Nanny state, circa 1433

I am now in the "Of the Food and Diet of the English" chapter of A Description of Elizabethan England, as republished from the Holinshed Chronicles (c. 1577, 1587) in the Harvard Classics. Toward the front of it is this somewhat remarkable passage:

In Scotland likewise they have given themselves (of late years to speak of) unto very ample and large diet, wherein as for some respect nature doth make them equal with us, so otherwise they far exceed us in over much and distemperate gormandise, and so ingross their bodies that divers of them do oft become unapt to any other purpose than to spend their times in large tabling and belly cheer. Against this pampering of their carcasses doth Hector Boethius in his description of the country very sharply inveigh in the first chapter of that treatise. Henry Wardlaw also, bishop of St. Andrews, noting their vehement alteration from competent frugality into excessive gluttony to be brought out of England with James the First (who had been long time prisoner there under the fourth and fifth Henries, and at his return carried divers English gentlemen into his country with him, whom he very honourably preferred there), doth vehemently exclaim against the same in open Parliament holden at Perth, 1433, before the three estates, and so bringeth his purpose to pass in the end, by force of his learned persuasions, that a law was presently made there for the restraint of superfluous diet; amongst other things, baked meats (dishes never before this man’s days seen in Scotland) were generally so provided for by virtue of this Act that it was not lawful for any to eat of the same under the degree of a gentleman, and those only but on high and festival days. But, alas, it was soon forgotten!

Alas, my foot.

By the way, meat generally meant food in general a few centuries back, not necessarily flesh. So, I'm not sure what exactly was meant to be under Wardlaw's ban, but, well, nobody tells me what to cook in my kitchen or serve in my house, thanks, and I don't want others to be bossed in that way, either. Plus, I'm decidedly opposed to governments having one set of rules for persons of high estate and another for common folk. Silly me.

I am not advocating obesity, by the way. It looks so dreadfully uncomfortable, it does get in the way of being able to do some things, and it can cause problems for other people. (If you know a fireman or paramedic or mortician, and he feels comfortable taking you into his confidence, he could probably tell you some hair-raising stories about rescuing or transporting fat people. For that matter, nurses have their own experiences. And...) And of course I think people should be held accountable in some fashion if they are recklessly fatalistic about germs and are cooking for an unsuspecting public. I just don't think government exists to tell people what cookbooks to use or what food dishes may be invented or on which days you may cook what. Or, for that matter, to tell civilians at large how much they are allowed to weigh. Silly me, again.

By the way, I am beginning to think that one of the too-little-appreciated touches of genius in the founding of the United States of America is that our founders set up obstacles to litter the path of a do-gooder or busybody who wants to use government to punish anybody who doesn't want to ride his favorite hobbyhorse, particularly if the hobbyhorse isn't on the list of legitimate government functions. (Enough of a mix of metaphors for you there? My apologies to language purists. Well, and the rest of you, too. It's late and it's been a long day. May I use that for some sort of feeble excuse? No? Well, of course not. I'll try to do better from here on out...)

That so many social engineering types have managed to dance past the obstacles by declaring the rules passé is another story. (These folks are generally fond of calling the constitution a Living Constitution, by which phrase, as far as I can determine, they mean that they've declared parts of it dead. 'Reinterpretation' is so much handier than that pesky amendment process, I guess.) The fact remains that our founders drew definite boundaries and told government officials they couldn't step out of them in their capacity as governors, because (get this) they don't have any right to do so. There are, they said, limits to what government should even try to do. The founders even, bless their hearts, set up watchtowers and barricades and armories in the form of separation of powers, so that, if need be, one branch of government could beat back another branch of government that it caught trying to storm the realm reserved for personal responsibility.

It's a noble experiment, trying to establish a government that protects even otherwise-powerless people from abuse of power instead of (as has happened so often in history) shoving out-of-favor residents around however the wind blows, to please a covey of well-connected and/or wealthy and/or vicious and/or paranoid and/or power drunk individuals. Could we, possibly, try to get back to the nice experiment, please? I don't think we're giving it a fair enough trial these days.

For any of you scratching your heads, wondering how in the world you could make a better world without government taking charge of the project, may I just say that families, neighborhoods, churches, service clubs, and even total strangers who happened upon calamity have managed to help folks in need for centuries now (at the very least). For that matter, I doubt that the original Good Samaritan was the original compassionate fellow, nor even the first person to have a practical head as well as a caring heart.

And, how's this? If you'd like to change the world, have you heard of discussion? Of laying out your case in a polite, logical fashion to try to convince someone to change his opinion on something?

Have you heard of setting a good example?

Or offering even just a word of encouragement, when someone's trying to change for the better?

I know that simply assigning government to do the mucky work can seem like a good deal. But, it seems to me, it depends on getting very virtuous, intelligent and wise individuals in the right offices, and hoping they can, against the odds, be nimble and flexible enough to deal with problems as they are as they arise, and not problems as foreseen or guessed at by the folks who got on a hobbyhorse and passed however many laws they thought would promote their cause. (Or consolidate their power, as the case might be.)

We've tried that a while. The results have been less than stellar, I'd say, with a marked drop-off in civility as partisans fight down and dirty for a chance to wield instead of dodge the ever-larger sledgehammer that government has become.

And now, thanks to aggressive government (and government-backed) meddling in recent years, we have swarms of people more or less trained to stay out of the way and let government take care of an astonishing array of problems, either out of a strangely-optimistic view that 'the government' is good at this sort of thing, or out of fear that some perhaps unknown, possibly counter-intuitive, perhaps insane, regulation will be triggered and bring penalties down on their head if they get involved. (You may now invoke the sledgehammer mental image, if you'd like. Or envision a bulldozer, if you'd rather. Or a plow. Or a minefield.) This is, I would like to suggest, probably not the best sort of government/citizenry interaction possible.

I might also venture to say that, in and of itself, it seems, on the face of it, inherently unwise to train people to distance themselves from the concept of personal responsibility.

We also have swarms of people for whom the government is now seen, apparently, as Arbitrator of All Things, or something close to it; additionally, a Dispenser (and/or Guardian) of Respect. These people, I propose, are, for starters, perhaps a little confused on what creates respect. But I digress.

Previous related post: A course in the classics

Update: Later in the chapter, there's the following, which includes another 'how or when you are allowed to eat' edict. It doesn't qualify as Nanny State behavior, unless the Normans meant the restrictions for the improved personal health of the inhabitants (I doubt that, but any historians out there who know about this time period, please feel free to weigh in), but I think it's interesting, as long as we're discussing what people in power sometimes try to do. I've added the emphasis:

Heretofore there hath been much more time spent in eating and drinking than commonly is in these days; for whereas of old we had breakfast in the forenoon, beverages or nunchions 6 after dinner, and thereto rear suppers generally when it was time to go to rest ( a toy brought into England by hardy Canutus, and a custom whereof Athenæus also speaketh, lib. I, albeit Hippocrates speaks but of twice at the most, lib. 2, De rat vict. in feb ac). Now, these odd repasts—thanked be God!—are very well left, and each one in manner (except here and there some young, hungry stomach that cannot fast till dinner-time) contenteth himself with dinner and supper only. The Normans, misliking the gormandise of Canutus, ordained after their arrival that no table should be covered above once in the day, which Huntingdon imputeth to their avarice; but in the end, either waxing weary of their own frugality, or suffering the cockle of old custom to overgrow the good corn of their new constitution, they fell to such liberty that in often-feeding they surmounted Canutus surnamed the Hardy. For, whereas he covered his table but three or four times in the day, these spread their cloths five or six times, and in such wise as I before rehearsed. They brought in also the custom of long and stately sitting at meat, whereby their feasts resembled those ancient pontifical banquets whereof Macrobius speaketh (lib. 3, cap. 13), and Pliny (lib. 10, cap. 10), and which for sumptuousness of fare, long sitting, and curiosity shewed in the same, exceeded all other men’s feasting; which fondness is not yet left with us, notwithstanding that it proveth very beneficial for the physicians, who most abound where most excess and misgovernment of our bodies do appear, although it be a great expense of time, and worthy of reprehension. For the nobility, gentlemen, and merchantmen, especially at great meetings, do sit commonly till two or three of the clock at afternoon, so that with many it is a hard matter to rise from the table to go to evening prayer, and return from thence to come time enough to supper….

(I'd say the author, William Harrison, had some strong opinions on how people should eat, yes?)

Book note: The Mind's Adventure, by Howard Lowry

I don't mark up books as I read them. I put in bookmarks to show pages to go back to. On The Mind's Adventure, by Howard Lowry, c. 1950, published by The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, I had to give up on bookmarking. A book won't close properly with that many in them. And, besides, bookmarks cease being useful, if there are too many of them.

This is one of those books that sat and sat on my shelf, because I thought it would be perhaps interesting, but probably a hard, 'scholarly' slog. The full title is The Mind's Adventure: Religion and Higher Education. The contents page lists five chapters: 1. Halfway in the Century, 2. Vision and Revision, 3. Liberal Education and Religion, 4. Liberal Education and Religion: The Church College, 5. The Last Half of the Century. Then there's a References section.

Dry, right? Possibly even dusty and/or ponderous, yes?

Well, no. Now that I've read it I can see I was badly mistaken in my first impression.

Uhm. I hate to make comparisons to C.S. Lewis, since Lewis is held in awe by so many people, but off the top of my head I can't think of a closer comparison. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of this book, both in content and in style.

In fact, if I could find the copyright holder I'd beg him to put it back into print. Or ask him to let me put it back into print. Or post it on the Internet. It has some of the best coverage of long-running worldview battles in colleges that I've read yet. But it's more than that. There's a good bit of American history in it, and philosophy, and... is reasoning the word I want here?

I'd recommend it to a Christian trying to better understand various secular stances, but also to any nonbeliever who wants to understand the Christian point of view.

