Bostonian of the Year

According to the Boston Globe, this is their 2007 choice for Bostonian of the year:

Over the years, as part of his permanent campaign to browbeat banks into giving fair loans to low- and moderate-income people, Marks and his yellow-T-shirted followers have swarmed shareholders’ meetings with enough force to shut them down. They have picketed outside the schools attended by the children of bank CEOs, pressing the youngsters in signs and chants to answer for the actions of their daddies. And they even once distributed scandal sheets to every house in one CEO’s neighborhood, detailing the affair he was allegedly having with a subordinate. In time, that CEO, like most of the others that NACA targeted, sat down with Marks and signed a deal.

To those who found his tactics an outrageous invasion of bank executives’ personal lives, Marks refused to acknowledge any line between home and work. “What you do is who you are,” he says. “It’s all personal.”

Recently this warm-hearted teddy bear of a guy picketed Bear STerns and JPMorgan, threatening to visit the neighborhoods of his fellow mortgage brokers (Yes, he's a mortgage broker himself)where he says, "we will educate their children on what their parents do."

What a principled man! So principled that he requires those he arranged mortgages for to participate in his 'educational' activities.

More on this guy at Michelle Malkin.

Indiana

Excerpt from the essay "Landscape and Imagination," by Scott Russell Sanders, found in the book "Where We Live: Essays About Indiana," edited by David Hoppe:

Without these lessons in seeing, from people and memories and books, the landscape would appear to me as little more than a straggle of postcards. In fact, without benefit of instruction, in a territory as unglamorous as the Midwest I would probably fail to appreciate even the two-dimensional postcard views. Of all the regions in America, this one has inspired, I would guess, the least smugness from local people and the least rapture from travelers. People do not move here for the scenery. I have no way of checking, but I would venture that fewer landscape snapshots are taken per square mile in the Midwest than in any other part of the country, including the deserts. Millions of people drive through Indiana every year without lifting their gaze from the highway. Those who do glance aside from the line of motion tend to see only indistinguishable fields and humble hills.

I have spent enough time in the mountains of Oregon and Tennessee, the redwood forests of California, the mesa country of New Mexico, the moss-festooned bayous of Louisiana, and along the stony coast of Maine to know the pleasures of spectacular landscapes. How could anyone equipped with nerves fail to rejoice in such places? On the other hand, to know the pleasures of an unspectacular landscape, such as that of Indiana, requires an uncommon degree of attentiveness and insight. It requires one to open wide all the doors of perception. It demands an effort of imagination, by which I mean not what the Romantics meant, a projection of the self onto the world, but rather a seeing of what is already there, in the actual world. I don't claim to possess the necessary wisdom of subtlety, but I aspire to, and I work at it.

I am reading this book for school, and this passage struck me particularly, because when we were visiting Colorado last February, I got to thinking along the same lines. I resolved to become better at 'knowing the pleasures of an unspectacular landscape,' although not in those same words. I am always so pleased to find passages in books where people have said something that I have thought and tried to write out in a coherent and logical fashion, and said it SO much better than I could have ever done.

Actually, I'd prefer to support another injustice.

There's a big hoopla on campus right now over certain issues in the student elections. I haven't figured out all the ins-and-outs of the situation (quite frankly, I'm not all that interested) but I do know it's a slightly bigger deal than is usually the case.

One of the candidates had a protest rally over one of the issues. Supporters passed out fliers explaining the details of the case and inviting people to join in the rally. Spread across the bottom in large text was their plea: "Show your support for This Injustice."

Sad, really.

Also sad was hearing about how students in my colonial American history class (a senior level course) referred to our most recent reading, a thoroughly researched and footnoted monograph on colonial American women, as a novel. A novel, I say!

THE LENT LILY

'Tis spring; come out to ramble
The hilly brakes around,
For under thorn and bramble
About the hollow ground
The primroses are found.

And there's the windflower chilly
With all the winds at play,
And there's the Lenten lily
That has not long to stay
And dies on Easter day.

And since till girls go maying
You find the primrose still,
And find the windflower playing
With every wind at will,
But not the daffodil,

Bring baskets now, and sally
Upon the spring's array,
And bear from hill and valley
The daffodil away
That dies on Easter day.

By A.E. Housman 

Video of the Day

81 year old veteran fends off would be muggers with the ten toes of death- he tells about it here.

File this under the 101 thousand reasons I am not a pacifist. There's just something fundamentally flawed with a worldview that would fault this old man for self-defense.

Children's Arithmetic, a Parents' Review Article

Article from volume II of The Parents' Review, edited by Charlotte Mason. This volume published in 1891-92

Children's Arithmetic, by the Rev. R. H. Quick

In a previous number of this Review (June, 1890), I endeavoured to add to some excellent suggestions previously made by Mrs. Hart-Davis on teaching arithmetic to children. I maintained that Grube's method of making children familiar with all the relations of numbers up to ten was the true method, and that these relations should be got at experimentally with cubes or counters. This foundation should be very carefully laid, and so long as the children are not bored it is hardly possible to advance too slowly. In settling these first ideas we are settling the groundwork of all knowledge of arithmetic.

Have we ever thought of the confusion and obscurity which teachers often introduce into children's minds instead of letting in the light of day? That this obscurity is in many cases directly due to the teacher was brought home to me by a conversation I lately had with a bright little chatterbox not quite eight years old, whom I overtook in the road during school hours, with a bag in one hand and some coppers in the other. Our talk was somewhat as follows:--

He.- Why are you not at school to-day?

She (timidly).- Please, mother wanted me to mind the baby and go of errands.

He.- What standard are you in?

She.- I'm in the first standard. So I was last year, but I didn't go on the day of the examination, so they wouldn't put me up.

He.- How do you get on with your reading?

She (timidity wearing off).- Oh, I get on very well with my reading! I read quite fast. There's my cousin, Annie, she's older than I am, and she can't read as fast as me. (then becoming melancholy) But she can do her sums, and I can't.

He.- What sort of sums do you do?

She.- We do 'dition sums and 'straction sums.

He.- How do you do the addition sums?

She.- We put 'em down and add 'em up like. I can do the 'dition sums, but what I can't do is them distraction sums!

He.- Tell me about them.

She.- You have to put them down some at the top and some at the bottom, and then you have to take away the bottom from the top.

He.- Well, why can't you do that?

She.- Because sometimes you can't take 'em away, and then you have to broow.

He.- What do you borrow?

She.- You borrow what you want, and then you have to pay it back again, and I can't do that.

So here was a poor child trying to see her way through the sophistries and absurdities the teacher had put before her, and driven to despair because she failed to do the impossible. I was among the audience when on e of the ablest men of our day, the present Bishop of London, told a meeting how what seemed a very slight difficulty had for a time barred his progress in childhood. Our children have not on an average anything like the force of thought that he had, and many still small difficulties seem to them insurmountable. How important it is, then, that the teacher should watch the action of the child's mind, and try to understand and sympathise with its difficulties!

(to be continued)

Obama and McCain

In the comments on this post, where I shared my dismay at being unable to vote for any one of the three presidential candidates this election, my friend Connie said this:

I see what you're saying about having a Democrat in the White House, but when it comes down to the choice between a Democrat and a Communist, I'd prefer the Democrat, whether he acknowledges that affiliation or not.

And she does have a point:

“In America,” Obama says, “we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.”

That's from a 1995 interview, as is this comment indicative of Obama's unifying, non-divisive, post-racial spirit:

Historically, African-Americans have turned inward and towards black nationalism whenever they have a sense, as we do now, that the mainstream has rebuffed us, and that white Americans couldn’t care less about the profound problems African-Americans are facing.”

To read the rest of the interview, click on the link above. It's quite eye-opening.

The Libertarian Republican says he has other links to the socialist movement:

Barack Hussein Obama visited Vermont in early 2006 to endorse longtime Socialist Congressman Bernie Sanders in his bid for US Senate. Obama chose to back Sanders over more mainline liberal Democratic candidates.

(Photo of Obama campaigning for Sanders for Senate in 2006, Sanders is on the left).

Additionally, here's the link for a YouTube.com, which curiously is no longer available for embedding, video showing Obama campaigning for Socialist US Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders in 2006.

It should be noted, Sanders scored a near perfect 96 on the National Journal survey of US Senators making him one of the most liberal/socialist members of the US Congress.

Obama scored a perfect 100 on that same survey.

Much more at the LR's link above. But Media Matters says there's a problem with National Journal's methods:

The Poole-Rosenthal ratings have a number of advantages over the National Journal ratings, most notably that they use every non-unanimous vote cast by every legislator to determine his or her relative ideology. By contrast, the National Journal's ratings were based on its own necessarily subjective selection of votes, what it describes as "a computer-assisted analysis that used 99 key Senate votes, selected by NJ reporters and editors, to place every senator on a liberal-to-conservative scale in each of three issue categories." Among the "liberal" positions Obama took to earn the distinction of "most liberal senator in 2007" were his votes to implement the bipartisan 9-11 Commission's homeland security recommendations, provide more children with health insurance, expand federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, and maintain a federal minimum wage.

They suggest he's only the tenth most liberal senator, and he's tied with Joe Biden for that position.

But let's not forget McCain's shady financial connections, which Captain Ed blogged about three years ago as he uncovered some pretty odd financial bedfellows :

... all hinging on Richard Davis, RI's president and John McCain's campaign manager. Since Davis also acts as McCain's chief political advisor, I found it odd that the RI -- which pays Davis a $110,000 "consulting fee" annually instead of a salary as its president -- received money from donors such as the sources that follow below.

Bear in mind, please, that foundations don't just line up to hand out cash. Rick Davis has to apply and then campaign for these funds, as budgets are limited even for the richest foundations. They carefully select their grantees to ensure that they support the overall mission of the foundation. Why would a close political advisor to John McCain go to these sources almost exclusively for the major funding of the non-profit that seeks to support McCain, a supposedly conservative Republican?

* The Tides Foundation, which heavily promotes "reproductive justice", giving over $500,000 to pro-abortion efforts. They also actively oppose the death penalty (so do I, FYI). John McCain opposes abortion and supports the death penalty, so why is his chief political advisor getting so much support from those who ostensibly oppose him?

* Educational Foundation Of America, which also supports abortion. ...It also supports euthanasia and assisted suicide through the Death With Dignity National Center, a group which it gave $45,000. ...

* The Proteus Fund...[spent] $935K ... on supporting gay marriage initiatives, ...

* OSI (Open Society Institute), founded and funded by George Soros. Among a litany of left-wing causes supported by OSI are People For The American Way, to support their Supreme Court Project. (Hint: It isn't intended on assisting Bush get his nominees confirmed.) They also gave $150,000 to the Campaign Legal Center, which will be important shortly.
....
But the oddities don't end at the donors page for Reform Institute. We've already detailed how McCain's chief political advisor earns a six-figure income from the nonprofit which heavily promotes McCain and the BCRA. As the New York Times noted yesterday, RI provides a back-channel method of keeping his campaign staff employed without McCain having to do any fundraising for his political campaigns -- and avoiding the donation caps that come into play for his donors. And Davis isn't the only beneficiary of this loophole.
...

John McCain, who has long campaigned on a promise to rid politics of big money, not only has built himself a lucrative third-party solution for fundraising but also a shelter to keep two of his top campaign operatives employed between elections. These top strategists also have an odd taste for funding sources, considering McCain's public positions on key issues for his base.

There's more at the original post, and if you think this is worrisome, you should follow the trackbacks in that link. Oh, and the RI in this story? Stands for McCain's 'Reform Institute.'

Environmentally Friendly

From the April, 2008 issue of Reader's Digest comes a tip for living green which we can totally support, and we encourage you to live this green lifestyle as well:

Stay Married
Happy in your marriage? Turns out, staying together is better for the earth. Converting one household into two means bigger utility bills and, therefore, more greenhouse gases. Researchers at Michigan State University last year computed that the extra electricity consumed by divorced families amounts to 73 billion kilowatt-hours, which works out to about 6,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per household.

Sunday Hymn Post

Below is one of the hymns we sang Friday night, and it was one that I found particularly moving.

The hymn sings are loosely organized, there are no prearranged songs. We pass out the hymnals and go around the room, each person picks a hymn, we all sing it, and then it's the next person's turn (occasionally somebody picks one nobody else knows. We either learn it, sing it badly without learning it, or the person picks another hymn, depends on the song itself). We had just sung the 23rd Psalm to the tune of an old English Psalter, and the next person chose this one. I thought the two were perfect companion pieces:

Father Hear the Prayer We Offer

Lyrics by Love M. Willis

Father hear the prayer we offer:
Not for ease that prayer shall be,
But for strength that we may ever
Live our lives courageously.


Not forever by still waters
Do we ask our way to be
But the steep and rugged pathway
May we tread rejoicing-ly

Not forever by still waters
Would we idly, quiet stay;
But would smite the living fountains
From the rocks upon our way.


Be our strength in hours of weakness,
In our wand’rings be our guide;
Thru endeavor, failure, danger
Father, be Thou at our side.


May our path be bright or dreary,
Storm or sunshine be our share;
May our souls in hope un-weary
Make Thy work our ceaseless prayer.

More here. The tune is St. Sylvester to those who follow these things.

Sunset in Europe

Colmar, France

WW2 Resources

Three part radio program:

Diet Eman was just 20 years old when Nazi troops invaded her homeland of Holland. The Gestapo's mission was to eliminate thousands of Dutch Jews and other "undesirables." Living under Nazi occupation, Eman joined the Dutch Resistance and disobeyed the Germans' wartime restrictions – all the while facing constant fear of arrest and likely execution if discovered. Hear how this young woman risked her life to help hide and shelter those fleeing Hitler's persecution.
"That is one thing that I can never convey to anybody who hasn't lived under oppression – the suspicion." – Diet Eman

This could be your substitute for our Harry.=)

The Men Behind Hitler: the eugenics movement before during and after Hitler.

Year 11 of Amblesideonline has other links and lists.

So, Yesterday

It was an assortment of good, bad, ugly, funny, and 'you're grounded for the rest of your life.'

We've mentioned before that a couple decades ago we had the single and unaccompanied military members from our church over just about every weekend when we were all stationed in Japan.

Last night we had a singing at Granny Tea's, and among the guests was a group of young people from a large church south of us (about 45 miles) which we visit often. My husband sat visiting with one of them for a while. This young man only moved her about a year ago, so they went over the usual (and for military families complicate) questions about 'where you're from.' You see where this is going? Yes, some 18 years ago or so, his daddy was one of the 'unaccompanieds' (married, but on such a 'short;- that means a year- tour that the military won't send family).
The HM and the HG have both actually met his dad, who also moved to the area a year ago. But because we are older and it shows (the hg having been about 6 or 7), they didn't recognize each other.

Cool beans.

Also at the singing, the BOY sat around behind the main group, back in a corner. At one point, while clearing my throat in preparation for a song with higher notes than I can usually hit, I saw him get up and leave the room, crawling under a table to do so. I tried to watch and see where he went, but he never crossed my line of sight again. This distracted me from the song, because it meant he had to have crawled the rest of the way out of the room. And while I was sitting there thinking 'I am going to do something about that boy' thoughts, I was startled by the apparition of a cup of water from just behind my right shoulder. The boy, noticing my throat clearing, had crawled out of the room (so as not to distract anybody(!). Plus, let's face it, that was fun) to the kitchen to bring me a glass of water, and had hunkered down out of sight to bring it back to me, commando style, sneaking along behind the couch. So as to surprise me. He did.

It was good to be surprised by a good deed, because more details have been forthcoming about the golf cart incident. He was driving it, my 9 year old who had not been given permission to drive it. The older girls have explained something I did not know. When his 12 year old sister says, "Can we take the golf cart out?" she means "and the boy and I will take turns driving because we're all into sharing and being fair and stuff like that," none of which I knew. NONE of which I knew.

Furthermore, he is not yet old enough to understand the pitfalls of self-incrimination: when Pip went over to see what needed to be done about the golf-cart and she had to tell them 'give it up, that thing's not leaving the mud until a great drought and at least six brawny men show up,' he shook his head in disgust and said, "But that's not even the biggest puddle we went through!! We went through at least three other puddles MUCH bigger than that one and we didn't get stuck at all."

Blink.

Book Quiz

You're The Guns of August!

by Barbara Tuchman

Though you're interested in war, what you really want to know is what
causes war. You're out to expose imperialism, militarism, and nationalism for what they
really are. Nevertheless, you're always living in the past and have a hard time dealing
with what's going on today. You're also far more focused on Europe than anywhere else in
the world. A fitting motto for you might be "Guns do kill, but so can
diplomats."


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I picked up the link from Tim's Mom, but be forewarned! I like my results, but we've learned the questions aren't always the same, and some of our friends have gotten some, um, odd results.

Sweating the Small Stuff

Some many years ago a mother with wild children that nobody really liked to be around asked me for some parenting advice. I struggled, because I knew that as unpleasant as her children were to be with, their mother came from a truly horrendous background, so she was starting with a handicap I could not even fathom, and she really, really loved her children in spite of her immature approach to parenting (and most of life, in fact). I said something, I don't remember exactly what, but it was probably incoherent and mumbly and must have brushed on the topic of discipline.

She laughed easily and said, "Well, my whole philosophy of parenting is just to ignore all the little stuff, and only focus on the big stuff, the stuff that matters."

I nodded slowly, decided it was tactless to point out that if this philosophy was working for her, we wouldn't be having this conversation, and said, "I think my philosophy is that if you take care of the small stuff while it IS the small stuff, then most of it won't escalate into the big stuff. And meanwhile, you've all worked on self-control and good habits over the smaller things. That should help with the bigger stuff, and you can maintain your cool better, too."

She looked startled and said she'd have to think about that.

Just a week ago I was chatting with another acquaintance who is going through some major life issues (sick family, emergency room treatment for a spouse who came off the worse in an encounter with angry table saw, housefire, resulting in a longterm stay with her mother and loss of most household goods)- and yet says she can't figure out why the things that are the hardest are the seemingly much smaller and minor issues more on the level of misplaced car keys or a broken dish. I told her I knew how she felt, and shared a quote I'd heard somewhere about how it's not the mountains ahead that wear you out. It's the grain of sand in your shoe.

And I am wondering why, if I could dispense such good advice, and I do think it was good, I found myself yelling at my 12 year old across the phone wires over the fact that she took the grandparents' golf cart out in the mud and got it severely stuck because she 'forgot' (apparently instantaneously) that I told her to walk the path first to make sure it was still frozen hard and not spring thawed muck.

And why was I banging my head on the desk and almost in tears two days ago because the scanner and the computer seemed not to be on speaking terms?

And why am I eating lunch in my pajamas?

Because, I realized as I read this post at Holy Experience (and I can SO relate, owning that same piece of equipment with the tiny and indispensable piece) myself), I haven't been sweating the small stuff. I've not been taking the grains of sand out of my shoes.

Life in Zimbabwe

Think we're having economic difficulties? Baby, we are so spoiled:

The Spar supermarket has bread at only $7 million a loaf. People rush to the shelf duly marked $7 million, but by the time they reach the till with their hyper-inflated Zimbabwean dollars, the price is up to $25 million.

That equals just 62 American cents, more than a teacher makes in a week. "How can we afford to eat that?" a woman exclaims. Customers leave their loaves at the counter and walk out with their brick-sized bundles of bank notes, angry and disconsolate.

Daily scenes of struggle with the world's highest inflation are the dark backdrop to an election Saturday in which Robert Mugabe is fighting to prolong his 28-year-old presidency, outpolled by his main opponent and accused of laying elaborate plans to rig the vote.

On 84-year-old Mugabe's watch, the country has collapsed from food exporter to being dependent on international food handouts and money sent home by many of the 5 million people — more than a third of the population — who have fled Zimbabwe.

More here:

At political rallies President Mugabe has again threatened businesses to drop the prices of basic products and services and the price of bread has been forced down to $6, 600,000 per loaf after the detention and arrest of baking industry leaders. The break even price is $15,000,000 per loaf (R1.67). There are now plans to slash all prices to February 12 levels which would once again close factories and empty the shelves.

Think we have disenfranchised voters? Try this:

The rigging of this election started in earnest in 2005 when the partisan Zimbabwe Police together with the military descended with bulldozers to demolish homes and livelihoods of more than 2 million people all urban dwellers that had been a bane to the dictator Mugabe and Zanu PF by consistently voting MDC since 2000. With no where to live the displaced Murambatsvina victims cannot not vote. Then came the new delimitation exercise that reduced the number of constituencies in the urban areas where MDC is heavily supported and the increase of constituencies in rural areas where the Dictator and his party Zanu PF purportedly think they have a bigger support than MDC. Its fact that Mugabe wants to stuff ballot boxes with ghost voters as MDC's examination of the voters roll has revealed. Mugabe has gone on and printed 9 million ballot papers where there are only 5.9 million voters on the voters roll. We also hear of a slush fund that will be disbursed to polling agents in order to bribe them. I will not even talk about the issue of the elections being free and fair. As a Zimbabwean in exile I have been forced to watch events unfold in Zimbabwe having been denied my right to vote which render any outcome which is unfavourable to me not free and not fair. Mugabe and Zanu PF continue to dominate the state owned media from Newspapers to television whilst denying the opposition equal access to the media. What about intimidation its what Zanu PF is renowned for, a large number of MDC members have falsely arrested, detained and released without charge that has impacted on their ability to campaign. Some MDC election support workers have been beaten some forced to eat campaign posters.

When you're having a bad day, when our own election news is discouraging, when you're scouring the frugal blogs looking for one more way to cook those potatoes or stretch that gallon of gas, or pay your electric bill, try skimming the posts and blogrolls of the above links. It broadens the perspective a bit.

