Apron Power!

Barbara Curtis over at Mommy Life recently hosted a contest for women who love aprons. It's over now, but pictures are up at Picasa Web Albums - Barbara - Apron Power!.

I applaud Barbara's comment explaining her contest:

I say it's time to bring back the apron - and I don't mean the unisex cloth chef's apron, but the frilly feminine - even to the point of useless - kind.

What's funny (or perhaps sad) is that up until last fall I might not have agreed. I remember that we were required to make aprons in home-ec class at school, but we were embarrassed about it. My friends and I didn't want to be caught dead in an apron. We were beyond aprons.

Last fall, I chanced upon some cheap (I mean $1.99 cheap) aprons at a local store. Feeling faintly ridiculous, I bought one, just because it seemed it might be practical to have one, and because I really liked the colors. If nothing else, I told myself, it would be a nice decorative touch, hanging on the wall.

Practical it has been (and how). But more than that, it has been fun. I've got two aprons now, both rather the chef's kind but in vintage prints (to go with my wonderful old-fashioned kitchen), and I'm thinking of making some frillier ones. Just because I feel like it.

Barbara elaborates in a post called Further thoughts on aprons:

As I told you in the beginning, I just started wearing an apron a year ago. It was only after the contest began that I "got" the significance of the apron - how feminism had changed it into a symbol of oppression. Funny how all those little womanly things that were passed down for generations were thrown out the window and now people like Martha Stewart make a fortune teaching us how to do them again :)

So my question is, have any of you had any further thoughts on the significance of aprons? Have any of you tried them for the first time and found them to be empowering? How about the fact that your clothes stay cleaner? :)

I think she's on to something. I'm having a grand time rediscovering the worthwhile know-how and wisdom and heritage and folkways that were given unwarranted bad press (or suppressed, or reinterpreted out of all recognition) in my formative years.

Like aprons.

I felt uncomfortable putting one on that first time, several weeks ago. Sheepish, you might say. Bad steers from bad company in your younger years can linger, worse the luck.

Then I went through a very brief defiant stage, a la Take that, you misguided mentors of my youth! I've outgrown you! I CAN wear an apron!

(Childish, I know. But there it is. Does it help any that it was just a flash, gone as quickly as it came?)

And now? Now those aprons are a part of my everyday routine. They make working in the kitchen easier. And they bring a smile to my face. They fit. Not literally. I'm short and they don't fit me well, but I've decided aprons in general are my style.

So's helping to run a business. And writing. And studying. And trying to learn something every day. (And blogging, when I've got the time. You might have noticed that.) And being neighborly. You know, trying to be a well-rounded, complete human being, improving as I go, if I can, but never (I hope) taking myself too seriously.

Tell me again why we ever bought into the ridiculous notions that a woman who liked being mistress of her domain - who enjoyed running a home - had taken two steps back and was somehow letting other women down? That wearing an apron was a badge of shame? Puleeze. How provincial can you get?

Feminists tend to panic too easily, I've decided.

That's their problem. Heh. Aprons for me, please.

Addition: Randi has a tutorial for making a "Mommy's Little Helper Kitchen Apron".

Addition: (via SFO Mom) My goodness, the blogger The Kitchen Madonna is organizing a National Wear an Apron Day! (An Apron Manifesto or How to Get All Tied up with Apron Strings of Love, The Kitchen Madonna, January 24, 2007):

There is an apron renaissance going on out there and much of it is recorded on the internet. Women everywhere are taking pictures of their aprons and posting them on certain blogs. They are scouring the internet looking for vintage patterns and materials. They are writing about what being a mother and a housewife means to them. These women aren’t depressed. They don’t need valium or to secretly drink or to watch a wildly popular television show that is a diabolical inversion of their lives.

I think a National Wear an Apron Day should be May 14th during the month of Immaculate Mary and the day after Mother’s Day. Amidst the quiet drama of our everyday lives, we can celebrate in gratitude our homes and families by toasting each other with tea and homemade cookies and fresh buttered bread. And go ahead, on Career Day at your local school, invite a girl over to see what your life is like. She most likely will have no idea how to hold a baby or how to make a stew or how to bake a casserole to take to a bereaved family or how soft your apron is for drying tears.

The devil very well may wear Prada but authentically feminine women wear aprons!

If you support a National Wear An Apron Day, please email the Kitchen Madonna...

This is my kind of revolution. :)

I don't think I'd go so far as to insist that authentically feminine women wear aprons. But if y'all want to sort females out into apronphobes versus the rest of us, well... let me think about it some more but it does have an appeal, I must say.

Update: Kitchen Madonna writes (see comments):

I need to clarify that while I love aprons, they also symbolize something THAT DOESN"T REQUIRE AN APRON TO ACHIEVE OR TO BE. You can be authentically feminine and not wear one. Don 't have to. I'm just taking a homey, common object and trying to say what women do in the home is so important...

New blog watch: Jay's World View

Now, this could be interesting, not to mention fun. It's a boy's blog from Kenya. So far, amongst other things, he's posted on a really cool treehouse, the coolest bug he's ever seen, abseiling down a really steep cliff!!...

hat tip: Nairobi Paul (that would be Jay's father)

The future is what you make it: Eastern Europe housing edition

You know those awful prefab high-rise apartment buildings of Eastern Europe? There's a move on to not tear them down, but instead to make them more energy efficient. (Making Eastern Europe's Tower Blocks Energy Efficient, Deutsche Welle, 04.02.2007)

I guess saving energy trumps feeding the human spirit with beauty if you're a certain type of efficiency geek. Or if you're a certain type of reporter. The caption on the lead photo with this article actually says, "The prefab's future is looking rosier."

Gee, that's good news. Isn't it?

Well, here, let me be fair. Here's the first part of the article:

Starting in the 1960s, virtually all new public housing projects in eastern Europe were pre-fabricated tower blocks. Millions of people continue to live in the buildings, which were built in an age when saving energy was low on the list of priorities. Now a group of researchers from the University of Kassel is doing their best to make the towers more environmentally friendly.

Engineer Hartmut Hübner and his colleagues have been working in Dunaujvaros, south of Budapest, to convert Communist-era high-rises into environmentally friendly housing. The high-rises aren't just inefficient in terms of energy consumption, they are also a potential source of social conflict, according to Hübner.

(Don't hold your breath. It's not what you think...)

"Here in Hungary, as in other eastern European countries, heating costs are still subsidized," he said. "But that will change. And with rising energy costs, it'll be difficult for the people here to pay their heating bills."

The Solanova Project, of which Hübner is a part, has already succeeded in retrofitting a seven-story building in the small town. The biggest problem was that prefabricated components for the buildings no longer exist, so the engineers had to experiment with parts such as solar panels or energy-efficient windows.

OK, OK, I have no objection to making existing buildings more energy efficient, especially if the government is about to hand over the costs to people who are stuck there.

But does it strike anybody else as somehow tragic that somehow all this gets reduced to 'efficiency good, energy waste bad'?

A little catechist humor, and a question

From Catechist's Journey, a blog I stumbled on this morning thanks to Georgie Tamayo Clemens, here's a child's take on Psalm 23. (He seems to have the gist, even if the words aren't quite right...)

On a slightly more somber note, from the same blog, where do people get the idea that priests are supposed to be perfect? I grew up in a secular environment, and I know I was taught wrong on this, but why do so many people from religious families get so messed up on this?:

...It’s no wonder that young people shy away from the thought of a vocation if they think it means being perfect. Yes, we need to teach them a respect for priests and religious, but we also need to help them see that all people, including priests and religious, struggle with the call to holiness…a call we ALL share. In a sense, to be holy is to be perfect but God alone is holy (perfect). When we refer to people as holy, we are saying that God’s presence is revealed in that person. We can all strive to reveal rather than conceal God’s presence in us.

Bibliothèque nationale de France - Virtual exhibitions, and France in America

While looking for a specific Medieval painting for Amanda's color feast (I found the uncredited painting in a book, but have yet to find it online, alas; Medieval art can be sooo colorful), I came across the virtual exhibitions of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, aka BNF, and managed to find my way to a version of the website in English. There's some good stuff there.

See, for instance: The sea
Also: Medieval bestiary

Getting out of the virtual exhibits, I found a France in America section:

Conceived in partnership with the Library of Congress - the great library of Washington - La France en Amérique/France in America is a bilingual digital library made available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It explores the history of the French presence in North America from the first decades of the 16th Century to the end of the 19th Century.

Through direct digital access to complete books, maps, prints, and other documents from the collections of the partner libraries, the project illuminates two major themes in the history of relations between France and the United States: the major role played by France in the exploration and settlement of the continent and its participation in several events which indelibly marked the history of the United States: the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, and the cession of Louisiana. The site will be completed in fall 2006 with a panorama of economic, scientific, literary and artistic exchanges between the two nations in the course of the 19th Century.