I'd also recommend it to anyone who is appalled by the anti-Christian activities on many college campuses today, or discrimination against Christian professors, particularly in the sciences. By 1950, this sort of thing was already a problem, and to my mind Lowry suggests some good ways of addressing the conflicts. He also provides a good overview of what led up to the conflicts. And he's articulate. (Did I mention he reminds me, at least vaguely, of Lewis?)

Then, too, anybody who wants a snapshot of American culture a half century ago could do worse than to read this book. Just from a history of culture aspect, it has its merits.

From the preface:

The plan of this book is a simple one. It begins with an analysis of our contemporary situation, of some of the ideas and influences that have brought us where we are, midway in the century, and of the bearing of all this on colleges and universities. Then in the second chapter there follows, not an account of the growth of higher learning in America, or even of the colleges founded by the Church, but the story of how and why religion that brought forth most higher education in this country yielded its place very widely to the secular spirit. The Harvard Report, General Education in a Free Society, is examined as a part of this story, as are some recent educational trends and their significance.

The heart of this book is probably Chapter III, which considers the relations of religion and education. Can a liberal education include religion and remain what it is supposed to be? If, on the other hand, it ignores religion, can it, in the nature of things, be liberal at all? Anyone who knows our contemporary campus scene knows the reawakened and vital interest in these questions, just as he also knows that one small book will not exhaust any treatment of them. Chapter IV, on the Church college, is but the second part of this same discussion. It is not a case study in any sense. It is rather an analysis of the nature of those colleges, whose influence in American life is out of all proportion to their size, that have the task of trying to be true to their religious purpose and at the same time be genuine places of higher learning and free inquiry.

The last chapter looks forward to the second half of our century and to the part education may or may not have in achieving some of our democratic goals. It tries to suggest also the kind of Christianity likely to have much significance for education and for human living.

This book deals only with colleges and universities, and leaves untouched the vexed question of the general role of State and Church in public education -- a problem less troubling, incidentally, at the college and university level, where there is allegedly a greater level of maturity, than at the level of the elementary and secondary schools. Some matters treated here have, to be sure, great bearing on the general question. Any thoughtful college officer or teacher knows that what happens to young people of pre-college age crucially affects all higher learning. He knows how relatively unimportant he is compared with those who deal with boys and girls before he sees them.

It will be obvious that by the term 'religion' the writer is usually thinking of Christianity, though much of what is said here has bearing on other religions, as well, in their relation to education...

This book was written at the request of certain men and women who felt a need for it or, perhaps more exactly, for something like it. Its engendering spirit was Dr. E. Fay Campbell, Director of the Division of Higher Education of the Board of Christian Education of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.... Dr. Campbell secured the co-operation of and gave much preliminary detail for consideration to a committee that crossed denominational lines. This group, students of religion and education, met with the author twice...for detailed discussion...

[...snip...]

Any thoughts or feelings I have about education owes so much to colleagues I have had at Princeton University and at The College of Wooster that I could not begin to detail the obligation...

As a side note, here's an article with a 1950 picture of Dr. Lowry with choral director Robert Shaw and playwright Thornton Wilder, on the occasion of Wilder going to Wooster to stage a production of Our Town, with Wilder himself starring as The Stage Manager. From the linked article:

During his campus stay, Wilder also received an honorary degree. Speaking to the new graduates, he praised Americans’ freedom to make choices and cited Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.

Wilder’s visit may have been brief, but his bond with Wooster was strong. Writing to then-President Howard Lowry shortly after leaving town, he thanked him for “an Ohio college and for the opportunity you gave me to move around in it; for a re-dipping into a series of American ways and joys and hopes and strains and reminders that I could not have obtained in any other way... I feel a deep affection for Wooster, and if you ever get any flagging of heart about the college or your evident mission in it — write me! I’ll tell you some home truths! I’ll sound the clarion! That right, and that privilege you put into my hands, publicly. My deep regard to Wooster.”

Special Collections, in Andrews Library, holds a selection of letters and postcards that Wilder wrote to Lowry and [speech professor William] Craig. Circulation cards from books that Wilder checked out proved that he researched his commencement address thoroughly. — Emily Ryan ’05

Robert Heinlein, elites, the Latin American model, "little platoons" and more

Building on a John Derbyshire article, S.T. Karnick tries to figure out why the 'elites' of today are able to wield so much power. He and Derbyshire don't seem to agree on how much hope there is of changing things for the better.

There are some interesting theories there. I lean toward Karnick's views on this, by the way.

A course in the classics

We own a Harvard Classics Five Foot Shelf of Books, which, incidentally, is more than five feet long in the edition we have, which was printed mid-1960s. At any rate, these are supposedly the classics which all persons should read to have a good foundation in learning. Or, at least, they represent a version of a high-level liberal education as offered to the public nearly a hundred years ago. You know, back before the modernists and their intellectual cousins decided to reinvent the world, their goal to be accomplished in part by discouraging a solid knowledge of the past (or rewriting it).

Over the years, I've dipped into the set, but only read a few of the books in their entirety. Don't fuss. Please. I know that to dip into a classic is to invite misunderstanding: many classics build and twist back on themselves, posing argument only as prelude to counterargument, and must be read in whole or else you'll miss the main points or draw the wrong conclusions entirely. I know that. But... fifty-one books seemed a bit daunting, especially after dipping into a few. Besides, many of them seemed reads better suited to men than women, if I might put it like that. (No surprise, because when this set was originated, most college-level learning was geared toward men, or so I understand.) And, then too, some of them were simply great treats to browse in, and then put back. It's hard to be disciplined under conditions like that...

But several months ago I decided to put a priority on actually reading the set. The whole set. I'm alternating reading these with reading other things so I don't get burned out (or that's the theory, anyway), but I am doggedly trying to make my way through the whole anthology. I am not, as I probably should, starting at volume one and going through to volume fifty-one. I've tried that any number of times, and failed to keep up steam. Instead, I am happily choosing books at random, sometimes even closing my eyes and grabbing a book, with the promise to myself that if I haven't read it yet, then I will read it now. All of it. No skipping over parts I don't like. Sometimes I vary the routine by picking a book I don't think I'll like, just to get it over with. Other times I reward myself with a book that looks especially tempting. But, bit by bit, one way and another, I'm making my way through the set.

I should have done this earlier. Like years ago.

I am currently in the third part of Volume 35, Chronicle and Romance, which includes three books: The Chronicles of Froissart, Translated by Lord Berners, Edited by G.C. Macaulay, original book from the 1300s; The Holy Grail, by Sir Thomas Malory, from the Caxton Edition of Morte D'Arthur, 1485; and A Description of Elizabethan England, written by William Harrison for Holinshed Chronicles, issued 1577, condensed in 1876 for the New Shakspere Society, and brought into "modern dress" sometime after that by a Mr. Lothrop Withington. (Why the editors of the Harvard Editions often didn't put in when editing was done -- or anything about the editor of the entry himself -- annoys me, by the way. I like to know these things.)

At any rate, if I hadn't vowed to read these books, all of them, each all the way through, I wouldn't have stuck with this volume. The first two books, at least, were not my cup of tea, to put it mildly. (Although, honesty compels me to say that I liked them better as I learned the dialect, got my bearings, and also started feeling an investment in the stories...)

Froissart's chronicle has mass killing after mass killing, and bribes and corruption and burning of towns, and people getting chopped to pieces, and just all sorts of evidence that life was held cheap, and honor was oddly defined. Note to any potential time travelers: if you land yourself in either France or Great Britain in the 1300s, hie yourself to the nearest "closed" town (walled, walled with a moat, whatever), and establish yourself on good terms there. The kings and mobs of the day apparently had no compunction of burning a town to the ground and slaughtering every person in sight upon little or no provocation, but generally only if it wasn't too much trouble, and closed towns were often seen as more trouble than they were worth. At least in these accounts. And don't think that posing as a man of the church will help you. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury gets murdered.

The Holy Grail by Mallory is harder yet to read, and I wish I'd had more footnotes to help me through it. A very strange book this is, and all mystical and full of strange warnings, and prophets and false prophets, and visions and dreams and miracles, and holy men, and devils dressed as holy men. (Beware 'holy men' on big, black horses blacker than any bear, by the way. They're apparently all frauds. Gentlewomen aren't always what they seem, either...) And now I need to rethink how I think about Launcelot and Galahad and King Arthur, by the way. This book turned my ideas about them on their heads.

I did more than a bit of cringing reading these two books, but... now some of the other history I've read makes more sense, and now I can see where some of the later legends came from. So, yes, perhaps I'm slightly better educated than before I sat down and read them. Perhaps I understand 'human nature' just a bit better, too. (Or perhaps it merely confirmed my suspicion that humans can be a very currish lot unless, individually, they decide to be good -- and then they're still prone to bad behavior, gullibility, excitability, miscalculation, and just plain bad luck. And, oh yeah -- another suspicion enforced -- the culture in which you're steeped seems to make a huge difference in how you think and what you revere. Imagine that.)

And so now I'm embarked on A Description of Elizabethan England, from Holinshed Chronicles, supposedly one of the sources Shakespeare used for some of his plays. And some of it's dry, and some of it's witty, and some of it's heartrending; and some of it's definitely of a time long past, and some of it could be written today, about people of today. There's rather a lot of commentary mixed in with the observations and inventories. For instance, in the order they appear in the book:

Unto this place I also refer our bishops, who are accounted honourable, called lords, and hold the same room in the Parliament house with the barons, albeit for honour sake the right hand of the prince is given unto them, and whose countenances in time past were much more glorious than at this present it is, because those lusty prelates sought after earthly estimation and authority with far more diligence than after the lost sheep of Christ, of which they had small regard, as men being otherwise occupied and void of leisure to attend upon the same...

or...