The Deck is Stacked: Three Jokers

Senator Obama bought stock in two companies whose investors included his 2004 campaign political donors. One, in fact, was developing medicine to treat avian flu — with the stock purchase coming right before Obama introduced legislation to increase funding to combat the virus.
The other company, SkyTerra, received government permission to build a national wireless network on the day Obama purchased his shares. Among the principal owners of this business were four people who had raised more than $150,000 for Obama. Attorney Obama claimed later that they were in a semi-blind trust, that just didn’t legally work out. When this became public, Obama sold the stock.

Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
Oops… he didn’t know. Or didn’t he mind?

Democrat MBolack has 15 other things he didn't know about Barak Obama here. Interesting read.

Over at the WSJ, Kimberly Strassel says that one reason Clinton's Bosnia sniper-fire fable is getting so much attention is because it allows:

...the press, the pundits, Democrats, and even Barack Obama, the catharsis of finally -- finally! -- getting a chance to confront the Clintons' questionable mores. Hillary's and Bill's scandals have been the elephant in the primary room ever since she first signaled a run. Yet up to now everyone has been too scared, or too loyal, or too weary to touch the ugly past. Her Bosnia misspeak is now serving as proxy for all the truths about the Clintons' non-truths, allowing even liberals to break free from their Clinton dependence.

And, ouch! The Pew Research group notes that nearly a fourth of the Democrats who don't like Obama think he's a Muslim:

In particular, white Democrats who hold unfavorable views of Obama are much more likely than those who have favorable opinions of him to say that equal rights for minorities have been pushed too far; they also are more likely to disapprove of interracial dating, and are more concerned about the threat that immigrants may pose to American values. In addition, nearly a quarter of white Democrats (23%) who hold a negative view of Obama believe he is a Muslim.

And, while it's a case of he said/he said, nobody comes out smelling pretty in this story of McCain's flirting with the Democrat party.

"Brain-Dead' Man Recovers

Full story here.

Zack Dunlap doesn’t remember much from the day he died, but he does remember hearing a doctor declare him brain-dead. And he remembers being incredibly ticked off.

“I’m glad I couldn’t get up and do what I wanted to do,” the strapping Oklahoman said in a soft drawl in an exclusive appearance on Monday on TODAY in New York.
[...]
...36 hours after the accident, doctors performed a PET scan of his brain and informed his parents, along with other family members who had gathered to keep vigil at the hospital, that there was no blood flowing to Zack’s brain; he was brain-dead.

Doctors showed the scan to Zack’s parents, and, Doug Dunlap told Morales, “There was no activity at all. No blood flow at all.”
[...]
Zack had declared on his driver’s license that he wanted to be an organ donor, so his parents gave permission for doctors to keep his body alive until the organs could be harvested.

They left him on life support until the organ harvesting team could arrive to remove his organs, including his still beating heart, from his brain-dead body. Four hours later nurses began removing a few tubes. Fortunately for Zack, in the meantime his grandma had been praying for him, as well as his cousins, who are both nurses. They were in the room when Zack's nurses removed the tubes. His cousins felt that something about his appearance didn't quite fit with the diagnosis of brain death. So, one of them pulled out his pocket knife and ran the blade gently up the sole of Zack's foot::

The foot yanked away, but the other nurse said it was a reflex action. So Dan Coffin then dug a fingernail under one of Zack’s nails. Zack yanked his arm away and across his body, and that, the other nurse agreed, wasn’t a reflex action. It was a sign of life.

Doctors warned the family that he could have profound brain damage and would probably never live a normal life. He does still struggle with memory issues and control of his emotions, but he was in rehab just five days after being declared brain-dead, and he was home less than two months later.
MSNBC had a previous story about Zack and his recover, and it turns out Zack was adopted as an infant, and struggled with dyslexia. He's a fighter, but even so, it took family members who loved him and were paying attention and were in the room with him (and had nursing credentials themselves so they were listened to) to keep his heart in his own body so he could recover and go home to be with his family.

Think about it. And you might read these posts over at Keel the Pot.

Gift Bags

We very seldom purchase wrapping paper or gift bags for each other- and not even for Granny Tea or G-pa. We reuse the same bags over, and over. Yes, even if one of the younger children once wrote on the bag itself with magic marker. I think the Progeny would actually be disappointed if they didn't see the same gift bags a dozen times a year holding different presents for different family members.

Included in our stash of gift bags we have a cloth bag that once held a baking mix, and for about 15 years we had the same brown paper bag that had been decorated with puff paints and stickers. It finally fell apart.

Instead of tape, roll the bags shut, or fold them over and tie with ribbon. Ribbon can be re-used. If you're giving a pair of shoes, you could even get cute and use the shoe-laces to tie up the packaging.

Winter Soldier II

Military atrocities and the people who commit them. Or not. Look, I am not naive, nor am I a jingoistic red, white, and blue-blooded American who thinks 'my country, right or wrong.' I know that creeps and criminals find their way into the military just as easily as anywhere else. When Sgt. Beauchamp was telling his lies to a willing to believe TNR, I didn't disbelieve him because 'no American military member would act like that.' I didn't believe him because the details didn't add up; they didn't make sense. When criminals act criminally I want them caught, punished, and put where they can't keep on being criminals, and that's whether they wear a uniform or a pair of jeans pulled down so low on their hips that they waddle when they walk. And the problem with Winter Soldier II in its unquestioning acceptance almost any accusation, and the accusers who will not back up those accusations, is that they actually dilute the issue for both sides- lefties who believe everything they hear that is critical of the military, the right, the war- begin to believe ALL soldiers are blood-thirsty torturers, and the people on the right who tend not to believe anything they hear likewise, and who keep seeing highly publicized and lurid accusations that turn out to be, well, unreliable, and from people who turn out sometimes not to have even been in the military, are further confirmed in their predisposition to disbelief- and the truth is what suffers in the end.

Whose Money Is It Anyway?

Well, over in Georgia the head of the public school employee's group has no questions about it- as Cato@Liberty puts it, "All your money are belong to us:"

The Georgia legislature is currently considering a scholarship donation tax credit program that would allow individuals and businesses to give money to non-profit scholarship granting organizations that make it easier for parents to afford independent schooling for their kids.

In arguing against the bill, the head of the state’s public school employee organization, Jeff Hubbard, had this to say: “Our opposition is [to] taking state funds, taxpayer income, and giving it over to private schools.”

Bullying in the news...

REading the story young man who has been bullied at school (and out) for the last four years made my stomach hurt:

Whatever the reason, addressing the bullying of Billy has become a second job for his parents: Curt, a senior data analyst, and Penney, the owner of an office-supply company. They have binders of school records and police reports, along with photos documenting the bruises and black eyes. They are well known to school officials, perhaps even too well known, but they make no apologies for being vigilant. They also reject any suggestion that they should move out of the district because of this.

The many incidents seem to blur together into one protracted assault. When Billy attaches a bully’s name to one beating, his mother corrects him. “That was Benny, sweetie,” she says. “That was in the eighth grade.”

It began years ago when a boy called the house and asked Billy if he wanted to buy a certain sex toy, heh-heh. Billy told his mother, who informed the boy’s mother. The next day the boy showed Billy a list with the names of 20 boys who wanted to beat Billy up.

Ms. Wolfe says she and her husband knew it was coming. She says they tried to warn school officials — and then bam: the prank caller beat up Billy in the bathroom of McNair Middle School.

Not long after, a boy on the school bus pummeled Billy, but somehow Billy was the one suspended, despite his pleas that the bus’s security camera would prove his innocence. Days later, Ms. Wolfe recalls, the principal summoned her, presented a box of tissues, and played the bus video that clearly showed Billy was telling the truth.

Things got worse. At Woodland Junior High School, some boys in a wood shop class goaded a bigger boy into believing that Billy had been talking trash about his mother. Billy, busy building a miniature house, didn’t see it coming: the boy hit him so hard in the left cheek that he briefly lost consciousness.

Ms. Wolfe remembers the family dentist sewing up the inside of Billy’s cheek, and a school official refusing to call the police, saying it looked like Billy got what he deserved. Most of all, she remembers the sight of her son.

“He kept spitting blood out,” she says, the memory strong enough still to break her voice.

By now Billy feared school. Sometimes he was doubled over with stress, asking his parents why. But it kept on coming.

His parents are suing one of the bullies.

Homeschooling in the News

Muslim homeschooling, as reported in the NYT.

One of my favorite poems.

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forest of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

- William Blake (1757-1827)

News and Views

Denins Prager compares and contrasts Tibet and Palestine. Very thought provoking. (bonnet tip Betsy).

And speaking of Betsy's page, I enjoyed this read on the disparate levels of charitable giving between 'liberals' and conservatives, although it was no surprise to me, nor am I surprised to read that most people I know give larger percentage of their income to charity than the Obamas (who make nearly a million a year), even accounting for their cynical increase in giving once he decided to run for president. On the other hand, I know that much of our own charitable giving doesn't get put down on the tax returns, and I am sure that is true for many others on both left and right. Still, the story does smash a few stereotypes for those who are open to having stereotypes overturned.

Democrat linked to oil for food scandal, As reported here:

The Justice Department said Wednesday that Saddam Hussein’s principal foreign intelligence agency and an Iraqi-American man had organized and paid for a 2002 visit to Iraq by three House Democrats whose trip was harshly criticized by colleagues at the time. The arrangements for the trip were described in the indictment of an Iraq-born former employee of a Detroit-area charity group who was charged Wednesday with accepting millions of dollars’ worth of Iraqi oil contracts in exchange for assisting the Iraqi spy agency...

Did they know? Possibly not. Did they want to know? Probably not.

Speaking of oil, just who are the 'big oil' guys?


Columbia siezes 66 pounds of uranium from left wing terrorist group.

Does the freedom of the press include the right to ruin reputations with impunity?

Mark Steyn on the ongoing court case over the alleged Toronto terrorist plot:

Young Muslims who've spent virtually their entire lives in the west. Interestingly, the above guys also met with the two Georgia Tech students currently facing trial. Not sure whether they're on scholarships, but they're another stirring tribute to the soothing effect of western education on the jihadist brow:

Excellent read at Belmont- Coptic Christian priest Zakaria Botros and his success at winning converts from Islam, why and how he succeeds.

Is buying green really all that green? Or is it still just about buying?

I am pro-choice on the light-bulb issue..

I'm nearly speechless:

That triumphal barnburner of an Easter hymn, Jesus Christ Has Risen Today – Hallelujah, this morning will rock the walls of Toronto’s West Hill United Church as it will in most Christian churches across the country.

But at West Hill on the faith’s holiest day, it will be done with a huge difference. The words “Jesus Christ” will be excised from what the congregation sings and replaced with “Glorious hope.”
The pastor, Rev. Gretta Vosper, has had it with “Big God-ism” and wants to turn the West Hill United Church into a New Age encounter group. Vosper says that the world has outgrown Jesus Christ and the church is finished unless it gives up God, Jesus, and pretty much the entire Bible, except possibly for the Sermon on the Mount. Her new book, With or Without God, makes plain her hostility to the tenets of Christianity over the last two millenia and the need to replace God with Human.

If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain... and so is your faith" (1 Corinthians 15) Without the resurrection, it's not Christianity, and there is no hope for us apart from that resurrection.

Tell Me Again, Why Was Dan Quayle Wrong?

Via Rick Saenz at Dry Creek Chronicles comes this link from Slate.

...modern culture is out of touch with the needs of children. Some researchers identify out-of-wedlock births as the chief cause for the increasing stratification and inequality of American life, the first step that casts children into an ever more rigid caste system. Studies have found that children born to single mothers are vastly more likely to be poor, have behavioral and psychological problems, drop out of high school, and themselves go on to have out-of-wedlock children.
For 10 years, the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study at Princeton University has followed the families of 5,000 children, three-quarters born to unwed parents. According to the research, most of these parents, both women and men, said they wanted to get married—and to each other. But they somehow feel this mutual decision is beyond their power to make. And by not making it, the forces of inertia start pulling them apart. Five years after their children's births, only 16 percent of the couples had married, and 60 percent had split.

Among the most poignant letters I get are those from young women wondering whether they will ever convince the father of their children finally to marry them. "My boyfriend and I have a 4-year-old son. We've broken up but realized that we truly are meant for one another. My father was diagnosed with stage four cancer last year, and I've made it known to my boyfriend how important it is for me to have my father with me when I get married. When I bring up marriage to my boyfriend his reply is we will get married, I promise, but he has not asked me."

Rick quotes a few statements shockingly lacking in any sense of self-awareness whatsoever ("My ex is rather immature and irresponsible. I had a recent fling with him that resulted in pregnancy. I am overjoyed with the impending arrival of my baby, but I fear that no one else in my life will feel the same way.") and says it makes him feel like he lives on another planet, and I agree. This world is really not my home.


Some 20-22 years ago, we lived on a military base on an island in Japan. There were many young single miltary folks there. We had the single (and unaccompanied, which is military talk for spouses not allowed on this tour) men and women from our church over every weekend for a couple of years. An overseas military church is a particularly transient group, so it was a constantly rotating crowd. I learned that my own children and I were often the only people there who had parents who were still married to each other.

I cannot tell you the number of times young (18-21 years old) men and women would come up to us before they left for their next duty station and say, "Thank-you for having us into your home. Until I met you two I had never seen a marriage that worked."
We were 23-25 years old in that time frame, we'd been married only since we were 20, and we were not Ken and Barbie. There were some particularly rocky and difficult issues we had to work through in that time period. We also knew that five years was not really very much time. It was extremely unsettling to realize that where we were then was so much better than what most of those young people had ever seen, that they thought it was 'successful' before it had seen a full five years. How many of those people, afraid of what had happened when their parents gave up, decided never even to try?

Another planet indeed.

Reporters Fooled by Forged Documents

Nope, not the old Rathergate story- this time it's not related to politics at all, but rather (heh) to the 1994 attack on hip-hopster Tupac Shakur. That part isn't very interesting to me, but the story of how the media doesn't make use of its alleged layers and layers of fact checking never fails to fascinate.

Voting for ?

Former Senator Bill Bradley, Obama supporter:

"The Clintons have long delayed releasing their tax returns and have refused to name the donors to the William J Clinton Foundation in Arkansas. Archivists are also blocking the release of hundreds of federal papers on White House pardons. “We need to know whether there were favours attached to $500,000 contributions, such as the granting of pardons, squelching an investigation, awarding a contract or deferring a regulation,” Bradley said. “The Democratic party has got to be in dreamland if they think the Republicans are going to let these matters go.”"

Andrew Sullivan on the Clintons as a horror film that just won't end (Samantha Powers was right, Hillary is a monster?):

Politics is also their life. They know nothing else. Most halfway normal people in politics could at some point walk away. Reagan seemed happy to. Not the Clintons. In the words of the American-based British writer Christo-pher Hitchens, these are the kind of people who never want the meeting to end. Hillary Clinton will never concede the race so long as there is even the faintest chance that she can somehow win.

They endure all sorts of humiliation – remember the taped Clinton deposition in the Ken Starr investigation (in which Clinton admitted to the inquiry headed by the far-right prosecutor that he had had an “improper physical relationship” with Monica Lewinsky)? Hillary’s dismissal of the Lewinsky matter as an invention of the right-wing conspiracy? – because they know no other way to live. They have been thinking of this moment since they were in college and being a senator or an ex-president or having two terms in the White House are not sufficient to satiate their sense of entitlement. Even if they have to put their own party through a divisive, bitter, possibly fatal death match, they will never give up. Their country, their party . . . none of this matters compared with them.
...The secrecy and paranoia endure too. Releasing tax returns is routine for a presidential candidate. Barack Obama did it some time back. The Clintons still haven’t – and say they won’t for more than another month. Why? They have no explanation. They seem affronted by the question.

So affronted they said he was acting like Ken Starr. Asking them to release their tax records is not a big deal. Of course, what most Democrats never realized is that Ken Starr didn't act like the Ken Starr as portrayed by the Clintons.
They lie as easily as they speak, but I repeat myself.

Sadly, the entire line-up for the Presidential campaign looks like a horror movie that won't end to me. I don't like any of the three contenders even a little bit as President, although if I had to sit down to dinner with the family of any one of the three, I'd succumb to the Obama charisma. I think Barak, Michelle, and their cute little girls would be the most interesting (in a good way, not, like the Clintons, in a scary train wreck way) dinner companions, don't you?

Nice as he seems, Obama's association with fundraiser Rezko (on trial for corruption issues in Chicago) will continue to plague him.

And his 'typical white person comments and 20 year 'association' (membership in the man's congregation) with a minister who tells his congregation that the AIDS virus was invented by a white American government for the purpose of genocide against blacks is just not going away for me and plenty of others.

But let's not forget Hillary Clinton's own connections and close associations with criminals who donate or raise money for her- why, including, it seems, Rezko, who is pictured here with both the Clintons. McCain, of course, has the Keating 5 issue, although I think that scandal isn't going to be quite as problematic for him as the other two are going to be for the Democratic candidates. For one thing, the other four senators in that 'five' of the Keating 5 were Democrats. For another, it's around twenty years ago.

McCain's real problems are more recent than Keating, and so are their effects-there's what Matt Welch calls his decade long attack on the individual. there's McCain-Feingold, a glob of spit in the face of everybody who actually respects freedom of speech, there's the infamous 'gang of 14, ' which made it perfectly clear McCain had no interest in seeing to it that judges who respected the Constitution were seated when he was Senator, so why would I trust him when he's President (language warning- most of it McCain's, but the comments here are never kid-friendly)?
That was a rhetorical question, I don't trust him. And I won't be voting for him. If we're going to have a Democrat in the White House next term, and we are, then I would just as soon it be somebody who acknowledges that affiliation.

So who am I voting for? I dunno. The Progeny and I (I will have FOUR voting Progeny this election!) have discussed writing in various different names. I think I can take the chance and use my vote as a protest vote. I certainly don't have any other use for it.

Nature Study: The Spring Beauty

Update: I tested this out on one computer/printer, and it did well. On the downstairs computer, the page is yellowish and spotty in places. I apologize for the poor quality some of you will be getting.
'Nother update: for a collection of links to coloring pages and other cool stuff for nature study, see here.



Spring Beauty: Claytonia
(Claytonia Virginica) Purslane family
(click on the picture to enlarge and print for coloring. Scroll down for photograph)

Preferred Habitat: Moist woods, open groves, low meadows.

Flowers: White, veined with pink, or all pink, the veinings of deeper shade. Each blossom is on the end of a curving slender pedicel (a smaller, usually weaker stem that attaches some types of blossoms to the main plant stem) - several blooms may form a loose raceme (cluster of flowers) at the end of the stems.

Most flowers have a small green, leaf-like ring around the petals at the base of the flower blossom. This is called the calyx. The green bits that appear to be leaves make up the calyx. They are not really leaves; they are called sepals. The calyx of the spring beauty has just two sepals. They are shaped something like a small boat, perhaps as a fish might see its silhouette from beneath the water.

Spring beauties all have five petals and five stamens (stems are small, slender, threadlike stems inside the flower. At the end of the stamens you will find the anther, which is where the pollen is).

The Spring Beauty stem is slender and breaks easily. It is 6 to 12 inches long. The root is tuberous - that means sort of like a potato in shape and style, but you should not dig up this spring flower just to look at the root.

The leaves are opposite- that means right across from each other, and the pairs of leaves begin growing just above the ground. The upper leaves are lance shaped, and smooth edged (something like wide blades of grass). The leaves are somewhat thick.

Flowering Season: March-May
Geography: Nova Scotia and far westward; south to Georgia and Texas.

Further description: The Spring Beauty sometimes grows in large patches, but at other times you may find on a few together growing on banks and around the bases of trees. Before the flowers unfold, the stalk is curved, but as the blooms open, the stalk straightens and raises the dainty blossom up to get the sunshine. After the flower withers the slender stalk droops again.

Dainty clusters of these delicate starry blossoms mostly turned in one direction expand in the sunshine only, like their more showy cousins, the portulaca or moss roses (which many people grow in their flower gardens). At night and during cloudy, stormy weather when their benefactors are not flying, the claytonias economically close their petals to protect their nectar and pollen from rain and pilferers.
Pick these fragile beauties and the whole plant droops and the blossoms close with indignation.

Very early in the spring, a race is run with the hepatica, arbutus, adder's tongue, blood root, squirrel corn, and anemone for the honor of being the earliest wild flower, and although John Burroughs and Dr. Abbott have had the exceptional experience of finding the claytonia even before the hepatica, certainly the earliest spring blossom worthy of the name in the Middle and New England States, is of course the rank skunk cabbage, whose name is snobbishly excluded from the list of fair competitors, even though it blooms before the others have even begun.

Whether the petals of the spring beauty are white or pink, they are always exquisitely marked with pink lines converging near the base and ending in a yellow blotch to serve as pathfinders for the female bumblebees and the little brown bombylius (the 'bee-fly'), among other pollen carriers.

(Above information adapted, rewritten, and/or combined from these two sources: Nature's Garden An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and Their Insect Visitors, with Colored Plates and Many Other Illustrations Photographed Directly from Nature by Henry Troth and A.R. Dugmore By Neltje Blanchan

The Nature Encyclopedia, edited by G. Clyde Fisher,published in 1921, 1923, 1927

There are two types of Spring Beauty:
C virginica and C caroliniana: both perennials are common in many parts of the east, extending southward to the Carolinas and westward, the latter being found as far west as the Rockies, while a closely allied species with short stem leaves- C lanceolata- continues to the coast. There are also some annual and at least one Alpine species found in the extreme west. While our two eastern species are so nearly alike as to be regarded among non botanists as identical, there are some distinguishing marks which render them easily identified. The principal of these is the foliage of C virginica is long and grass-like; that of C caroliniana is much broader, ovate or almost spatulate. The latter too, generally produces slightly larger flowers, though in smaller clusters. Popular Science News

The name claytonia honors a London born physician, chemist, and botanist who joined his father in Virginia in the 1700s, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life, dying in 1773.