The missions of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Library of Congress are to make their resources available to ever growing numbers of people and to preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations. La France en Amérique / France in America is the newest addition to Gallica, the Bibliothèque nationale de France's digital library. With some 76 thousand digitized texts and 80 thousand images to date, Gallica offers the online public an encyclopedic reference collection as well as sites dedicated to particular themes. The companion site at the Library of Congress is part of the Global Gateway project, whose mission is to establish cooperative digital libraries with national libraries from around the world.

[...snip...]

This digital collection takes its place alongside two other websites brought online since 2003 dedicated to the shared history of France and North America: La Louisiane française, 1682-1803 (http://www.louisiane.culture.fr/en/som.html), produced by the Ministry of Culture as part of the "National Celebrations" collection; and the French-Canadian site Nouvelle-France, horizons nouveau (http://www.archivescanadafrance.org/), undertaken by the initiative of the Direction des archives de France, the Library and Archives Canada, and the Canadian Embassy in Paris.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Library of Congress present these documents as part of the record of the past. These historical documents reflect the attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs of different times. The two libraries do not endorse the views expressed in these collections, which may contain materials offensive to some readers.

So, what are you doing still hanging around here? ;)

Photoperiod-based sleuthing

From Super-Fun Geography Studies with Journey North's Mystery Class (Melissa Wiley, The Lilting House, January 24, 2007):

As one of my little ones used to say, I'm so a-cited! It's almost time to begin a new season of happy hunting with the Journey North Mystery Class. Ten classes of schoolchildren around the world have been chosen to be Mystery Classes, and it's up to the rest of us to track down their location. You too can join in the fun!

Here's how it works...

"Best Silly Kid Arguments" sought

Melissa Wiley is collecting Kids Fight Over the Most Ridiculous Things stories. (It started, as I understand it, when she posted about her kids fighting over dryer lint...)

Share The Love Blog Awards

Share The Love Blog Awards showcases a lot of blogs I don't know, nominated along with blogs I really like. Hmmm. I know my links list is too long already. But... but... this looks like a gold mine. The awards are hosted by the hostess of One Woman's World.

hat tip: Randi

Movie note: The Pursuit of Happyness

In Commentary: Material Goods and The Pursuit of Happyness, Jordan Ballor writes:

Will Smith's latest movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, stands as an extended argument underscoring the truth of conservative values. This may sound like an improbable anomaly given the traditional political, ethical, and social allegiances of Hollywood, but the power of the story lies in its basis in fact, and this in turn prevents it from being appropriated as a tool for liberal political ideology.

The narrative is inspired by the true life experiences of Christopher Gardner, a struggling and homeless single father turned successful stockbroker and CEO. The story begins in 1981...

Movie note: Miss Potter

Javamom recommends the movie Miss Potter, based on the life of Beatrix Potter.

Job opening

From Help Wanted (Cafe Hayek, January 30, 2007):

I'm looking for someone who might be able to do some simple animation to tell economic stories. For example, I have an idea for a narrative that would show how the minimum wage hurts the workers with the lowest skills. You could make it a full-blown documentary or animated story. But what I'm thinking of is a low-level of visual sophistication (stick figures or crayonesque drawings) that would have a certain stylish simplicity so that you could create this kind of visual story quickly and at relatively low cost. But it would be fast-paced enough and entertaining enough that people would want to watch.

Ball's in your court.

What are libraries for?: Social uplift edition

From A Social-Uplift Program That Works by Nicole Gelinas, City Journal Autumn 2006:

The Queens Library is that rare New York phenomenon: a government-funded social-uplift program that works. It succeeds by doing what it has done for over a century: giving New Yorkers with ambition (however modest or grand it may be) the tools they need for self-improvement. These tools get real results in Gotham, where people can earn an incremental reward for each skill they obtain. Learn English, and move from a kitchen job to an office job. Master math, and pass the GED and start technical college. The Queens Library’s crowded branches suggest that many poor and immigrant New Yorkers understand the city’s opportunities for upward mobility and that they see themselves not at all as victims trapped by circumstance but as individuals possessing the independence, the self-discipline, and the chance to get ahead.

That's the good news. For the bad news, Gelinas notes that city leaders don't recognize libraries as poverty-fighting tools and have cut funding.

The article has some nice history (including background on Andrew Carnegie), and showcases the services offered then and now. For instance:

Because nearly half of the residents of Queens are foreign-born, one of the library’s most practical services is to help the borough’s African, Asian, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern immigrants assimilate into American society, just as it helped German, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants become citizens a century ago. The library is particularly effective at this task, because it recognizes a key truth lost on many contemporary immigrant-advocacy groups: newcomers can’t succeed in America unless they speak English. Hence the library’s wildly popular, and free, English-for-Speakers-of-a-Second-Language program—the largest such initiative in the nation, serving 3,000 students annually. Each semester, the program must turn people away, sometimes two prospective students for every one who gets a slot.

The whole article is well worth a read.

Previous related articles:
What are libraries for?
What are libraries for?, revisited

The sign

Donna-Jean recounts going to a March for Life rally nineteen years ago:

Nearly everyone, it seemed, carried a sign. They were both factory-made (big red octagon shapes saying "Stop Abortion Now") and homemade (I remember the quote from Dr. Suess' "Horton Hears a Who" on one: "Because a person is a person, no matter how small.").

I didn't have a sign. I could have asked for one, I'm sure, but I wanted something different - something that reflected why my husband and taken the time to come there.

Then I realized my sign was in my pocketbook. I pulled out my latest photo of our precious just-turned-two year old daughter, got a safety pin from my husband (one of those people who always, always has one in his wallet, because "you never know when you'll need one"), and pinned her picture to my coat.

Click through to her post for more on that rally, plus what she and others are doing these days for women hurt by abortion, and to help young men and women grow up with valor and virtue.

Color feast entry (or would that be entree?)

Does the green outweigh the grey, do you think? (In other words, is it colorful enough for a color feast? Possibly not, but I hope it'll sneak in as warm, heartening, or cheery.)

This shot was taken from inside the house, through a window, the end of October. There were two or three other deer in the back yard, but this trio looked especially at home. We keep the back semi-wild for the fun of it, and are repaid with scenes like this. (Actually, they sometimes also bed down in the more-manicured front lawn, too. Deer around here aren't terribly shy.)

For those of you not up on wildlife of Oregon, those are mule deer. The ears should explain the name.

Previous related post: On color feasts, dog years, and Leap Day, etc

Changeover

I've just changed over to New Blogger. I'm hoping it's a smooth transition. Please bear with me while I learn the ins and outs of the new set-up (and do let me know if I introduce glitches)...

On color feasts, dog years, and Leap Day, etc.

Amanda Witt's family recently relocated to a snowy area, and all that whiteness is getting to her. She's fighting back in a wonderful way (to my way of thinking):

And so I was driven, two days ago, into the arms of defiant El Greco. Today I give you Cezanne, along with an invitation: Bloggers, post something bright, something colorful, warm, and heartening, and let me know; non-bloggers (unbloggers?), if you run across something colorful and cheery in the next week or two, send me a link to it. I'll post the links, and we'll have a color feast to tide us over until Valentine's Day.

I don't know why, but this made me think of one of my favorite bits from The Pirates of Penzance. The Pirate King has come to explain to the hapless (but dutiful) Frederic why he isn't out of his apprenticeship after all:

For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,
Some person in authority, I don’t know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,
Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February,
twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty,
One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine and twenty.
Through some singular coincidence – I shouldn’t be surprised if it were owing to the agency of an ill-natured fairy –
You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap-year, on the twenty-ninth of February;
And so, by a simple arithmetical process, you’ll easily discover,
That though you’ve lived twenty-one years, yet, if we go by birthdays, you’re only five and a little bit over!

OK, OK, I know why I thought of it. First of all, because of the idea that February is shorter because it's beastly, and it's not nice to add a day to it every fourth year, but you might as well laugh at it. Secondly, because I'd just read this other Wittingshire post on dog years. Personally, I'd like for the concept of "dog years" to become one of those things that dissolves in the mists of time. I don't find it very useful as an adult, and it confused the stuffing out of me as a kid. But the post is funny, and I got to wondering if that household has ever tackled the ins and outs of the folks who have their birthday on Leap Day. I seem to remember being concerned, when younger, about people who only had "real" birthdays every four years. From a child's perspective, it seemed the sort of thing that might scar you for life, being subjected to faux birthdays or, worse, being asked to stoicly not have a birthday party three years out of four. Horrors! ;)

Beyond that, it just seemed a riddle, that some years were longer than others, and Feb. 29 sometimes was and sometimes simply wasn't.

Then I found out that George Washington (along with a lot of other people, of course) had two birthdays, because the calendar got changed during his lifetime. That really threw me. Calendars, to that point, had seemed eternal truths, or something along that line. (A very wrong assumption, as it turned out.)

On Reading Aloud

Kate Pitrone advocates reading aloud. Why? Let her tell you. (On Reading Aloud, Guest Commentary, Ashbrook Center, January 2007)

hat tip: Wittingshire

"Angels Among Us"

See Angels Among Us at A Rose By Any Other Name for a link to a video by the musical group Alabama, taking note of those who make a difference in the lives of others. Good stuff.

