived on an island in the deep blue sea,
He ate little fishes, which were most delicious,
And he ate them for breakfast and he
ate
them
for tea.

But this poor little puffin, he couldn't play nothin',
'Cause he didn't have no-one to play with at all.
So he sat on his island and he cried for a while, and
He felt very lonesome and he
felt
very
small.

Then along came the fishes and they said, "If you wishes,
You can have us for playmates, instead of for tea."
Now they all play together in all kinds of weather,
And the puffin eats pancakes, like you
and
like
me.

My love for these poems also has something to do with the Christmas week I spent in the hospital with Pneumonia, in the company of the nurses (who let me watch Night Gallery so they could watch it with me), and this poetry book, which my aunt gave me that Christmas.

Science and Human Values, a Commonplace Book Entry

Science and Human Values by J. Bronowski

From the Preface:

'...science is as integral a part of the culture of our age as the arts are.'

'The trial of Galileo in 1633 was a specutacular display of strength by the forces of tradition in the Holy Office...This was the most tenacious rearguard action that has yet been fought by established belief against the challenging spirit of science...'

I know this is one of our most entrenched beliefs, but:

"They [Catholic authorities] thought it [earth centrism] was really true because they had adopted a Hellenistic cosmology. They thought that way because Aristotle had thought that way....
...The churchmen did not resist Galileo because he represented Science and they represented Theology. They resisted him because he represented the New Science and they had already compromised with the Old Science. They had not yet learned the truism that he who marries the science of the moment had better be prepared to be a widow tomorrow."

From a story in Credenda Agenda, and


(I also liked this treatment of the 'who's at the center of creation' debate: "If Galileo and Copernicus were supposed to have humbled us by showing how very small and far from the center we were in God’s creation, why has this humility been expressed by an almost constant and invincible self-regard?

...We laugh at the medievals, who thought they were at the center of the universe. Yet somehow they knew, as we do not, that though at the center they were not the only thing that mattered.")

But back to the prevace of Science and Human Values:

"... I have deliberately confined myself to establising one central propostion: that the practice of science compels the practitioner to form for himself a fundamental set of universal values. I have not suggested that this set embraces all the human values; I was sure when I write that it did not; but at the time I did not want to blur the argument by discussing the whole spectrum of values. Now that the crux of my argument has been accepted, I would, were I beginning again, give some space also to a discussion of those values which are not generated by the practice of science- the values of tenderness, of kindliness of human intimacy and love. These form a different domain from the sharp and as it were, Old Testament virtues which science produces, but of course they do not negate the values of science."

'...the exactness of science can give a context for our judgments...
The gravest indictment that can be made of our generalized culture, is, in fact, that it erodes our sens of the context in which judgments must be made.'

Dr. Bronowski began writing and thinking about this topic when he visited Nagasaki in the aftermath of the atomic bombing in WWII. He believed that rather than rebuilding, Nagasaki should be preserved as it was. In fact, he wanted all disarmament discussions, or any international talks 'which weigh the fate of nations, to be held in that ashy, clinical, sea of rubble.' He believed that in such a place alone could the decisions of statesmen be made with at least some thought of the possible consequences and realities of their decisions.
Others pointed out that his ideas here were impractical, because, after all, 'delegates would be uncomfortable in Nagasaki.'

Common-Place Post about Common-Place Books

According to Wikipedia:

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) emerged in the 15th century with the availability of cheap paper for writing, mainly in England. They were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests.

I loved this comparison of 18th century coffee-houses and commonplace books to blogging (and I think most of my readers will, too). Here is just an excerpt:

This congruence of two technologies, one from the Renaissance and the other from yesterday, has not escaped notice. There are a significant number of sites with the words "commonplace book" in their title or subtitle; I have identified nine with one quick search with Google. This is not to mention all the myriad blogs which fulfil similar functions: reading logs are one of the most common forms — there is even software to make it simple to offer a quick reading list, with graphics, in the sidebar of one's weblog — as well as various other collections and catalogues of information useful perhaps only to its collector, perhaps to a wider audience. Many of these are produced by individuals for their own use, much as commonplace books were, historically. But then, commonplace books were sometimes shared, and many an internet projects that may have been originally designed as a personal repository has taken on a wider life and become engaged in the wider exchange of the web.

Jonathan Swift advised young poets to keep a Commonplace book:

There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there.

However, that being Jonathan Swift, I should advise you to read everything he wrote and assume he meant exactly the opposite.

You can read more comparing blogs to commonplace books here (by the digitalmedievalist, and with a name like that, I should think you'd want to).