Longfellow wrote of these flowers in his poem Hiawatha:

Where the fire had smoked and smouldered
Saw the earliest flower of Spring time
Saw the Beauty of the Spring time
Saw the Miskodeed in blossom

Miskodeed is , or at least was believed to be, an Indian name for the Spring Beauty.


If somehow you accidentally come across some spring beauty stems and blossoms that have recently been uprooted (perhaps the baby got to them before you could stop her, or perhaps your dog's chain yanked up a few stems as it raced past, or perhaps some bird plucked at a juicy bug that held on to the stems very tightly), the flowers will open up again if they are put in water and placed where the sun shines on them.

In case you are wondering, no, we haven't spotted any yet. We won't be seeing them until sometime in mid-April, at soonest. Pip took that picture last year or the year before, and it really doesn't quite do justice to the delicate pink lines tracing out from the center of the flower to the edges of the petals.

Previous post of things to do while studying Spring Beauty (including a quilt square) here.

More From Graves of Academe

"We tolerate the educational establishment the same way that we tolerate the children themselves, and we therefore extend to the guidance counselors and curriculum facilitators the same immunities that we extend to the children, the harmless children. They are all together - over there - aside from the mainstream of real life. But anyone who will look long and carefully at what happens "over there" will sooner or later notice something that doesn't seem funny. He may begin to suspect that perhaps there are some consequences to child's play, and that maybe the children aren't so harmless after all, to say nothing of the counselors and facilitators. It may begin to dawn on such an observer that the children in school actually are people and not merely yet-to-be-formed raw materials who will start to be people after the last blackboard has been washed. Where once he tolerated the silliness of the schools as a temporary and sectarian custom in a small fragment of real life, he now sees that the habits and attitudes so earnestly inculcated in children by silly people will almost certainly not evaporate on commencement day. And why should they? Habits and attitudes never evaporate. We may sometimes change them consciously, but only after skillful observation and controlled thoughtfulness, which are generally not among the habits and attitudes that children acquire in school. Those are the habits of literacy. The attentive and patient observer, therefore, must come to see at last that school is not "something else over there." School is America. If you want to predict the future of our land, go to school and look around.

"Schools do not fail. They succeed. Children always learn in school. Always and every day. When their rare and tiny compositions are "rated holistically" without regard for separate "aspects" like spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or even organization, they learn. They learn that mistakes bring no consequences. They learn that their teachers were only pretending in all those lessons on spelling and punctuation. They learn that there are no rewards for good work, and that they who run the race all win. They learn that what they win is a rubber-stamped smiling face, exactly as valuable as what they might lose, which is nothing, nothing at all. They learn that the demands of life are easily satisfied with little labor, if any, and that a show of effort is what really counts. They learn to pay attention to themselves, their wishes and fears, their likes and dislikes, their idle whims and temperamental tendencies, all of which, idolized as "values" and personological variables, are far more important than "mere achievement" in subject matter. The "whole child" comes first, and no one learns that lesson better than the children. Just as you can predict the future by going to school, you can decipher the past by looking-around. All those thoughtless, unskilled, unproductive, self-indulgent, and eminently dupable Americans - where have they been and what did they learn there?"

Richard Mitchell, THE GRAVES OF ACADEME

Ephemera for the Scrapbookers

I meant to post these pictures before, and maybe I did, but I came across them while looking for something else. When my uncle was much younger he had a penpal in England, and this was a birthday card from his penpal sometime in the fifties.

Watering Houseplants

Going to be out of town for a few days and worried about a plant? Fill a milk carton with water, put the lid on *tightly* Take a pin and poke a hole down towards the very bottom. Set this down in the pot with your plant or out in the garden next to it. Now fiddle with the lid, loosening it until you see that pinhole opening begin to drip, very slowly, giving your plant a steady supply of water. This does not work well in windy areas, because as the water level lowers, the milk carton blows away. I have thought of burying it half way down near a plant that is going to need water while I am gone, but I haven't tried that.

For inside plants (and some outside plants) fill a jar or pitcher of water, put it near your plant, then put a strip of terry cloth (or other rag) between the water supply and the plant- one end in the water, one end on top of the dirt in the pot. The water source should be slightly higher than the plant pot so that water can wick down the cloth, moistening the dirt.

It's worked for me.=) Other WFM tips at Rocks in My Dryer.

Excitement.

Today the soy bean field across the road caught fire. It wouldn't have been a really big deal except the winds today were HARD, and so it kept on spreading and spreading across this field and into the cornfield next to it, which had twice as much stubble for it to burn on. So, the fire department was called upon, and they courageously put out the fire, and we all watched. It was interesting, especially for The Boy here and the four boys who were visiting today. They were much thrilled when they waved and screamed at the fire truck as it was leaving and the nice men inside let off the siren a few times for them. (Just a note- the boys were much noisier than the siren. Seriously.)

Still learning...

... This is one of those exhausting school weeks where projects for all the classes come together and collide at once, leaving the poor student dizzy in the midst of papers, exams, and books to be read.

After getting home today, I spent a long while reading a book on German campaigns in Russia during World War II. This type of reading, while worthwhile, is also demoralizing and depressing. One does not want to go to bed with that type of reading on the brain. For someone who got up at 5 to get an early start on school things, though, bed is sounding very good. I decided to find something entertaining and mind-dulling to do for a bit before hitting the sack.

*cough* A confession is on the horizon...

I'm girly enough to love browsing through places like Kohls and Old Navy online just to see what I could get if it were somehow feasible or reasonable to splurge on clothes from those places. Because they do make cute clothes these days and I have a weakness for cute clothes.
Tonight while I was browsing, the Boy came over to look over my shoulder. When I reached this skirt, he was there with commentary that only a guy could view as supportive to a gal's ego.

Me: Oooh - isn't that cute?!
This was addressed mainly to the Equuschick, who was nearby, as I knew better than to expect spasms of delight from my brother. He had spasms of his own, though...
Him: Actually, it reminds me of a lampshade.
* a pause as his brain races through the ramifications of how he might have hurt his sister's feelings*
Another comment, very sincerely given, as he pats me on the back: But that's OK! I love lampshades!

Rather a sad post...

XXXVIII

The winds out of the west land blow,
My friends have breathed them there;
Warm with the blood of lads I know
Comes east the sighing air.

It fanned their temples, filled their lungs,
Scattered their forelocks free;
My friends made words of it with tongues
That talk no more to me.

Their voices, dying as they fly,
Thick on the wind are sown;
The names of men blow soundless by,
My fellows' and my own.

Oh lads, at home I heard you plain,
But here your speech is still,
And down the sighing wind in vain
You hollo from the hill.

The wind and I, we both were there,
But neither long abode;
Now through the friendless world we fare
And sigh upon the road.

Poem from "A Shropshire Lad," by A.E. Housman

Blog-Cleaning

I have been fiddling about with small things here and there on the blog, cleaning up the links on the side-bar, adding some, taking away some that are defunct, tidying them up, putting them alphabetical order or reverse ABC order just to be different. I also added a 'recent comments' widget that I am very pleased about, off to the left, and probably it is the most obvious of the new changes.

If you read us through a feed, you probably (I THINK?) won't have noticed. If I left somebody off the blogroll that should be there, let me know. I also FINALLY got around to adding a few of my favorite left bloggers- they are under the News and Views listing. Can you say procrastination? Of course you can. How do we spell procrastination? D-E-P-U-T-Y-H-E-A-D-M-I-S-T-R-E-S-S....

I don't link to anybody who regularly engages in gratuitous profanity, Not Safe for Work (NSF) photographs of clothing malfunctions, and sleazy stuff. But I hope it's obvious that not all the newsworthy posts you might read in those links are going to be free of anything anybody might object to.

On a purely subjective 'safe for kids' scale, I would say our blog and the links are safer than google, but nothing is as safe as the parents' own previewing, and we aren't all going to agree on what is an isn't 'safe' or even how important that 'safe' label is. So please do consider this blog and the links as a tool, while remembering (as I am sure everybody who reads here does remember) there is no substitute for parental involvement.=)

Updated to add:

For those wanting to know how they can add this feature to a blogspot blog, I am not sure that I can translate my uber-mad techno-geek skilz into the common speech, but I will try. You should probably take notes. Here's what I did:

1. Google How to add recent comments feature to blogspot.
2. Click on the first link. That wasn't it.
3. Click on another link with instructions.
4. Followed instructions. Failed to have comments show up on Blogspot.
5. Clicked on another link, which had this link embedded.

6. Followed painful technical instructions carefully. Had to call up esoteric minutiae such as the blogs name and how many recent comments I wanted to show up on the sidebar.

7. Hit publish.

8. Called 911 to have the fire department come out and put out a run away grass fire across the road. But that's another blog post and not necessary to add the recent comments widget to your blog. You can skip this last step and I am sure you will be fine.

Richard Mitchell on Education and Bad Writing

"Bad writing is like any other form of crime; most of it is unimaginative and tiresomely predictable. The professor of education seeking a grant and the neighborhood lout looking for a score simply go and do as their predecessors have done. The one litanizes about carefully unspecified developments in philosophy, psychology, and communications theory, and the other sticks up the candy store. The analogy is not perfect, of course, for the average lout seldom nets more than thirty-five dollars per stickup, and he even runs some little risk of getting caught. Nevertheless, the writing and the stickup are equally routine and boring. It's not often that we find ourselves admiring these criminals, therefore. Once in a while, however, some unusually creative caper pleases us with its novelty or its audacity. So, too, with the works of the grant-seekers, perhaps because creative force is so much less common in grant-seekers than in other culprits. We turn now to just such an enterprise. If it were only a little bit less illiterate, it would seem to have been written by someone who had read deeply in Luther and even Nietzsche and had decided to sin boldly and to hell with Sklavenmoral. We find here none of that meager, mealymouthed obsequiousness that piously assures us that teaching and learning have now been shown - really - to have something to do with one another. That's the tepid prayer of a half-baked scholastic. What follows is the work of a veritable academic dervish:

Project WEY Washington Environmental Yard (1972) is a manifestation of the intercommunal, process-oriented, interage, interdisciplinary type of change vehicle toward an environmental ethic from the school-village level to a pan-perspective. The urban focus of the project as the medium has been inestimably vital since it is generally speaking the message. Situated near the central downtown area of the city of Berkeley and a mere block from civic center, Washington Elementary School courts the thousands of daily onlookers/passersby (20,000 autos!) traveling on a busy boulevard with easy access to the physical transformation and social interactions (at a distance to close-up) a virtual open space laboratory. It has served evocatively as a catalyst for values confrontation, even through a soft mode of visual/physical data exchange system. Since 1971, the dramatic changes have represented a process tool for the development of environmental/educational value encounters on-site/off-site, indoors/outdoors and numerous other bipolar entities and dyads. The clients represent a mirror of the macro-world just as the children and parents of the school reflect more than thirty different ethnic groups as one of numerous dimensions of diversity.

"It is difficult to comment on this writing, and dangerous as well, since too much attention to this sort of thing may well overthrow the mind. The earlier passage is at least decipherable, but this is a form of contemporary glossolalia and not to be grasped by the reason alone. It requires the gift of faith as well...

"...It would be a polite euphemism to call the writer of that barbarous nonsense an illiterate. The word just doesn't do the job. The writer, however, is a university professor supported by taxpayers. He has degrees in education, and has satisfied others of that clan that he is worthy to sit in their company. What did they ask of him? How did they decide that he was, indeed, worthy to profess? Was it his vast knowledge of his subject? Obviously not; his "subject" is a non-discipline. Was it his power to communicate the nonexistent knowledge of his non-discipline? Well, yes. In a way, yes, that is. It must have been his power to sound as though he might well be communicating some unknowledge in a non-discipline. They must have thought that he could, indeed, call spirits from the vasty deep. His prose, like the thinking it reveals, is full of cloudy suggestions of something beyond the range of mere cognition. He has been given power, if not over the entities and dyads, certainly over the ignorant and superstitious."

Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can SayBut, after all, the barbarous writer above is credentialed, which is all that matters. Right?

I not only disagree that this credentialing is important for homeschoolers, I believe it would be detrimental.

About Authors

There are certain authors of whom personally we know little, but
of whose works we cannot ever know enough, such a one for example
as Shakespeare; others of whose lives we know much, but for whose
works we can have but scant affection: such is Doctor Johnson;
others who are intimate friends in all their aspects, as
Goldsmith and Charles Lamb; yet others, who do not quite come
home to our bosoms, whose writings we cannot entirely approve,
but for whom and for whose works we find a soft place somewhere
in our hearts, and such a one is Anthony Trollope.

William Teignmouth Shore, introduction to Trollopes The Three Clerks

Vaccines

Michelle Malkin has an excellent and balanced (unlike Glenn Reynolds' recent 'bad parents' post) on vaccines.

For many years the best way to get polio in this country was to be exposed to the polio vaccine either directly or through a recently vaccinated child. Our local hospital was one of the last in the country, it seemed, to switch to the dead vaccine. So I had the frustrating experience of going there and requesting the dead vaccine only to be treated to a long harangue about how ignorant I was, how stupid it was to be worried about the live vaccine, how much better the live vaccine was, how they used it because it was superior, yadda, yadda, yadda. I stuck to my guns because this was my sixth child instead of my first. ONE MONTH later, almost to the day, the hospital had switched to the dead vaccine. A friend of ours with a baby just a few weeks younger than our sixth child was concerned for a number of reasons- this was her first child, and she worried that starting her baby on the live vaccine and finishing up with the dead vaccine might be counterproductive. She also worried because she'd BELIEVED everything the hospital had told her about the inferiority of the dead vaccine, and now, in shades of 1984 Newspeak, she was being told the exact opposite by the same people, who still implied that she was an idiot for doubting them even a little bit.

Glenn also claims that if the vaccines were really a health threat, the companies would be sued, showing he's not done his homework:

The Committee on Government Reform discovered that 3 out of the 5 FDA advisory committee members who voted to approve the deadly rotavirus vaccine in December, 1997 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies. Remarkably, those same companies were developing different versions of the vaccine.

Ditto for 4 out of the 8 CDC committee members in June, 1998.

The vaccine was pulled from the market after it was found to cause severe bowel obstructions. But you can bet your life - and you very well might - that the pharmaceutical companies are doing just fine, thank you.

Why? Because no matter how much they harm the public with vaccines, we can't sue them. In order to manufacture the junk, pharmaceutical companies wrangled a deal to shield them from lawsuits. The feds set-up a national fund to handle vaccine-damage claims.

So if you're 1 of the estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people a year who experience an adverse vaccine reaction (15% are considered "serious" or "life-threatening"), go ahead. Sue the fund.

Vintage Cookery, UK style

One of the little treasures the HG delivered to me from England is a sweet little gift from Baleboosteh, a book called Dinner Building by the delightfully named W. Teignmouth Shore. It's a chatty, friendly sort of cookbook, published in 1929.

He refers to cream cheese as 'Miss Cream Cheese,' to give you some idea of just how chatty and friendly he is. I think anthropomorphizing one's food is deliciously quirky.

Some of you will remember my other postings from vintage cookbooks and housewifery books, and how we have marbled at the cooking methods and times for many foods in days of yore- basically, for an authentic historic dish, boil it until there is neither flavor or color left, toss the water and eat the resulting mush.

Shore notes this method of the past and sometimes still contemporaneous practice, as he tells an 'obstinate friend' that he must surely 'regret the many delightful flavours and relishes which you forego by boiling your foods.'. Shore calls the resulting boiled mush 'rubbish.'

Says Shore, "It is a wrench to realise that one of the principle methods of cooking, unthinkingly pursued by ourselves and our forerunners, is bad. Boiling is bad. Is it not obvious that it must be so? To boil fish, meat or vegetable is at best to make soup or broth of it. And then you go and throw the soup away! When you are making stock, what do you do? Exactly the opposite. You boil all the good out of the meat or bones, or what-not, and throw them away. Vegetables are of food value because in varying amounts they contain nitrogen, sugar, starches, salts and other matters essential to the maintenance of good health. Otherwise they are not of much account; little more than pleasant tastes. Brussels sprouts, cabbages, carrots, parsnips, leeks, turnips- indeed, the whole lot of winter and summer vegetables, and in particular potatoes, lose, when boiled, most of their beautiful flavors and practically all of their health values."

He says those who have only tasted boiled potatoes have tasted only potato and water, not the potato at all, and the only two ways to prepare and eat a potato are steamed or roasted in its jacket.

Potatoes, by the way, are Mr. Murphy. To prepare, you must 'wash or lightly scrub Mr. Murphy, whether he is young or old, and then steam him, which will take some three times as long as boiling him. But thus he will be superlatively tasty and retain all his nourishing qualities, from which his flavour is derived. And, remember, you can be cooking one or two other thing with the same steam produced by the same heat. "What delicious potatoes!" your friends will say, and you will agree with them. I refuse to eat 'boileds' myself, because I know the delight and the satisfactory value of 'steameds.' I may be a goose, but I am not going to stuff myself with rubbish."

About picnicking- which he calls 'hampering,' he says 'it is a treat to meet a sandwich which is not tongue or ham or cucumber.' We have only had tongue once, and it wasn't in a sandwich. I thought it tasted lovely, but since we had prepared it ourselves, none of us could get beyond the fact that it was, in fact, a giant TONGUE, from which tastebuds, gristle, and thick skin had had to be removed. In order to speed up sandwich making, he suggests keeping on hand a spread made of butter mixed with salt, cayenne, grey pepper, prepared mustard, and a dash of lemon juice. In the whole of the sandwich chapter there is not a single mention of mayonnaise, though anchovy butter is used often (it is also mixed with the yolks of boiled eggs to make what must be a British version of deviled eggs). The HG says every meal she had in England was delicious, and she was surprised at how everywhere we tend to use mayonnaise, the English used butter. But only the best butter, I am sure (that was a quote that insisted it wanted to go just there, in fact, the HG said that while it was different, she quite liked it).

Favorite Dessert

I am supposed to choose a dessert for a special dinner in the near future, and I am just at a loss. Do you have a favorite dessert? Have a link or recipe to share?
All submissions must meet the following criteria:

Be sweet
And Yummy.

Spring!

With all the snow and freezing weather we've been having lately, I was beginning to think that Spring would NEVER come to Indiana. Today, however, I found proof that it is indeed on its way, and possibly even half way here. While walking the dogs through the woods, I found tiny daffodil plants. Unfortunately, I didn't have the camera. Taking pictures with a leash in both hands is a bit difficult, so I don't bring the camera with me when I'm walking the dogs. Next time I take a walk dog-less, though, I plan on bringing the camera and taking pictures of all the signs of new life.

This is one of my favorite hymns!!

Hark, My Soul, It Is the Lord!
words by William Cowper
music by John Dykes

Hark, my soul, it is the Lord!
’Tis thy Savior, hear His Word;
Jesus speaks, and speaks to thee,
“Say, poor, sinner, lovest thou Me?”

“I delivered thee when bound,
And, when bleeding, healed thy wound;
Sought thee wandering, set thee right,
Turned thy darkness into light.

“Can a woman’s tender care
Cease toward the child she bare?
Yes, she may forgetful be,
Yet will I remember thee.

“Mine is an unchanging love,
Higher than the heights above,
Deeper than the depths beneath,
Free and faithful, strong as death.

“Thou shalt see My glory soon,
When the work of grace is done;
Partner of My throne shalt be:
Say, poor sinner, lovest thou Me?”

Lord, it is my chief complaint
That my love is weak and faint;
Yet I love Thee, and adore:
O for grace to love Thee more!

You can listen to it here.

Oh, the shame.

The FYB and FYG are studying Sir Francis Drake and Queen Elizabeth and all that, and the DHM sent them to ask The Equuschick what Queen Elizabeth's pet nickname for Sir Francis Drake had been.

She sent them to The Equuschick because for a very long period in her adolescence she was the Recognized Expert on Sir Francis Drake. The Spanish Armada, the expeditions, Drake's gallantry (and yes, even his womanizing), were all put in a little box of her intellectual obsessions with Komodo Dragons and other random items.


But The Equuschick's feet, they were of clay. For now she is 23 and 13 was ten years ago and when the FYB asked, she could not remember. She had to look it up.

The pain. The humiliation. The sense of disloyalty to a former hero.

My dear Pirate. How could The Equuschick have forgotten? She was so charmed. So utterly delighted. Faithful courtier and grateful queen. What a unique relationship that must have been. The Equuschick spent six months of her early teen-age years exchanging e-mails with her grandfather under the guise of Queen Elizabeth, and he was My dear Pirate.

See, look. This is why The Equuschick never wanted to grow up. You forget things that were once so special to you. You enter the Adult Land of Bills and Jobs and Dull Routines, and suddenly all the innocent pleasure you once took in addressing your grandfather as My Dear Pirate is forgotten.

Some People Commit Crimes, So Investigate EVerybody

Stephen Downes continues the discussion on homeschooling at his blog with a new post. Here are the points that stood out for me:

When he said, "My own criticism of homeschooling has always been in line with the ruling by the court: it is a form of child abuse to subject children to an education at the hands of a person who is manifestly unable to provide it," and others (including me) read that as equating homeschooling with abuse, that was because we didn't understand the meaning of the word 'it:'

I said: "it is a form of child abuse to subject children to an education at the hands of a person who is manifestly unable to provide it." Hanley and others are misreading the word 'it' to mean "homeschooling". This is an error.

I am using the word 'it' in the sense "It is wrong to steal." Or "It is a crime to steal." This should be clear to any reader. Substituting 'home schooling' for 'it' in my sentence is grammatically absurd.

I hope we will have no more accusations that I am equating 'home schooling' with abuse. This is a transparently incorrect reading of my assertion.

I don't think it was as 'transparent' as he says, but I am glad I misunderstood him. I hope he will acknowledge that he is misrepresenting the homeschoolers who have engaged in this discussion when about the specific case involved, he says:

Why home schoolers would want to leap to the defense of the family in this case is beyond me, as it appears to be in every way an appalling mistreatment of the children involved.