Putting his foot down (and in his mouth at the same time)

Mark Laswell, deputy books editor at The Wall Street Journal, takes on Sen. Chuck Hagel's jab at shoe salesmen:

Washington is a city of many diversions, but very little surpasses the pure entertainment value of watching a senator--media chatter about his potential attractiveness as a presidential prospect ringing in his ears--commandeer the microphone during a committee meeting and then posture in a most forceful and statesmanlike way for the television cameras. Sen. Hagel did not disappoint last week. As the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations prepared to vote on the resolution expressing outright opposition to the increase in troops, Sen. Hagel, a longstanding critic of the war, was in ultra-dudgeon about what he apparently regards as an insufficient amount of Capitol Hill kibitzing on the president's conduct of the war.

"I think all 100 senators ought to be on the line" by having to make a "tough vote" on the troop increase, Sen. Hagel said. In a bit of bullying that instantly became the TV quote of the day, he then appeared to call out an unspecified number of his honorable colleagues as cowards: "If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes."

Whereupon, Mr. Lasswell makes some comparisons between having a Senate job and selling shoes, (which is, as reality would have it, not that safe a job).

But here's the meat in the broth:

It's not clear precisely what the point would be of a resolution opposing the troop increase, other than letting legislators flatter themselves with the notion that they have some influence over the president's war-making strategy. Conducting a periodic opinion poll on Capitol Hill (for that's what nonbinding resolutions are) might be useful. Certainly historians would wish that during the Civil War the Senate had taken its temperature every few months regarding President Lincoln's prosecution of the war. Might have been interesting to compare their vacillations with his single-mindedness.

Hmmmm.

Full article: If the Shoe Fits: Chuck Hagel courageously takes on footwear salesmen (OpinionJournal, Feb. 1, 2007)

The First Annual Hidden Treasure Blog Awards

Via Dewey's Treehouse, here's a blog award project I can link to without reservation (yay!). From everyday mommy:

Your mission is to scour the mommy blogosphere for hidden treasure. Read through archives, visit new blogs and find that well-written gem. This can come from a favorite blog which you already read or a blog you've discovered during the treasure hunt. But, the idea is to find well-written posts which are off the beaten path.

The categories are: Children & Family, Faith, Marriage, Motherhood, Homemaking, Humor, Current Events and Life. No profanity, questionable or offensive material is permitted...

Nominations will be accepted Feb. 1 through 7. Then the voting begins. More info here.

DVD note/Book note: My Man Godfrey

I just got through watching My Man Godfrey (1936) with William Powell and Carole Lombard, for the second time this winter. (It's one of those movies with enough going on that you can miss some rich details the first go-round.) I went looking for information about the movie after I watched it the first time - but found that most of the reviews gave away too much information. So... I'm not going to repeat that transgression here. Suffice it to say that it usually gets listed as a screwball comedy, but it's rather more than that. That isn't to say it doesn't have its screwball moments (lots of them) or that Lombard's character isn't one of the ditziest females ever to grace a screen. It is to say that it's a movie you can laugh at - with your kids, even - but that slides a few ideas about right and wrong into the mix, and takes jabs at the spoiled 'sophisticates' of its day. This is from a Hollywood that still knew how to laugh at itself as well as the world around it.

My copy is on a DVD I don't see listed for sale online (it's one of those clearance-priced four-movie-pack specials, selected out of a larger collection, I think), so I've linked to one that supposedly has both the colorized version and the black and white. (I always choose the original black and white, given a chance on old movies. But to each his own on that.) I understand there was a David Niven 'remake' in the 1950s, with an altered plotline. No thanks. Powell is the perfect Godfrey.

Add the novel the movie was based on to your treasure hunting list. It seems to be scarce enough to have sent some copies into the several hundred dollar range. The author is Eric Hatch. If you find a hardback first edition with a dust jacket, well, now you're talking four figures, probably, depending on condition. At first glance at the markets, I'm guessing at this point that the true first edition was published 1935 by Little, Brown, and Company of Boston (which is funny, given the skewering the Eastern upper crust crowd gets in the movie), with a Grosset & Dunlap edition out later the same year.

Update: The Common Room lists other fun movies.

Prognosis: "at the very, very best she will be a vegetable for the rest of her life"

Oh, yeah?

Three cheers for Batya Feigenbaum and the people who didn't give up on her.

Book market note: Books by Augusta Huiell Seaman

In the stack of used books that I'm getting ready for sale, I came across a book from 1947. It hasn't aged particularly well. The pages are still soft (flexible, not brittle), but they are browning. As far as the boards go, there's wear to the corners and the head and tail of the spine; not real bad, but enough to be unhappy about. If there ever was a dust jacket, it's long gone.

But this turns out to be one of the harder to find books by the prolific author Augusta Huiell Seaman (1879-1950), once quite popular with kids and teens, and now apparently popular with collectors. Even "reading copies" (i.e., ugly but all there) are selling for $25 and up. Hmmm. That's a nice surprise, from a seller's point of view.

I did a quick look around and it looks like several of her titles are scarce, well worth keeping your eye out for when you're at garage sales and thrift stores, etc.

For a lengthy article on the author and her work, plus a bibliography, see Nancy Drew for Smart Kids: Mysteries by Augusta Huiell Seaman by Christine M. Volk.

Eggs not all in one basket

The lead on this morning's local radio news was that a small town north of here suffered a broken water main, and is without water - but, at the same time, isn't without water.

The city water supply is temporarily toast, but (the mayor explained live) there was one citizen inside the city limits with a private well who was providing water to everyone, as were a few citizens outside the city limits with wells.

The mayor also assured everyone that there was a back-up plan should the community suffer a fire before the water lines were back in service. He declined to give even an outline of that back-up plan. (Not that I particularly wanted one. I'm a big fan of not letting bad guys know how cities are set up to deal with things like compromised water systems.)

The hope is that city water will be restored sometime today. In the meantime, hooray for the maverick with an in-town well.

Glimpses of the past

All right, so I set out to do a bit of research on author Alice Hegan Rice, and along the way I stumbled on the Kentucky Library and Museum online site. This was not a good site to stumble upon on a busy day. ;)

See, for instance, the vintage postcard collection...

Too fun.

Hillary wants a conversation, Jim Geraghty obliges

I don't often link to "fisking" but Hillary Is 'In It.' Last Name to be Determined Later (the hillary spot, National Review Online, Saturday, January 20, 2007, Jim Geraghty reporting) is too spot-on to pass. And, besides, it's not quite "fisking" -- is it? It's more like a conversation... ;)

Let's see, if you count 15-year-olds as women, and exclude husbands in the military, and... (Updated)

*Scroll down for a closer look at the numbers by Michael Novak.*

From Journalistic Malpractice in "Marriage is Dead" Report by Michael Medved:

On Tuesday, January 16th, 2007, the American people awoke to startling and disturbing news: for the first time ever, the majority of women in the country were living without a husband.

All the TV networks, radio news broadcasts, pundits, talk show hosts and leading newspapers reported on the devastating milestone, and saw it as yet another indication of the ongoing collapse of the traditional family. Some commentators hailed this development as an encouraging sign of newfound freedom, while others decried it as a reflection of decadence and dysfunction.

With all the debate and pontification about the new minority status of married women, it’s just too bad that no significant media outlet (beyond this writer, on my nationally syndicated radio show) made the single most important and salient observation about the big news--

That is, it’s not true.

According to Medved, you have to include "some 10,154,000 girls between the ages of 15 and 19" in the pool of "women" before you can approach the figure used by reporter Sam Roberts in the article run in the New York Times.

(Personally, I hope most "women" in the middle of adolescence are still single. Silly me.)

It gets worse:

Yet even the ridiculous inclusion of his ten million unmarried teenagers couldn’t give Sam Roberts the story he wanted to report – that most American “women” are now unmarried. As a matter of fact, the Census Bureau shows that among all females above 15 the majority (51%!) are still classified as “married.”

So the New York Times required yet another sneaky distortion to shave off that last 2% from the married majority, though this bit of statistical sleight-of-hand Sam Roberts had the decency to acknowledge. “In a relatively small number of cases, the living arrangement is temporary, because the husbands are working out of town, are in the military, or are institutionalized,” he writes. In other words, in his brave new majority of “women” without spouses, he includes all those thousands upon thousands of wives and mothers who are waiting and praying at home for the return of their husbands from Iraq or Afghanistan. By arbitrarily removing this 2% of all females (2,400,000 individuals) who are classified as “married/spouse absent” from the ranks of the married, and then designating as “unmarried” his millions of middle school and high school girls who are living with their parents, together with some 9 million elderly widows who have devoted much of their lives to marriage and husbands (42% of all women over 65 are widows), Roberts can finally arrive at his desired but meaningless conclusion that “most women” now “are living without a husbands.” Eureka!

Full Medved article

hat tip: The Alliance Alert

Update: Michael Novak also runs the numbers (Married Women and the New York Times, First Things, Feb. 7, 2008):

...An impressive 58 percent of white non-Hispanic women were married with husbands present.