Knights be not born, neither is any man a knight by succession, no, not the king or prince: but they are made either before the battle, to encourage them the more to adventure and try their manhood; or after the battle ended, as an advancement for their courage and prowess already shewed, and then are they called Milites; or out of the wars for some great service done, or for the singular virtues which do appear in them, and then are they named Equites Aurati, as common custom intendeth. They are made either by the king himself, or by his commission and royal authority given for the same purpose, or by his lieutenant in the wars…

Sometime diverse ancient gentlemen, burgesses, and lawyers are called unto knighthood by the prince, and nevertheless refuse to take that state upon them, for which they are of custom punished by a fine, that redoundeth unto his coffers, and (to say truth) is oftentimes more profitable unto him than otherwise their service should be, if they did yield unto knighthood...

or...

Whosoever studieth the laws of the realm, whoso abideth in the university (giving his mind to his book), or professeth physic and the liberal sciences, or beside his service in the room of a captain in the wars, or good counsel given at home, whereby his commonwealth is benefited, can live without manual labour, and thereto is able and will bear the port, charge, and countenance of a gentleman, he shall for money have a coat and arms bestowed upon him by heralds (who in the charter of the same do of custom pretend antiquity and service, and many gay things thereunto, being made so good cheap, be called master (which is the title that men give to esquires and gentlemen), and reputed for a gentleman ever after, which is so much less to be disallowed of for that the prince doth lose nothing by it, the gentleman being so much subject to taxes and public payments as is the yeoman or husbandman, which he likewise doth bear the gladlier for the saving of his reputation. Being called also to the wars (for with the government of the commonwealth he meddleth little), whatsoever it cost him, he will both array and arm himself accordingly, and shew the more manly courage, and all the tokens of the person which he representeth. No man hath hurt by it but himself, who peradventure will go in wider buskins than his legs will bear, or, as our proverb saith, “now and then bear a bigger sail than his boat is able to sustain.”

or...

Yeomen are those which by our law are called Legales homines, free men born English, and may dispend of their own free land in yearly revenue to the sum of forty shillings sterling, or six pounds as money goeth in our times. Some are of the opinion, by Cap. 2 Rich. 2 Ann. 20, that they are same which the Frenchmen call varlets, but, as the phrase is used in my time, it is very unlikely to be so. The truth is that the word is derived from the Saxon term Zeoman, or Geoman, which signifieth (as I have read) a settled or staid man, such I mean as, being married and of some years, betaketh himself to stay in the place of his abode for the better maintenance of himself and his family, whereof the single sort have no regard, but are likely to be still fleeting now hither now thither, which argueth want of stability in determination and resolution of judgment, for the execution of things of any importance...

I've just finished the chapter on the history and state of The Church of England as of that time. Oh, my, I'd say the author had some strong opinions on that topic.

To see what the Holinshed Chronicles looked like when printed, go here (courtesy Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image, University of Pennsylvania Library).

More on Shakespeare and Holinshed here, at Internet Shakespeare Editions, affiliated with the University of Victoria (Canada). (This looks like a site that a person could spend hours at, by the way... Lots and lots of info, pictures, links...)

More on the Harvard Classics and the companion set of The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction here.

Ryan Rahe's generous heart

Ryan Rahe decided he'd send some of his Special Olympics medals to soldiers in Iraq for good luck.

I'm impressed not only with Ryan's generosity, but with the graciousness of Chief Warrant Officer 2 Anthony W. Grillett, who wrote to thank him. Well done, gentlemen.

Book note: Walter, the Story of a Rat, by Barbara Wersba

The blogger at Seasonal Soundings recommends the book Walter, The Story of a Rat, by Barbara Wersba, which is advertised for ages 5 to 8, but this blogger says would be good "for ages 5 to 80."

In short, Walter the rat is born with the ability to read, which, of course, would make life interesting for anybody.

If the pull quotes at Seasonal Soundings are any guide, this is not a lightweight book, but one with history lessons and mind stretchers. I haven't seen it yet. Have you? What did you think? Is it, perhaps, a bit too much to write about assassinations in a book supposedly appropriate for five year olds? (See the pull quotes.) At what age should kids start learning about bad stuff like that?

hat tip: A Circle of Quiet

Urban legend watch: tiger raising piglets

We recently got an email from a friend about a tiger in an unnamed zoo in an unspecified location in California being consoled after the loss of her cubs by being given piglets to raise, the piglets being "wrapped in tiger skin" to fool the supposedly depressed mother tiger into thinking they were her own offspring.

That sort of story screams hoax. Not that ranchers haven't been known to get a cow that has lost her own calf to accept an orphan calf by putting the skin of the dead calf on the orphan. Same with horses. Not that I think I would or could do it, mind you, (major blech) but I know it was recommended in how-to-raise-livestock books that I read when I was young and my brothers had Herefords (more here) and I had a horse. I'd rather bottle feed, thanks. Any day. Absolutely. And, no, I don't know if skin-suiting is still recommended, or how well it generally works or doesn't work. I just know we were told we might have to do that someday, so we'd better be prepared. (Perhaps it was just a way of trying to weed out sissies, or folks not really prepared to deal with animals that insist on being animals instead of fairy tale creatures?)

Oh, wait, let me google... Here you go, Maternal Behaviour of Beef Cows, by Joseph M. Stookey, seems to have about as much or more than I really want to know about mothering, mis-mothering, and fostering with beef cows. It appears to be a good overview, anyway. And it notes that grafting a skin onto the calf you want the cow to adopt can result in a successful bond - but often isn't necessary. Oh, good. Glad to hear it. Skinning baby anythings just strikes me as something to be avoided if possible, you know?

But, back to the story at hand, these "tiger skins" didn't look like tiger skins, and why in the world just say 'a zoo in California'? It just didn't scan.

So, here's what Snopes has to say about it, and here's what About.com has to say about it. The write-ups are similar, and agree that the pictures come from a zoo/circus in Thailand, which does this sort of thing as part of its exhibits. The zoo is also proud of its ladies who wrestle crocodiles, btw, for all you who admire that sort of craziness. (Not my thing. By a long shot. But since I spent part of my youth planning on putting on shows with killer whales at Sea World or something like that when I grew up, I'm not sure I have a whole lot of room for fussing. Do I? I like to think that swimming with intelligent and sociable killer whales is somehow saner than wrestling massive-jaws-with-man-eating-incredibly-brainless-reptiles-attached, but... honestly, I'm not sure if that's a difference in degree or in kind. Although, to be sure, I do think it's possible to be ladylike while putting killer whales through their paces. Wrestling crocs, I don't think so.)

Motherhood, two looks

Wittingshire has an interesting excerpt from Robert Farrar Capon's book Bed and Board: Plain Talk About Marriage, about mothers as "geography incarnate," the 'effective symbol of place.'

At a Hen's Pace links to an article by Ann Voskamp, which works on the theme that a mother is a type of priest.

Book market watch: How to talk with practically anybody about practically anything, by Barbara Walters

Noted in passing. In today's stack of used books to go through for our bookstore is a copy of the c. 1970 book, How to talk with practically anybody about practically anything by Barbara Walters. Actually, it's a copy of the 1971 paperback edition by Dell. It is, frustratingly enough, in good minus condition, with watermarks in the green that lines the page edges, and a number written on the front. Even in this condition, though, the current market price is - to my surprise - about five bucks.

I wonder when it stopped being a one dollar book? And why?

That's not to say the prices might not crash again. You never know in this business. This afternoon's prices could be a fluke or some sort of publicity-related mini-boom. Or... it might be an early sign that supplies are getting scarce enough that prices could be headed up more or less for good. (Have I mentioned lately that you just never know in this business?)

Update: Over at Wikipedia (I know, I know, take it with a grain of salt, OK), from the Barbara Walters article:

Walters has been married three times. As she told The New York Times in 1996, "I'm convinced that you stay married when the days are bad only because you really want to be. But I always had an out. I had this job, and this life and enough money. I didn't have to fight the bad days."

I hope she was misquoted. If not, it would be nice to know the context and tone. Was she bragging, or mourning? Or what? It doesn't strike me as a healthy attitude, that's for sure, whatever spin goes with it.

And how do you write 'wedding vows' for a 'marriage' you're only going to honor if it's only full of good days? (As if that's possible?)

At any rate, it struck me funny, considering the title of her book. How to talk with practically anybody about practically anything apparently doesn't include talking to a husband or fiance about the things that really matter when it comes to going through life shoulder to shoulder come what may. Well, it struck me funny in a sad - very sad - way...

Hot, but dealing with it

In general, where I live now has slightly more moderate weather than where I grew up. Slightly. In fact, in general, when you check out a weathercast that features both places, we're generally a few degrees cooler in the summer, and a few degrees warmer in the winter. I'm going to knock on wood when I write this, but neither place is known for tornadoes or other extreme weather, unless you count thunderstorms which, truth be told, usually bring relief if there's enough rain with them. They can be a bit frightening, and sometimes they knock the power out or start a fire or two, but, on the whole, they're a gift, usually.

But, then, there are days like the last few days. We're still cooler here than where I grew up, which means that when they're clocking in 109 we're at 103, or something like that. Yigh.

Of course, if we regularly had weather in the triple digits I'd plan for it. I'd have trellises and shade cloth all over the sides of the house. I might add a screened-in porch or two, or an open-ended lean-to alongside the back side of the house. I'd plant more trees, tall flowers and vines where they'd count for something. I'd probably invest in a second air conditioner, for the bedroom portion of the house. (That's if my shade cloth and/or trellises, etc., didn't do the trick.) I'd figure out how to get into the attic and improve the venting during the summer. I'd increase the insulation. Well, I'd do those things as the budget and the landlord and time allowed, of course, but the point is, since we don't get this hot very often, and it never lasts terribly long, we don't go to any length to provide for it. And so, for a few days here and there we run around jerryrigging heat-fighting apparatus and strategies. And get a bit hot anyway.