While I am sure there are some somewhere, in reading the responses at Stephen's blog, Dana's, and my own, there has not been one single homeschooler in this discussion defending the family in the case at all, let alone 'leaping' to their defense. The legal remedy being sought by every homeschooling group I know of is not even to overturn the ruling, but merely to limit it to where it belongs, with this particular homeschooling family.

Dana (and others) have pointed out that research shows no connection between teacher certification and ability to teach, and that there is no correlation between teacher certification and how well students do. Stephen can't believe it:

On the whole, this assertion is implausible. While we agree that certified plumbers may be incompetent, and that uncertified plumbers may be competent, on the whole, in general, we take certification to be a reliable indicator of competence. And this belief is reflected in our behaviour: on the whole, we opt for certified plumbers, certified dentists, and certified doctors.

He does cite other studies and he gets into specifics, which you can read there.

I think that since homeschooled kids consistently score above public schooled counterparts, the noncertification of their parents should be a nonissue. However, for those who like more numbers, NHERI has some:

* The home-educated typically score 15 to 30 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests.



* Homeschool students score above average on achievement tests regardless of their parents’ level of formal education or their family’s household income.



* Whether homeschool parents were ever certified teachers is not related to their children’s academic achievement.



* Degree of state control and regulation of homeschooling is not related to academic achievement.

Stephen says:

If parents are not even going to subject themselves to a literacy test - something that would be important, given the levels of functional illiteracy in the United States - then how can we know they are even able to teach their children to read.

A high number of those functional illiterates are, in fact, HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES with a diploma (according to a homeschooling mom in Stephen's very province, only 60 percent of their high school students graduate with that basic ability). And there are far more functional illiterates graduating from our high schools than there are home-schoolers, so I think it would be more effective to focus on a known and proven problem than a hypothetical and utterly unproven issue. Nobody has ever shown that illiteracy is a homeschooling problem.

We cannot depend on some mysterious 'self-selection' mechanism to defend children against parents who would use the cover of homeschooling to perpetuate the sort of abuse cited in the court case. We need some sort of evaluation, some sort of assessment. Something that would indicate to us, incidentally, that the 'involved' parent can also fill some of the functions of the teachers they are replacing.

Certification seems like a very small requirement, for such high stakes.

I have a number of areas of disagreement with this, but I find it puzzling that a government institution that cannot successfully regulate itself, that has a failure rate of anywhere from 25 to 40 percent is supposed to be given the authority to regulate and certify the parents who achieve much better results.

The problem is, there is a certain number of parent-child relationships that are not healthy. "During FFY 2005, an estimated 1,460 children died due to child abuse or neglect." A certain number of parents who will not seek alternatives, even if they are failing. A certain number of parents who will not even be able to recognize that they are failing.
The law must be made, not just for you, but for those other people. We need to know that you are not one of those people. 1,460 children died due to child abuse or neglect. Is it too much to ask for some guarantee that your children will not be among those statistics?

How many of those children were *already* in the public school system, already even part of a social worker's caseload, already red-flagged as risks? I would say almost all of them. So in what way would more regulation of homeschoolers be a remedy?
And no, the fact that other people have committed crimes does not justify exercising prior restraint and interfering in the lives and homes of innocent people who home educate their children. You have to have some reason to suspect that a specific family might be at risk. We don't issue nationwide blood tests because some people do drugs. We don't have blanket search warrants of all citizens because we know some citizens are criminals. And we don't certify all homeschooling parents because 1460 children (who were probably NOT homeschooled) were slain by people who were supposed to care for them, horrific as that situation is.

Lest We Forget

Dr. Alexis Carrel, a French-American Nobel Prize winner and an influential man (he won staff with The Rockefeller Institute from the beginning) published a book titled Man: The Unknown in 1935. Within three years it had been translated into 9 languages. According to chapter two of the Men Behind Hitler:

In his last chapter "The Remaking of Man", Carrel repeatedly looks to Eugenics as the solution to the ills of society. He suggests the removal of the mentally ill and the criminal by small euthanasia institutions which were to be equipped with suitable gases:

"There remains the unsolved problem of the immense number of defectives and criminals. They are an enormous burden for the part of the population that has remained normal. As already pointed out, gigantic sums are now required to maintain prisons and insane asylums and protect the public against gangsters and lunatics. Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? The abnormal prevent the development of the normal. This fact must be squarely faced. Why should society not dispose of the criminals and the insane in a more economical manner? We cannot go on trying to separate the responsible from the irresponsible, punish the guilty, spare those who although having committed a crime, are thought to be morally innocent. We are not capable of judging men. However the community must be protected against troublesome and dangerous elements. How can this be done? Certainly not by building larger and more comfortable prisons, just as real health will not be promoted by larger and more scientific hospitals. In Germany the Government has taken energetic measures against the multiplication of inferior types, the insane and criminals. The ideal solution would be to eliminate all such individuals as soon as they proved dangerous. Criminality and insanity can be prevented only by a better knowledge of man, by eugenics, by changes in education and in social conditions. Meanwhile criminals have to be dealt with effectively. Perhaps prisons should be abolished. They could be replaced by smaller and less expensive institutions. The conditioning of petty criminals with the whip or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay in hospital would probably suffice to insure order. Those who have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts. Modern society should not hesitate to organise itself with reference to the normal individual. Philosophical systems and sentimental prejudices must give way before such a necessity. The development of human personality is the ultimate purpose of civilisation."

Quote

Regarding the 'creative writing' courses in our colleges, one must add that they tend to destroy the audience of literature. They do so by promoting into writers, and often opinionative writers, the susceptible but uncreative persons who might otherwise be the best readers.

Van Wyck Brooks, From a Writer's Notebook

A travel journal

For my birthday several years ago, the Equuschick gave me a travel journal with an encouraging note inside saying, "One day, the sun will shine on you in foreign lands. And there will be great rejoicing. :-)" Seven years went by before that statement became reality, and the journal waited patiently (more patiently than I did) in my room. It was, of course, one of the first things I packed when preparing for this trip.

My first day in London was a long one, understandably. My plane landed at 6:30 a.m. London time. I walked around London (these lions along the Thames are from that day's walk) and visited Westminster Abbey. Although I was excited about seeing Ye Olde Tombs of Kings and Queens and Such (and they are well worth the viewing), I wanted just as badly to find the memorials for William Wilberforce, Pitt the Younger, etc. And this is where being an interested visitor to a place can really pay off. I found a couple of the people I wanted, but hadn't yet found "everybody." I finally asked one of the staff members there, explaining that I'd found Wilberforce, Buxton, Clarkson, and others but that I still having trouble finding Pitt. This wonderful person showed me the spot of his memorial (he's above the doorway, which means he's way too high for this short person to see without craning her neck!) and then took me behind a cordoned-off area to see the memorial of another abolitionist... the name of which fails me entirely because of jet lag. That was an instance where I could have used the journal to more effect. Anyway, quite a bit of security and monitoring equipment is kept in this corner of the Abbey, and so you're not allowed back there unless an official someone takes you. And she did, bless her. :-)

An Observation on Life

The Equuschick acknowledges she is only 23. It isn't as if she's observed a lot of life. But it seems that this is precisely the time in her life when she ought to be recording the most observations and taking notes, learning who she wants to be and how to get there.

Naturally it is a never-ending process, and it is never too late or too early to begin to look for patterns in the tapestry of life and character.


In light of all this, therefore, The Equuschick should like to make the following observation.

It seems to her that whatever habits you cultivate (intentionally or otherwise) during a time of peace and tranquility are precisely those habits you're going to fall back on most heavily in times of crisis, because that's all you'll know. And the implications of this one observation are terrifying.

You cannot afford to say, when your path is smooth and your life is tranquil, "Aw, there's not too much at stake here. I can relax, let my discipline slide, and coast a bit." When your road is smooth, you must still exercise your character like you would a muscle- Or you will forget how to walk.

You cannot drop your sword, no matter how peaceful the moment. You will need your sword again later, so fence with it now. You must practice for war in times of peace. Otherwise your inexperience with the sword will cost you the victory.

It is not simply a question of procrastinating. It is true that you must make your hay while the sun shines, and indeed, can only make your hay while the sun shines. But if during the off-season you've been on the couch watching T.V and eating bonbons, you'll have forgotten the art of hay-making by the time the sun finally returns.



When you stub your toe, you cannot afford to say "I have only stubbed my toe, and the worst I'm going to say is darn. So I'll let my self-control go." Never mind what it was you actually said, if you said "darn" because you surrendered your self-control you're in far worse shape than someone who was tempted to use the f-word but controlled himself. When the two of you face a real crisis together, he'll be the one whose character has been prepared. You'll be in a world of hurt.

When you're having a good day and you're ahead of schedule (oh goodness how The Equuschick is preaching to herself), you cannot afford to say "I don't want to finish this today and I have time, so I'm going to sit for a bit." Again, this is about more than just procrastination. You may actually have time, today. But a crisis will come tomorrow and you won't have time for a break, and tragically for you, you won't have the work ethic to carry a task to the end because you haven't practiced for war in times of peace.



The point is, when it comes to character you cannot afford to have an off-season at all. When a crisis comes and you'll need it the most, it will be too weak to support you.

The Equuschick only hopes she hasn't learned this lesson too late.

The Political Jokes Just Keep on Coming

This is totally hilarious. If you've not seen it yet, it's must see stuff.

Here is how Madame Clinton recently described her 1996 trip to Bosnia:

I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia, and as Togo said, there was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn't go, so send the First Lady. That’s where we went. I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.

If it was too dangerous for the president, send the First Lady. And the First Daughter, too, it seems. And other little girls. Check out the video at the link above. It's genuinely snort-worthy.

Failures vs Full Working Order

This is powerful reading. Playright Tom Stoddard, born in Czechoslovakia, moved to England, and struggled with embarrassment over the literati on the left:

I was as aware as most people were that not everything in the gardens of the West was lovely and of course we didn’t know – one never knows – the half of it. But when in August 1968 the armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia, an act which was simply the ongoing occupation of eastern Europe writ bold, my embarrassment at our agit-prop mummers’ “revolution” turned to revulsion.

What repelled me was the implied conflation of two categorically different cases. The “free West”, God knew, was all too often disfigured by corruption and injustice but the abuses represented, and were acknowledged to represent, a failure of the model. In the East, though, the abuses represented the model in full working order.

A small incident which must have confirmed some people’s worst suspicions about me occurred when I was asked to sign a protest against “censorship” after a newspaper declined to publish somebody’s manifesto. “But that isn’t censorship,” I said. “That’s editing. In Russia you go to prison for possessing a copy of Animal Farm. That’s censorship.”

What a breath of common sense. Read it all.

Delightful Housewarming Gift

I love this! It's from an anonymous comment to the Frugal Feasting and Fun post, and I think it's a perfectly lovely idea:

It's traditional among my friends, when someone moves into a new place, if they have nothing, we have a potluck at the new house, and everyone brings a food item AND his/her own place setting (plate, fork, knife, spoon, etc). The place settings are washed after dinner and left behind, so the new household now has enough dishes for a party.

I like it so much that it makes me want to go find somebody just moving into a new home!

Another 100 Great Books List

The House and Home A Practical Book By Lyman Abbott
The House and Home A Practical Book By Lyman Abbott

The House and Home A Practical Book By Lyman Abbott

The House and Home A Practical Book By Lyman Abbott

The House and Home A Practical Book By Lyman Abbott

*****************

The House and Home A Practical Book By Lyman Abbott

The House and Home A Practical Book By Lyman Abbott

Some People's Children

Years ago when we had five children and Pip, the youngest, was two, we had the children's picture taken professionally. When I say it was an ordeal, you do not know the half of it.

The photographer put the three youngest children on a table- Pip and Jenny are 17 months apart, and The Cherub is very small for her age and was the same size as Jenny. Equuschick stood on a stool behind them on one side, and the HG stood behind them on the other.

The Cherub, you may recall, is retarded, wears leg braces, and at that age was as cute as a bug's ear (not that she's not still cute, but she's older now and it is different). The photographer would get the girls all situated, posted, turned just as she wanted them, and then she would walk back to the camera. As soon as she turned her back the Cherub would quickly reach back and give the EC a poke just hard enough to knock her off balance. Or she would learn sharply to one side, shoving Pip hard with her shoulder. By the time the photographer turned around, The Cherub was innocently back in position, looking blandly at the camera, a slight, and deceptively cherubic, smile on her lips. EC or Pip were, to the photographer's eyes, the naughty children squirming, wriggling, and messing up her arrangement.

We did reprimand the Cherub for shoving, poking, pinching, and pushing her sisters, but I think since the photographer never saw anything but the Cherub's sweet smile and perfectly posed person, she just didn't believe us. She thought we were mean. After a painful hour or so, we finally got a reasonably decent picture, and then the photographer insisted, somewhat defiantly, that she wanted to do an extra series of photos of just The Cherub. Since we were only there because we had a certificate for one free 8X10, and we didn't have to pay for anything else, we let her. My husband took the other four children outside to play.

And for the next half hour I maliciously sat idly by, smiling sweetly and neglecting my motherly duties while the Cherub proceeded to sabotage every effort by that photographer to get a good picture of her. The photographer would pose the Cherub nicely just where she wanted her, return to her camera and the Cherub would smirk and scoot over just a few inches away from where the photographer wanted her to be. The photographer would sigh (first quietly, gradually more loudly each time), return and repose the Cherub. She would say, 'don't you want to sit here nicely for a good picture?' And the Cherub who could not understand a word of it, but always says yes to every question you ask her (including, "would you like me to pull your hair? Bite your nose? jump up and down on your feet?"- questions I ask to demonstrated to disbelieving acquaintances that I do in fact know what I am talking about when I tell them that the Cherub says yes to every question not because she understands them, but because she has learned that people never ask her questions unless they mean to do something pleasant), would nod in seemingly vigorous agreement, and then smirk and spoil the shot as soon as the woman turned her back again.

She never did cooperate, and since the photographer had previously made it very clear that she disapproved of my efforts to get The Cherub's cooperation, I saw no reason to subject myself to her further disapproval. After all, it was her time, and it was at her insistence that we were there in the first place.

The photographer's smile grew stiffer, her patience visibly evaporated even as my own stretched and expanded luxuriously, basking in the warm glow of schadenfreude. It wasn't very nice of me, but it was fun. I don't often get such perfect opportunities.

The Cherub is retarded, developmentally delayed, whatever you want to call it. She's also a darling. But just because she has disabilities, that doesn't make her less or more than human. That means that she is fully capable of being a perfect little pill if she wants to be. She can be loving, affectionate, friendly, warm, and cranky, crabby, bitter, spiteful, resentful, furious, sad, unhappy, bewildered, and, in short, just as human as the next person, although dealing with those varied moods can be more complicated.

We have learned that people who don't really get kids like The Cherub can not get it in a variety of ways. Some assume she's just a vegetable, no personality at all. Some are presumptuous enough as to feel sorry for her, though she doesn't need any pity. Some people just are freaked out by the retarded, and they are very uncomfortable around her. And some people make up a sort of 'noble savage' idea about her, sappily going on and on about how these children are just so incapable of mean-ness or spite, and interpreting everything she does through a 'the stars are God's daisy chain' sort of haze. There is something just as dehumanizing about this attitude as there is about the 'no personality at all' people.

And then there are the people who spend five minutes with her and assume they know more about her than I do. Those people have variously told me she can probably read, she's probably really not retarded at all, that she probably just needs a hug (when she pinches her sisters so hard they bleed because she's just in a spiteful mood and it's PMS time for her), that she can probably really talk, that she really does want such and such, because they asked and she nodded her head yes, etc. etc. etc.

Other people struggle with other challenges, and some of those challenges are complicated by the different assumptions strangers make about their children. People on the outside looking in do not have enough information to draw hard conclusions. It's not always easy to tell you don't have enough data. When the Cherub was six, for instance, she looked about three years old, and she had no obvious facial characteristics declaring her disabilities. I've had friends with children who are 'normal' but just huge for their age. The behavior was perfectly age appropriate, but onlookers had no way of knowing that they were actually five years younger than they looked.


And this post isn't to instill guilt in anybody. I have been and still can be that person. I've been at the grocery store and wondered why some parent didn't just deal with her child, or why she'd apparently never taught her child certain elementary rules of behavior. In fact, there's a family I have seen several times at the local thrift shop that I have thought just such thoughts about- 'why doesn't she keep a better eye on..., why doesn't she teach her..., why does she let them...., what is she thinking to permit/encourage/ignore....?' Just two days ago I happened to be in the thrift shop at the same time as this family again, and while waiting (I hope patiently at least in appearance) for one of her youngsters (a youngster bigger than me) to stop pawing all the toys on the shelf and shouting across several aisles to his mother about toys that were years too young for him, so that I could get my cart through the aisle he was blocking, something clicked, a kaleidoscope shifted and brought a new pattern into focus and I realized that in all probability both of these children are special needs- only, like the Cherub, they don't have any tell tale physical characteristics announcing that their mother needs an extra measure of grace and charity, and unlike the Cherub, they talk, masking other issues further. I hope that I have never made my private disapproval of her parenting obvious. I know I try not to do that. But I also know that we can be extraordinarily sensitive to reading those signs of disapproval. We see them often enough ourselves.

As the Cajunchic knows. See this post where she explains a little something about her life with her own Monkette:

She is that child that you see in the store and think, "She needs to be spanked!" She is the one who is screaming while covering her ears or is licking something in her hand. She is the child that is running through the parking lot while her mother chases after her. She is the one who you see spinning in circles in the middle of the aisle or maybe even crying hysterically. She is the one who you look at and wonder why in the world a mother is letting a 4 year old chew on a baby teether. What you don't realize is that she has sensory processing disorder. While she may seem like a normal child on the outside and sometimes has her good days where she does not seek sensory stimulation, she also has her bad days.

Read the rest, and when you see one of those children out in public, smile at the mother and say a quick prayer for her and her family. Here's thing- it's true that some children are just downright naughty and their parents really are not parenting in the way they should. But even if we're right and the child is just downright naughty and undisciplined, it's just a lucky guess if that conclusion is based on a few minutes of observation in the grocery store, and everybody can use a smile and prayer.

Exerpts from a forward a friend sent me:

(I don't know if all these are really true, but they sound like they could be! :) )


Many years ago in Scotland, a new game was invented. It was ruled "Gentlemen Only...Ladies Forbidden"...and thus, the word GOLF entered into the English language.
~~~

It is impossible to lick your elbow.
~~~

The cost of raising a medium-size dog to the age of eleven:

$ 16,400
~~~

The first novel ever written on a typewriter, Tom Sawyer.
~~~

Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history:



Spades - King David

Hearts - Charlemagne

Clubs -Alexander, the Great

Diamonds - Julius Caesar
~~~

111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
~~~

If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died because of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
~~~

Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn't added until 5 years later.
~~~

Q. Half of all Americans live within 50 miles of what?



A. Their birthplace
~~~

Q. What do bulletproof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers and laser printers have in common?



A. All were invented by women.
~~~

In Shakespeare ' s time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes, the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. Hence the phrase..."Goodnight, sleep tight"
~~~

It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride ' s father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month, which we know today as the honeymoon.
~~~

In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts... So in old England , when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them "Mind your pints and quarts, and settle down."



It ' s where we get the phrase "mind your P's and Q's"
~~~

At least 75% of people who read this will try to lick their elbow!
~~~

We've Come a Long Way, Baby

Older homeschoolers and those interested in religious freedom and parental rights may remember the case in Nebraska where a private church school was shut down because the minister would not use certified teachers or release the names and addresses of those in the school (which would have been like releasing to the state the church membership rolls). The state locked the church building, opening it only for (state) designated hours of worship, jailed seven fathers, and would have removed children from the homes except the mothers fled the state with their children.
The only quarrel the state had was that the teachers were not certified. At the hearing for the fathers, then State Senator Robert Kerrey (later a U.S. Senator for Nebraska) said, "If we allow these people to raise their children any way they want to, they will not fit into the society we are building."
see here for quote.

About those seven fathers and their families, Nebraska Senator Pete Hoagland appeared on television April 15, 1982, and said this:

"What we are most interested in, of course, are the children themselves. I don't think any of us in the Legislature have any quarrel with the right of the Reverend or members of his flock to practice their religion. But we don't think they should be entitled to impose decisions or religious philosophies on their children which could seriously undermine those children's ability to deal in this complicated world when they grow up."

Source: the HM's notes (thanks, honey!! and this website as well as this one)

That was then.

This is now. From March 30 through April 5, Nebraska observes Nebraska Home Educator's Week. Dana is looking for ideas on activities.

Here are some of mine:

Jammy DAY!! Every day.=)

On the fourth of July and President's Day we read aloud from the Declaration of Independence, and we read about George Washington. Why not read about the famous Nebraska Seven, who risked their liberty for our homeschooling freedoms?

Coloring pages of the famous and successful home educated?

Read about the founding fathers who were largely home educated.

Read about Nobel Prize winners and what they thought of their institutionalized schooling.

Write a letter to the editor about homeschooling.

Design a pro-homeschooling bookmark, poster, or t-shirt.

Have a picnic with other homeschooling families. (It's okay to let the kids out of the garage, attic, or cellar once a year).

Tell stories to your children about why you homeschool. Talk about the biggest challenges, blessings, and funniest moments.

Write a poem about homeschooling. Try a pantoum.=)

Have a homeschool party/talent show/Ceilidh- people can exhibit collections, art work, science projets, play music, sing, recite, whatever they want to do to share their interests with other home educators.

Have a homeschool open house. Just make sure you clear away the fish-heads in the attic before outsiders come. They just wouldn't understand.

Or just spend the week doing the usual things.=)

Another view of London.

Experimenting with camera settings, a view of the London Eye and the Royal Aquarium across the Thames River. I wish I'd gone to take a closer look at the Aquarium building, but I was heading to Westminster Abbey at this point and by the time I'd finished there my jet lag was making itself very definitely known.