As you can see, many of my blogposts here are by way of being my online commonplace book.

Home-made Cookin'

I read a true story once of a woman who cooked everything from scratch, and her sister who cooked nothing from scratch. The non-cook came to visit the cook, and she looked around the kitchen and said something like, 'But what do you eat? There's nothing here but ingredients!'

This week's made from scratch carnival is up, and it's mostly about cooking with ingredients. There's also a pincushion, compost piles, laundry soap, and bird food!

Want to learn how to make your own ginger ale? Salsa? With the ginger ale recipe, there's also a link to make one of my children's favorite treats- crystallized ginger.

Pay a visit- I'm sure you'll find it worth your time.

Carnival of Homeschooling

It's time once again for the weekly homeschool support group, brainstorming meeting, and co-op that meets in the comfort of your computer desk. Check it out.

Hello, 'Tis The Equuschick again.

She is confused.

So picture her surfing the net, researching natural dog food brands, and coming across a page for what appears to be a most excellent company.

Listed among their accomplishments, you see, they proclaim the good news that they are "recognized by PETA because they do not test on animals."

Um...well, really. The Equuschick just wants to know who they do test their dog food on? *scratches head*

The Equuschick Wants-

The World's Biggest Dog.


No, really. She is in earnest. She MUST HAVE HIM, SHE MUST. She weeps. He was ORDAINED to belong to The Equuschick. She must have him, to hold and to pet and to stare at and cuddle up on the bed with the little cutie. She wants that dog.

(Coveting? What? Who? Where? =D)


EDIT:

Concerning the chaos she has caused, The Equuschick does apologize. Thanks to anonymous for posting the snopes link, she knew in her heart of hearts it was a leeeeeeeetle too good to be true. ;-)

(But she still wants a dog that big.)

These Are a Few of My Favorite.....

Poems...

April is National POetry month, and I'm going to continue to share poms for the rest of April. I've decided not to try to be intelligent or intellectual about it (not always the same thing, those two). I'm just going to think to myself every morning, "What's one of my favorite poems?" and then I'm going to post it. That means today's choice is:

Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall;
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King's horses
And all the King's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again!

And naturally one can't think of Humpty Dumpty without thinking of the Jabberwocky:

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Why must one follow the other? Why because of this, of course.

Conformity

From time to time I hear some young idealist insisting that if all the world just had enough food, water, clothing, shelter, and a little freedom then we'd see an end to crime. In fact, I once saw the same silliness on a Star Trek, Next Generation episode (Time's Arrow), where Counsellor Troi explains to a cynical Mark Twain that the world of the Federation is a world which has no crime because they have seen "the end of poverty" and the blessings of the "cooperative ways of the United Federation of Planets."

It is incredibly ironic to me that often it's the people claiming to be part of the 'reality based community' who think that if everybody just had enough food, clothing, and shelter and democratic freedom, then nobody would do vile things. People are not cows. Some people want raw power. Some are not satisfied with food on the table, they want control of food on everybody's table, or they want stockpiles of food and other resources. Selfishness, greed, lust for power- these are very real parts of human nature and they motivate some people more than others, and no amount of 'education,' funding, or wishing otherwise will change this.

Under the wrong circumstances, even ordinary, well-fed, clothed and sheltered people make choices and statements that they know are wrong, even to the point of harming another human being.

I once watched an interesting television program on conformity and obedience (I think it was one with Diane Sawyer). The special began with a fairly simple, seemingly benign experiment where a group of people were shown two lines and simply asked to say which was longer. However, the study was set up so that only one person in the group was really being studied. The other members of the group were all clued in to give a wrong answer every time.

They repeated the experiment with a different person several times. In all but one case it only took a few times before the subject was agreeing with the rest of the group that a two inch line was longer than a six inch!

As a side note, it was fascinating to see that the one person who stuck to her guns was an Asian girl, very good student, very much what my brother the artist would call a conformist, while the man who was quickest to jump ship and deny the evidence of his own eyes in order to fit in, was, by his own self-description, an artist, free thinker and non-conformist. It's not the first time that I've thought that nonconformists are actually some of the most group-think oriented people I've ever seen, but it was the first time I've watched it happen in a scientific study.

From there the program took a nasty turn, telling viewers about the MIlgram Experiment, a horribly fascinating experiment done after WWII ( and I also mentioned this in a previous blog post here.). The goal was to see if it was really the bad conditions in Germany that led people to turn a blind eye to the horrendous treatment of Jews, or even to participate in it, or if even healthy, well nourished middle class Americans might be brought to do the same thing.