Looking at these numbers another way, add to the 58 percent of white non-Hispanic women with husbands present, the 12 percent that had been divorced as of 2005, and the fewer than 2 percent separated, plus the 1 percent married but with husbands absent. Also add another 11 percent who were, not by choice, living as widows. Therefore, the total of white non-Hispanic women over twenty who were or had been married was 85 percent. It is obvious that, in that year, marriage was the overwhelmingly preferred choice of American white women over the age of twenty. In addition, a significant proportion of the not-yet-married women over twenty will also enter into marriage in the future. The proportion choosing marriage, then, easily exceeds 90 percent.

Because these numbers do not include black, Hispanic, and Asian women, they do not give an accurate picture of the whole U.S. female population. But they do give a clear picture of the largest culture, as a point of comparison...

f a i t h * i n * f i c t i o n's short story contest

David at faith*in*fiction is co-hosting a short story contest, built on the theme of "daily sacrament":

As always, we're not going to completely pin you down on what this means. It could be the daily made sacred (like Andre Dubus) or the sacred explored in terms of daily life (as Marilynne Robinson does so eloquently in Gilead...

Encyclopedia info sought

One of Danielle Bean's readers is looking for a set of encyclopedias that's not hostile to Catholic values. So far, people are recommending older editions and the internet. Surely there's something contemporary that hasn't been co-opted by social engineers, so to speak? The discussion is going on here.

My understanding is that the encyclopedias don't need to be Catholic, per se. What's wanted is something that presents knowledge without undermining morals.

If at first you don't succeed, rabbit edition

Unbelievable.

What are libraries for?, revisited

Reader johng, responding at my previous post What are libraries for? (about libraries discarding books based on circulation stats, even if a book might be considered a classic or otherwise an important cultural heritage) wrote:

Kathryn, this article is timely. But such an insane practice has been standard in some libraries for at least the last decade. One librarian and I shared a laugh. She and others would 'check out' books essential to the library just to save them from the clutches of the library director, who was determined to turn the public library into a computer only center. That one check out would preserve the book until the next purge! Believe it.

We commiserated with another librarian. Hers was a newly opened public facility. The only books in the Young Adult section were recent publications, and a large number of them were objectionable to many parents. If there were classics, we didn't see them. Hers was a collection not usable for many families.

The holding of that which is good and beautiful, and necessary for civilisation--certainly a noble goal for our public libraries. And a lost role for many.

I have to admit that I feel rather silly for not having thought to suggest this before, but, really, it wouldn't take very many of us going to libraries and checking out books we don't want lost to the community, to save quite a few books worth saving.

Spread the word, eh?

Thanks, johng, and please thank those librarian friends of yours who battle for a good, healthy selection of books in their libraries.

Tsunami warning

There has been a major earthquake (currently listed at 7.9) east of the Kuril Islands off Russia. There are tsunami warnings/watches in effect for various places in and around the Pacific. More information is available at the USGS Earthquake Center.

Update: West Coast & Alaska Tsunami Warning Center (Event maps)
Update: Pacific Tsunami Warning Center

A splendid diversity

Although I don't share the alarmist tendencies of many people in the heirloom seed industry (several of whom aren't slow to tell you that we're doomed if we don't preserve old vegetable varieties), I do share their enthusiasm for preserving a wide and rich vegetable and flower heritage.

I'm also a great fan of commercial seed companies that have managed to develop plants that do well under a variety of conditions and/or that hold up well for shipment to distant markets.

And, no, I don't see a contradiction there. I think we need good commercial varieties, and I think we're far better off in both the long and short terms if we have great regional or niche varieties, too. I think we're better off from a safety standpoint if we don't become overly reliant on too few varieties or depend too much on a just a handful of seed sources. I know we're better off from the standpoints of taste and beauty and experience if we don't let our food and surroundings become too much of a sameness, so to speak.

All of which is prelude to saying that I am having a wonderful time reading the Seed Savers 2007 Catalog which came in the mail. I think my favorite info snippet this year so far is "Found growing in a street crack at 56th and College in Indianapolis, Indiana. First offered by SSE member John Hartman."

Oh, wait... you didn't think you had to be some sort of specialist or have membership in some sort of fraternity to help save and share great and/or interesting flowers and vegetables with the rest of the world, did you? You thought you had to have a horde of seeds from plants originally brought to America by your great-great-great-grandparents and zealously cultivated by your family ever since?

Think again. Those who stumble across plants worth propagating also play their part. The catalog is full of stories like that. Found in a market in Russia (or India, or wherever). Found growing at an abandoned farm. That sort of thing.

This is, as I understand it, in keeping with how many of the world's best loved flowers and food crops got established. Someone found them somewhere, and took them somewhere else where they might be appreciated or studied or improved. I have books on my bookshelf featuring stories of men risking their lives to acquire exotic plant specimens to take to collectors in fad-hungry Europe, for instance. More on that someday, when I've got more time.

For now, though, I just wanted to alert you to the catalog before too many of the offerings sell out.

Well, that, and I want to publicly thank those families that have quietly and patiently and doggedly saved the vegetables and flowers grown by their ancestors instead of letting them be lost to us. I haven't learned the art of saving seeds properly. But I admire those who have.

A note: Introducing plants from one part of the world to another has been known to unleash some awful pests in the new place. (Some parts of Oregon, Washington and California are horribly infested with Scotch broom, for instance, to the detriment of practically everything else in the vicinity.) Please, please, exercise some caution and common sense when importing plants, and keep an eye out for anything that unexpectedly looks to be on the verge of rampaging off your place. Thanks. I feel pretty safe promoting the Seed Savers stuff, because most of what they offer requires cultivation to survive, but, still, do keep an eye out, won't you?

P.S. The Seed Savers catalog also features a selection of books that's well worth a look.

Not available in all pet stores

I have before me a flyer for King's Discount Stores, for a sale running January 8 through 14. Among the items on sale:

100 PIECE JUVENILE
JIGSAW PUZZLES
GREAT ASSORTMENT OF PETS

The accompanying picture shows a puzzle featuring dinosaurs.

Perspective

I was talking on the phone to an older lady who lives several states away, and she informed me that she'd looked in the mirror and finally seen a wrinkle. And so we both cheered.

She has, you see, been battling heart failure, and it had caused terrific swelling, and she'd been looking in the mirror and seeing what she called a pumpkin instead of her own face.

Being able to see your wrinkles is good.

What are libraries for?

John J. Miller, noting that many libraries are getting in the habit of discarding books that haven't been checked out in two years even if they're classics, wonders if librarians are becoming mere clerks instead of those who "shore up the culture against the eroding force of trends." ("Checked Out," OpinionJournal, Jan. 3, 2007)

It's a fair question, I think, although I'd like to invite Mr. Miller to check out bookstores like ours if he thinks bookstores only cater to the latest fad. For that matter, we generally sell quite a few classics over the course of any given year, often to people who made it through a public school education and/or college without being exposed to much Western Civ and who wonder what they've missed. Heh.

Blogs4Life conference Jan. 22

The Second Annual Conference of Pro-Life Bloggers will be Jan. 22 prior to and after the annual March for Life in Washington DC. More info here.

Author note: A. J. Cronin

I get the Scotsman.com's business news daily email, which always includes a Fact of the Day. Today's fact:

A J Cronin, the creator of "Doctor Finlay", was born today in 1896 at Cardross near Dumbarton. After completing his medical studies, Cronin became a Navy surgeon. He then settled in a mining area of South Wales, which was used as the setting for his novel "The Citadel", said to have been one of the inspirations for the setting up of the UK's post-war National Health Service. Other popular works were "Hatter's Castle", "The Stars Look Down" and "Keys to the Kingdom". Cronin died in 1981. To read about other famous Scots, visit heritage.scotsman.com

By guess and by gosh pumpkin custard

I love to experiment with recipes. Sometimes it works. Occasionally it doesn't. But it's fun.

I decided that since I'm the only person around here who eats pie crust, and I'm not crazy wild about it myself unless it's really, really good (which it rarely is), I decided to skip the crust and make something akin to a pumpkin custard instead of a pumpkin pie. I bought a can of Libby's Easy Pumpkin Pie Mix. I mixed it with eggs and evaporated milk as called for, but poured it into a casserole dish instead of a pie pan. (What? Custard cups? Who has that many custard cups? Who wants to bother with that many custard cups?) Then I went to bake it just like a pie.

Then I reconsidered. Probably having a starting temp of 425 for 15 minutes was to cook the crust, of which I didn't have any. Probably without a crust the higher temp was a bad idea. As if on cue, I started getting wafts of browning smells from the oven. Oops. I pulled the casserole dish out of the oven until I could get the heat down a bit.

My husband wandered through and mentioned his grandmother always used water baths for custard. Well, I almost always do too, but in the press of getting several things done at once I'd forgotten. It's not like I cook a lot of custard. (I should change that. We like custard, and it's relatively easy to make. But I digress.)

I did not have a big enough pan to put the casserole dish in a proper water bath, so I used a broiling pan and got water up almost halfway to the top. This is not at all as high as it should be, but did I mention I didn't have a big enough pan to do any better?