Frugal Feasting and Fun

Over at Frugal Hacks Momadvice has a really good post and comment thread on how the frugal lifestyle can sometimes make us feel intimidated about having people over. We have extra people over to eat at least twice a week, often more. Last year we also had over fifty overnight guests, so I thought I would share a few ideas and give you a closer glimpse into life at my house, too.

We do live in a large, very roomy house. We have lived here for two years (this month). It's huge. I do have a large roomy kitchen and plenty of extra bathrooms. So I am spoiled there, and I can't say I feel too guilty about it. We more than tripled our living space when we moved in here. But the space is large and functional, not House Beautiful. Except for the kitchen. I really like just about everything about my kitchen.

Here are some things we don't have. None of my dishes match. My dishes haven't all matched since the last of the set of stoneware I got when we got married all broke, and that was by the end of our second year. Until last month when the HG bought me a brand new set of glass drinking cups, we drank out of glass jars for the most part (I have a few plastic cups I bought when the quads came to visit).

We don't have a table large enough for my family. We use two, their ends pushed together to make one long, very long, eating surface in the dining room. One of the tables is a large plastic conference style table with folding legs. We bought it a couple years ago. The other is a smaller (seats four comfortable, six tightly) wooden table that my grandparents got when they set up housekeeping in the late 20s or early 30s. The top is covered in contact paper. The legs are scratched and scuffed. I love it. I don't love having two tables that so totally do not match, do not even blend. We always have table cloths on them to hide the fact that one is a cheap plastic folding table and the other is a rickety vintage collectible. I figured out just this last fall that I feel much happier about this if the table clothes match, giving the two tables one unified look, so I've been watching the thrift shops, yard sales, and the major discount store up north for table cloth sales, and I buy a duplicate set. Twin size sheets (two of them) also work, although we have to fold them in half since the tables are so narrow. There are at least three different kinds of chairs in the dining room, and an old chipped white farm bench.

We don't have a couch in the living room. We have two love seats and an assortment of chairs. Two wooden rocking chairs match. Nothing else really does. I don't really mind the mismatched upholstery and styles there- they don't match, but I do think the majority of it blends, although others might not. I do wish it was all more comfortable (your legs go to sleep in the matching rockers, the green 'faux leather' rocker has a split that pulls your hair and it rocks you back so far you think you're about to stand on your head, and one of the love seats slowly rejects you, and you find yourself gradually slumping, then sliding down towards the floor so slowly that you're almost there before you realize what's happened). I want a couch, but it won't be a new one, and I've been checking thrift shops for about a year.

We don't have television reception. Our TV is for watching movies. I think our television is 15 years old.

There are no curtains in any windows except the bedrooms (and not all of them), and one set of windows in the Common Room (I bought them used for the craft room, but then they didn't fit).

The dogs have pretty much destroyed the cork floors in the Common Room- it's scratched, gouged, discolored, and hideous. It's also messed up in the living room, but it's not too bad in the other rooms. I will not be replacing the cork floors in my lifetime, so this is it.

Please understand that this is not complaining- it's perspective. When we have people over they sit in a very lovely dining room surrounded by antique glassware, vintage books, a lovely tapestry on one wall (a housewarming gift), a timeline for school on another. They sit at an elegantly covered table, or so it appears, and eat on mismatched plates with mismatched utensils, and until recently, probably drank from mason jars. I'm totally okay with that. Our previous houses have been much smaller than this one, tighter, dysfunctional in other ways. Pothing's nerfect.

None of these things should matter (yes, I know they often DO, but we all know they shouldn't). Even if they do matter, do not apologize for them. The hostess should be making her guests feel comfortable, and you don't do that by apologizing for the size of the house, the mess in the living room, the quality of the peas, the decorations in the dining room, or the food you serve, the mismatched dishes, the lumpy couch, the stained rug. I do it, too, and I know why I do it. I presume you are the same. I want people to know that I know that the peas are not the best, that there are tidier living rooms- I want people to know that I do know what 'tidy' looks like, even if I don't do it very well. But this is merely pride and it ought to be squelched. When you go to somebody's house and they begin apologizing for everything, you are made to feel like you are a burden to the hostess, that she would be much happier without you there to witness her discomfort, and you are compelled to consequently reassure her. This is not comfortable, so we ought not to do it with our own guests.

But let's get to the food and activities.

Over the years, here are some of the ways we've fit entertaining into our budget:

People usually enjoy contributing, and I am not embarrassed to invite a large crowd over for a potluck, or ask others to contribute a salad or side dish to my main dish.

Here are some other meals that are nice for a crowd:
Home-made soup along with home-made bread- People don't have time to bake and cook from scratch anymore, so this can be a real treat. Or you can have a potluck soup- tell folks you're making a giant pitch-in beef stew and ask them to bring along an ingredient. Meatless taco soup is tasty and frugal. Potato soup is good on cold days.

Muffins and fruit for an afternoon tea

Stew- I have a nice recipe for a oriental flavored stew that uses the toughest cuts of meat but makes it tender and flavorful. You can always add more liquid and vegetables to stretch out a stew.

Fried rice

Egg fu yong

Chinese chicken cabbage salad- the one with the toasted ramen noodles in it for crunch. Cabbage and ramen noodles are both very, very inexpensive and this is a tasty spring salad.

Have a salad bar and ask people to bring toppings- you provide a basic salad, with a couple inexpensive side salads, like macaroni and/or potato salad, and maybe some home-made salad dressings.

Have a potato bar and do the same- provide a couple toppings, invite others to bring along one or two of their own.

Roasted Winter Vegetables:
Mexican stack-ups (like tacos)- there is a series of foods like corn chips, tortillas, rice, beans, taco meat, diced lettuce, tomatoes, onions, grated cheese, salsa, sour cream, etc. People go through and just pile what they want on their plates. This also lends itself to a pitch-in- everybody bring something they like on tacos, and you supply the taco meat, rice and beans.

Serve home-made bread or biscuits alongside your meals. Add a few herbs to your biscuits for an extra 'company' touch. Fan-cut potatoes are another extremely frugal but very, very pretty side-dish.

Savory Vegetable Pies

Quiche

Of course, now that spring is coming for some of you, salads are a good choice. HEre are a few of the salad recipes we've posted:
Primary pasta salad
Chili Corn Salad
Salad dressing recipes
Two main dish salad recipes here, a rice salad and a chicken barley salad
BLT Chicken and pasta salad
Turkey (or chicken), walnut, and rice salad
Garbanzo bean and artichoke heart salad (this can be frugal if you find the artichokes at a good sale)

You need not be embarrassed to only have tea and water to drink. Sometimes we don't even have the tea.


Sometimes we have had people after dinner. We might just pop popcorn (from scratch, not microwave) and play cards or watch a movie. Or I might just serve a dessert and coffee- this can be very elegant without being very pricey. It can also be as simple as cookies and tea.

What to do with your company while they're there?

Visit- just talk with each other
Sing
Watch a Movie
Play games (Dictionary,
Push back the furniture and teach them a Virginia Reel
Go outside and play kickball, croquiet, tag, hide-n-seek, softball, or just go for a walk
Do a puzzle
Adapt some of the activities from these posts.

Mostly, relax, keep an eye to your guests' comfort, and have fun. Do not worry about whether or not the fare or home is good enough. Melchizedek served Abraham a meal as simple as bread and wine (Genesis 14). Bridget served bread, eggs, milk and fruit and it was a feast. Jesus served loaves and fishes.


There are other frugal ideas up at Biblical Womanhood's Frugal Fridays, and my Friday post is up at Frugal Hacks.

This is just the sort of thing The Equuschick thrives on.

The Equuschick received in the mail this morning a mysterious and unlooked for medical bill, of confusing origins and suspicious content.

The Equuschick filed for assistance for this bill on Oct. 19'th, and on Dec. 12'th she was mailed a letter telling her that she had qualified for 100% financial assistance and her account balance was now zeroed out.


Just today, she received another letter from the same organization for the same account number informing her that she had qualified for 93% financial assistance and still owed them so much.


So The Equuschick called, and the representative was very pleasant and not at all helpful.

"Yes ma'am," she said brightly, "the first letter was simply sent out incorrectly."

Oh, well. Everything is now clarified. Problem solved.

"93% is a huge deduction," The Equuschick replied, "and I appreciate all the help I've been receiving. Had I received this letter first, I would not have been concerned. But because I was told that I would not have to pay I did make some financial decisions that I would not have made if I had known this bill was coming."

"Yes, ma'am." (Still very civil, she's been trained well.) "93% was the correct adjustment, the first letter was incorrect."

And that's where The Equuschick left the dear, unhelpful, thing.


Her conscience is being strained at the moment. It is in a state of indecision. To be difficult or to be civil?

The Equuschick can pay the bill. It will be an inconvenience and a large one that will require the rearranging of her budget and the adjustment of several plans, but she can pay and no one will starve. And truly, 93% is a very generous adjustment.

But The Equuschick hates stupidity, okay? Individuals make mistakes. And organizations and institutions are built up by individuals who are but human, and therefore err.

But! But! This is a very stupid mistake! It inconvenienced The Equuschick. She is spoiled, and she does not like to be inconvenienced by the mistakes of others, and never mind how many times her own mistakes have inconvenienced anyone else.

The Equuschick supposes she's not going to see Wicked anytime soon. Poor spoiled baby.

Another AGW Defector

Oops

New derivation of equations governing the greenhouse effect reveals "runaway warming" impossible

Miklós Zágoni isn't just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was.

That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA's Langley Research Center.
[...]

Miskolczi's story reads like a book. Looking at a series of differential equations for the greenhouse effect, he noticed the solution -- originally done in 1922 by Arthur Milne, but still used by climate researchers today -- ignored boundary conditions by assuming an "infinitely thick" atmosphere. Similar assumptions are common when solving differential equations; they simplify the calculations and often result in a result that still very closely matches reality. But not always.

So Miskolczi re-derived the solution, this time using the proper boundary conditions for an atmosphere that is not infinite. His result included a new term, which acts as a negative feedback to counter the positive forcing. At low levels, the new term means a small difference ... but as greenhouse gases rise, the negative feedback predominates, forcing values back down.

NASA refused to publish his results. He's resigned from NASA, saying, "My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results."

HT Ace

One Weird Thing About One Of Us

You know those Memes where you are supposed to list so many weird things about yourself?

Well, I have seen mention of this all strange custom over the side of the blogosphere where the cool homeschooling moms hang out, so I know I must be the odd woman out- but still, I think it's you folks and not me who are weird. Pedicures. EW. I just cannot imagine asking another human being to groom my feet, not even for ready money. Just. Ew.

Homeschooling Debate Over There....

Important Updates Below!!! And MORE, Bigger Updates. See the DHM Eating Tasty Crow. Bleah.

Over at Principled Discovery, Dana talks about an opinion she read recently which equated homeschooling to abuse. In fact, here's what Steven Downes said (among other things):

An interesting debate has exploded into the mainstream as a California appellate ruling that bans homeschooling by uncredentialed parents. My own criticism of homeschooling has alwas [sic] been in line with the ruling by the court: it is a form of child abuse to subject children to an education at the hands of a person who is manifestly unable to provide it.

Dana did a great job correcting his many misconceptions about homeschooling. So then he clarified what he meant in a video- he still doesn't like it, not even a little bit. Dana has a little to say about that, but she'll be saying more later. I suggest you check back.

What makes it more interesting than the usual unresearched, undocumented, unsupported, anti-homeschool stuff (and this is all of that) is who Stephen is and what he does. He works "for the National Research Council, Institute for Information Technology, in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. I specialize in online learning, content syndication, and new media."

And this what he says he believes:

I want and visualize and aspire toward a system of society and learning where each person is able to rise to his or her fullest potential without social or financial encumberance, where they may express themselves fully and without reservation through art, writing, athletics, invention, or even through their avocations or lifestyle.

Where they are able to form networks of meaningful and rewarding relationships with their peers, with people who share the same interests or hobbies, the same political or religious affiliations - or different interests or affiliations, as the case may be.

This to me is a society where knowledge and learning are public goods, freely created and shared, not hoarded or withheld in order to extract wealth or influence. This is what I aspire toward, this is what I work toward.

Ironic, yes?

Updated 3/20:

Dana has found the time to present a reasoned, civil, and worthy rebuttal. I suggest you all read it. I am going to adapting my reply to her for reposting here (this is also an adapted version of a comment I left here, so if you think I am repeating myself, you would be right):

Upon further reading of Steven's views, I think his problems are bigger than just his unwillingness to actually do any research on homeschooling before issuing his 'expert' opinion. He is incapable of seeing the parent/child relationship objectively. He presupposes that just about all parent/child relationships are fatally flawed, toxic, and founded entirely on parental selfishness. He filters everything he sees and hears through that defective sieve.

Dana points out that one reason homeschooling works so well even though the parents have no credentials is because so long as the parent child relationship is healthy, nobody wants to see that child do well more than the parent. And I agree- but....

And here is where I eat crow. I completely botched it when I read the comments- the following quotes are from one 'Weaver' not from Steven. So, yum, yum, give me a pie with at least 4 and 20 blackbirds in it. I am suitably ashamed and very, very embarrassed.

Steven Weaver cannot accept that the parent/child relationship can be, and usually is, healthy. He turns that normal and healthy desire for our children to reach their potential into something poisonous. I missed it before, but here how Steven Weaver answered somebody else who made the same point in reply to Steven's previous post on homeschooling (emphasized words, presuming I did the html properly, are mine):

"Quite correct!
Are you infering that the parent has much at stake, or the child?
I think you will find that the parent does, although it will be disguised as concern for the child.
the parental factor that requires the child to succeed in order for the parent to garner the indirect success element, invariably at the child's expense.

Introducing the child into a social environment whereby some level of sociological self-establishment and independence of entity can be established is a required, and dare I say it, necessary educational step.

To retain that child within the home environment, driven by the fear generated by a parents very selfish, personal requirement would appear to be a massive step in retrograde.

Let us not fail to remember, that a very significant number of young people, having failed, within their own definitions, then turn to the realm of parenthood assuming that because they are biologically capable of having a child, they are, therefore mature enough to be parents. The principle of selfish achievement in action.

So a 'significant' number of us are parents *only* because we are selfish gits who have failed at everything else. Parents, the vast majority of them in Steven's Weaver's world, possibly ALL of them, are only concerned about 'success' insofar as it reflects well on us, monstrously seeing our children, as we do, sort of like trophy Stepford children. And in Steven's Weaver's world, the school, with its age segregated, peer-dependent culture, as deeply flawed as even he realizes it is, is actually the only place children can achieve some level of 'sociological self-establishment.' That was totally my experience in public school, how about you? Public school was ALL about 'sociological self-establishment and independence of entity,' and there was NEVER any pressure to fit in, to dress, act, and speak in a manner that wasn't true to myself. THAT only happens at home.

In Steven's Weaver's world it is the parents who disguise their selfish aims as 'concern' when they give up a second income and make many other sacrifices in order to educate their children OUTSIDE of mind-numbing, personality stifling, institutional settings.
---------------------------------------------
In spite of my muddleheaded and sloppy gaffe, the rest still applies:
In the real world, most parents love their children more than anybody else can or will, and most parents unselfishly want their children to have what they need to be happy, healthy people. Also in the real world, as Mike points out in the comments below, Steven has some vested interests of his own- he is

"an academic/bureacrat with a vested interest in *pushing* all this newfangled media "education" stuff. Success at that---note the word "syndication"---means he needs a captive audience who cannot turn off the TV set or computers or whatever it is."

I see that as a marked conflict of interest. Steven Weaver accuses just about all parents of not really being interested in the well being of their children, but disguising purely self-centered, self-seeking, selfish motives as 'concern' for the child.

Yet, unlike Steven, I will not make any money if people accept and implement my ideas about learning, living, and the education of children.

(Really, I should have left the heavy lifting to Dana.)

A Pantoum

This is a post about a Pantoum. What, you might ask, is a pantoum? And why are you posting about it? A pantoum, as some of you might know, is a type of poem. It is (so my poetry book for school tells me) not difficult to write, but it requires thought. Much thought. My feeling is that things which require a lot of thought and concentration are difficult, but anyway. The poem is an unusual sort of poem. Here's an example:

Eyes shining without mystery,
Footprints eager for the past
Through the vague snow of many clay pipes,
And what is in store?

Footprints eager for the past
The usual obtuse blanket.
And what is in store
For those dearest to the king?

The usual obtuse blanket.
Of legless regrets and amplifications
For those dearest to the king.
Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,

That's not the entire poem, because the whole thing would have been much too long, but it is a portion of "Pantoum" by John Ashbery. Now here is the breaking down of a pantoum from my poetry book, "The Roar on the Other Side," by Suzanne U. Clark:

"It's not too difficult to write but does require skill and thought. This form, originally from Malaya, was brought to the West by Victor Hugo in 1829. Here's how it works. Write four lines of poetry. Fill them with imagery. Number the lines. In stanza two, repeat the lines according to this pattern: line 2 from the first stanza becomes line 1 in the second. Line 4 from the first becomes line 3 in the second. Lines 2 and 4 in this [second] stanza are new ones you will write. The next stanza repeats the pattern. There's no limit to the number of stanzas in a pantoum, but let's simplify the form by thinking in terms of four.
When you come to the final stanza, all the lines are written. It's up to you to decide the order. Use lines 1 and 3 from the first stanza and lines 2 and 4 from the third. Ending with line 1 gives the poem a strong finish, like a circle being closed. "

You do not have to end with the first line if you don't want. Also, you can change the meaning of the line by changing the punctuation, and it looks pretty cool that way.

I know some people who say that following tight rules, such as the ones in sonnets and haiku and pantoums, cramps their style and they don't feel it's necessary to follow those rules. My feeling is that you can really challenge your creativity and grow *so much* by setting boundaries and seeing how much variety and beauty you can get within those boundaries. (This is true for music, too- some of the most beautiful and well known pieces of music in the world were written within very strict boundaries- Pachelbel's Canon is a good example.)

I've tried writing pantoums, but I'm not very good at them. No doubt practicing would be good for my creativity AND my character. :-)

Here's a website with more on the pantoum if you want to read it. Virtual Chocolate from Germany to anyone who writes one!

Homeschooling and Living History

Flexibility.
That's one of the things I love about homeschooling. We can turn on a dime to follow opportunities. Yesterday was one such opportunity.

It was our art class Tuesday, the day when three of the children have art lessons in town from 10-1, and then a family of four boys rides out to our house with our three girls, and we have a sort of a school co-op. The older children read Shakespeare together, we have some science and art, read a story or two together, play some math games, the oldest three youngsters play Propaganda, we sing a folk song and chant a Psalm, then have dinner together, followed by a Bible study.

But yesterday while the three girls who take them were at art lessons, Granny Tea called and asked if we wanted to come over some time during the afternoon. Her old college chum and college chum's spouse were going to be passing through and spending the night on their way further south to visit other old college chums. So when they arrived home at 2:00, I let them eat lunch and then we trotted over to Granny Tea's to meet her college chum and spouse.

And why should that interest the Progeny and friends?

College chum's spouse was born to Polish Jews who had moved to Paris in the 30's because life in Poland at the time was too hard. Henri's father was a cobbler. At the same time, another aunt and uncle moved from Poland to a small town in Illinois (this will be important).

Henri was born in Paris, and he was very small when the Germans marched through. He says he remembers the day vividly because he was outside playing and his mother ran and brought him inside, and because she seemed clearly agitated and upset he thought he was in trouble, and he was indignant about that because he knew he'd done nothing wrong.

Eventually his father, as well as many other men in the Jewish community, was arrested and taken to a camp of some sort- Henri, being a child at the time, isn't sure where it was or what sort of a camp. His wife says she thinks it must have been a holding camp until other facilities were finished. Henri, his mother, and his older sister Dori, were permitted to go to the camp and visit with Henri's father through the fence, and they passed things through the fence at times. One time, his father passed his wedding ring through the fence to his wife. The next time they went to the camp, his father was gone and nobody could say what had happened to him. They never saw him again. Henri still wears his father's wedding ring.

They moved to an outskirt of Paris, staying with a Gentile family in a nearby village while their mother continued to go into Paris to seek information about her husband. The Gentile woman they stayed with began to be afraid to continue to hide them, so she asked them to leave. The mother asked where she should go, and the woman suggested a nearby village where she thought they would be safe. I think that while the mother was working on arrangements to move the children there, they all lived with an aunt in another part of Paris, a very, very, poor section of Paris- I missed some of the chronology here, so I am not clear on exactly how long it had been and exactly where they were when the mother finally learned something. She had gone to aplace they described as something like a Jewish community center, and there were Germans there who used the organizational system of the community center to disseminate information they wanted sent out to the Jewish community. A German officer told Henri's mother that he did know where her husband was and he promised that if she would go home and get her children and return with them, he would send them to be with her husband.

She rushed back to the aunt's house (her sister). The aunt said she didn't like the sound of things and didn't think it was right. She tried to talk her sister out of going, and then said that if she really wanted to go, then she should at least leave the children behind with her, and when the mother arrived, if it was safe she could send a postcard and the aunt would send the children on to their mother. The mother agreed. Her family never saw her again, although they did discover that the German officer was telling the truth- he did know where her husband was, and he did send her to the same place.

Twenty years later they learned that place was Auschwitz. Because the Germans kept such meticulous records, they even know which cattle car their parents were on. Henri and Dori's father was on #5, their mother on #22. And because of those meticulous, careful records, they know that almost everybody on Convoy 22 had taken a gas shower within minutes of arrival.

Henri and his older sister were taken to the village their mother had been told about, where they lived with a farm couple who already had a couple of children in their 20s. The farmhouse was right in the village, behind a wall. The children actually went to school in the village. The farm couple warned them never to speak Yiddish, never to say who they were, and they passed as young relatives of the couple who were caring for them. Here they stayed throughout the war. They did not know their parents were dead, although I believe the older sister wondered. Henri, being younger, didn't know enough about what was happening to guess that he was an orphan. Their aunt sent money to help care for the children, and I believe her child also stayed there at least for a while.