Oh, well. I rather like sitting on the porch while the house cools down. I sometimes wonder what we lost when our technology got so good that we could comfortably stay indoors 24/7 in the summer, if we wanted.

Don't get me wrong. I have an ill husband, and I'm not as well or young as I used to be, either. I'm not arguing against air conditioning. I understand that for some people it is not so much a luxury as a matter of life and death. Yay, air conditioning!

I am saying that I spend a fair amount of time wondering about how reliant on fancy technology and electricity we've let ourselves become, and whether it's altogether a good thing. Here we are, with pretty much all of history's solutions to human comfort problems available to us, and we have this tendency to forget or scorn the 'easy' or the 'old': shades, shutters, cooling towers, grottoes, alignment, valley vs hillside vs hilltop placement, porches, courtyards, breezeways, vents, landscaping, etc.

Treat yourself someday to a copy of A Shelter Sketchbook by John S. Taylor, if you can find a copy. I currently don't have a copy (bookseller's remorse strikes again), but I remember spending rather a lot of time marveling at the ways that even very ancient people came up with to deal with whatever conditions needed to be dealt with locally. As an example, some cultures have had ingenious air conditioning systems, drawing air over water, for instance, or using that 'hot air rises' principle to suck the hot air out of the house using a cooling tower.

I remember many years ago reading in Sunset magazine that a house in a desert in California was built with a cooling tower, as something of an experiment, and that the homeowners were comfortable even in the height of summer, just from that. Why don't we do that sort of thing more often? Why do we settle for one-size-fits-all as often as we do, especially since it generally doesn't work all that well, at least in architecture?

I think one of the downsides of our age is that there are too many people walking around for whom pretty much everything is a matter of fashion, of style, of preference, or of convenience. They've either forgotten that there were reasons for something to be the way it was, or else they think they're somehow beyond all that. Well-watered lawns provide cool spots - and also fire protection, just for starters. Why are we so prone to forgetting that sort of thing? Why are so many people hung up on what's novel, or new, or fancy, or kinda sorta looks good to them?... On what is the current fashion - especially for their clique - and never mind if it makes any sense?

I have my theories. Do you?

On a slightly different note, the other day some of the neighbors had a young boy visiting, at a guess eight or nine or ten, something like that. He was running through the spray of the lawn sprinkler. He looked, to be honest about it, like your fairly typical couch potato of the overweight but not obese variety, but there he was, striding and leaping to the best of his ability, with the folks on the porch cheering him on. There was a light in his eyes that I'll bet you doesn't light up while he's sitting around the house.

Sometimes he had to force himself to face the spray, or to brave a mighty leap over the sprinkler itself, but force himself he did, to applause all around.

I had the feeling he wasn't used to pushing himself like that. I also had the feeling he liked it rather more than he thought he would. Heh. :)

American by choice

Peter Schramm points out that Americans are made, not born. That it is principles that define us, not lineage.

Elsewhere, he links to two of his favorite speeches for the Fourth of July: Calvin Coolidge in 1926, and Frederick Douglass in 1852. He has a nice excerpt from the Coolidge speech.

Free speech and not so free speech, three takes

George Will brings to light the trouble faced by some Christian women in Oakland, California, who merely wanted to discuss marriage and family values. (Valuing Speech, Townhall.com, June 24, 2007) content warning

Jonah Goldberg inserts a bit of common sense - and history - into the discussion of what speech the Constitution protects, and why. ((Free) Speech Disorder, Townhall.com, June 29, 2007) content warning

Wilfred McClay finds a recent Supreme Court ruling on a free speech case full of "an almost ludicrous amount of huffing and puffing" about side issues, "all deployed to justify what ought to have been crystal-clear on entirely different grounds." (Never Reverse?, Mere Comments, June 28, 2007).

Both Goldberg and McClay take on, among other things, the often-repeated, too-little-examined mantra about 'students not shedding their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.'

Books about America

David Gelernter shares five of his favorite books about America (Five Best, OpinionJournal, June 30, 2007).

Another thumb's up (or two or three) for Ratatouille

I don't live anywhere near a movie theater (I think the nearest one is about an hour and a half away? If it even runs new releases? If it's even still in business?) so I'm somewhat out of the loop when it comes to movies. But, I can't help noticing that some folks are tickled with Ratatouille. Phil at Brandywine Books, for instance.

Orrin Judd links to some positive reviews in newspapers. That would be 'liberal-leaning' newspapers.

I guess that's what gets me as much as anything. Praise is coming from across the worldview spectrum, so to speak. That doesn't seem to happen very often, does it?

Have you seen it? What did you think?

Update: Frederica Mathewes-Green also likes it. (Pixar This, National Review Online, June 29, 2007)

Update: The official movie site is here, with clips and trailer and more. Caution: Soundtrack started all of its own accord.

Two weeks + some styrofoam and concrete + volunteers = two houses

All right, it's a bit more complicated than that, but not much. And it definitely looks like work. Go here to learn what some college students and others have been doing in Armenia. There's a link to a slide show at the bottom of the ncnnews.com article.

According to the article, Habitat for Humanity and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are looking at using the technology to build more homes and storage sheds. There's also a mention of negotiations underway to try to have the polystyrene blocks built in Iran.

The Saturday Review of Books...

...is up at Semicolon.

Crater Lake National Park Nature Notes

All of the articles published in Nature Notes from Crater Lake since 1928 are online. It's a pretty eclectic collection of articles.

The website is still under construction, but it promises to be quite an enjoyable and educational resource.

If you've never been to Crater Lake here in Oregon, you're missing an experience, in my book. I'm not saying your life would be incomplete without it (far from it), but it is one of those places that tends to strike people as not what they imagined it would be. And besides, it's a fun drive to get there. (A word of caution: Some of the roads in that part of Oregon - like in my part of Oregon - are seasonal. Especially in winter, you should check ahead.)

hat tip: my husband

The best laid plans...

So, BooMama thought she'd go to a coffee shop and put in five hours of writing...

Ooh, well done, Mr. Potts

Phil at Brandywine Books has links to videos of singer Paul Potts, who has burst into prominence in the U.K. (and no wonder). Oh, Bravo. It's been a long time since I couldn't keep from clapping while someone was in the middle of a song. Poor audience manners of me, I know, but...

And how nice to have a really good opera singer who seems blessed with a bit of humility. I don't know about you, but the prima donna routines don't impress me all that much.

Thanks, Phil. Somehow I'd missed this.

Quote of the day

Via Deschamps:

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." -- Chief Justice John Roberts

Book note: Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading, by Eugene H. Peterson

There's a fairly lengthy excerpt from Eat This Book over at Christianity Today (May 2007), in which the author discusses "a dog-with-a-bone kind of reading," and World War I, and Swiss pastor Karl Barth's influence on author John Updike, and Barth's anecdote about people living in a self-contained world in a warehouse with grimed over windows (people who therefore don't know there's any world but the warehouse world until a child scrapes some grime off and looks outside), and Kafka, and more, rather a lot more actually... and somehow makes it all come together. It took me a while to get into the piece, but I'm glad I persisted. There's lots to think about there.

Much of it is aimed specifically at spiritual reading, but there's also quite a bit about different ways of reading, and of using language, that I think pure secularists might appreciate.

(Speaking of using language: I'm currently reading a book from the 14th century, translated from French into English, but not modern English by any stretch. It's just modern enough I can wade through, with much-appreciated help from footnotes, but in the process of learning to read this dialect I'm, uhm, starting to have archaic words pop into my head when they shouldn't, and occasionally find myself assigning old meanings to words that are still in use but don't mean what they used to, and sometimes I'm having to work at sentence structure instead of just flinging off whatever comes to mind. It wouldn't be quite so much of a problem, I suspect, if what I'm reading were an ugly or dull way of communicating, but it isn't. More on this later, in another post... if I retain my ability to speak in intelligible English, that is. ;)

Getting back to Eat This Book... I'm pretty sure somebody traded in a copy of it at our bookstore, and I only glanced at it, thought 'cute but strange title,' but didn't put any meaning to it. (The author explains the title in the above-linked excerpt, by the way.) So I probably had a copy of the book I could have read, but probably don't anymore, and now will likely have to buy a copy instead of borrowing one from the shelves, which wouldn't bother me a bit, of course, if I didn't remember already having one. Welcome to Bookstore Land, where seller's remorse is a way of life. (I'm laughing at myself here, by the way. In some ways I'm more naturally suited to setting up a library - I wouldn't have to relinquish any books except to criminals or misadventure if I ran a library - but giving people ownership of books has its own rewards. I'm afraid if I were a librarian I'd feel bad about demanding that someone bring a book back after he'd discovered it was more meaningful than expected.)

And... did I just use the word misadventure? Me? Did I mention I'm studying the 1300s right now? Or that I read three books from the 1600s earlier this year? Or that I've dosed up on early 20th century literature lately? Or that a few weeks ago I read something from the 4th century (in translation, of course, but it was still not modern English by any stretch). Bouncing from one century to another like this is certainly expanding my vocabulary. Whether it's expanding it in beneficial ways is another question entirely...

On a more serious note, I've found that it really helps me to read old books now and then. As C.S. Lewis might have mentioned (I think it was Lewis), every era has its blind spots, including whichever era you happen to live in. I don't think you can see your own world as clearly as you ought to, unless you borrow, now and again, the perspective of people who lived in other times, civilizations, and/or circumstances. It helps me, at any rate.

Update: Via the Saturday Review of Books, here's a review of Eat This Book that appeared at Vox Vendsel.

Talking to a fence post

We have a saying in this part of the world, that talking to someone "is like talking to a fence post." In other words, he might as well not have ears since he doesn't seem to hear what other people say. OK, admittedly, in less charitable moments and applications, it also is a way of saying someone seems to have no more brains than a fence post - but nicer people try not to use it that way. In any case, it means that it's almost impossible to hold a conversation with the person. This post featuring a passage from a Shirley Jackson book definitely made me think of it.