So, I put it back in the oven, this time at 350 degrees, in its half-bath, and cooked it until it was done. I can't tell you how long that was, because I just kept checking and adding time, but not keeping track.

But here's the kicker. It came out wonderful (if I do say so myself). It was light and moist and creamy and when you added a bit of Cool Whip it was one of the best desserts we've ever had around here. Forget trying to get pie pieces just the right size, too. With this stuff, in a casserole dish, you just scoop out as much or as little as you want. How easy can it get?

So.... do I have to do all that early-too-hot, water-bath-late-and-low stuff or can I get the same results by sticking it in the oven in a more or less proper water bath at 350 from the get-go? I'm going to try the easy way next time, in part because I'm not at all sure I could replicate the sequence-that-worked if I tried.

If you're wondering about my title: my neighbors in Wisconsin, back when I worked there, called cooking by the seat of your pants "by guess and by gosh" cooking. I hear it's a term commonly used in the Midwest. At any rate, that's definitely what this effort was.

Mary Katharine Ham begs to differ with the Washington Post

Mary Katharine Ham attends The Falls Church in Falls Church, Virginia, which recently broke away from the Episcopal Church to join the Anglican province of Nigeria. So when she saw that her church was being profiled in the Washington Post she compared what was said in the newspaper against her first-hand experience. She wonders if the reporters went to the right church.

The original James Bond was an ornithologist?

For what it's worth, in my email update from The Scotsman (aka scotsman.com) for 04 Jan 2007, the Fact of the Day is:

The real James Bond was born today in 1900. No, not the super-spy, but the American ornithologist whose name was borrowed by author Ian Fleming for his best-selling novels. Whilst living in Jamaica, Fleming (who was a keen bird-watcher) had a copy of Bond's "Birds of the West Indies" and took his name for the spy since he considered it a "brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name that] was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born." To read more about a real Scottish hero from the world of espionage, visit heritage.scotsman.com

That story almost sounds too good to be true... (Pause while your hostess googles...)

Well, my goodness. Over at Barnes and Noble I see that A Field Guide to the Birds of the West Indies has James Bond as a co-author along with Roger Tory Peterson, and I see Wikipedia has an entry on that book, saying it has become a collector's item among Bond fans. It also has an entry on James Bond the ornithologist. It mentions that the 20th Bond film (do I want to know how many there are?) has the spy James Bond, played by Pierce Brosnan, examining the book in a scene set in Havana.

I haven't found a link for it at Barnes & Noble yet, but elsewhere on the internet I see that there's also a Collins Field Guide/Birds of the West Indies, 5th Revised Edition, 2002, that lists James Bond as author, with no mention of Peterson.

French judge rules that pork soup isn't racist

Police in Paris had shut down soup kitchens for serving pork soup. From The Guardian (Jan. 2, 2007):

But the judge at the administrative tribunal in Paris decided that as there was no evidence the SDF [Solidarité des Français] had refused to serve Jews and Muslims, who do not eat pork for religious reasons, it could not be accused of discriminating against them. The city's police prefecture was ordered to pay €1,000 (£670) in costs to the group.

In a statement, Roger Bonnivard, the group's president, said: "After weeks of dirty manoeuvres, intimidation, harassment, all kinds of pressure, and despite a new ban, the Paris police authorities now have to adhere to the decision. There are no legal grounds allowing anyone to ban pig soup."

hat tip: It Shines For All

Did I hear that right?

The radio was on in the next room, and I wasn't listening, but I thought I heard a newscaster say that some city was having trouble keeping its public transit running on time because of people collapsing and needing attention - and that most of the fainters were women on crash diets?

Nah. I couldn't have heard that right. And if I did, it sounds like urban folklore to me.

Still... I'm not a crash dieter, but I've known a few... it seems possible... especially since New Year's resolutions have just kicked in and some people are not known for being intelligent about New Year's resolutions....

New York Times Magazine article found wanting

In Truth, Justice, Abortion and the Times Magazine - New York Times, readers' representative Byron Calame finds that the April 9, 2006, cover story in The New York Times Magazine did not meet the standards that readers of The New York Times should expect. The article claimed that a woman named Carmen Climaco was sentenced to a 30-year jail term in El Salvador for having had an abortion, when court records show that she was found guilty not of an abortion, but of having a full-term live baby and then strangling it. Calame also doesn't think the reaction to early complaints about the article were handled well.

Hats off to The New York Times for publishing Calame's column on this.

hat tip: ProLifeBlogs.com (of which I'm a member)

On plagiarism, internet and otherwise

A blogger got caught passing off the work of other writers as his own, which prompted professional writer/screenwriter Robert J. Avrech to say a few things about people who plagiarize, and the people who shrug it off or even defend it.

Book note: In Search of Lost Time

Robert J. Avrech is almost embarrassed to admit it (he says), but he has read the seven-volume French novel In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, and loved it. But, he says:

The difficulty in the book is the oceanic prose; sometimes, quite frankly, it's hard to follow the plot through the scrim of Proust's often labyrinthine sentences. But for me it was worth it. After making my way through the seven volumes I felt as if I had glimpsed an entire age, seen into a specific man's soul. It took me over a year of disciplined reading, and I actually plan on doing it again.

The very best book to help you get through the seven volumes is: Roger Shattuck's Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time. It is essential, and without it I might have given up any number of times.

Here's one of my favorite quotes from Proust: "We believe we can change things according to our wishes because that's the only happy solution we can see. We don't think of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution; things don't change, but by and by our wishes change."

Full post

I haven't read the book and don't know anything about it except what Mr. Avrech tells us in his post, but I couldn't resist noting a post about a book that took more a year to read with the help of a field guide, and was still deemed worth the effort. Besides, I love the Proust quote.

Something else I thought I'd never hear myself say

Let's be up front here. You can't pay me to listen to the Coast to Coast radio show. I grew up around people who believe space aliens are the determining factor in mankind's future, and if I never hear another word about UFOs, etc., it will be too soon.

And so, if you had asked me up until this afternoon what the chances were that I'd write a post thanking Art Bell (a major UFO cheerleader) for anything I'd have said none. No chance whatsoever. End of story.

Allow me to eat a very small crow, here. A friend of mine who does listen to the show, I hope for entertainment purposes, told me that Art Bell waxed eloquently pro-life on his show last night, at some length. It seems Mr. Bell and his wife recently discovered that she was pregnant, and before taking an airplane trip they went in for a medical check-up. Mr. Bell was, I'm told, astonished by what he saw on the ultrasound. He had no idea you could see a heartbeat so early...

I guess he stated emphatically that no one was ever going to be able to convince him now that life doesn't begin at conception.

Gotta love those ultrasounds.

My friend says that some of Mr. Bell's callers were urging him to pick up the banner and lead the pro-life movement. Heaven spare us. (Not that any one person or group can "lead" a movement as big and broad as the pro-life movement.) On the other hand, he's definitely in a position to reach a few thousand people who otherwise might never hear a word in favor of treating unborn babies as fully human and worthy of protection.

The universe moves in strange ways.

Thank you, Mr. Bell, for standing up for the most defenseless among us. I'll bet you saved a young life or two last night, just by making some people stop and take a fresh look at what pregnancy means. Here's hoping that particular seed you planted grows in a few hearts over the years to come.

Playing card money

I have here on my desk a used book I'm getting cleaned up for the store: 1960 Standard Catalogue of Canadian Coins Tokens and Paper Money: Fully Illustrated 1670 to Date, by J.E. Charlton, Whitman Publishing Company, Racine, Wisconsin, c. 1959.

Noted in passing, a caption on page 99:

First brought into use as a result of scarcity of regular currency - and as a temporary expedient. Playing Card Money nevertheless remained in common use for a period of approximately 75 years in French Canada. Full cards, half cards, quarter cards and even portions of clipped cards were used.

The years in question aren't listed, but the examples shown in pictures have dates on them of 1714. 1729, 1749 and what appears to be 1757. The next illustration is of "Canada's First Bank Note" issued in 1792.

That puts a different spin on "dealing" or "closing a deal" or "do you want to deal?"... ;)

Who ya calling a pup?

When it was time to check out at the grocery store today I headed for a line that had an older lady I know, hoping to have a brief chat. Well, to call it a line is stretching things. There was one person ahead of her, and she was end of the line until I joined her. She was unloading her groceries onto the belt as I came up.

The bag boy looked up, saw her, and said, "Hi, Granny."

"Does everyone call you Granny?" I asked her. We do, and I think everyone we have as mutual friends does, but somehow to have a cocky teenybopper do it with a straight face was a surprise.

"Oh, him?" she said, picking up on my surprise about the bag boy. "I've known him since he was a pup."

He wasn't sure how to take that.

The checker grinned. "He's still a pup," she volunteered, teasingly.

To this, the bag boy took offense, and said so. The checker explained to him that since she had children older than him, he was a pup.

He spent his time bagging Granny's groceries and then mine alternating between proclaiming his maturity and trying to get back at the checker for saying he was still a pup. His main tactic was to compare himself favorably with her children. Not, perhaps, a wise course of action...