The Germans came to their village, and they even came to the farm and bought eggs and food from the family, Henri and his sister saw them and were seen often, but hidden in plain sight as it were, the Germans never realized. One day on the farm, Henri witnessed a dogfight between a Canadian and a German plane. He saw the Canadian's plane explode, and then he saw a parachute. For days the Germans searched the woods, fields, and houses, looking for the Canadian pilot, which frightened the children and probably their host family, as they were all afraid that the Germans might become suspicious of them. The Germans never did find the Canadian because one of the French farmers had found him first, hid him, and then helped him make contact with the French Resistance. Another farmer informed against the man who hid the Canadian, and the Germans came to his house and took him away. Two months later, some children and their dogs playing in the woods uncovered an arm. They ran back to get adults, and the adults found the missing farmer. Henri said that because his sister was older than he was, she often knew more about what was going on around them. The farmer had been tortured before he died, and shot several times. Years later when he returned to the village, he learned that they had changed the name of the only street in town to the name of the farmer who died for hiding a Canadian pilot.

Meanwhile, the war went on, Henri and his sister went to school, made friends, and, he said, he doesn't remember ever really suffering, except for the fear when the Germans were around, and wondering where his parents were. He says the family were good to him, kind people, and he was just a boy. He remembers the day the Americans came, he and his cousin stood outside all day waving at the passing army- and it took all day because the one street in town was so very narrow that they could only drive through single file. He says he stood there all day not for any noble reasons, but because the Americans threw candy, and they hadn't seen chocolate in a very long time. By the end of the day, he thinks, the boys had amassed a treasure trove of a bushel basket of candy.

When the war was over they learned that they were orphans. The aunt in Paris took them in, but quarters were very tight, she was having babies (her husband had been a French prisoner of war in Germany for most of the war); she wanted her niece to stay home from school and help and the niece wanted to finish school. They wrote to the aunt and uncle in America, who agreed to take in the two children. It took another two years, I think, for paperwork and approval to come through, and then Henri, 10, and his 15 year old sister were put on a Russian ship to New York. They arrived January 8, 1948. A Jewish charity organization put them up overnight and then put them on the train for Chicago, where their aunt and uncle picked them up.

They spoke no English, only Yiddish and French. Their Aunt and Uncle did not speak French, and the Aunt did not speak English, or at least not well. They did speak Polish and Yiddish, so they communicated in Yiddish. Because she did not speak French, the aunt though Henri sounded more like Harry than anything else, so Henri became Harry. The small country school simply put both children in the first grade. This motivated them, Harry told us, to learn English as quickly as they could, and they studied and worked hard so they could be placed in their own grades. Henri/Harry also said that in France he had hated school and thought the teachers were cruel. In this country school that handled language barriers by putting even teens in first grade, they thought the teachers were kind. Both of them loved school, and both of them decided to become teachers. Harry's sister taught French, and Harry taught history, American government, American history, geography, and social studies.

He says he never told his students that his parents had died at Auschwitz because it wasn't something he could talk about yet. It wasn't until he retired that he felt able to talk about his experiences- and that is also when he learned of Holocaust Deniers, and realized that some of the denials had gone unrebutted because of silence from people like him. He felt guilty, and resolved to speak out. He gives talks to schools and youth groups.

He was in his forties before he returned to Europe. They went to Germany, and at his wife's insistence (of the sort where she said, 'you don't have to come; I will go by myself') they went to Dauchau. He says he is glad he went once, but he will never, ever go to another concentration camp again, and he particularly would not go to Auschwitz, where his parents died. He's glad the camps are there as museums and mute testimony of the horror that was and should never be again, but he can't go again.

Together with his sister, they went to the village where they had lived all those years ago hidden in plain sight. They rediscovered some old school friends and spent the day visiting with them. During the course of the conversation, they were surprised to learn that their school friends knew that they were Jewish. Harry told them, "We thought that was a secret. Why didn't you ever talk about it?" And his friend said, "Because it was a secret." They learned that pretty much everybody in the village knew that Harry and his sister were Jewish children hiding from the Nazis. Harry asked if there were any other Jews hiding in the village, and his friend told him yes, he thought about half a dozen Jews lived in the village, 'hiding' like Harry and his sister.

So that is what we did yesterday instead of science, math, music, and other things (the older crowd did do Shakespeare late in the evening), because of a last minute opportunity right next door.

The Boy had not wanted to come. He usually prefers to do the talking, and an hour or two listening to somebody else talk did not sound interesting to him. He asked if he and the other little boys could go downstairs and play in the basement at Granny Tea's house instead. I said no without any qualms whatsoever, of course. All the children sat quietly for an hour (which is really unusual for the boys, mine included), hardly moving or making a sound. Towards the end of the first hour Harry apologized for talking quite so long and thanked his varied audience for sitting quietly for so long- and the Boy leaned over and whispered to me, "This was actually quite interesting." And so it was.

Harry's 70 years old. If you know any Harrys in your community, get them to talk with your Progeny before they're gone.

The first of many photos from London

Granted, this doesn't have anything unique to London in it, but it's still one of my favorites. I took it at Russell Square Park my first morning in London. Spring has sprung there, and it was wonderful to see so many flowers in bloom.
Another reason I like this picture: it's one of the few times I actually managed to use the camera to its full potential. :-)

News and Views

Updated at 2:05 to add a few links.

I haven't mentioned this in a while, so for anybody relatively new around here, news and views posts are primarily for my high-school aged Progeny. They keep a current events notebook, and sometimes I include a post or two of links to news events, editorials, and blog-posts that I think may be (or should be) of interest to them. LIke these:

News from Tibet

Political prisoners in Cuba




The Supreme Court hears a landmark case on gun control and the second amendment.

Michael Graham of the Boston Herald didn't like Obama's speech on race and the Reverend Wright.
The New York Times did.
Over at Hot Air, they don't like the NYT.
You can read the transcript and WLS's objections to it over at Patterico.
Betsy points out that either he still doesn't quite get it, or he doesn't want to acknowledge what really bothers people about his pastor's sermons. He suggested that it was the style of a Black church that bothered people, the noise and movement that were 'jarring to the untrained ear.' Actually, no. I have been to several Black churches and that's a non-issue. As Betsy points out:

People weren't finding that laughter and humor what was jarring. It was hearing someone assert, five days after 9/11, that the "chickens were coming home to roost" or blaming white America for the AIDS virus.

Klaus on false equivilancies in Obama's speech
Sailer on Obama falsifying his grandmother's statement about being afraid of black men in the street.
Mom's take: Obama showed us all once again that he is an incredibly gifted orator with great charisma. I would have liked to hear him say that, contrary to his pastor's claims, white people did NOT invent the AIDS virus to kill black people. I would have liked him to deny other conspiracy theories held dear by his pastor and preached from the pulpit. Unless, of course, the Senator from Illinois believes those conspiracy theories, in which case I would like to hear him say that, too.
NEW: And while, No, Virginia, the government did not invent AIDS to commit genocide against all the black people, never forget crimes of shame like Tuskegee.

You could skim around the Counterterrorism blog for some news notebook worthy stuff

Betsy also tells us that the court upholds Michigan's measure banning racial and gender preferences in government hiring and university admissions.

A little info on oil prices

Hoover, FDR, and George Bush- read it and think, Common Room Scholars. You've just been reading about this period in history. What do you think?

A Certain Slant of Light has a good read on where the true conservatives in the GOP have gone (note: they are not running for president).

Pork in Washington

NEW:
Planned Parenthood is spending 10 million dollars to influence this election. Those of the Progeny reading Grand Illusions for school should read this link to see why.

Loved this- a timeline of Global Warming/Cooling warnings, via media articles (mostly NYT) going back to the 1900s.

The Welfare State and Assimilation- do they conflict?

Allergies

In the Jan/Feb 2007 issue of Cooks Illustrated, Christopher Kimballs wrote an essay on curiosity. He said that

'in cooking, there are folks who are fundamentally curious as to process- why bad things happen to good recipes- and sympathetic toward the notion of culinary education.... Others are content to believe that cooking is about no more than positive attitude....
[M]any folks have enthusiasms that don't reach beneath the surface. But with nor more than an extra spoonful of curiosity, we soon discover that rabbits run in circles, why stew meat often cooks up tough and dry (and what to do about it), and that your unassuming neighbor, the guy who is particularly fond of a big slice of pie- landed on Utah Beach on June 6, 1944."

I don't know why we say curiosity killed the cat (I like to tell people 'satisfaction brought it back') when it can be such a helpful and healthful tool in life.

Years ago we realized that the HG was allergic to something she ate from time to time. It wasn't life threatening, just inconvenient. Whenever she ate whatever it was (and it took us several years to figure it out), her cheeks would flush a beautiful, lovely, glowing, blooming red. It was very, very lovely. She, however, said it didn't feel lovely- it felt like a bad windburn. Her cheeks would be hot to the touch.

From time to time we thought we had discovered the cause, and then that wouldn't be it at all. We thought it was tomatoes for a while, and she skipped spaghetti sauce, chili, and pizza but then she got the flushed cheeks over tomato free foods- even a stew that we thought had no visible allergens.

One day she got the flushed, painfully (but beautifully) red cheeks when all she'd had to eat was a deviled egg (we had formerly ruled out eggs). That really puzzled me. And then I realized, to paraphrase Archimedes, "PAPRIKA!"

Paprika was on those eggs, and I believe that particular batch of deviled eggs one of the youngsters 'helping' had been rather liberal with the paprika jar. Paprika comes from pimento pods. Pimentos are, as Cooks Illustrated described them in that same Jan/Feb 2007 issue, "thin-skinned, heartshaped sweet peppers with a slightly bitter aromatic flavor reminiscent of paprika."

And we put peppers in our spaghetti sauce, our chili, and on our pizza. We put paprika in that stew (a Hungarian goulash), and we even sometimes put peppers in our tuna or egg salads.

It took me far, far, too long to make the connection between peppers/paprika and the HG's pretty pink cheeks. But I never would have figured it out at all if some time during my lifetime I hadn't been aimlessly curious about paprika and where it comes from.

The HG's allergy doctor later told her that this is called 'oral allergy syndrome,' and is more common in people with hayfever type allergies. She's not, he thinks, technically allergic or sensitive to peppers. But her body mistakes peppers for something she is allergic to, and so reacts to them. He says that her reactions (and we have found this to be true) can vary with the season, the preparation of the peppers, and where she lives. If she lived somewhere that didn't have whatever pollen it is her body confuses with peppers, they probably wouldn't bother her. As she's grown up, cooked peppers are far less likely to bother her (and paprika doesn't usually give her a reaction anymore).

Another common reaction with this sort of odd allergy/food sensitivity is the burning tingling mouth- it can lead to the dangerous reaction you read about or see on television dramas- hives, swollen lips, and closing windpipes, although it never has for either of us. I get this with eggplant, which is very sad because I love eggplant. But sometimes when I eat it my mouth burns and I feel like I am eating a very spicy and even prickly food. If you've noticed that some foods irritate your mouth, or you've complained that something tastes peppery when nobody else notices, maybe you have oral allergy syndrome, too (obligatory reminder that this is not medical advice).

Speaking of peppers, I thought I'd pass on that Cooks compared Goya pimentos with Divina roasted red peppers. Straight from the jar, Divina was the favorite. However, they said, opinions were split on the which brand people preferred when using the peppers or pimientos in red pepper dip or arroz con pollo. Their conclusion was that if you were using it in something cooked or mixed well with other things, you could choose roasted red peppers or pimientos based on price. But if the peppers were a significant ingredient- a major aspect of the taste experience, then you should go for the Divina.

She's Home

Busy day for the HG today, as she basically had to hit the ground running. We got lost several times on the way home from the airport by way of Chinatown, and did not get home until almost 10 p.m. We kept her talking all the way, and then we stayed up another hour to look at pictures, presents, and other goodies. This morning she had to get up at 6:15 to leave for school, and she won't be home until suppertime, when we're having company until late.

She had a wonderful time, my dears, and met lovely people and saw lovely things, and hopes to go back again some day.

For those interested in travel, this recent article in the UK's Guardian is a fun read.

Politics and Me

I am not altogether proud of it, but I do note some similarities between my views on politics and the attitude of the dwarves in The Last Battle:

"You must think we're blooming soft in the head, that you must," said Griffle. "We've been taken in once and now you expect us to be taken in again the next minute.... We've been fooled once and we're not going to be fooled again."
.... We're going to look after ourselves from now on and touch our caps to nobody. See?"

"That's right," said the other Dwarfs. "We're on our own now. .... The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs." And they began to fall into their places and to get ready for marching back to wherever they had come from."

And later, when that Last Battle is over and they believe they are still locked in a dark and smelly stable, they pat each other on the back by saying, "Well, at any rate there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”
~C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle, (1956)

Dymphna and the Baron take the high ground:

We didn’t make the decision [to ignore the Presidential primaries] lightly, but I have yet to read one article, essay, post, or comment that has led me to change my mind. This is a sideshow and I simply can’t join it. The whole thing is obscene.

Yes, it does cause a loss in traffic, as your email attests. And a drop in traffic costs us money. But even that is not enough to make me swim in the sludge of the murky circus. Don’t you feel stained, or smudged, or in need of a bath when you’re done reading about those folks? How does the content of what they do differ from reading about the promiscuous personalities that are also under a 24/7 media magnifying glass?

When something is truly news in this campaign, I’ll be glad to write about it. So far, I haven’t seen anything, though.

And no matter how pedestrian the pettifogging becomes in October, I will begin to write about it then because it will be the right time to do so, even if the choices are nothing more than eenie, meenie, minie, or mo.

Me, I sit in the corner and jeer, dwarflike, at eenie, meenie, minie, and mo, paper tigers all.

When Your Head Is Full of Children

Ouch- In a bigger hurry than usual to post this before shutting down the computer, I missed several major typos. All fixed now. One hopes. So, more accurately, it's been through another reading and editing session.=)

Parenting is different, I think, than any other 'project,' any other relationship, any other experience we will have. When our babies are new and tiny, some of us are so totally absorbed in them (and often overwhelmed by them) that we only think about them for a while, and then suddenly we wonder why we never think about anything else, and have we lost our minds (I say no, but we have certainly lost our hearts). But this total absorption does change as the babies grow older and we grow more accustomed to this miracle.

The parent-child relationship continues to be unique to any other. The relationship with my adult children is still different from any other relationship I will ever have- but it's been a very long time since it was an all absorbing totality. It's on a new level. They're friends, _really_ good friends, but because they're also my daughters this friendship has a different quality to it. I guess I'm just saying that the total absorption part is a stage, not even a very long one in the big picture, and it doesn't mean you've lost all your brain cells.

I also think no other project _matters_ as much as our children- I _don't_ mean we have no life or meaning outside of the children, and I don't mean that marriage is a distant second. Marriage is important, and marriage should outlast the children in the home and it will be our primary human relationship (if we do it right). But this isn't about marriage, it's about parenting, and there are some distinct differences in the consequences of failing to be a good wife and failing to be a good mother.

For a few years, we hold another person's life completely in our hands. My husband will not actually die if I do not feed him. He can fend for himself, unlike small children. He does not need me to change his clothes, he won't die of pneumonia if I do not notice he's sick and thus do not take him to the doctor. In addition to the basic physical life-and-death responsibility we have, I don't know that we can cause as much harm or good, long term, in any other activity as parenting. Adult spouses can wound either other deeply, of course. But as a parent, what we do, for good or ill, can deeply affect the very inner being of another human person on this planet.

It seems to me that this is the real reason why we think becoming parents damages the memory- we don't remember the things we used to remember with ease, and we aren't interested in the things we used to be interested in. I don't believe this is because we are stupider- I think it is our brain's way of recognizing that priorities change, that what we're doing now is so vitally important to the good of a single individual, and later, to the species- far more important than the latest movie, the talk show circuit, American Idol, or any of a hundred things that used to seem important but are really just trivialities compared to how much a parent matters in the life of a child.

It is possible to combine having a child with having a full and rich intellectual or
creative life. I do not believe having children interferes with that as much as having children spotlights the fact that some of what we thought was worthwhile is really rather empty. But I also believe that too many of us enter adulthood without having learnt how to provide for our own intellectual resources.

Which brings us to one of my favorite Charlotte Mason quotes, one I've shared here too many times to count:

"What we have reason to deplore is that after some eight or twelve years' brilliant teaching in school, the cinema show and the football field, polo or golf, satisfy the needs of our former pupils.... We are filled with compassion when we detect the lifeless hand or leg, the artificial nose or jaw, that many a man has brought home as a consequence of the War. But many of our young men and women go about more seriously maimed than these. They are devoid of intellectual interests, history and poetry are without charm for them, the scientific work of the day is only slightly interesting, their 'job' and the social amenities they can secure are all that their life has for them.

She goes on to say,

The maimed existence in which a man goes on from day to day without either nourishing or using his intellect, is causing anxiety to those interested in education..."

I think that many times before children come along we are able to fill our lives with intellectual inanities, sports, 'the cinema show,' social rounds, our jobs (which, face it, all jobs have tedious and boring elements, and a good many jobs contain only tedious and boring elements) and the social amenities. The children, because at first they are so all absorbing of time and attention, replace those things in our lives for a while. But then they get older and our lives are no longer consumed with just meeting the needs of the utterly needy- and maybe after being so involved in an enterprise that really was a life and death matter we can't work up the same enthusiasm and focus for trivialities we used to have- but we don't realize that's what's going on. Perhaps we had an impoverished intellectual life before, but we were able to mask that reality with all those things listed above. Or maybe we just have trouble switching gears and we just need time to get back in sinc with a different stage of life. And maybe for some people, for the first time our subconscious has a glimpse of the former poverty of our intellectual life and we are at a loss- either to recognize it or to know how to fix it.

Or maybe we had important things in our lives, an interesting job or career, relationships, things that did matter, but we didn't realize that those things aren't a substitute for an intellectual life, history, poetry, science, etc, _outside_ of that career.

The problem, I believe, isn't so much with being a sahm, it's with never having learned to live the interested life. But it's never too late to start.

Folk Music

Around here we like bluegrass and folk music. I don't mean we like to listen to them, although we do. I mean we like to sing along, either just amongst ourselves, or along with the C.D. or tape.

Once upon a time as I was enjoying belting out my own version of a song- in tandem with some famous singer on the stereo, a joyless and musicless soul (who did not realize just how music-less and pettifogging a soul it was) sneered at me and said, "I don't know why you bothered to turn it on- you can't hear it. Being younger then, and more insecure, I shut up, but it was music-less soul who missed the point, not me.

Although music can be a passive, that is, receptive experience, where you sit quietly and experience it, if that's all music is for you, you've missed at least half of what it has to give. For me, the joy of folk music and the reason to listen to it in the first place is not so that I can be entertained, but it is so that I can listen to and learn the songs so the Progeny and I can sing them throughout the day, on our own, naturally and as freely as breathing.

They become part of the family repertoire, part of that secret family code that every family has, where you kind of have to know the background to know why some apparently meaningless phrase sends everybody into peels of laughter.

Which is why one of my favorite folk song resources is American Folk Songs for Children. There's the book, by Peggy Seeger, and the 2 disc accompanying CD set by two of her grown children (which I think is still available).

There's nothing exceptionally 'professional' or polished about it, so children won't be programmed to think they can only sing the songs one right way. When we bought this set some 15 years ago, we listened to it a few times, but then we sang the songs into our lives. As I thumb through the tattered copy we still have, these are some of the vignettes that play through my mind:

A newly adopted child, tactile defensive and struggling with all those bonding issues, would only let me hold her if I was singing through the Folk Songs for Children book. So once a day I would get it out and start singing, and she would come, drawn by something I never could identify (thought I suspect there was no singing in the previous home) and climb in my lap until I sang all the way through the book (that's something like 100 songs, folks).

Two small girls in summer dresses, running outside to check the mail, leaping off the porch as they sing, "I got a letter this morning... Oh, yeah."

Children playing dress up and promenading downstairs as I sing, "Down came a lady, down came two, down came Miss 'Jenny Dots' and she was dressed in blue..."

Children racing up stairs, and upon being told not to be so rambunctious singing back, "Such a gettin' upstairs I never did see, such a getting up stairs, it don't suit me."

Children going out to play and asking each other in song, "What shall we do when we all go out..." Children answering in song, keeping the tune but making up their own answers.

'There was a man and he was mad' on long car trips.

Sisters holding hands and skipping while singing, "Oh sister Phoebe, how merry were we, the night we sat under the Juniper tree..."

Children covering my mouth and telling me not to sing that awful 'down by the Greenwood Sidey-O.'

Starting tag and hide-n-seek games with 'Run, childern run, the patteroller catch you!"

Practicing 'yes, ma'am' and No, ma'am' by singing Old John the Rabbit and Did you Go to the Barney and having the children sing the replies.

Everybody's favorite for a time, Billy Barlowe

Singing five little ducks to a child who said her feet were the ducks and having her feet 'quack, quack, quack.'

Children singing along while they do their chores while singing 'hanging out the linen clothes...'

Children unhappy with doing chores comforting themselves while wailing, Do, do pity my case' as they work.

Children announcing that they see a sister on her way home (or back to those of us waiting in the car) by singing, "here she come, so fresh and fair, sky blue eyes, and curly hair, rosey in her cheek, and a dimple in her chin, say, young man, but you can't come in!"

That's the role this book and set played in our lives, but I have no doubt that there are resources just as good for the occasion, if not better. This was where we needed it when we needed it.

Really, there's a snatch of folk music for almost every occasion. Folk music is participatory, not merely passive entertainment, and whatever folk music resource you choose, it should encourage participation.