'Religion' a la carte

A woman in Washington State recently proclaimed herself to be both an Episcopalian priest and a practicing Muslim (with heightened emphasis on Islam on Fridays, and the Episcopal Church on Sundays, or so it appears) - and her bishop thinks this is an exciting interfaith statement??? To make it even more interesting, the woman recently was director of faith formation at her church. (Pass the smelling salts and a catechism, please. Not necessarily in that order.)

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the two-track priest and her bishop appear to be a bit confused. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, takes it on in a bit more detail here. (Also has links to news coverage.)

It's views and actions like this that are driving not just individuals and families, but whole congregations, out of the Episcopal Church. For more on Anglicans in the United States who refuse to follow the Episcopal Church on its march away from Anglican teaching, see the American Anglican Council website and Anglican Mission in the Americas, for starters.

W. S. Gilbert on Shakespeare

Hmm. I've stumbled across something written about Shakespeare by W.S. Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan fame, and I don't know if he's funning or serious, or some combination of the two. (Usually he made serious points by being funny, of course, but in this case I'm not sure.) According to info on this page (which also features links to other short prose by Gilbert), Unappreciated Shakespeare was originally published in Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, Christmas Number, 9 December 1882 and reprinted in Foggerty's Fairy and other tales, London: George Routledge and Sons, 1890.

Absurdistan, etc. (updated)

Via Why is Hollywood Afraid of Abortion? (Albert Mohler blog, June 15, 2007), I've discovered a columnist I've just added to my links list.

Gerard Baker, United States Editor and an Assistant Editor of The Times (aka the London Times), writes a weekly opinion column that is, on the whole, very intelligently written, if the five or six archived columns I've just read are any indication. That's not to say I've agreed with him on all points (we are definitely not of one mind on gun laws, for instance). But he's articulate and forthright. And he has wit. And he seems to be well-informed. And I've felt I've learned a thing or two reading his columns -- always a good thing, that.

Baker's most recent column, Alas, poor Britain. The best name for it is Absurdistan, makes some points about big government, multiculturalism, and a culture of dependence that apply in general, sadly enough, to America as well as the UK, I think. He and I are in pretty close agreement on this one.

Update: Apparently, Mr. Baker's observations on Hollywood tending to steer clear of abortion were part of a mini-flurry of such articles. See No Happy Ending for Abortion, for instance, which includes links, references, to New York Times article, more, in addition to commentary. (Via Townhall.com)

Making money with money (serial number edition)

I'm getting better at looking at the serial numbers on bills. Until recently, I had no idea that some people collect dollar bills with "fancy" serial numbers. But go check eBay. It's amazing.

Many of the bills that go to auction don't go for more than face value, or barely more than that, but sometimes something pops, so we've learned to check the bills that come into the bookstore, and also the bills I get in change at the grocery store. We haven't found very many worth trying to auction, but having sold a twenty for twice face value got me hooked.

I'm still a rookie, so haven't figured out the ins and outs and categories yet, but what I'm currently looking for in money that passes through my hands are bills that have years in them (for instance, 19792001), that have the same digit four or more times (25555346 or 23535551, for instance), that feature number blocks in mirror image (for instance, 54322345 or 35644653), bills that don't have any digits that repeat, especially if the numbers are in sequence, (for instance 24358760 might get bids, but 2345678 almost certainly would), bills with only two digits (23323232, for instance), really low numbers (00000007, for instance), or bills that have the same repeated digits front and end (22254222, for instance). There are also bills that supposedly somehow feature "good poker hands" but I haven't figured that out yet. Then there are "lucky number" bills, like those featuring lots of eights. I haven't got those figured out yet, either, not really. (How should I know what someone else considers "lucky"?) Condition also matters, but we've sold some bills in not very good condition to people who apparently really, really wanted a bill with that serial number.

I might caution you that a few of the buyers and sellers in this field seem to be into occult stuff. Not many, but, well, forewarned is forearmed and all that.

As a funny side note, the other day when my husband went down to our bookstore cum gas station, as luck would have it just then a one dollar bill very near the top of the stack in the cash register had what looked to be a pretty good collectible number. A tourist came inside, saw my husband looking at the bill, noticed the serial number, and offered $20 for it. The customer left happy, and we were happy, too. It's a smallish store. Nineteen dollars to the good is nothing to sneeze at. But... after the man left, my husband and our employee started wondering about what had just happened. 'Wait a minute. Wasn't that the man who just paid for gas a couple of minutes ago? Did he pay anything in one dollar bills?' We're not sure, you understand, but we have a funny feeling the man might have paid twenty dollars for a one dollar bill he'd just spent with us. Maybe not. But it's a distinct possibility. But he was pleased as punch I'm told, and apparently had money to fling about without doing harm to himself, and so... we're trying to ease our consciences some by counting it as charity on his part, if, indeed, he did buy his own bill back, so to speak. (And thank you, sir, if that's what you did. Twenty bucks may not be anything to you, but to us it's a blessing.)

Anyway, I don't have any yen to collect bills for their serial numbers, but I'm quite happy to help collectors fill out their collection, if I can. And, besides which, it's a bit like going on a treasure hunt every time I get bills back in change at the grocery store or post office. I put newly acquired bills in a different place in my purse than already-checked ones, and sit down later to go through them. It's a bit of a sport, really. And it costs me nothing. Such a deal.

Corn chips and beginner's luck

A couple weeks ago, looking through this cookbook, I found a recipe for cornmeal tortillas. In short, stir one cup cornmeal into one cup boiling water, add one teaspoon salt (optional), and one tablespoon shortening, then "Shape into extremely thin, flat cakes and bake on hot, ungreased griddle."

This seemed doable, so I made a half batch. Since I was using a nonstick griddle I only used medium-high heat, and since I wasn't skilled enough to make full-sized tortillas I made tortilla chips, shamelessly making them about the same size and shape as Fritos. (Hey, it's a good size.) I didn't make them extremely thin either. (Thinness must also take practice.) But, when everything was said and done, I had the best corn chips I could remember ever eating, and the whole process had been easy, even fun. I dreamed of having people over for Let's Make Corn Chips parties. Hey, even the kids could do it. Such a deal, and it's the sort of recipe a person could memorize, too. Can't beat that.

Fast forward to yesterday. My husband brought home bean dip and so I decided to make homemade chips instead of using the store-bought kind. This time I made a whole batch. Correction, I put all the ingredients for a full batch together, and wound up with not one usable chip. Not one. I couldn't get the dough to work right. When I did get something resembling a chip to the frying pan (I'd decided to use a different pan, one that could stand high heat better), it scorched instead of cooked, so I was left with odd bits of corn goo burned in spots but raw in the middle. I tried adjusting the temperature down. Didn't help. I tried letting the dough cool, to see if that helped. No go. I even tried adding more cornmeal to the dough, to see if that would help. Definitely, it didn't. I tried adding more shortening. Forgetaboutit. After a while, I admitted defeat, while I still had a fry pan left. My husband, generous soul that he is, offered to scour the frying pan for me to get rid of the scorch marks and molecularly-bound corn residue. I shouldn't have let him do it, probably, but I did. (No, ladies. You can't have him. He's mine.)

If I hadn't had that success right out of the starting gate, I'd quit now, at least on this recipe. And, no, I don't know what I did differently, not really. Somehow I got the consistency right on the first batch, and horribly wrong on the second. I guess I'll have to give it another go or two or three, and see if I can't get the hang of it.

Good luck if you try it. That first batch really was fantastic.

A mother's gain

Follow the link in this short post for a video report from the BBC about some American troops going to the rescue of a woman and her unborn baby in Afghanistan. Well, there's more to the report than that, but the rescue features prominently.

Three cheers for our side. And for the BBC for the report.

A mother's loss

I spent part of yesterday and today sitting vigil with a stray cat. About two and a half weeks ago she brought her two young kittens to meet us -- and also to show them where the food and water dishes were. They were too young at that point to eat solid food, and they toddled more than trotted, but since then they've made great progress. A couple/three days ago they finally hit the mighty leaps and mad dashes stage of kittenhood, and were finally getting good at wrestling with each other. The mother cat started taking them on short parades (there's no other word for it -- she had them in formation), extending their world just beyond the back porch. And then, yesterday we awoke to hear her frantically calling, and only one kitten in sight.

All day she called and looked. Her voice got hoarser and hoarser, until it was unrecognizable as the voice of a cat, until it was low moans and wheezes, and it seemed to hurt her to call. And still she tried to give her baby something to steer home by, something to reply to.

I went on search forays myself, hoping to spur the mother cat into giving me a clue, if she had one, hoping it was just a case of falling down a hole or getting tangled in a brush pile, something that could be handled by a human body but not a feline one. No luck there. She obviously had no clue where the kitten was.

This neighborhood has owls and dogs and raccoons and skunks and tomcats and cars and trucks and pedestrians, amongst other kitten-world hazards. I can hope the kitten went on a grand walk and followed her nose to another friendly house, or else got scooped up by someone who thought she was too cute for words and needed a home. (She was too cute for words, too. And charming, to boot.) But the chances of that sort of happy ending, I know, are pretty slim.

Her mother showed up at our back door for the first time at just about that age, way too young to be on her own, but on her own nonetheless. I like to think it's a case of like-mother-like-daughter, and the kitten just went off and found a home of her own. I rather doubt that, though, since of the two kittens, this one generally stayed closest to mama, and also was the more obedient of the two. Whenever mama meowed the code for 'stop,' she stopped. When mama said 'come,' she went straight to mama. I fear she's met an early death.