He insisted on taking my cart out for me. As we went across the parking lot, which slopes down, he apparently forgot he was in the midst of a mission to prove he wasn't a pup. He jumped on the back of the cart and steered it by applying his feet to the wheels, happily zigging his way to my van. All boy. All kid. All pup. Heh.

I kept a straight face and held my tongue. He was being careful and wasn't likely to run into anybody, which I figured was the main thing.

When we got to my van, without missing a beat or batting an eye he hopped to the ground and morphed back into a grown-up, pleasant and well-mannered and helpful.

Life in a small town, holiday post office edition

Our post office is only open Monday through Friday, although between ten and noon on Saturday morning you can knock on a certain Dutch door if you've got a yellow slip in your box announcing that you have a package to pick up, and they'll go find the package for you. (These yellow slips, I might add, never get filled in like at some post offices. Probably the postal worker knows which box is yours anyway, and if he or she doesn't, you just tell them. No sense wasting forms when you can reuse them for the price of a little human to human communication.)

So, when I walked into the post office Sunday morning early to check our P.O. box, I was startled - and a bit concerned - when I saw that the top of the Dutch door was wide open. It's not even wide open on Saturdays, thanks. And this Sunday was Christmas Eve, a holiday, a day you might expect the post office to be full of echoes instead of workers.

I was relieved when the movement I saw in the back room, through the Dutch door, turned out to be the acting postmaster. I wished him a Merry Christmas and he wished me a Merry Christmas right back and we went on about our separate business.

When I got home, the mystery was explained. Several times over, the DJ on our local radio station announced that Chuck down at the post office still had a mountain of Christmas packages, and he'd be there until noon for anyone who wanted to come in to pick theirs up. If you didn't know if you had a package, you were urged to call Chuck.

Since I live quite close I sauntered back minutes before noon to check my box again, just in case something Christmas-y had slipped in at the last moment. There wasn't a yellow slip in it, but there were three pieces of mail that hadn't been there earlier in the day. Behind me, hidden behind the wall of boxes across the room, I could hear Chuck diligently sorting mail into boxes, making good use of his time waiting for latecomers.

Merry Christmas!

From our home to yours, may you feel the joy of Christmas.

Random acts of generosity

If I ever have money to burn, I think I'd like to do something like this. (Wouldn't you?):

A mysterious woman hopped aboard Spokane Transit Authority buses Thursday, greeted passengers with "Merry Christmas" and handed each an envelope before stepping off. The envelopes contained a card and a $50 bill.

The scene was repeated on several other buses.

The secret Santa did it so quickly that descriptions of the woman varied among surprised passengers.

Authorities said she handed out at least a thousand dollars. Spokane is in Washington state.

Full story: Bus Riders Get $50 Gift From Anonymous Woman (AP on TheDenverChannel.com, Dec. 22, 2006)

Those shy and sensitive wild beasts

Shortly after we opened our first bookstore, my husband stepped out the back door, only to fly back in and slam the door. It turns out he'd nearly stepped on a mountain lion standing at the bottom of the steps. This was inside a lean-to that ran along the back of the building and opened onto the parking lot, mind you, not out in the open air. The cougar had invited itself inside.

The bookstore was in a building that had been a feed store, and before that a truck repair shop, and I'm not sure what else over the years. Somebody along the way had built a floor over the service bays, leaving the deep pits as they were, and incidentally leaving enough room between the old floor and the new for a cougar to maneuver. This cougar had decided that this set-up made a perfect den. Never mind that the floor above her head housed a bookstore and computer repair shop, and that people came and went, came and went, footfall after footfall after footfall, day after day, hours every day. It was apparently a good enough den to compensate for the neighbors - hey, it even came with heat - and it turned out she accessed it through a hole near the back steps, hence my husband's close encounter of the life-endangering kind.

The Fish and Wildlife people were kind enough to come trap her and relocate her to the deeps of the forest somewhere, just before she had her kittens. (Thanks again, fellas!)

She was just one of three cougars that I remember we had trouble with in that location. One was an old cat, too crippled up and toothbare to hunt anymore. He came for the trash cans behind the building next door. The other was a young male cougar, who'd trot through the parking lot now and then, just passing through. Never mind that we were along a state highway in a town that's been around since the 1860s.

I took to running outside with warnings to anyone who let their children or pets loose to play outside. But a curious thing happened. I'd tell people that they probably shouldn't let their five-year-old run off steam beside or behind the building because we'd been having cougar sightings, and some of them got on their high horse with some variation of "What do you take me for? Cougars are wild animals and they'd give a place like this right on the highway a wide berth. Everybody knows that."

Well, no. A thousand times no. They'd found easy pickings in pet cats and dogs and trash cans, and they'd proved themselves perfectly happy to put up with the hustle and bustle and cars roaring by. (Your children don't want to hear this, but sometimes the first clue you've acquired a cougar as a neighbor is when pet dogs and cats disappear. Although they don't generally provide as much meat, they're ever so much easier to catch and kill than deer and elk, etc.)

More than once, I've seen a cougar chasing deer on the hill above the elementary school here. It's apparently a good hill for ambushing deer...

At any rate, some people do tend to vastly underestimate the ability of animals to adapt to - i.e. ignore - life's little annoyances, human-caused or otherwise. Laer's The Fish Guys And The Bear Guys post provides a pretty good illustration of the point.

hat tip: The Paragraph Farmer (includes book recommendation)

I hope we're not killing the messenger

Late last night we ordered a plant online, to be delivered by a florist a few hundred miles from here to an older relative who suffered a fall. She's OK, but she's hurting - and besides it's Christmas - so we ordered up a small but perky holly plant to be taken to her door.

This morning we see by the news that where she lives is suffering some of the worst winter weather in living memory, with stranded motorists and car wrecks all over the place.

Note to delivery people: I don't want anybody risking his neck to deliver stuff for me. That's one of the reasons I don't like to ship via 'overnight' or other such rush-rush ways, especially in the winter. I worry about delivery people, feeling pressure to get stuff somewhere, even when conditions are bad, and even when the deliveries aren't truly urgent.

I wish sometimes there was a place on order forms where I could mark a priority box, so that in blizzards the deliveryman could set aside my shipment without a qualm, waiting for a sensible time to try to get it to its destination.

If you give a gal a new cleaning agent...

Back in September, I read a Works-For-Me Wednesday post over at Fernnook Farmgirl in which the blogger said her grandmother kept her house spic and span using a bit of dishwashing detergent in water in a spray bottle. I decided I'd try it when I ran out of the spray cleaner I already had. I could see that if her suggestion worked well enough to suit me, I could save a fair amount of money.

So, I finally ran out of the other stuff, and instead of buying a refill I filled the spray bottle with water and added a small squirt of my off-brand, very inexpensive dishwashing detergent.

Tell me again, why have I been buying more expensive stuff all these years?

But here's the funny part. I tried it to see if I could save money, but once I tried it I realized that it didn't subject me to the smells I don't like about cleaning.

Once I realized that it didn't subject me to smells I don't like, it occurred to me that since it didn't fill the house up with nasty smells I could use it in the morning when my husband is still asleep. (I'm the early riser around here.) Theoretically, I could have cleaned with the other stuff, but it seems inconsiderate to jar a person out of slumber with assaults to his nose and lungs.

Once I started cleaning in the morning, I found it jumpstarted my day. I know I didn't acquire more time to do housework in, but things done before breakfast seem like bonus work, if you know what I mean? Besides, it got those chores out of the way, uncluttering the rest of the day. (Besides, if I get going before I turn my computer on, I don't get pulled off course so easily or so often. Ahem.)

Once I got cleaning in the morning, and seemed to have more time to do that sort of thing, I found I was getting my cleaning done with time to spare. So I found I was looking around for little jobs I'd been putting off...

Once I started tackling little jobs I'd been putting off, it occurred to me that I wasn't hesitating to clean surfaces with seriously diluted dish detergent that I didn't much like to clean with the other stuff. I'm still careful to rinse and dry surfaces involved in food prep, etc., but I don't have that 'gee, I wonder if I got the cleaner off enough to be safe' feeling I used to have.

Now that I wasn't worried about turning my home into a hazmat site, I got to thinking about the other tasks I put off because of the chemicals...

I hate cleaning my oven with the commercial oven cleaners, and I never do it except in good weather when I can throw open windows and doors. (I have an old kitchen. No exhaust fan.) Why soapy water wouldn't work was beyond me, so I washed the inside of the oven. This didn't get all the caked on stuff, but it got a lot even with my hit the high points and rinse twice for good measure approach - and when I made scalloped potatoes right afterward I didn't wonder what I was baking into the food. Before I baked, I preheated the oven and sniffed for good measure (and out of habit, since I always heat and smell check the oven after I've cleaned it) and for once I didn't have that sharp aftersmell that seems to go along with cleaning an oven.

I figure that I can clean my oven more often, now that it's not a major undertaking with rubber gloves and newspapers on the floor and rinse buckets and fans and open windows and locking the cats in another part of the house for their safety. I figure in the long run I'll have a cleaner oven on average than the old way. Such a deal.