Evangelical Atheists

Here's a fascinating read, an essay called The Atheist Delusion by John Gray. I agree with some, disagree with some, don't know what to make of bits, but it's all thought-provoking:

Zealous atheism renews some of the worst features of Christianity and Islam. Just as much as these religions, it is a project of universal conversion. Evangelical atheists never doubt that human life can be transformed if everyone accepts their view of things, and they are certain that one way of living - their own, suitably embellished - is right for everybody. To be sure, atheism need not be a missionary creed of this kind. It is entirely reasonable to have no religious beliefs, and yet be friendly to religion. It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human. Yet that is what evangelical atheists do when they demonise religion.

[...]
The growth of knowledge is a fact only postmodern relativists deny. Science is the best tool we have for forming reliable beliefs about the world, but it does not differ from religion by revealing a bare truth that religions veil in dreams. Both science and religion are systems of symbols that serve human needs - in the case of science, for prediction and control. Religions have served many purposes, but at bottom they answer to a need for meaning that is met by myth rather than explanation. A great deal of modern thought consists of secular myths - hollowed-out religious narratives translated into pseudo-science. Dennett's notion that new communications technologies will fundamentally alter the way human beings think is just such a myth.

[...]Contemporary opponents of religion display a marked lack of interest in the historical record of atheist regimes. In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, the American writer Sam Harris argues that religion has been the chief source of violence and oppression in history. He recognises that secular despots such as Stalin and Mao inflicted terror on a grand scale, but maintains the oppression they practised had nothing to do with their ideology of "scientific atheism" - what was wrong with their regimes was that they were tyrannies. But might there not be a connection between the attempt to eradicate religion and the loss of freedom? It is unlikely that Mao, who launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet with the slogan "Religion is poison", would have agreed that his atheist world-view had no bearing on his policies. It is true he was worshipped as a semi-divine figure - as Stalin was in the Soviet Union. But in developing these cults, communist Russia and China were not backsliding from atheism. They were demonstrating what happens when atheism becomes a political project. The invariable result is an ersatz religion that can only be maintained by tyrannical means.

Something like this occurred in Nazi Germany. Dawkins dismisses any suggestion that the crimes of the Nazis could be linked with atheism. "What matters," he declares in The God Delusion, "is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does." This is simple-minded reasoning. Always a tremendous booster of science, Hitler was much impressed by vulgarised Darwinism and by theories of eugenics that had developed from Enlightenment philosophies of materialism. He used Christian antisemitic demonology in his persecution of Jews, and the churches collaborated with him to a horrifying degree. But it was the Nazi belief in race as a scientific category that opened the way to a crime without parallel in history. Hitler's world-view was that of many semi-literate people in interwar Europe, a hotchpotch of counterfeit science and animus towards religion. There can be no reasonable doubt that this was a type of atheism, or that it helped make Nazi crimes possible.

[...] America's secular constitution has not ensured a secular politics. Christian fundamentalism is more powerful in the US than in any other country, while it has very little influence in Britain, which has an established church. Contemporary critics of religion go much further than demanding disestablishment.[...]
Lying behind secular fundamentalism is a conception of history that derives from religion.

I was reminded of this post and a conversation I once had with a, presumably very young, atheist. He said that while there have been many pogroms of one religion against another there has never been a general pogrom against all religions, implying that therefore, religion itself was at fault.

He seemed never to have heard anything of the history of the atheist governments of Stalin's Russia (and Lenin's), Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and the current monstrous regime in North Korea.
Nor did he seem to have heard of the bloody revolutionary government of France in 1792, The PLA in Albania (led by Hoxha), and Turcanu's Romania.

I mentioned them, and as I recall, that was the end of that discussion. He just Went Away.

Sometimes people do horrible, inexcusable things. Sometimes they claim to do them because they believe in God or some other deity, and sometimes they do it because they don't believe in any power higher than themselves and they wish to eradicate everybody who differs.

I suspect that usually such unspeakable and horrible acts are neither truly because of one man's religion or lack of it. I think they choose the philosophy that justifies best what they want to do anyway. I think it can actually be traced back to the fact that people can be dreadfully horrible, wicked, and evil. Some of us would use the word 'sinful.'

She's Coming Home Today!

Here are bits and pieces from our last batch of email exchanges:

1.
Church today was wonderful! All German service, of course, but several people there spoke English and helped a bit.

We're off now for something else....
2.
I'll be seeing you in about 24 hours - I think. My poor body clock will be so confused again. I leave London from my layover at 11:30 a.m. and get in at three p.m. -- and fly for eight and a half hours. Mm. That doesn't make much sense, does it? Time's a funny thing.


I still haven't finished packing. I was going to try and write you a juicy e-mail about today, but then I realized I can tell it all to you in person SOON. w00t!

Europe is amazing. I am so glad I came.


And I can't resist sharing this bit of motherly advice I offered her. She emailed to say her cell phone was completely dead as she'd used it for an alarm clock (not to those who were making notes of her minimalist packing- a small alarm clock, or a wristwatch with alarm would have been a Good Thing to Have), not noticing that this meant it would sit up all night like an old grandmother, fretting about a signal. However, she says cheerfully, people have been finding each other at airports without cell phones for decades, so she is sure we can manage.

I told her:

Am told your cell phone battery is stone cold dead, so you have no way to get in touch with us if you need to. Am all astonishment that the obvious did not occur to you- Put on a woeful face, accost some Random Stranger, have a sad tale in readiness, and ask to borrow R.S.'s cell phone. Aren't you blonde? If the UBO could startle friend Susan and your good selves into acquiescence, surely you can do same.=)

We're off in an hour or two to spend the entire day getting to the airport, picking her up, picnicking on the way up (even in the cold), visiting a couple sites in the vicinity of the airport while we avoid rush hour traffic, and making it home again in time to put her to bed for school tomorrow.=)

Terry Pratchett

What I love about Terry Pratchett is that he skewers everybody, every group, every shibboleth with equal glee, and he does it all with such a cheeky grin that I can't help laughing even when it's my cherished ideas he's skewering. In many ways, the character that I envision as author when I read his books is much like the endearing con-artist who is the main character in Making Money, Mr. Moist von Lipwig. Here are some of the funny bits (by which I only mean, of course, the bits that made me laugh) from MM:

There were meetings. There were always meetings. And they were dull, which is part of the reason they were meetings. Dull likes company.

There is a character named Miss Estresseh Partleigh who works for the Campaign for Equal Heights. She complains that the Post Office doesn't employ enough dwarfs. The Post Master can't figure this out, since 1/3 of the staff were dwarfs. Estressa says 'that since dwarfs were on average two-thirds the height of humans, the Post Office, as a responsible authority, should employ one and one-third dwarfs for every human employee.'

"He sighed. It had come to this. He was a responsible authority, and people could use terms like 'core values' at him with impunity.'

There's a tea mug that says "You don't have to be mad to work here but it helps!' The bored post-master adds a comma between here and but, and crosses out the exclamation point. "He hated that exclamation mark, hated its manic, desperate cheeriness. It meant: You don't have to mad to work here. We'll See to that!"

"It would be hard to imagine an uglier building that hadn't won a major architectural award."

There is a giant treadmill which is the source of power for coin stamping at the bank. "Powered by prisoners once upon a time, when 'community service' wasn't just a word. Or even two. It was considered cruel and unusual punishment, however, which does rather suggest a lack of imagination."

An unsympathetic character tries to 'make self esteem do the work of self-respect.'

There is a head-spinning chapter or two against the gold standard which would make an excellent counter argument to Richard Mayberry's Whatever Happened to Penny Candy- which, even though I couldn't quite agree with Pratchett, he made me laugh, and it was as good a counter argument as I've seen anywhere.

"Stamp collecting! [runs on] strange, mad rules. Was there any other field where flaws made things worth more? Would you buy a suit just because one arm was shorter than the other? Or because a bit of spare cloth was still attached? Of course, when Moist had spotted this, he'd put in flaws on purpose, as a matter of public entertainment.

About a large, magnificent temple dedicated to some unknown deity (discworld is crawling with gods, mostly small, parochial beings)- Building the temple didn't mean you believed in God. You believed in architecture."

"I hate it when there are two 4 o'clocks in the same day.'

One character compliments another on a very 'graphic analogy, which aids understanding, while being, strictly speaking, wrong in every possible way."

Vampires (discword is also swarming with such odd creatures as zombies, trolls, golems, werewolves, and more- but not in a gruesome way. Just in a bizarre, and often hilarious way) come to the city and 'take the pledge,' which means they leave off their ghoulish ways. It is no longer acceptable, however, to call them the 'undead.' They are the 'differently alive.' And neither it is PC to speak of odd, strange, or bizarre behaviour. There is only 'differently normal.'

Somebody invents some unique device which was intended to predict financial futures, but in fact, is able to control them. The inventor is concerned about what might happen if it gets into the wrong hands. The main character agrees. The inventor suggests donating it to the government. The main character shudders, as "a prime definition of the wrong hands was the government."

There is a character at a meeting who says, "As' chairman of the, Merchant's' Guild gentlemen may, I point out that these thing's represent a valuable labor force in this' city--" The footnote to this comment explains, "As a member of the Ancient and Venerable Order of Greengrocers, Mr. Parker was honor-bound never to put his punctuation in the right place."

The city is run much on the lines of ancient Venice- guilds, a patrician in charge of everything, and he is said to be a tyrant but he is actually a very gifted leader. "What the iron maiden was to stupid tyrants, the committee was to Lord Vetinari; it was only slightly more expensive, far less messy, considerably more efficient, and, best of all, you had to force people to climb inside the iron maiden."
He intends to appoint the ten noisiest people in a mob to some committee that 'could be locked in a distant office.'

There is more, much more. There is language, which I mention mainly so that nobody is shocked and wonders why I didn't warn anybody. There are some crude innuendos which I could do without. Unfortunately, there is also a dirty old man who dies, leaving behind a secret cabinet full of, well, novelty toys of an intimate nature. They are never described in more detail than that, but they come up with some regularity as the little mongrel who has inherited the bank (yes, the chairman of the bank is a small, yappy, lapdog), insists that one of them is a dog-toy and drags it around in embarrassingly public places. Elements such as these (yes, I am afraid I also laughed here) make it difficult for me to suggest this book to all my friends. Some of them will like it anyway (a few will like it better) and some of them will blush and be shocked and wonder what is the matter with me. You must take your chances and decide for yourselves.

Unfortunately, the 59 year old author has been diagnosed with a rare form of Altheimer's. He announced this recently, saying that while he woul have preferred to keep it private, he thought it wasn't entirely fair to his publishers or the fans who hold Disc World Conventions to keep that dark. He also said: "I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as 'I am not dead'. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think - it's too soon to tell. I know it's a very human thing to say 'Is there anything I can do,' but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry."

There's more here well worth reading.

Travelogue, Day 8

Very briefly --

Today:
* WWI battlefield in trenches in the Vosges hills.

* Colmar, France

* Stotz (I think?), France - a beautiful little village where we were lost on our way to the trenches

I e-mailed the church in Basel and someone will be picking me up at the Claraplatz (one of the main town centers and bus stops) tomorrow morning for services. Then heading out somewhere with J's parents in the afternoon.

Will do more detail later, but for now I am tiiiiireeeed.

Travelogue Footnotes

Little bits and pieces I forgot to share:

Granny Tea shared a postcard she received from the British Museum. Her postcard had some of the Lewis chess pieces pictured. You can see them and read more about them here and here (the first Harry Potter movie featured Wizard's chess pieces modeled on these). The HG had mistakenly called them The Lewisham pieces.

Baleboosteh had emailed me the correction, but I forgot to pass it on. Those interested in the Noah-ish aged old man buried at Westminster Abbey will be glad to have this bit of info from Baleboosteh as well:

The long lived chap, by the way, is Thomas Parr (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Parr). Astonishing, if really true!

And I cannot find the email I want to give the precise quote, but the HG has raved about Baleboosteh's sweet family, and was particularly charmed when, as she left, a five year old boy-child shook her hand and said something like, "You are a very sweet young lady."

And, confidential to another person whose email I have misplaced- that kind person in London who did email and give us some helpful contact information should the HG require it, and I really did mean to respond with effusive thanks, even though she was leaving London that day. But then I got distracted, and, well, I didn't. I wasn't very consistent with thank-you notes as a child, either, and I am ashamed.

Spin Sisters and Martha Stuart

Betty Friedan repudiated the "traditional woman," and today, even while we trumpet choice and try to avoid the so-called Mommy wars (except for when we don't), the elite just can't avoid backhanded little jabs.
We recently watched a terrific movie, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio. It's about a mother of ten, married to an alcoholic who drinks away their only steady income and is, to put it mildly, difficult to get along with. It's a true story, and the heroine of that story keeps her family together, supports her children, finds creative ways to bring in some extra income, protects those children, and even manages to avoid getting dragged down into co-dependency without being dragged into useless anger and recriminations. And about this hard working mother of ten who has to feed and clothe her family on her wits, both Julianne Moore (the actress who plays her) and the director refer to the underused brains of the typical housewife. Speaking of underused brains, that's what I thought of when watching through the movie with Julianne's commentary turned on. She is a lovely and talented actress when given other people's lines to speak.

Which brings us to one of my other favorite bits from Spin Sisters, by Myrna Blyth. Unfortunately, I already returned the book, but I did find this online essay by her, where she makes the same point from her book which I remember nodding along to in gleeful agreement.

In the early 1960s, Betty Friedan jumpstarted the modern feminist movement with her book The Feminine Mystique. In it Friedan decried the lifestyle of upper-middle-class homemakers, the trapped housewives of the time, who, she claimed, spent long, lonely, wasteful hours cooking and crafting and arranging flowers. Exactly the same activities Martha so skillfully repackaged and so profitably sold to the same demographic a couple of generations later.

The irony there is rich and delicious. I don't even need butter.

For Your Listening Pleasure

More cool downloads here.

Housewives' Monthly Calendar

Baleboosteh has been posting a fun little thing- excerpts from The Housewives'Monthly Calendar by Elizabeth Craig, published in 1936.

We have sandwiches and fillings for March (Sample:
Stir 1/4 pound ground dates, 1/4pound minced figs or raisins, and ¼ pound ground mixed nuts together. Mix in the strained juice of half a lemon and half an orange. Use with thinly buttered brown bread.)

Table decorations
(Sample: Bowl of primroses, fringed with violets (very flat bowl).

Tea bread (Pastries, biscuits, buns, layer cakes, and more, including: Buns: Cherry; Chocolate and walnut; and Hot Cross Buns.)

Here's a bit more about Elizabeth Craig, a sort of pre-Martha Stewart, says Baleboosteh.

Fun stuff

HG"s European Travelogue, Days 5 and 6

Yesterday the internet service where the HG was refused to cooperate with her, so we did not get any news. Y'all can imagine how happy I was about that- I am so spoiled. I kept reminding myself that those who traveled abroad over a century ago could go weeks and months without hearing from their loved ones- but I didn't really care. I didn't live then. I live now in the computer age, and I want my, I want my, I want my ISP.

However, Providentially, yesterday is the day we received the postcard the HG sent from England. The pic on front was the Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey. She said what she liked even better, but could find neither poscards nor take pictures, was seeing the tombs and memorials of the likes of Pitt, Wilberforce, Fowler, Thos Clarkson, and Charles Fox. She said royal tombs litter the place until she reached saturation point- Elizabeth I, Mary I, Edward the Confessor, Richard II, Charles I, Anne of Cleves, Mary Queen of Scots- Reading her postcard swept me back to the sofa in our little house, where I read our favorite young person's history book, Our Island Story to our youngest two children.

The HG kindly says that it all would have been 100 times more enjoyable if we were along with her, too. Then, she says, we could have laughed with her at the tomb of the guy who supposedly lived through the reigns of seven princes (unless it was 9?) and died at the age of 157, or something Noah-ish.

Today she called us and spoke to all but two of us for a few minutes. She says she went into Basel Switzerland where Erasmus died, and that if only she knew something about the language, she could have figured out where to go to see something about Hans HOlbein's work, or life. He was a pupil of Erasmus' and lived and worked in Basel for a while. She said it was very, very frustrating (and humiliating) to be basically mute and illiterate.

Later today she emailed:

Highlights from yesterday:
- Helped J with dorm cleaning. We went to Starbucks in Basel, Switzerland aferwards, which was fun. There was a toy museum next door with absolutely beautiful window displays. Pictures of it were taken, of course.

- Also yesterday J. and I went out to an old castle on the top of a hill -- looking out into more hills and valleys. It's easy to see here why Germany took so long to be unified.

Today J. & I took a long walk up into hills. Spring in the Black Forest... some flowers, breezes (including ones carrying the scent of manure that cultivates the fields)

After lunch I took the bus into Basel (gulp - and I speak no German). Walked along the Rhine for a bit and then to the Munster. Places like that are great reminders for how tiny and insignificant we are in the world's history -- each generation has had its own dramas, joys, griefs... and for them these things made or broke their world. But eight hundred years have passed - what thrilled them? what broke their hearts? We don't really know - and if the world is still here eight hundred years from now, those generations will only know hazy details about our own lives. Time marches on. We can only live our part in it...
Hm. I don't know if I was going anywhere logical there.

At any rate, tomorrow I'm going somewhere in France with J. and her family... where precisely is still vague.

Here's some perspective. Today three of the Progeny and I, en route from a local cult meeting 4-H club meeting, took advantage of a map and book I recently acquired all about historical buildings and architecture in our town. We took a peek at two of the significant buildings in the vicinity of the cult meeting. One was built in the 1890s, the design is Italianate brick with iron pilasters, and the other is a stone church building featured in Life Magazine some fifty years ago, built by the local pastor with some assistance from his congregation. On the way home we saw a family of wood ducks bobbing for food (ducktails UP!) in a pond on the side of the road. On the way there we saw a flock of Canada Geese in a boggy meadow, and a hawk flew very near our van. We drove for 45 minutes over roads dividing barren cornfields, some of the time on gravel roads, often on roads with no signs whatsoever (we thought we were lost a few times. We actually WERE lost once). We stopped and got a snack in a local grocery store/meat market where the prices are still applied to the items with a price sticker, the cashier has to ring up the prices by hand (no bar code scanner) and the conveyor belt is not the long strip of black rubber we're used to, but a lazy susan sort of mechanism of solid wood and formica.

The farms we passed were, none of them, older than about 150 years. Indians never even lived here, though they did hunt. It was once a wetlands. We passed two or three country cemeteries, none of which could possibly have a grave dating back to beyond 1800 or so- though a few of them mark the graves of hardy pioneer stock born elsewhere in the 1700s who immigrated here.

I am not complaining. I am not (precisely) wallowing in some sort of inferiority complex. As bad as gas prices are, we still pay by the gallon and not the litre. I love driving 45 miles through country roads and seeing perhaps three other cars and maybe fifty houses (probably less). I can bloom where I am planted.

And I can do all that and shiver with pleasure at the thought of touching a bit of history ten times older (and sometimes more) than anything in my entire state.

Hand in the Cookie Jar

Christopher J. Ward,

The former treasurer for the National Republican Congressional Committee diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars -- and possibly as much as $1 million -- of the organization's funds into his personal accounts, GOP officials said yesterday, describing an alleged scheme that could become one of the largest political frauds in recent history.

More here

Infant Care Tips from 1907

From Study of Child Life, by Marion Foster
Washburne


The Healthy Home Evironment

The whole house in which the child lives ought to be well warmed and
equally well aired. Sunlight also is necessary to his well-being. If
it is impossible to have this in every room, as sometimes happens in
city homes, at least the nursery must have it. In the central States
of the Union plants and trees exposed to the southern sun put forth
their leaves two weeks sooner than those exposed to the north. The
infant cannot fail to profit by the same condition, for the young
child may be said to lead in part a vegetative as well as an animal
life, and to need air and sunshine and warmth as much as plants do.
The very best room in the house is not too good for the nursery, for
in no other room is such important and delicate work being done.

The temperature is a matter of importance. It should not be decided
by guess-work, but a thermometer should be hung upon a wall at a
place equally removed from draft and from the source of heat. The
temperature for children during the first year should be about 70
degrees Fahrenheit during the day and not lower than 50 degrees at
night. Children who sleep with the mother will not be injured by a
temperature 5 to 20 degrees lower at night.

Proper Clothing for the infant:

The ordinary dress for a young baby, for example, leaves
the arms and the upper part of the chest unprotected by more than one
thickness of flannel and one of cotton--the shirt and the dress. About
the child's middle, on the contrary, there are two thicknesses of
flannel--a shirt and band--and five of cotton, i.e., the double bands
of the white and flannel petticoats, and the dress. Over the legs,
again, are two thicknesses of flannel and two of cotton, i.e., the
pinning blanket, flannel skirt, white skirt, and dress. The child in
a comfortably warm house needs two thicknesses of flannel and one of
cotton all over it, and no more.

Infant Feeding

The natural food of a young baby is his mother's milk, and no
satisfactory substitute for it has yet been found. Some manufactured
baby foods do well for certain children; to others they are almost
poison; and for none of them are they sufficient. The milk of the cow
is not designed for the human infant. It contains too much casein, and
is too difficult of digestion. Various preparations of milk and grains
are recommended by nurses and physicians, but no conscientious nurse
or physician pretends that any of them begins to equal the nutritive
value of human milk. More women can nurse their babies than now think
they can; the advertisements of patent foods lead them to think the
rather of little importance, and they do not make the necessary
effort to preserve and increase the natural supply of milk. The family
physician can almost always better the condition of the mother who
really desires to nurse her own child, and he should be consulted and
his directions obeyed.

Frugalities

My weekly post is up at Frugal Hacks.

It's Frugal Fridays over at Crystal's blog.

This is a good time to start tightening the belt, paying down your debt, and learning to live iwhin your means, if you haven't already done that.=)

Politics of Hope?

Just how much attention should a candidate's preacher receive? I thought at first some of the things said about Obama's preacher weren't entirely fair. We've worshiped at a congregation here the minister was a pacifist, and we are certainly not pacifists.

