Hooray for Calvin & Hobbes, and E.T.'s Melissa Mathison

You just never know where kids will find inspiration.

You'll understand the first part of the above title when you get to the part about Hamlet's soliloquy and Calvin's yucky dinner. Heh. (Boys!)

The second part of the title comes from something that happened back in the 1980s.

One of my favorite assignments as a newspaper reporter was to interview grade school kids in a remedial reading class. They'd written to Melissa Mathison, the lady who wrote E.T. (a popular space alien movie), and she'd been kind enough to write back, answering their questions one by one. No form letter, this. I hope she'll forgive me for mentioning it, but the letter was obviously typed on a typewriter with some difficulty, with strike-outs and everything. Someone had sat down to answer a letter, and had backed up here and there to take a fresh go at the best answer or put slashes over a typo. Once I got over my surprise, I found the presentation strangely charming, and somehow friendly. Even back then, a typewritten letter (as opposed to printed) was becoming a rarity -- and one that wasn't sanitized into perfection was rarer still. It had personality, that letter. (Do not try this at home. You'll only look sloppy if you're insincere.)

I was sent to interview the kids, who had become schoolyard heroes overnight for having received a letter from a screenwriter of a very popular movie.

They had, before that, been taunted by classmates, who had designated them dummies, mostly by virtue of the fact that they'd been having trouble learning to read. Many of them were children of Mexican farm and factory workers, either migrant workers, or former migrant workers who had decided to settle down and become American citizens. Some of them, the teachers told me, regularly showed up at school in the firm clutches of a resolute grandmother, who had dragged the child to school kicking and screaming. Grandmother was determined the kid was going to learn to read English if it killed him, and otherwise get the best education ever attained by anyone in that family. The kid was tired of the humiliation. The grandmothers, fortunately for the kids, were stronger and didn't give up as easily.

I showed up with a plan to make sure every kid in the classroom got a chance to feel that the reporter had listened to him or her - I did this in all my classroom-related stories, by the way, but in this case I knew I was with kids who might not get another shot at being in the paper, so I was being extra careful not to leave anyone out.

As I was politely giving each child a chance to contribute something if he or she felt like it, one kid in the back exploded with "Can't you hurry?". The teacher tried to shush him with a reminder that it was nice of the newspaper to send the nice reporter lady to their school and it was rude to interrupt, but I was intrigued.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know you had something else planned," I said, fishing.

"We have to get to the library and look up more on Einstein!" another kid exploded. To which sentiment there was much enthusiastic seconding, I might add.

More on Einstein? More on Einstein? Little kids in a class for slow learners thought they were going to die if they didn't get to go do research on a famous physicist? Right now, no less? When faced with choosing between the fame of being in the newspaper and with getting to the library, the potential honor and fame lost? Hands down?

I wrapped up in short order (who am I to argue with miracles?) and the teacher dismissed the kids to go to the library and I had to duck between desks to not get knocked down. Outside, their chaperone kept yelling "Don't run!" but it was a losing battle on her end. The kids would dutifully slow down for a step or two or three or five or six, then shoot off again. All because a patient and considerate writer took the time to explain to a bunch of kids she'd never met that something about E.T.'s looks was based on Alfred Einstein, and from there Einstein had captured their imagination.

I don't know who wound up with that letter. I hope it's framed somewhere, or, better yet, kept lovingly in someone's drawer and brought out now and then for a tender rereading. It set some kids on fire, and in a very good way.

There's something else, too, that's stuck with me all these years. It's a bit hard to explain. It's not just that the kids were suddenly, for perhaps the first time in their lives, excited about learning and passionate about reading. Something about how they held themselves, something about their expressions, made me think about little kids in a wedding party, wearing wonderful, new, stiff, special clothes they weren't used to -- but with these kids it wasn't the clothes.

I remember sitting in my car for a long time trying to pin down what it was about those kids that was so astonishing besides their love of Einstein. I finally decided that what I'd seen was a whole group of kids who were proud of themselves, and not used to it. They were wearing a self-respect that was alien to them. They liked it, but there was no question they weren't used to themselves like that.

You did good, Melissa Mathison. Thanks.

At the time, I thought I'd like to try to track the kids down a decade or two later and see if the fire had stayed lit. But, later, when the decade came around, I found I couldn't do it. Or didn't want to. It would have broken my heart, I decided, if the kids had slid back into thinking of themselves as dummies. I invoked the "don't ask questions you don't want to hear the answers to" rule, and hoped for the best. I still do.

Sometimes, though, I wish I'd followed up. I can't help but think at least a few of the kids from that class kept that fire alive. It would have been a good story.

More to the point, now that I'm older I can't help but wonder if, had there been some falling away, that perhaps I could have done some good by sticking in my own words of encouragement, my own reminder of that day when all that mattered was getting to the library as soon as possible.

See the test for yourself

Via Betsy's Page, here's where you can go to take that civics and history quiz that's behind the recent headlines bemoaning what college students know about America.

Betsy has some quibbles about the quiz, and so do I (on the whole my quibbles are different from hers, by the way), but I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself how fair a job the quizmakers did when setting up this survey.