Whatever the fate of the kitten, the mother cat was beside herself. She'd drop down now and then to sleep, but I never saw her nap for more than a minute or two, fitfully at that, and then she'd drag her weary body around, crying, and crying, and crying, straining to see every possible movement from where she was off to the horizon, stopping her crying only long enough to listen now and again with everything she had in her. It was heartrending. I'd go out and sit on the porch and let her lean against me as she cried, wishing I could do more, both for her and the kitten. All day yesterday and today, I've stepped outside now and then to look and listen for all I'm worth, but... nothing.

I've tried to pet the remaining kitten, to provide him the comfort his mother can't right now, but the mother cat always moves in, not to protect the kitten but to grab every bit of petting that's being dispensed. She's needy in the worst way. She's hurting in the worst way.

I'm not sure I've mentioned this before, but incidents like this are part of why I went from being 'pro-choice' to 'pro-life.'

Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that the abortion industry, perhaps without meaning to, treats women as if they have less understanding and imagination, not to mention less capacity for devotion or loyalty, than the average cat, or dog, or horse, or even cow, for that matter. I've seen a pathetically nonathletic pony break down a stall door to get to her foal. I've seen a formerly docile dog turn into a force to be reckoned with, once she got it into her head that she was the first and perhaps only line of defense for her puppies. For that matter, I've had songbirds attack me if I got too close to a nest, and who hasn't seen a mama killdeer feign having a broken wing while loudly drawing danger toward herself and away from her eggs?

And yet we're supposed to pretend that a woman, possessed of vastly greater understanding of cause and effect, of life and death, of possibilities, and blessed (or is that cursed?) with being able to look ahead and to recall the past, and possessing a sense of right and wrong (however mangled and rewired by modern culture) won't suffer after she's cooperated in the killing of her own offspring? That she won't ever know what's happened, or what it means? That she can't understand, sooner or later, that she was that baby's first and best line of defense against all dangers, natural and man made? That she might have lost her child to miscarriage if she'd carried on -- but that losing it naturally and handing it over to destruction are not at all the same thing, one being fighting the good fight, the other being betrayal of someone who was completely at her mercy?

The thing is, being human we can fool ourselves, sometimes for a long while. But, being human, we have dreams and memories and regrets. To tell a frightened or heavily-burdened woman that her best bet is to jettison an 'unwanted' baby to make her own hike easier is cruel, leaving out as it does the long years she has ahead of her, years in which she's liable to learn that she is, after all, stronger than she thought and more adaptable than she knew, and years in which she's apt to see phantoms at playgrounds and graduation ceremonies, and years in which, given half a chance, she'll find that love grows stronger in adversity if watered with nothing more or less than simple loyalty.

And then where is she? A mother, without her child. Knowing and feeling her loss. Because it is a loss, and nothing can change that.

The 'pro-choice' community seems to be fond of spreading the rumor that 'pro-life' people only care about the unborn baby. I'm sure that's true in isolated cases (any controversy draws or spawns a few folks with more fervor than sense, who are blind as a bat to the suffering of people around them, or at least it seems that way to me), but I was pleasantly surprised to find, once I looked, that by far and away most pro-life people are passionately concerned about what abortion does to women. What it does to a woman. (Feminists For Life and Silent No More are just two of the organizations that have women as their primary focus, and most pro-life groups put a strong emphasis on it.) What it does to men, and the health of relationships, and society, and siblings and other survivors is also of concern, of course, but when offered abortion, it's the mother who ultimately decides whether to defend or desert, whether to be a fortress or a trap. And then she has to live with it.

Another fancy bit of disinformation I bought into in my younger days is the assertion that Christianity shuts out women who have had an abortion, because it's murder, and murder is a mortal sin. This is, as I've since found out, turning Christianity on its head. Basic Christianity in its many flavors and translations does consider abortion to be murder (authentic Christianity insists on calling a spade a spade, and no wonder, since Christianity teaches that if you delude yourself on matters of magnitude you're endangering your eternal soul), but Christianity also teaches that even murderers can put their misdeeds behind them and start over with God. (What? You thought prison ministries were just for show? Or for the fun of being chummy with people with a history of violence and deceit?)

Besides which, abortion isn't murder in the usual sense, is it? In the usual sense, you have a murderer who's out there all by himself, making up his own rules as he goes, picking his victim or victims for his own twisted reasons, and running the risk of horrible punishment and severe and widespread disapproval if he gets caught. With abortion, it's too often a matter of a woman getting targeted by sometimes-terrible pressure to go through with a 'termination' whether she wants to or not, being told, oftentimes, that she ought to do it - for her own sake, for her boyfriend's sake, for her parents' sakes, for society's sake, for the planet's sake, for some other cause's sake, for her business colleagues' sakes, what have you, even, God help us, for the child's sake - and that she'll probably be in big trouble if she doesn't do it. And besides which, abortion providers advertise. Openly. And people offer funding to pay for it. Openly. It's crazy. Tee-totally, absolutely, one hundred percent crazy. You might as well hand the woman a formal petition while you're at it: "We, the undersigned, declare you Inadequate For The Task At Hand and think that for you to give birth to this baby would be a bad idea." Sheesh.

A pregnant woman has enough to deal with, it seems to me, without having to fend off people fussing at her to second-guess (and second-guess again) whether she really wants to go through with it.

A few years ago I realized that I'd become part of the problem. Upon getting news that an unmarried couple with financial trouble had just found out they were pregnant, the first words out of my mouth were, "Oh, they are going to keep the baby, aren't they?" And then it hit me. By thinking that way - talking that way - I was helping to put pressure on a woman to "choose" whether to give birth to a baby she was already carrying, and also to justify, if you will, whatever she decided to do from there on out. I vowed not to do that again. Even if I have to force myself to show more optimism than I feel, I have promised myself I will find something more positive to say - "Oh, that's exciting," if appropriate, "Let me know how I can help," if that's better, whatever, just never, never, anything that undermines a mother's faith in herself. Never, never anything that adds to the gauntlet that many pregnant women must endure these days. Not if I can help it. But there's the rub. Popular culture has a horrid tendency to treat a positive pregnancy test as a trigger to sit down to consider whether you want a child after all (unless, of course, you were openly trying to get pregnant, in which case the pro-choice people will probably leave you alone unless prenatal tests come back with results with which they aren't comfortable). It's a poisonous attitude, but it's pervasive enough that sometimes it affects you whether you mean for it to or not.

Sunday update: Last night my husband was startled by a big owl when he stepped outside. I mean a big owl, searching our yard for prey. All day today the mother cat has been furtively watching the skies, and tackling her sole surviving kitten if it tries to venture from cover. It seems likely that the first kitten was taken by an owl, and even more likely that since then an owl has taken a dive at the remaining cats. In general, I like owls. Right now, not so much.

Utopian is just another word for...

Jonah Goldberg, writing at National Review Online, has an interesting (and instructive, I think) piece that begins:

We get the word “Utopia” from Thomas More. It was the name of a fictional island where everything ran flawlessly, everyone was happy and perfect justice reigned for all. He chose the word “Utopia” as a Greek pun, because it translates to “no place.” Today we mostly use the word “utopian” to describe people who think impossible things, like the Pentagon could hold a bake sale to fund itself or that Communism could work if only someone would give it a fair shot.

Oddly, utopianism — the idea that we can create a perfect society — still has a vaguely positive connotation, despite the fact that utopian ideologies were responsible for nearly all of the great mass murders of the 20th century. But Mao, Stalin, and Hitler don’t come to mind when we hear the word “utopian.” We’re more likely to imagine hippies who want to buy the world a coke and sing in perfect harmony.

That’s O.K., because utopianism is usually just a fancy word for idealism. We may never get to the perfect society, but if we don’t have a conception of one, we may lose sight of the path toward the good society (“Eutopia,” or the good place, for those interested).

But what drives me a little bonkers is when people dress up utopianism as common sense...

I'd like to second that last bit.

And, yes, I've been as guilty as the next person of dressing up utopianism, now and then, on this and that, especially when I was younger. I was trained to do that. It was a curse of coming of age in the 1970s. What can I say? (Other than I work very hard these days to not let my mind fall back into 70s-think?)

Mr. Goldberg's article was prompted by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's recent decision to change his party affiliation from Republican to unaffiliated. The latter part of the article looks at not only Bloomberg and his supposedly nonpartisan outlook on life, but... oh... begging Mr. Goldberg's pardon for lifting such extensive quotes, but this, I think, is something more people should consider. It's food for thought, at any rate.

Moreover, political parties aren’t the source of our disagreements, but the vehicles by which we express them. For much of American history, political parties weren’t so ideologically distinct. Some of the most passionate liberals — a.k.a. Progressives — were Republicans, and some of the most ardent conservatives were Democrats. But we still had political disagreements.

Indeed, the Founders didn’t really anticipate parties at all. But they did expect what Alexander Hamilton called “factions,” recognizing that our democratic republic couldn’t work without them. Oh, and every third-grader is supposed to understand that Congress and the White House were designed to compete with each other. Just Google “separation of powers” if you don’t believe me.

Democracy isn’t about agreement, but disagreement. People have different interests and ideals. Getting rid of parties — or “transcending” them — won’t get rid of disagreements. To believe otherwise is the height of utopianism.

Full article here

More on raising boys

Mona Charen, writing at National Review, talks about life with her own boys, and also notes:

Boys and boyishness were out of fashion for a couple of decades, but that is changing. The Dangerous Book for Boys — a celebration of all things mechanical, natural, and adventurous — is flying off the shelves...

Raising boys (in today's culture)

Tony Woodlief has three sons. He disagrees with some of today's academics, and feminist-influenced cultural notions about boys and men. He says, "Raising three sons has helped me appreciate the masculine virtues."

The article includes references to The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers, Raising Cain, by child psychologists Don Kindlon and Michael Thompson, and Manliness, by Harvey Mansfield.

American lit of the 1920s

Jeffrey Hart, an emeritus professor of English at Dartmouth College, and the author of "Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe" (2001) and "The Making of the American Conservative Mind" (2005), recommends five books from and about American literature of the 1920s (give or take a year or two).