But when the minister is actually part of the candidate's campaign (in a symbolic role similar to that Ferraro played for Clinton), and when he says things like this, and when what he says from the pulpit almost certainly violates the IRS rulings that every church I have ever been a part of has felt compelled to comply with, then I don't think it's out of bounds after all.

It's not even that I completely disagree with everything he says. It isn't easy to be black in many ways in this country. Just because I don't share a belief in affirmative action as the best way to remedy certain issues, doesn't mean I don't believe there are no race related problems in this country. But.... this rhetoric is inflammatory, over the top.

Listen to the video, read some of the linked blog posts (mind the minister's language), and ask yourself, if a Hilary or McCain went to church where a white minister said exactly the same thing, only he said it about blacks, would it be off limits? If they chose to sit their children down in front of that kind of preaching, would everybody be okay with that? And is this really a message of unification and hope?

The Anchoress says it's not racist, it's the emotional appeal to victimhood, and there is some truth to that, but I still think it's also a nasty display of identity politics.

The Corn Invasion

Here's a story on whether or not the presence of corn in just about everything we eat is contributing to obesity.
Those of with family members with a corn allergy know just how difficult it is to avoid the stuff.

Politics of Hope?

Just how much attention should a candidate's preacher receive? I thought at first soem of the things said about Obama's preacher weren't entirely fair. We've worshipped at a congregation here the minister was a pacifist, and we are certainly not pacifists.

But when the minister is actually part of the candidate's campaign (in a symbolic role similar to that Ferror played for Clinton), and when he says things like this, and when what he says from the pulpit almost certainly violates the IRS rulings that every church I have ever been a part of has felt compelled to comply with, then I don't think it's out of bounds after all.

Listen to the video, read some of the linked blog posts (mind the minister's language), and ask yourself, if a Hilary or McCain went to church where a white minister said exactly the same thing, only he said it about blacks, would it be off limits? If they chose to sit their children down in front of that kind of preaching, would everybody be okay with that? And is this really a message of unification and hope, compatible with the feel good speeches Obama has been running on?

Update: Rick at Right Wing Nuthouse explains why this is more than guilt by association.

House and Home

There is no better field for the display of art and originality than is offered three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, three times each day, to the mistress of the household; and the wife who meets this opportunity, not as a servant but as a mistress, is the one of whom the prophets foretold, "Whose husband praises her in the gates and whose children rise up and call her blessed."

The catering for a family involves more than the tickling of the palate or the pleasing of the artistic sense. It means securing the family health, increasing the working force. This cannot be done unless there is knowledge of the value of foods, their strength and heat-giving qualities. A physician of standing not long since said that women and children starved to death in this country because they did not know the kind of food to eat, or would not take food enough to meet the demands made upon their vitality.

It is quite common to hear the busy women, of our large cities especially, say, "Oh if we only had some form of concentrated food. I feel faint- famished- but I don t want to eat." This condition of mind or stomach or both has been recognized and we have columns in our newspapers advertising concentrated food, nervines, and tonics. A knowledge of the chemical values of the several kinds of food would save doctors bills, prolong life, and increase the working powers of the whole people.

Many times the habit formed in childhood of eating but little and eating food unsuited to the physical condition is the cause of the habit of eating in adults that leads to disease, impaired vitality, depleted nerve force. It is a fact that working girls when at the vacation houses prefer bread and tea to the nourishing food furnished. They do not care for meat and vegetables, being unused to them. Their stomachs seemingly reject such strong food. Children who are not taught to eat nourishing breakfasts when they cannot have a supply of nourishing food until late afternoon or evening dinner pay, through all their lives, the penalty. The habit is formed and is never broken. Each day's labor is undertaken without, to use a figure, sufficient fuel to maintain steam enough properly to run the engine. This almost national habit cannot be remedied until proper feeding becomes a moral responsibility. Ignorance cannot be pleaded in our days. The laboratories of the world are at the service of the housekeeper; governments think it a part of their duty to discover how the people may be well fed at the least cost, how the best physical conditions can be supported. The health of the people is protected as far as governments can protect the individual from the adulterations of food or the use of deleterious substances in food preparations.

How many housekeepers avail themselves of this avenue of useful knowledge, which costs nothing but time, to write a note to the Government at Washington for the pamphlets that are being constantly issued by the Department of Agriculture? There are standard books on the adulterations of food, but their sales never make the fortunes of the scientists who write them. Publishers do not clamor for the privilege of putting their imprint on the title pages, while not a few are put in printed form by the efforts of the philanthropist.

"The American public is to be congratulated upon this useful and valuable contribution to the needs of its great army of working people, made possible through the humanitarian benevolence of a private citizen. This was the fifth prize offered by the same citizen, through the same channel, for the noble purpose of ameliorating, in some degree, the hardships which baffle mankind in the tireless struggle for existence." -*Report of the Secretary of the American Public Health Association referring to the prizes offered by Mr Henry Lomlb of Rochester NY through the American Public Health Association.

Yet no intelligent woman ought to feel that her household furnishings are complete unless her kitchen library contains the standard books, not only on recipes, but the scientific books on the basis of foods and their preparation in the manner that secures the preservation of their values. Simple tests are possible to detect adulterations in food, yet few housekeepers know how to make these tests. It is not possible in the limits of this chapter to give chemical tests. Mrs Ellen H. Richards has published two books, one on "Food Materials and their Adulteration" and one on "The Chemistry of Cooking and Feeding," both published by Estes & Lauriat of Boston, Mass. These books are necessary in every house where its mistress has a care for the best results, for money expended, and the desire to secure these results with the least waste. Die deutsche Frau in der Vergangenheit By Max Bauer

About Ellen Richards- it seems she invented Home Economics, and she loved chemistry and other branches of science, and she certainly enjoyed academia. She paid her way to Vassar by working for years (likely beginning her teens) cleaning houses, among other things. She went to MIT, where she cleaned house for some of her professors, too. She wrote her parents that perhaps she won some allies amongst her professors because she was not a radical, and "..I do not scorn womanly duties but claim it as a privilege to clean up and sort of supervise the room and sew things..."

More links to her work here

Winter Soldiers

Hot Air has a fantastic video segment (and the transcript) of an upstart (read: not from the dinosaur media) young reporter confronting Senator Kerry over his lies and slanders against American soldiers in his Winter Soldier movement during the VietNam era. Kerry, I know this will surprise you, lies. It's also crossposted toMichelle Malkin's blog.

A new group of activists are organizing an event they call Winter Soldier II, and Jason Mattera asks Kerry some questions about that. For instance:

MATTERA: Do you think that they will make slanderous accusations–accusing the troops of raping women, pillaging villaging, just like you did to the Fulbright committee?

KERRY: Uh, I didn’t make those.

MATTERA: You didn’t?

Audio clip, John Kerry, 4/22/71: [They told the stories at times] they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

Kerry claims Winter Soldier Investigations were substantiated by further investigation.

MATTERA: Did you ever verify those –

KERRY (crosstalk): I’ve been misquoted about that hundreds of times.

Well worth watching.

See here for some further information on Winter Soldier II.

ADD Political Ramblings

Wayne Barrett, who apparently consults his prejudices rather than the facts when he writes a story:

The prime movers of both political parties have long tried to game the presidential nominating process—not only to choose their eventual winner, but also to pick their November opponent. And in this landmark election without incumbents, the media wing of the Republican Party, in particular, has quite visibly been playing that game. Right-leaning pundits for months now have very openly not just called for Hillary Clinton's head, but also coddled and promoted Barack Obama, salivating over the prospect of facing him in November.

Except for when they are doing the opposite:

Rush Limbaugh Explains Why He's Urging Republicans in Texas and Ohio to Vote for Hillary Clinton on Super Tuesday 2

Barrett also seems unaware that George Will, like many true conservatives, has opposed the idea of a McCain presidency since McCain-Feingold.

I don't listen to Rush unless I have turned on the radio too soon and Michael Medved isn't on yet, but I had to check out this claim:

Limbaugh had started the campaign way back in early 2007, singing "Barack the Magic Negro," a "Puff the Magic Dragon" parody about Obama's supposedly inauthentic blackness, even calling him the "Magic Negro" 27 times in a single show. Then he went silent about Obama during the heat of the January primaries. Now he's mocking the new frontrunner again, asserting that his rhetoric is as empty "as Hillary Clinton helplessly protests," and declaring that "his career bears no trace of his own character."

Rush didn't coin the phrase, and he didn't apply it to Barak- he was quoting an L.A. Times writer who did- David Ehrenstein.

Here's what Rush had to say about it:

Limbaugh later asserted: "I'm going to keep referring to him as that because I want to make a bet that by the end of this week I will own that term," adding, "If I refer to Obama the rest of the day as the 'Magic Negro,' there will be a number of people in the drive-by media and on left-wing blogs who will credit me for coming up with it and ignore the L.A. Times did it, simply because they can't be critical of the L.A. Times, but they can, obviously, be critical of talk radio." Limbaugh continued to refer to Obama as the "Magic Negro" throughout the broadcast -- 27 times, to be exact -- and at one point sang "Barack, the Magic Negro" to the tune of "Puff, the Magic Dragon." Limbaugh defended his use of the song, stating, "Well, that's what we always do here. We do parodies and satires on the idiocy and phoniness of the left."

And I found Rush's parodies and satire schtick funny the first five or six times I heard it, when Rush was a breath of fresh air in a previously liberal dominated arena. It wasn't long before it was kind of relentlessly annoying, which is why I don't listen to Rush much- but being annoying doesn't change the fact that Hilary's problems are not due to any 'right wing conspiracy' as much as to her own history and personality, nor does it make Rush's parody of a liberal writer into something bigoted.

We've also not neo-neocon pointing out some hard truths:
Recently I was listening to some talking heads on cable news. Unfortunately I don’t remember who was speaking, but the man went on and on about Hillary’s “attacks” on Obama this past week: the Rezko connection, NAFTA and Canada, Obama’s lack of experience in foreign policy. He then then said, almost as an afterthought “of course, she was also helped along by developments.”

In other words, by reality, by what happened, including what Obama may have actually done or not done, said or not said. It didn’t all happen in a vacuum! Maybe, you know, like, some of the charges might even be true (whatever that means). It might be the case that Obama actually does have a close connection that has been neither fully explored nor explained with a shady Chicago character who’s under indictment. That Obama said one thing about NAFTA, his aide said another to Canadian officials, and then Obama denied that fact. That as little experience as Hillary Clinton has in foreign policy, Obama has less.

The type of reportage that focuses less on substance and more on gamesmanship is rife, and getting more commonplace all the time. [ ]

She points out the silliness of articles that imply McCain and Clinton are somehow 'ganging up' on Obama (the 'pincer grasp' references I have seen lately), as though three candidates for the same office won't find that two of them reach the same conclusions about the weaknesses of the third- and it won't always be the same odd man out, either:

...any “pincer movement” comes from one thing and one thing alone: the fact that these arguments based on Obama’s “lack of national security and foreign policy expertise” are a natural for any opponent to make. That’s because his vulnerability to such arguments is based on (gasp!) his lack of national security and foreign policy expertise.

The press is supposedly getting tougher on Obama. It remains to be seen whether this will continue. The sad thing is that it seems to have taken a combination of Hillary’s hammering away at the obvious, and a skit on Saturday Night Live mocking the press’s kid gloves treatment for Obama, to have motivated the press to finally ask some questions of Obama that they should have been asking right along.

And yeah, that SNL has always been on of the Right's best weapons in that vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

Neoneocon references a

"recent TNR piece by Noam Scheiber, for example, on the subject of the press’s treatment of Obama vs. Hillary. Scheiber manages to employ approximately 1500 words to analyze what might be behind the press’s newly critical stance towards Obama without ever trying to ascertain whether the questions being asked have any validity.

What’s driving it all, according to Scheiber, is not the issues themselves, but a divide between two types of press: the elite corps and what Scheiber calls the “working stiffs.” The former consists of journalists from the NY Times and the like (no doubt TNR would be included); the latter consists of reporters such as those from the Chicago Tribune. The latter, of course, are also most familiar with Obama and subjects such as Rezko. According to Sheiber, “these are the people who pounce.”

And, according to Scheiber, these were the people who happened to have been in attendance at the now-famous Texas press conference where Obama whined at having to answer more than eight questions on the subject of Rezko. The whole thing is seen by Scheiber as a power struggle between the above-it-all media elites (with whom Obama displays a natural affinity) and those media “working stiffs.”

Here’s what one of the “working stiffs,” Steve Huntley of the Trib, had to say about Obama’s Texas news conference:

Try to imagine President Bush, fleeing questions coming at him fast and furious over a controversy, closing a news conference by saying, “Come on, I just answered like eight questions.” Democrats in Congress and liberal interest groups would be shouting coverup. The editorial pages of the national newspapers would be thundering outrage….Obama is lucky the Rezko affair is a Chicago issue with which national reporters are unfamiliar. And, given what’s known today, it’s hard to see how the Rezko case could wound Obama’s political ambitions. But for that reason, it’s hard to understand his reluctance to answer questions from the Chicago investigative reporters who know the Rezko issues best.

NeoNeocon continues:

Here’s Scheiber again, quoting Obama:

In Obama’s telling, the press’s recent friskiness was largely the result of Clinton mau-mauing. And so, on a plane ride out of Houston on primary day, Obama engaged in a little media criticism of his own. “I didn’t expect that you guys would bite on that,” he told reporters. “I am a little surprised that all the complaining about the refs has worked.”

Interesting concept, that of the press as the “refs.” It not only continues the sports analogy, but it subtly flatters the press by playing to their concept of themselves as objective and above the fray. Nobody ever said Obama wasn’t smart.

And just because it was kind of amusing, here's a leftwing blogger admitting what we all already knew:

I have always accepted that Keith Olbermann's Countdown show was a biased broadcast. And that he favored the progressive and Democratic point of view on things in his choice of stories, tone and reporting. He was the Dems' Faux Noise, but sticking to the facts (while admittedly ignoring others.) But I never expected him to become Barack Obama's Bill O'Reilly/Rush Limbaugh. But he has.

'The bias was okay when it favored the issues and people I liked.'

REading the comments to almost any Obama or Clinton related post there is an eye-opening and kind of scary dive into identity politics at its worst.

The comments in this one were pretty rife with the same. Stuff like this, where we learn that things are terrible for women, just terrible, why we have almost no representation because:

For example, black males are a bit more than 5% of the U.S. population. Yet only one of them is a Senator now. That would not be "lots," correct? So how many do you think would be at least better representation? Say 5% -- 5 black male Senators?

Then, of course, there ought to be 5 black women Senators -- among a total of 51 women Senators.

And again, that's just the Senate. Shall we go on to governors next? With 50 governors. . . .

(for the sake of accuracy the commenter did say the 5's should be changed to 6's, as that was a typo)
And this:

More women in the United States then men....2004 - 149.1 million female to 144.5 million male.

If we were proportionally repesented in the Government... over half would be female.

So... following this bean counting logically, men should only vote for men and never women, because women couldn't possibly represent them, and women should never vote for men for the same reason, and whites should never vote for blacks for the same reason, and blacks should never vote for whites, and only Hispanics should vote for Hispanics, and I guess we either need a transgendered candidate with DNA from at least four separate ethnicities as President or we need four or more Co-Presidents? This is madness.
Speaking of which, of course, here is the Geraldine Ferraro comment they're referring to:

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."

Which is really hilarious in that absurd way I appreciate so much because back when she was Mondale's running mate, that's exactly what I said (and still believe) about here- the only reason she was where she was is because she was a woman. And with Hilary Clinton, it's even more so- her political career is largely built on what she's doing as the wife of a successful politician (who would certainly not be where he got without her help).
Following the furor over her comments, Ferraro has stepped down from her 'honorary' position in the Clinton campaign.

As says George Neumayr in his article on Reverse Discrimination:

IF, AS FERRARO SAYS, the country is "caught up in the concept" of embracing an unqualified black president, that's because she and her friends propagandized Americans in that notion a long time ago. Ferraro's whining is the grousing of a propagandist whose student has surpassed her.

Obama can throw in the faces of left-wing paternalists all their most cherished claims, starting with the idea, advanced by Sandra Day O'Connor among others, that in America's suffering sweepstakes black males enjoy pride of place over white women. Who should get into Michigan's law school first? A black male? Or a white woman? Well, for the next 25 years or so, spitballed O'Connor, let's give it to the black applicant. Isn't it a little late for Ferraro to be complaining about reverse discrimination?

Hillary's definition of "experience" presupposes a tenet of conservatism, that excellence and merit trump all other considerations. But that's not the definition of experience she normally endorses and for the eight years her husband was in office she treated it as de facto evidence of racism. Equality by any which way is more important than experience, their policies assumed. Where has the Clintons' commitment to a White House that "looked like America" gone?

Hohum. I know this is terribly boring for many of you who just don't do politics, and especially for our friends who aren't in the states. But there's just so much to mock here that I can't look away. Everywhere I go I find some new absurdity.

How To Find Morels

In general I don't eat wild mushrooms, partly because I have read too many murder mysteries. Morels are the exception, because they are fairly easy to identify and pretty hard to confuse with poisonous varieties of mushrooms.

Milan Pelouch and his wife Lila have written a hand little guide for those who like morel hunting, and I scored an early review copy at LibraryThing.

This little book does exactly what it says it will do in the title (how to find Morels even as others are coming back empty-handed)- tells you all about how to find Morel mushrooms.
Clear photographs and helpful descriptions (including photos and descriptions of mushrooms that are NOT Morels) are just the beginning.
Pelouch also takes time to explain the science behind Morels, how they grow, why they grow where they do, when they grow, and how to harvest them so as to ensure the chance of a good harvest next year. Best of all, he gives excellent advice on where to find them, describing the sort of terrain, soil, vegetation, and other aspects of the sort of habitat where you might expect to find morels.
The recipes (by Lila Pelouch) are a bonus, and Milan Pelouch concludes with a section on mushroom hunters etiquette and a map with a time table showing when you might expect tfo find morels in your state.
We love morels and I am looking forward to using this book to discover a patch in our woods, but even if we don't find any, we'll have learned some useful woodcraft and field information from this book, which, as Charlotte Mason type homeschoolers, makes me pretty happy.

HG's European Travelogue Day Four

Here are a few excerpts (edited) from our chat this morning:

Me: How are your bruises?

She: not as bad as they were a few days ago.
The couple I stayed with have a comfy little upstairs study in a garret type room.
The stairs are incredibly steep and narrow (much worse than at the little house where we lived before [DHM's note: this must be about as steep and narrow as a ladder, then]) and I tripped on the first step and fell down them the first day I was there.

me: Ouch. But still- I was picturing some humiliating fall down the steps at the British Museum or some other public place, possibly in the rain.
Glad there were no bones broken.

She: no. nothing humiliating in public, except for feeling bad that my backpack stuck out so much.

me: I heard sandhill cranes this morning. Jenny went for a walk and says the daffodil green spears are just peeking up and something purple is budding (hyacinth, she thinks).
AND she saw a fox- twice.

She:
It's been amazing to smell fresh flowers here... it's been way too long
Not as much litter out and about in Germany that I've seen, although I'm in a really rural part of Germany and I'm sure rural British don't do it as much

me: Americans were thoroughly indoctrinated on the sins of littering in the seventies.
IT was a massive campaign, on the news, signs on the roads, lessons in the schools, radio public service announcements, major public shaming, increasing fines, even handouts at restaurants and everything. I must say I appreciate the results, but am not sure the tactics are compatible with my political philosophy.
Watcha gonna get us in Germany, huh? Huh? Huh?=)

She: J. said this area is known only for its beer steins and its cuckoo clocks.

me: I love cuckoo clocks.

She: The beer steins are cheesy and the cuckoo clocks are expensive.

me: Sigh. Oh well.

She: The flower fairies woman grew up not far from one of the places I visited in England.

me: Wistful sigh.

She: I think that you & EC should look into coming in October or something.

me: Why October?

She: Rates are really good, then, and you would have two of you together

me: But EC is a neurotic traveler, and I don't think we need two neurotics without a keeper on the same overseas journey.

She: lol.

me: I know!!! I will start taking each child as a graduation present (to me).[smile]

SHe: there you go. [smile]
but in the fall, because spring and summer are pricey.

me: Fall is good.

She: And the pound is double the dollar right now. ouch.

me: Winces.

And here's her notes from today:

Quiet day today...

It poured rain this morning - we must have England's storm. J. & I went down to a restaurant near here that's part of a family farm. We had a large breakfast (omelettes, fruit, delicious bread) in a warm and cozy room with huge windows that looked out into the hills and orchards. Here they don't rush you out of restaurants... the attitude is to sit and enjoy your food and the conversations. (I'm not basing this off of this am's experience alone - J. mentioned it later).

Then we went back and because of the huge rain and wind, we sat in J's room and talked for a couple lovely hours. Then we took one of the girls (I say we, I was just a passenger) to Lorrach for her orthodontist appointment. J stays there with her, so I walked around for a little bit. The sun was out by then, so it was even more beautiful. Only it's a hugely intimidating thing to walk around a town where you don' speak a lick of the language. Well, I know "bitte," I guess. You don't need the language to enjoy the window displays or the sunshine on the town center, though.

I think it's going to be a quiet evening here. I didn't take any reading with me on the plane over because of space issues, but I found a pb copy of Mansfield Park in one of the British thrift shops, so I am reading it right now. I read about half of it yesterday.

So the guy on the plane... wanted to know what I thought of the election, if I thought it was going to be Obama or Clinton. He said he thought it was similar to the 1976 campaign, where the Democrat candidates kept going further and further left and McGovern, as the furthest left, got picked at the convention. He was too left for the country, though, so we got Nixon.
(I think that's what he said, anyway - a lot has happened since that conversation)

About McCain, he said McCain doesn't have a great attent