They set up this box thing, attached official looking wires and electrodes all over the supposed subject's body (really he was one of the researchers), then told the real subject of the experiment (who didn't know he was the subject, he thought he was just helping out) that a scientist would ask the person in the box questions, and for every wrong answer, this person was supposed to turn on a switch that would jolt the other guy with an electric shock. They filmed the experiments, and this television program showed footage from the orginal study.

What happened was incredibly sickening. Subject after subject continued to blast the person in the box with what they believed were horribly painful levels of electricity. The man in the box would begin screaming that he had a heart condition, begging them to stop, and the person at the switch would look nervously at the scientist in his white jacket, and continue to increase the voltage- even after all screams in the box had stopped and the person operating the switch could only presume the other guy was dead or unconscious.

The people at the switch would look worried, sweat, bite their lips- but continued to apply what they thought were dangerous levels of electricity because they were told to by a person in a white coat.

Later these experiments were stopped as the scientists began to have concerns about the ethics of what they might be doing to the subjects.

Clearly, man will do evil things to other men for reasons that have little to do with lack of material comforts and everything to do with one's individual value system and strength of character. Few of us will be called upon to do anything so dramatic as resist authority in order to save a life.

Since so many of don't resist popular opinion around us on a daily basis, that's probably a good thing.

Carnival of Family Life

It's the 50th edition, and there are some really great entries this week. I love reading about real people, real families, real lives and no airbrushing.

Here are some of my favorites.

Julie's ranting, and her final rant made me laugh out loud. I wish I'd done this when some of mine were little.

The one starts with one of the funniest poison control center phone calls I have ever heard of.

This one had me grinning while wincing in self-recognition. I think it was the tea bag and toster part that actually prompted a genuine outloud chuckle.
For some reason it reminded me of the time my mother was mixing cookie dough with our big stand alone mixer. The plug detached from the mixer (I guess to make it easier to lose the plug so that you had to buy a new one every year). So while she was mixing dough the plug fell out of the mixer and into the batter- leaving the other end plugged into the wall socket. Mother picked it up and licked the batter off. And since it was plugged in, she got two nice blisters on her tongue from the electric shock.
She insists that's only the second dumbest thing she ever did. The first place spot for dumbest thing ever done, according to Mum, was telling us about the mixer incident.

I've never met Manic Mama, but it seems we shared similar personalities as children. Granny Tea, you'll want to read this one.

Another New Critter

We have a new animal at the Common Room homestead- a goat. The HM and I are calling her Spare Rib. The Progeny are calling her April. This does not bode well. Neither does the fact that the first thing the HM said when he saw her is 'Awwww. She's cute.' Every homesteader knows the only proper thing to say about a new bit of livestock on the hoof is, "Mmmmm. Looks delicious."

The idea is that she and the comrades soon to join her are to eat the poison ivy that prevents the HM from so much as taking a walk without breaking out. This portion of our property, at least, is at long last fenced off to keep dogs in and coyotes out- and now to keep goats in. We just want five, and we only want them until fall. We'll switch them to an all grass pasture for a couple months in the fall and then butcher them for the freezer.

Meanwhile, they will have cleared out all sorts of underbrush, and especially the poison ivy that the HM and now the FYG are so allergic to. At least, that's my idea. I suspect her idea is to specialize in peonies, lilacs, and rose bushes. Not that she's done anything to justify my suspicions. Yet. I am just a cynic and I see a gleam in her eye that does not bode well for Jenny's flowers.

Of course, before she starts on the flowers, she may fortify herself with a steady diet of window screens. She's been nibbling at ours, pawing at them, and gently butting at the windows.

You see, it seems she wants to be a house-goat. We don't know where she got that idea. She's one year old already and our understanding is that she grew up as a companion animal to other pasture fed creatures. She is underfed and undersized because they were bigger and ate more than she did on an already over-grazed pasture. But she definitely wants in the house rather than out of it. She stands up and paws (Can that be right? Surely it must be hooves) at the garage door. She stands up outside the living room window, front legs against the vinyl siding, nose pressed against the window. This drives the dogs mad, and they stand on the other side of the glass barking, growling, and sounding for all the world like a pack of fifty hounds out for blood. They begin this 'game' in the morning before anybody else is out of bed. Better than an alarm clock, because you can't turn the...... ahem. Well. The beasts have no snooze button, although I've threatened to give them one.