On this day in history...

From a daily email I get from The Scotsman, today's Fact of the Day:

This day in 1846 the North British Railway was opened from Edinburgh to Berwick-on-Tweed. The inaugural train had five locomotives and 28 carriages, displaying - according to the account in The Scotsman - "the flexibility of a silken cord, while rivalling the eagle's flight in speed". Get today's Edinburgh transport news at news.scotsman.com

Do schools still teach about how railroads changed the world? I mean, the impact was enormous, wasn't it?

Testing, testing

I wouldn't call it a perfect storm of technical trouble by any means, but my computer has started restarting itself now and then, apparently at whim (which wipes out whatever I've worked on since the last save), plus the internet and email connections (and long distance phone connection) have been hit and miss for a week or so now (some days I couldn't get on at all), and then, when I did get on, and managed to log in, and write, those odd extra lines kept showing up in my drafts... and to cap it all off, when, against the odds, I published posts, they showed as published on my dashboard, but they never showed up on my blog. Discouraging, that.

All in all it seemed a great time to take a vacation from the internet, a vacation I enjoyed greatly, by the way.

But, well, here's hoping the worst of the glitches have been fixed in my absence. It wouldn't do to turn into a modern day Rip Van Winkle, or an honorary resident of Brigadoon. Would it? (Some days I can see how a person might be temporarily tempted...)

Testing, testing...

Update: So, I can post, and posts that didn't post before have posted themselves, but now spacing in posts that are already published is going haywire. Yargh.

Don Herbert, aka Mr. Wizard, has died

"Mr. Wizard" helped make science not only fun, but part of my life. He has died at the age of 89.

Martin Weil of the Washington Post, among many others, has more on the man and his accomplishments. Mr. Wizard Studios has a guestbook for people who would like to share their memories with Mr. Herbert's family.

Why expect freedom to come easier to Iraq than the United States?

Nouri Al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, wants a few things to be better understood by Americans, and provides some history lessons - both American and Iraqi - along the way. I yield the floor to the gentleman from Iraq. ("Our Common Struggle," OpinionJournal, June 13, 2007)

Word to the wise: plumbing edition

When in doubt about how long to let adhesive/glue/whatever-it-is dry and cure on plastic plumbing pipes that have just been joined, may I politely suggest that you let it cure a bit longer? Just for good measure?

We finally got someone over to fix a shower that has been dripping and dripping, not from the head but out of one handle. An earlier "fix" didn't last more than a day or two; it had become obvious that what was needed was something more along the lines of an overhaul. It's an old shower, with old pipes and fixtures. It was time.

So, we half-emptied the room adjacent to the bathroom, so the gentleman (who shall remain unnamed) could saw through the wall and take out old pipes and put in new ones, etc., without having to jockey around stuff, and so he'd have plenty of room to lay out his tools and pipes, etc. So far so good.

Our repairman turned off the water heater. Quite unaware of this, my husband used a lot of hot water in the other bathroom. This would be beside the point, but it turned out to be important. Still so far, so good.

We have never had a water shutoff valve in this house, not really. There's one you can reach at one toilet, I think, and there's a rumor there's one inside the wall behind the other toilet, and there might possibly be one behind a nailed down panel for the tub. There might be one for one or another of the sinks around here. Maybe. But for the shower, no. Not even behind the nailed down access panel in the mud room/utility room. To turn off the water to the shower, or anywhere else in here that doesn't have its own valve (or for the house in general), you must (as I understand it) go out and find a special very long rod with a special end and take it to a manhole out front of the house and figure out how to get the manhole cover off and then figure out how to use the fancy, special rod (of which we haven't one ourselves, but would have to run next door to the construction company's shed and borrow their's, if it's there, and if we can find it). And then, at a guess, you have to hope you're turning off your water. (I got checked out on this when we moved in, but obviously I've forgotten some of it.)

No, no, don't get ahead of me here. Our repairman thought it might be nice if we had shut-off valves for the shower, considering how much trouble it's been. Thank goodness for small favors.

So, after much sawing and wrestling and trips to the hardware store and finagling and maneuvering and gluing and tightening here and there, we were getting close. Toward the end, watching him brush the pipe ends with purple something or another before putting them together, I asked him if that stuff needed to sit for a while, to cure or set or whatever. "Naw," he said. (Which is a local way of saying, 'oh, goodness, no.')

You are now invited to get ahead of me here...

He got everything done to his satisfaction, then escorted me around to the bathroom to watch a demonstration of the new hardware. The demo went wonderfully. Very nice. No drips, either. Yay! Plus, the design of the new handle, while tacky-looking (we didn't pick it, the landlord did, out of what he had lying around, I guess), is much better for handicapped use, which is a wonderful thing for our family.

But then he turned the shower off. And seconds later the unmistakable sound of burst pipes and spraying water started on the other side of the wall. "O-o-h," says I, "that doesn't sound good." (Yes, I know, I know. A perfectly brilliant thing to say under the circumstances.)

He ran to the other room, and I followed, more slowly (honestly, you wouldn't think a man of his size and age could have moved that quickly). I was in time to see a surprisingly large spray of just-less-than-power-washer-velocity water hitting the ceiling light fixture, with lesser streams and mists going elsewhere in the room. I had to laugh. Honestly. A Hollywood disaster movie producer couldn't have found experts to have done it better for both dramatic and comedic effect. There is a shelving unit across the room from the plumbing; empty spots on the shelf were staying perfectly dry while stuff right next to the empty spot was getting wet. The cat box was getting its own swirling fog settling down onto it. I kid you not, you couldn't have planned the destruction much better. (Shattering a windowpane or two would have been more spectacular, certainly, but luckily we didn't go there.)

The repairman got the water turned off using the hot water shutoff valve he'd just installed. I did mention my gratitude for small favors, didn't I?

Yes, you read that right, by the way. Hot water valve. It was the hot water pipe that had failed. Which made it suddenly not the least funny, until we determined that, thanks to him turning off the water heater when he arrived and my husband using a fair amount of hot water in the meantime, the water coming out of the pipe was only very, very warm and not hot enough to do damage. (We achieved this partially by accident. If you attempt a similar project, you might want to put something like this into the plan. Just a thought.)

At this point I laughed again, this time at the water all over the floor, and at the dry empty spots on the shelves, and at the idea that we'd been very, very lucky, all things considered. And also because, quite frankly, it was without question one of the most ludicrous situations I'd been in the middle of for a very long time.

I don't own a mop, by the way. This is a house long on carpets (why anybody would put carpet in a kitchen or bathroom is beyond me, or in a dining room, for that matter). The flooded room happened to be the only plain hardwood floor in the house, and was mop-able, but no mop. So I ran for my husband, who had been sick in bed most of the day, and told him what had happened and said we could probably use his help deciding what to try to save first (is triage the word I want?) if he felt up to it, and then I grabbed towels and set to work while the repairman trotted outside and elsewhere to get a mop and mop bucket. Actually two mops. It seemed a two mop job. At least.

In the end, we were very, very lucky. When we'd half-emptied the room to make way for the plumber, we'd done ourselves a favor because there wasn't a whole lot left to move, and much of it was junk or barely better than that. And somehow the stuff that would have been ruined by a thorough drenching managed to get less wet than all that. And because of the shut-off valve, the deluge got stopped before we had a major flood. The floor was wet and then some, with standing water, but it was, what?, a quarter inch?, at a wild guess. (I didn't stop to measure.) Mop-able in short order, if you didn't dawdle, at any rate.

The repairman was a bit surprised by my laughing it off. I assured him it was because the situation was so incredibly ridiculous, nothing more, nothing less, "And besides, what else can we do? Really?" I asked. He didn't have an answer to that. I guess he's not used to people who don't really care about little things like a flood in a utility room/mud room/storage room. (We've lived here a year and a half, and we still haven't settled on what to call that room. Not that it matters.) After what we've been through in the last several years, a flood in the mud room hardly registers. Trust me. You get a bit better at recognizing trivia for what it is after your family battles nerve disease and drastic pain and other such challenges for a while.

When my husband got there (in surprisingly short order, actually), the repairman pointed to me, and exclaimed, 'She's laughing! The place is flooded, and it's the happiest she's been all day!'

Well, no. There's a difference between appreciating the ridiculous and/or being to laugh at oneself or at adversity -- and being happy about what's just happened. A big difference.

He shook his head at us, or rather at the spectacle of two folks just setting to work cheerfully enough, after pipes have burst, swapping silly quips that popped to mind.

He got my husband's attention again, 'Do you know what she said? "Oh, that don't sound good." Water's going everywhere, and she says, "Oh, that don't sound good."' He drew it out, and then repeated it a few times. "Oh, that don't sound good. Oh, that don't sound good." Not mocking, exactly; not quite incredulous, but somewhat amazed, I think. He probably would have sworn in a court of law that what I'd said was "Oh, that don't sound good." Never mind that I'd never say "that don't sound good" or anything like it, except for comic effect. File that away for the next time you hear eyewitness testimony, by the way. Often enough, someone will remember things in his own style instead of what really happened. Try something along those lines as a parlor game sometime, if you don't believe me.

Since my saying "Oh, that doesn't sound good" was, without question, ridiculous, and since the repairman seemed to have discovered the fine and too-neglected art of appreciating the ridiculous, we let it go. (Especially since it was better than what I've heard previous repairmen say when a job went wrong.)

We mopped, we set up fans, we lived with a dining room overflowing with evacuated wet stuff for a couple of days. But everything is more or less back where it was, except for the few things we found that we thought we'd lost in the last move, which are now where they should be.

Admittedly, if years ago I'd been subjected to the same mini-disaster, I'm fairly sure I wouldn't have handled it this well. Age and experience and the gifts of grace all help keep experiences like this in perspective, and give a person strength, too. Thank goodness. And thank God.