Heh. Watch out. I am armed with a spray bottle, and I'm not afraid to use it.

Thank you, Laurie, for the tip. And thank your Grandma Opal for me, will you?

Update: Fixed editing error second graf.

Author note: Richard Carlson, author of `Don't Sweat the Small Stuff' books, has died

Richard Carlson, who got a lot of people to lighten up by teaching them not to sweat the small stuff, has died of a heart attack. He was only 45. He was in the middle of a book tour for his latest book, Don't Get Scrooged.

According to Jackie Burrell, reporting in the Contra Costa Times, "The family is requesting that memorial donations be made to local food banks, Challenge Day, Girls Inc. or Children Inc."


Don't Get Scrooged: How to Thrive in a World Full of Obnoxious, Incompetent, Arrogant, and Downright Mean-Spirited People

Four-legged golf hazard

If you want to play at a certain golf course near Missoula, Montana, expect to lose a golf ball or two to an unusual hazard: a fox that likes to steal balls that hit the green. Luckily, players seem to have a good sense of humor about it. nwcn.com has video.

Gadget geekery deluxe

I can't quite comprehend the sport of having a more gadget-laden knife than the next person, but I have known some competitors in my day. For them, the new Giant Swiss Army knife (Call that a knife?, Andrew Martin, Guardian Unlimited, Dec. 6, 2006) ought to send rivals whimpering into a corner, acknowledging defeat. Or down on the floor laughing. I'm not sure which. :)

hat tip: Lars Walker

"Responding to Rangel"

James Taranto, who runs Best of the Web Today at Opinion Journal, has been printing comments from readers who have decided to respond to Rep. Charles Rangel's unflattering statements about U.S. servicemen and -women. The sixth installment ran today. Links to previous installments are at the bottom of the article. He promises more tomorrow.

I'm not sure those serving in the American military ever fit the template assigned to them by the big boys in the media and certain varieties of college professors in the last half of the 1900s. But they sure don't fit that template now. Not from what I can see.

Blair's take on PC multiculturalism

If you missed British Prime Minister Tony Blair's speech in which he attacked what is wrong with multiculturalism in practice, and laid out what he thought should be done about it, you can read the full text at the Telegraph. An excerpt:

Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain, Britain. So conform to it; or don't come here. We don't want the hate-mongers, whatever their race, religion or creed. If you come here lawfully, we welcome you. If you are permitted to stay here permanently, you become an equal member of our community and become one of us. Then you, and all of us, who want to, can worship God in our own way, take pride in our different cultures after our own fashion, respect our distinctive histories according to our own traditions; but do so within a shared space of shared values in which we take no less pride and show no less respect.

The right to be different. The duty to integrate. That is what being British means. And neither racists nor extremists should be allowed to destroy it.

hat tip: Rush Limbaugh

Book note: Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansick

Danielle Bean has been testing some of the theories presented in the book Mindless Eating. Her post here.


Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More than We Think

Clicking on the book cover will take you to Barnes & Noble, where you can read an excerpt.

Smiling at people on treadmills

Brrr. Cough. Sniff. This is cold and flu season around here, and for weeks now my husband and I have been catching one mild to moderate bug after another. Last week, I had a bug that made me feel cold no matter what I did, while simultaneously my hubby had one that made him feel overheated no matter what he did. It gets a little tricky, knowing where to set the thermostat in situations like that...

Today we both woke up fighting something that made us feel chilled, amongst other things (I'll spare you the details). But I was well enough this afternoon to do my usual work.

By late afternoon I was feeling the effects of being cooped up more than usual lately. (This is too early in the year for cabin fever. Way too early.) So I bundled up and went for a walk, just a short one, rounding a couple of blocks. I figured the fresh air and exercise would do me good, despite the rotten weather and harsh wind. (Did I mention I have a mild case of cabin fever? Or that my judgment is sometimes questionable when I'm sick?)

I am lucky in that I have several good options for walks around here. But for the purposes of this post I'll just note that most of my routes go by a certain gym on Main Street sooner or later. This gym has its treadmills facing a front window. The front window is very large. So, passersby and cars provide a show for the folks on the treadmills, and the folks on the treadmills provide a show for the passersby and people in cars.

During the spring, summer, and fall, I suppress a chuckle most days when I go past the gym. Here I am, walking just like the folks on the treadmills, albeit not so earnestly, and I'm getting fresh air and multiple opportunities to chat with neighbors over a fence. I'm getting a bit of sunshine, vital for good heath. And I'm getting all this for free. Plus I'm not making a spectacle of myself, not like the folks in leotards on treadmills, at any rate.

Today the trade-offs weren't quite so obviously in my favor. The wind was howling. It was strong enough I had to lean into it when I was facing it, and had to compensate for it when it was to my side or behind me. There certainly weren't any neighbors working in their yard for me to pass the time of day with. And yet, when I passed the gym and there was an athletic woman walking at a fast clip on one of the treadmills, I found myself suppressing a chuckle anyway. We half-glanced at each other, and my translation of the look that passed between us was that each of us thought the other person was to be pitied, just a wee bit.

For what it's worth, she is in better shape than I am. Also for what it's worth, I was enjoying myself, the wind, wet and cold notwithstanding. (Of course, I was well-bundled and it was a short walk.) She looked like she was fulfilling some grim duty.

To each her own, I guess.

Just for grins

If You Give Your Mom Some Bubble Bath is inspired by real events (as well as "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie" books), Mother Auma says.

Girls will be girls... :)

Book market watch: Hanna's Christmas

If you happen to run across a nice used copy of a children's book called Hanna's Christmas by Melissa Peterson, you might want to buy it if it doesn't cost the moon. Here's why.

Of course, if we're lucky, somebody will authorize a new print run. But it doesn't seem likely at this point.

How River Rising got its name

I would be very surprised to hear that you've lost sleep wondering how Athol Dickson's book River Rising came to be called River Rising. But the acquisitions editor who snagged the book for Bethany House has the behind-the-scenes story. In my humble opinion, it helps prove that humans work in publishing after all. ;)

Athol Dickson blogs at the group blog Charis Connection, by the way.

Related previous post: New book buzz: River Rising


River Rising

An interview with Hank the Cowdog creator John Erickson

Susan Olasky of World Magazine got author John Erickson to talk about his books, his views on storytelling and art, and what buzzards do when they're upset. The buzzard bit is gross, but his views on artists are refreshing:

WORLD: You've said that you learned from parents and teachers that your "business is not books. It's nourishment." What do you mean by that?

ERICKSON: People need good stories just as they need home-cooked meals, clean water, spiritual peace, and love. A good story is part of that process. It affirms divine order in the universe and justice in human affairs and makes people better than they were before they read it. If artists are more gifted than ordinary mortals (we keep hearing that they are), they should find order and harmony in human experience. That's what Bach and Handel did. Artists should nourish the spirit, not poison it.

[...snip...]

WORLD: You wrote that you once received three letters in a month from mothers of autistic children. You found out later why the books connected with these kids. Would you explain?

ERICKSON: One of the mothers explained that autistic children fight a constant battle against mental chaos. They crave structure and order. My stories are tightly structured. They all have happy endings and in every story, justice is affirmed. The grotesque irony is that, while the mothers of autistic children fight day and night against mental chaos, popular culture scoops it out by the ton: frantic television images that have no coherence, movies that can't distinguish between heroes and villains, art that seems to have lost all vision of form and beauty.

Full article

hat tip: Amanda Witt

The Vocabula Review

Since I know a lot of you care deeply about not letting language slide into the gutter or get too muddy to make things clear, John Epstein's article Language Guardian (Opinion Journal, December 7) led me to The Vocabula Review, which operates under the tagline "A society is generally as lax as its language."

Ooh, that tagline hit home for a reason you might not suspect. It wasn't until I got a job as a newspaper reporter that I learned the word its. My friendly editor went nuts until I learned to not use it's where I should have used its. To this day, whenever I use it's I stop to make sure I can turn it into it is or it has. Just to make sure. Just because I drove a lady bonkers in my former ignorance. Silly, I know. For those of you who are new to the word its, the way I remember to use it is to think of it as being in the same verbal basket as his and hers and ours.

Of course, the tagline hit home for other reasons. Words matter. Misusing words can make communications difficult and reasoning muddled. I'm far from being a good role model on matters of grammar or punctuation, I know, but it's not for lack of caring. I had a few too many teachers who had individualized ideas about such things, shall we say? If you think I'm original now, you should have seen me before I realized I'd been mistaught. Yinga. The relearning never ends. I haven't had a chance to take a good, hard look at The Vocabula Review, but at first glance it looks like it might be able to teach me a thing or two.

hat tip: Between Two Worlds (which I found from a link at Ponderosa Hill, which, appropriately enough, has a post today on a phrase that people seem to use without thinking about what they're saying. I know I've used it without thinking...)