"Don't you ever have any normal pets?" a friend wonders. Well, no, now that you mention it, it seems not. Donavan, a dog of indiscriminate breeding, but surely at least partially a breed of the sort that ought to be her natural enemy, is terrified of her. They are roughly the same size, and she chases him. He runs, cowering, to hide behind the humans. She dodges, veers, and turns, intent on separating him from his humans, cutting him out of the herd and smashing him beneath her hooves, all two inches of them.

The HM took him out on a leash to help them get acquainted. We thought the idea would be to teach Donavan to leave the goat alone. The goat is perfectly willing to teach him that lesson herself, with no help from any of us. The HM had thought to just tie the dog up to a nearby tree while he got some work done in the yard (on one of those day's off of his), but he brought him back in, saying, "I can't tie him up. Then he's just a target."

Zeuss, on the other hand, wants to play, and he wants to play by going for April's Spare Rib's soft under-belly. This way lies death, mayhem, blood shed, tears, and vet bills. Don't ask us how we know. The demise of Hunky's twin Dory, some 10 years ago, is still a traumatic memory. We know Donavan's fear won't last long, either. He's always afraid of new things, always hides behind us to make sure the new thing isn't dangerous enough to kill us, and then he gets over it and starts acting like the nearly brainless beast he is.

The youngest two Progeny are delighted with the goat. The three of them race up and down the path outside my bedroom window, thundering like a herd of wildebeests on the Serengeti. The analogy is weak, though, because I am quite sure wildebeests do not shriek like orangutans or laugh like hyenas. The goat seems to be enjoying herself as much as either of them.

When I say the path outside my bedroom window, I refer to a path exactly level with my bedroom window, which windows the HM thoughtfully left open while I was taking an afternoon nap. These would be the same windows and the same naptime involved when the dogs came in and barked like fiends at the racing children and goat, and the goat returned to do battle, taunting them through the open windows. I am sure she called them rude names. The dogs seemed to think so, anyway, and I believe they retaliated in kind. I'm sure Zeus needs his mouth washed out with soap, and I never knew the Lady Sadie Dog had such a dreadful vocabulary.

Dogs, goat, and children were finally separated, hushed, shushed, and sent to other quarters. I firmly closed my bedroom door and windows and settled back down for my nap when the phone rang. It was time for us all to go somewhere- and of course, at that moment the Cherub chose to let drift a wave of fetid air, communicating that she needed to use the toilet- perhaps an hour previously but hadn't wanted to trouble anybody about it. As the rest of the family left somebody asked me if I wanted Donovan put in his kennel. I had other suggestions.

I thought Donavan, Zeus, and Sadie might be shot immediately, the goat hung by her hooves from the highest tree, and the youngest two children bound and gagged.. The Cherub might be hosed down with a firehose and then she could be put to bed for a week starting at 5 p.m, providing we sawed a hole in the middle of her bed and put it over the toilet.

The Progeny merely laughed and blew me kisses as they danced out the door. The Cherub clapped her hands as though I'd promised her a treat. Donovan waited until I was busy with the Cherub and then went to the kitchen, where no dogs are ever allowed. Fortunately, before I'd gotten very far in my ministrations with the Cherub I realized I needed a bag from the kitchen, and so Donovan was caught before he'd even begun anything. He seemed most indignant about that. Zeus merely stood aside, looking noble and not a little smug, for all the world as if he were saying, "I'd never stoop to going into the kitchen. I know it's against the rules. I told him, but he never listens."

I told him not to be a prig, and then, since nobody was looking, I rubbed his ears, and Donovan's too. The Cherub doesn't like her ears rubbed, so I gave her something else.

It seems the court martials and other threats have been post-poned.

More Sesquipelians and Other Word Finds

I just read Michael Innes' book Appleby's End, and started making a list of words that I either didn't know, or did not know as clearly as I thought I should.

Metensomatosis-The assimilation by one body or organism of the elements of another. Innes uses it in reference to a woman under the delusion that she is a cow. The Inspector wonders what further metensomatosis she might go through before the investigation is over.

Vacimulgence- the former occupation of the woman who thinks she is a cow.

Bosky- I've run into this one often, but never looked it up before, content I had a general sense of its meaning. This time I decided I wanted a more exacting understanding. It means

covered with or consisting of bushes or thickets; "brushy undergrowth"; "`bosky' is a literary term"; "a bosky park leading to a modest yet majestic plaza"- Jack Beatty
brushy
wooded - covered with growing trees and bushes etc; "wooded land"; "a heavily wooded tract"

aubade- since the context was an ancestor who repopularized madrigals and the aubade, I knew it was a musical term for a particular type of song, but I wanted to know what type:

A song or instrumental composition concerning, accompanying, or evoking daybreak.
A poem or song of or about lovers separating at dawn.