Now we've moved on to the adventure of dealing with an very old, worn wood floor that has recently had a hot bath. Mostly it's plain, aged wood, but for variety it still has a bit of finish here and there. After the flood, it got dried soon enough to prevent warping or other obvious physical damage, but it seems a bit bleached or something...

The landlord has offered to put down linoleum. So we have that option if I totally mess up the clean-up. I could live with linoleum. It would be easier to keep clean, at any rate. But, just now, it's not my first choice.

It's too late to warn me not to use any oil on a floor you hope to refinish someday, by the way. That horse left the barn months and years ago with this floor, and I've compounded the problem quite recently, ahem.

My husband has floated the idea of painting the floor. (With oil-based paint, since water-based paint probably couldn't cope with the oil on the floor.) That could be fun, especially if a person got it into her head to not just do a Plain Jane job of it... I'm miserable with stencils, but I could probably still come up with designs of some sort... :) Ooh, that could definitely be fun...

OK, I don't know about you but I think it's high time I did an inventory of all the water shut-off valves I can find in this building. In writing. For memorization, and perhaps for posting somewhere, just in case we ever burst another pipe, or otherwise have an unwanted, unwelcome fountain in a room not set up for one.

Seriously, do you know where your water valves are?

Recommended Reading: Nonfiction

At Books for the Backpack -- Recommended Summer Reading, Albert Mohler suggests recent books on pirates, presidents, the "bomber boys" who manned B-17s in World War II, the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth, and the Six Day War.

How nice to know that I'm not the only one who finds the better books about history enjoyable as well as educational. :)

Addition: For more on men who manned bombers in World War II, there's the 1943 book, We Thought We Heard the Angels Sing, by Lieut. James C. Whittaker, about the ordeal of the men who went down over the Pacific Ocean with Eddie Rickenbacker, and weren't rescued for three weeks. That's three weeks in small rafts in a trackless, tropical ocean with essentially no food or water.

Save lives, perhaps win prizes

Danielle Bean is spearheading an online fundraiser for a maternity home "that welcomes women in crisis pregnancies (regardless of faith), provides them with a safe, secure environment in which to live, and gives them access to the medical, educational, and professional services they need to choose life for their babies..."

And she's going out of her way to make donating fun as well as charitable. (There are reasons her blog is so popular, folks.)

Be sure and check her main page to pick up any updates.

Jane Austen fans, take note

At The Point: Welcome to Lori Smith, Gina Dalfonzo welcomes a new blogger to The Point blog.

The new blogger, it turns out, has been researching Jane Austen for a new book, due to come out later this year...

(That sound you hear is certain ladies at The Common Room, not to mention about 90 percent of the rest of my more-regular readership, clicking across to see what somebody else thinks about their beloved Austen... :)

Book note: Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life by Robert Lupton

I haven't seen the book yet, but if this interview of the author by Marvin Olasky ("City Smarts," World Magazine, June 9, 2007) is any indication, Lupton's a man well worth listening to. He's learned the hard way what types of charity tend to make things worse, just for starters.

Lupton has spent more than 35 years working with inner city poor in Atlanta.

I highly recommend the article.

What I can't get over is how closely Lupton's experiences seem to parallel the experiences of Edgar James Helms, the founder of Goodwill Industries, and, to a lesser extent, Donald L. Carcieri, who went from serving as program director for Catholic Relief Services in Jamaica to being the governor of Rhode Island.

hat tip: Zoe Sandvig

From The Scotsman, June 7, 1944

The headline reads: INITIAL LANDINGS IN FRANCE SUCCEED

It's a bit hard to read, because it's one of those copy-of-actual-page pages, which requires some finesse at scrolling around (and a small dose of patience), but if you like to read 'first draft of history' primary sources, resources like this beat a transcript, in my book.

Cutty Sark damaged by fire, and musings on historical sites

Back on May 21, one of the most famous historical ships in the world was extensively damaged by fire. Via The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh visit Greenwich, 22 May 2007 (Royal Insight magazine, May 2007), here's a link to a page with instructions on how to make a donation to the Cutty Sark restoration efforts if you'd like. (I assume I can't be the only person with a soft spot in my heart for tea clippers? Especially this one?)

The Cutty Sark Trust's home page is here.

As it happens, I identify somewhat with the people who have been lovingly tending the Cutty Sark. Many years ago, I traveled a few hundred miles away from home and dedicated a summer to helping restore a wonderful old opera house that had fallen on hard times. I helped put on stage shows to raise money. I worked backstage, onstage, out in the community. I polished brass. I scrubbed. I swept. I rounded up volunteers and supervised them. I talked to service clubs, luncheon parties, whoever would have me. I bought ads, sold tickets, helped organize a parade, soothed temperamental egos, reassured superstitious ones, met with community leaders. I wasn't the head of the project by any means, but I threw my heart into it. (Side note: Teaching sign language to kids in a cast is a useful way of keeping backstage quieter when enthusiasm and nerves are near bursting in a couple dozen people at once.)

I had taken the job merely as a job, more or less, with the added spice and challenge of getting to work in summer stock theater, which I thought would be a hoot. But, quite unexpectedly, I fell in love with that theater. I was highly enough placed that I had a key, and sometimes at night I'd let myself in and stand on the stage and let my imagination wander over who else had stood on those boards, and what they might have sung, danced, said, acted, felt, done. There was magic there. If you've never been on stage I'm not sure you can understand, not really. (I don't think I could have, at any rate.) And if you've never been on a stage graced by greats I'm not sure I can explain that to you, either. It's humbling, but huge, all at the same time.

I hesitate to say there were ghosts onstage with me, because I don't mean it the way some people mean it. I don't mean actual departed individuals in spirit form, not by any means. But all the same, it was impossible to work there and not feel the past, and feel connected to people long dead, to feel that they had, somehow, left something behind that had become part of the place. Something invisible, but real. That much, I think, is true of many truly historic places. (Mark Mossa touched on something similar, I think, when he posted a comment here about walking past an admired author's house.)

But. A few months after I left, the opera house burned down. I couldn't help thinking that it wasn't just a building that was destroyed, but, to some degree, in some fashion, lingering shadows of the people who'd been in her, too. That's crazy, perhaps. But there it is. There are reasons some people pause at historical spots. Reasons beyond mere curiosity (although I have nothing against mere historical curiosity).

I have no doubt that many of the people who have been preserving the Cutty Sark know what I'm talking about. I'm sure they've felt the presence of the past. I'm sure they know what's it's like to feel that you've been handed a responsibility to help keep one specific part of it properly tended, if you want to put it that way. And so I can't help wishing that they'd been spared this grief, because I know it is grief, not the same as for human beings, of course, but real grief all the same.

I'm not always sure, when something is largely destroyed, how much you can rebuild it and call it what it was. To be honest, I looked at the photo at the Royal Insight site, and thought perhaps the Cutty Sark was lost, and in future we'd have to settle for a replica. Replicas have their place, of course, but...

But then I read this:

Statement From Richard Doughty, Chief Executive, Cutty Sark Trust

21st May 2007 - A fire broke out this morning at 4.45am this morning at the Cutty Sark in Greenwich,which was put out by the London Fire Brigade by 06.28am. The ship was undergoing a major conservation project and everyone involved in the project is devastated. It was a quarter of the way through and so much work has already been carried out. However, 50% of the ship had been removed for conservation reasons,including the masts,the coach house and significant amount of planking,so it could have been a lot worse.

We know that there is major damage to the tween decking and some of the ship ’s iron work has buckled but we have yet to assess the full extent of the damage.

When the original fabric of the ship is lost, the touch of the craftsman is lost, history is lost. To lose the timbers and iron frame of the ship is to lose not just maritime heritage but part of our national heritage. We must save as much as we can and hopefully the fire has left us much to still conserve.

This is a significant blow for us,and a major set back to the people working on the project. It will take us a significant amount of effort and funding to get the work back on track.£25m pounds was needed to preserve the ship; we had £18m pounds raised already and now we are appealing for help close the funding gap and to get us through the crisis and return the ship to its former glory.

One thing is certain - we will now redouble our efforts to save the world ’s most famous clipper ship.It has been rescued twice before,in 1922 and 1953 – this will be third time lucky. Now more than ever the Cutty Sark needs support from all her friends across the world...

Now, let me be the first to say that historical preservation people sometimes (often) get rabid, and trample on the rights of other people (or get government to trample on other people for them), for which I don't think they have any good excuse, regardless of the project. But, according to the website, the Cutty Sark Trust is "an independent charity which owns and runs the sole surviving tea clipper." From that, and what I've seen so far browsing around their website, this group appears, at first glance at any rate, to be a happy exception to that stereotype. (I certainly hope so. I am not an ends justifies the means person.)

For more on Cutty Sark's history, and on collections held in trust by its museum, start here. (For navigational instruments, go here. I'm fascinated by old instruments, aren't you?)

Here's wishing the restorers the best of luck as they move forward on this. Here's hoping the spirit of the old ship still lingers.

Caring about stuff

Robert Farrar Capon has some interesting observations about the value and meaning of possessions, about stuff, and caring, and crafts, and knowing about excellence but not caring enough to bother with the details needed to produce it, and more.

Suzanne Temple shares a lingering, loving look inside her Hope Chest, with Practicality disagreeing with Romanticism as she sorts through what's in there.

Overcoming crime, fatherlessness, and a hurricane's destruction (for starters)

Jamie Dean, writing at World Magazine, reports on Desire Street Academy, which is turning a crime-ridden area around, one young man at a time. And it's doing this despite having been leveled by Hurricane Katrina.

hat tip: Catherine Claire

Book note: Summer at Tiffany by Marjorie Hart

Martha Anderson has read the book Summer at Tiffany, which recounts the adventures of two small town college co-eds in New York City in the summer of 1945, and pronounces it a fun read.