Dueling gift traditions

When I was a child, my mother taught me that when handed a present, the proper thing to do was to open it in front of the gift giver, and then politely thank him or her for it whether you thought it was what you wanted or not. If you didn't like it, you weren't supposed to fake enthusiasm for the gift, but you weren't to let on you didn't like it, either. Thank you for thinking of me isn't lying. It's acknowledging that the other person wanted to please you, even if they didn't. This is known as being civilized. You can let them get to know you better later, if it comes to that.

So, fine. I was tested from time to time, when I'd open a gift and wonder how I'd managed to come across as somebody who would like that. But it wasn't any big deal, generally. Thank you makes people feel good. It's a gift you can give anybody. Any time. (People who give home decor and tell you exactly where and how to display it call for a slightly different approach, of course. There's a fine line between presenting a gift and trespassing. Learning how to say thank you while carefully not agreeing to take something with strings attached is a necessary life skill. It is called learning to deal with difficult people.)

I learned that being gracious was basically a good policy. And, besides, gifts can grow on you, if you give them a chance.

But then I went to Japan to visit a friend who was teaching English. While I was there, some Japanese ladies handed me a gift. Dutifully, I started to open it.

There were sharp intakes of breath. I thought my hostesses were going to faint.

They did not know a whole lot of English and I had only a few words of Japanese at my disposal, but I managed to ask if I'd accidentally done something wrong.

Obviously, I had, of course. The ladies looked uncertainly from one to another, with that 'who's going to tell her?' look that seems to exist cross-culturally.

Finally, the explanation got past the language barrier. In Japan, they said, you never open a gift in front of the giver. Shifting your attention to the gift suggests that the thing is more important than the person.

Oh. I can see that. Good point.

On the other hand, not much beats watching kids open Christmas or birthday presents.

What to do? What to do?

Personally, I decided to pick either Japanese rules or ancestral rules depending on the circumstances. I like the Japanese emphasis on people being more important than stuff, but I also don't want to be a spoilsport. Besides, I like to think I can get across that the person is what matters, and the stuff is mostly for message and fun.

Then I got married. And found there are differences between my family's traditions and my husband's family's traditions... some subtle, some not.

I guess that's pretty common. Yes?

Luckily, we're all pretty quick to laugh at ourselves around here. :)

Book note: How to Train Your Pet Like a Television Star, by Ray Berwick

As I understand it, Ray Berwick was one of the top animal trainers in the entertainment industry back when animal actors were big. As much to the point, he had great success without using pain or punishment. How to Train Your Pet Like a Television Star, c. 1977, covers birds and dogs and cats mostly, with a few tips for horses, too. The forward is by Robert Blake. His show "Baretta" featured a cockatoo (Fred) trained by Berwick.

The used copy I have on my desk right now, getting it ready for sale, is a 13th printing from 1983, which suggests that the book had a good run of popularity back in the day. It seems to be out of print these days, but internet prices are surprisingly low for the limited number of used copies for sale. The publisher is Armstrong Publishing Company, Los Angeles.

The back cover copy: "For the first time, a fast and comprehensive method for training animals and birds without pain or punishment. It is the same method used by Ray Berwick and his associates at Universal Studios, San Diego Wild Animal Park, Marriott's Great America and Lion County Safari."

Berwick also wrote a book or books on training your cat, also out of print. I haven't seen it/them, so don't know if it's one book released under two titles, or two somewhat different books. The titles I've seen are Ray Berwick's Complete Guide to Training Your Cat and Train Your Cat. (And, yes, some cats can be trained. We have one that plays fetch handsomely. When she feels like it, that is... :)

For some nice stories in passing about Ray Berwick, see this transcript of a March 2005 television interview with actress and animal lover Tippi Hendren, in which, amongst other things, she talked about the filming of Alfred Hitchcock's movie The Birds.

Metal thieves endangering themselves and others

Steps are being taken to dry up the market for stolen metal. Why? Well, let's see, public safety, for one. Huge repair costs for some victims for another. See Metal Thieves Risk Life and Limb by Pam Blair, Ruralite, November 27, 2006, for more.

If you don't click through, one of the things you need to know from the article is that metal thieves have taken to taking grounding wires from existing homes as well as those under construction. Their measly haul nets them a few pennies or maybe a dollar or two, but leaves your home without working breakers or fuses. Not a good thing.

The article includes suggestions on what to watch for to help keep the electrical system safe. Many of the tips would apply equally well for tripping up terrorists, I think. There are rather large rewards on offer, too, for information leading to the arrest and conviction of burglars at power facilities, if rewards matter to you.

Three members of Kim family found, father still missing (Updated)

Wednesday update: James Kim has been found dead.

I'm almost afraid to believe this but AP and kgw.com are reporting that Kati Kim and her two young children have been found and airlifted to a hospital. The father of the family, James Kim, is reported to have left them two days ago on foot, looking for help, and hasn't been found.

The family went missing on November 25 on their way back to California from a trip to Washington state. Previous post: Info sought on missing family.

Peg-Leg Webb's legacy

From the What's a Bog? section of the Ocean Spray company's website (bottom of post):

At Ocean Spray we take a lot of pride in our cranberries. Only the best make it into our products. But how does one judge a cranberry? Well, we start by judging their color, size and freshness. And, surprisingly enough, by their ability to bounce. That's right. Bounce. You see, an early New Jersey grower, John "Peg-Leg" Webb, first noted this special property of the cranberry. Because of his wooden leg, he couldn't carry his berries down from the loft of his barn where he stored them. Instead, he'd pour them down the steps. He soon noticed that only the firmest and freshest berries bounced down to the bottom; the soft and bruised ones didn't make it. This led to the development of the first cranberry bounce board separator, a device we still use today, to remove damaged or sub-standard berries.

Children, I forbid you to test cranberries for freshness without your parents' permission.

The Nativity Story and the Real Mary

I don't live anywhere near a movie theater, so I'm out of the loop on this, but Mark D. Roberts - who saw an advanced screening of the film - is not only recommending people go see The Nativity Story, he's asking for people to turn out for this opening weekend if possible. He wants to send Hollywood a message, you see.

He's written a series of articles prompted by the movie: The Nativity Story and the Real Mary.

Breakfast Cookies? Hmmm.

I'm just about out of cookies from my last batch (I freeze them and thaw as needed wanted), and was casting about for a new recipe to try. Randi at I Have to Say... shares what looks like a good one. Although I'm not sure I'd try the cheese. I'm having trouble getting my head around the idea of cheesy cookies.

Randi omits the cheese, and says she gets good results. I'm game. Where's my shopping list? All I lack is the raisins. I wonder if chopped prunes would work? I have prunes...

Info sought on missing family

James and Kati Kim of San Francisco and their two children, Penelope, age 4, and Sabine, 7 months, have gone missing while traveling through Oregon. The public is being asked to keep a lookout for them, and their car, which has a custom license tag.

From the police page set up for them:

The San Francisco Police Department is seeking information regarding a missing San Francisco family of four. On Friday, November 17, 2006, James Kim, his wife, Kati Kim, and their children, Penelope Kim and Sabine Kim left on a road trip to Seattle, Washington. The family was expected to return to San Francisco on Monday, November 27th, 2006. When both James Kim and Kati Kim did not show up for their appointments on Tuesday, November 28th, it caused their co-workers to be worried for their safety. The Kim’s are known to always keep in touch daily either by phone or e-mail with their friends and co-workers. The last known whereabouts of the Kim family was in Portland, Oregon on Saturday morning, November 25, 2006. They were driving a 2005 silver Saab station wagon with California personalized plates of “DOESF”

There are photos and descriptions and more information at that link, as well as contact information.

Their co-workers have also set up a website with info and pictures and links.

Associated Press/Northwest Cable News (NWCN) reports that police have determined that the family's cell phone and credit cards haven't been used since Nov. 25.

Jockey Russell Baze breaks most-wins record

Jockey Russell Baze of California has become thoroughbred racing's winningest jockey.

Baze becomes thoroughbred racing's winningest jockey with victory No. 9,531, by Beth Harris, Associated Press (USA Today, Dec. 1, 2006)

Baze's record more Ripken than Rose, by Jeremy Plonk (Special to ESPN.com, December 1, 2006)

Folk music, circa 2006

Danielle Bean has had good luck using a folk/bluegrass CD by Justin and Hope Schneir to put her kids into better moods. She has a link to a site where you can listen to some clips.

It looks like the Prime Minister will have a special needs son

India Knight notes that both of the men in line to become Prime Minister in the UK have a child with a disability. David Cameron's son, Ivan, has cerebral palsy. Gordon Brown's infant son Fraser has been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.

Please note: The Gordon Brown post to which I linked is family friendly, but a quick browse through India Knight's blog turned up language that isn't allowed under my roof, and a few entries that I found unsettling. On the other hand, Isn't She Talking Yet? is specifically set up as a supportive blog for parents of special needs children and it has its good posts, too. (Not to mention cute kid pictures.) The blog is hosted at Times Online.

Update: One of my readers bets that neither David Cameron nor Gordon Brown will become Prime Minister. I don't know from UK politics right now, so I'm not going to bet against her (besides, at a guess Maxine's more savvy on this than India Knight). See comments.