Hebdomadal-taking place, coming together, or published once every seven days; weekly: hebdomadal meetings; hebdomadal groups; hebdomadal journals.
–noun 2. a weekly magazine, newspaper, etc.
This was used to refer to an oddly assorted group of fellow weekend passengers in railway car.

nescience- this one I could easily guess by context and nearly as easily by the word itself, but it looked like such a useful word that I wanted to look it up. 1. Absence of knowledge or awareness; ignorance. 2. Agnosticism.
In the book one character dismisses a bit of information because he's 'never heard of that before,' and another character replies tartly that '...your nescience is scarcely very strong evidence against the objective existence of a phenomenon.'

A young mother of my acquaintance who possesses but a very limited store of knowledge to begin with dismisses all attempts to increase that store with a similar nescience. Tell her that bottles of juice or milk in bed are a leading cause of cavities in children, and she shrugs and says, "I never heard that before," and continues to give her toddler bottles in bed. Tell her that caffeinated cokes are not the healthiest drink for toddlers and she answers, "I never heard that before," and gives the tot a full can of Coke. There really is not any authority she recognizes as greater than her own nescience.

integument- a natural outer protective covering such as the skin of an animal or a cuticle or seed coat or rind or shell- Innes uses it in a discussion about a rather fierce character who, surprisingly, also does lovely embroidery. When the Inspector is surprised to learn this, his informer says, "Ah, I see you have not penetrated much below the ferocious outer integument of Robert..."

exuviae- The cast-off skins or coverings of various organisms, such as the shells of crabs or the external coverings of the larvae and nymphs of insects. Used by Innes in reference to a bit of cake and a bone from the larder allegedly stolen by an alleged folk character allegedly interested in witch-craft.

These last three were words used by a 6'4" minister, a fine specimen of 'muscular Christianity,' who uses his gifts wisely and well. He was a minor, but a delightful character.
-
yatter- what it sounds like- verb- to chatter or jabber. –noun 2. chatter; idle talk.

callet- verb, to rail or scold. Noun- a scold, gossip, strumpet, loose woman- a country term.

finical- Another one where I had a working idea of what it meant, but decided I wanted a more precise (heh) understanding. It means 'exacting especially about details; "a finicky eater"; "fussy about clothes"; "very particular about how her food was prepared." It was Word of the Day once.


rummer- large drinking cup or glass.

This particular book also includes numerous mythological, artistic, literary, and theological references.
The theological references include a paragraph or two using the words Docetists, Monophysites (we've seen that one recently), Pelagians, and Gnostic Ebionite. Shakespearian references include a remark about 'the good Fluellan when he came to compare Macedon and Monmouth.' I had to look that one up. It's from Henry V.

Not a bad collection for a bit of escapist reading, eh, what?

Chick Flicks and Chick Lit VS the Good Stuff

Grand post on the topic right here.

Milgramesque Experiments in the Classroom

A little indoctrination, a little social experimentation on minor children without consent of the minor children or their parents, a little despair- all in a high school teacher's day, it seems.

At least that's how it strikes me. What do you think?



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For those interested in reading more about the Milgram experiments, in addition to the Wikipedia link provided at the above post, there's a short biography of Milgram here.

Those interested in the Stanford experiments might be interested in this bit of information from an ex-con who helped advise the researchers in setting up this experiment:

Regrettably, the gulf between verisimilitude and real prison life is a huge leap of faith that still raises serious issues of validity from the get-go. Nevertheless,ideas such as bags being placed over the heads of prisoners, inmates being bound together with chains and buckets being used in place of toilets in their cells were all experiences of mine at the old "Spanish Jail" section of San Quentin and which I dutifully shared with the Stanford Prison Experiment braintrust months before the experiment started. To allege that all these carefully tested, psychologically solid, upper-middle-class Caucasian "guards" dreamed this up on their own is absurd.

And those interested in Abu Ghraib would do well to begin with this post at Mudville Gazette, following the links provided. Warning- it's not all safe reading for the young, but I'm sure that's not the only reason so many on the left seem unaware of Graner's nasty background (pre-military) in abuse, exploitation, and pornographic photography, nor of his civilian experiences as a prison guard. Nor does this explain why so many are unaware of the deep flaws in the testimony of Colonel Karpinski.