If you're wondering, I got 52 right out of 60, which put me well ahead of the average so far for September, but well behind what I was aiming for.

Knowing and teaching...

... aren't quite the same things:

She knows that there is a step-by-step pattern, and she is aware that the larger part of the equestrian world understands it and communicates with it, but she cannot.

She can accomplish the tasks, she spent six years of sweaty, grimy, painful work acclimating her body to a culture that was quite foreign to her in the beginning.

She has absorbed the culture. She can mount the horse and perform the tasks without even thinking about them.

But that's the trouble, she can't think about them. Her body has learned the language, but the brain has not. It sort of happened by osmosis.

A student can ask her "How do you such and such?" and The Equuschick's response is "I actually have no idea."

Hence the closed eyes, the muttering, and the careful step-by-step parade across the arena.

OK, be honest here. If you're over the age of, say, seven, haven't you been in a similar situation, where you have learned something so well it's second nature to you, and therefore, especially at first, it's almost impossible to teach it to someone else? Haven't you been reduced to saying, "I don't know, I just do it," or "You add enough flour until the dough just feels right," or something else along those lines that's truthful but of precious little use to the person listening to you, if they don't already know what you're talking about?

Been there.

On the other hand, a point Equuschick makes at the end of her post is a good one. Sometimes the best way to learn is to teach. My husband likes to have his seasoned employees train the new employees, at least for part of the job. Sometimes it's even money which one learns more, the rookie or the pro.

Read the whole post here.

A face to go with the blog

A couple weeks ago or so I met someone who knows me through business, and through this blog, but whom I'd never met in person. I found I'd somehow built up a radically wrong picture of him in my mind. He didn't say how much I matched or differed from his guesses about how I looked, but he did say it was nice to finally have a face to go with the blog.

I'm dragging my feet on sharing my mug with the whole world, but Phil at Brandywine Books has dropped the curtain, and mugs shamelessly for this post.

Assuming that's really Phil, I have to admit I blinked. Not at all what I had in my head. Not that I had a clear image in my head, but whatever I had, I was mistaken. For one thing, somehow I thought he was older...

On the other hand...

... sometimes an innovative bit of Christian theater can be respectful in its own way.

If I describe it as something along the lines of hand theater in black light, I hope that doesn't keep you from clicking through. The kids are pretty good, I think.

Solempne

C.S. Lewis - and others - on solemnity, or, more precisely, the older, richer, related solempne.

To which I say, amen.

"25 Skills Every Man Should Know: The List"

Via Peter Lawler, Popular Mechanics is discussing practical skills in this perhaps over-techno age. See 25 Skills Every Man Should Know: The List, Ready for Your Debate for more.

Feminists, you are invited to kindly stop gnashing your teeth. Nobody's saying we ladies can't learn these things. They're just noting that a lot of men these days haven't learned how to build or fix things or deal with emergency situations. And that can't be good, as far as I'm concerned.

Mrs. Judson's white-and-wheat pancakes

Since "whole wheat" breads, etc., taste bad to me, but at the same time I don't think using just white flour is all that healthy, I've had to adjust most cookbook recipes, or make up my own recipes altogether when it comes to breads and noodles and that sort of thing. (Somewhat-whole-wheat cooking hasn't been properly discovered yet, or something.)

After reading an aside in an old cookbook to the effect that it had been discovered decades before that sourdough starter wasn't needed for a foamy pancake batter - that plain old lemon juice would do in its stead - I dumped my sourdough starter (it was a bit too much like having a fussy pet, when it came right down to it - a pet that smelled, no less), and started in on devising my own faux sourdough, somewhat-whole-wheat pancakes. After a bit of experimenting, I came up with the following.

Right off the start I'd like to note that these do not have the tang associated with sourdough. They don't even have the tang I expected from the lemon juice. But they are airy and tasty, all the same.

Mix together: 3/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour, 1/4 cup whole wheat all-purpose flour, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and 2 tablespoons sugar.

Add: 2 tablespoons cooking oil, 1 beaten egg, 1/4 cup milk, and 1/4 cup water.

Mix until smooth, and then add water a little at a time until you have the batter as thin as you like. (As a rule of thumb: the thinner the batter the thinner the pancakes will be.)

Stir in 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Let sit a minute or two to get foamy.

Pour by scant quarter cups - or whatever size you like - onto preheated fry pans or on a griddle. On my stove, a setting halfway between medium-low and medium works best. Cook until edges are dry and center is riddled with air holes, then turn over and cook the other side.

If you aren't used to cooking pancakes, don't worry if it takes a bit of practice to learn how to get them just the shade of brown you want. There's an old saying in cooking that the first pancakes of any batch are never as good as the ones that come after. It's all a matter of learning how the pan's heated up this time, and of course no two batters are exactly the same, and the weather might possibly be a factor, and...

Here, now, if you're a novice, don't let me scare you off. Making pretty good pancakes is relatively easy, with just a bit of experience. Making gorgeous pancakes, on the other hand, is where a bit of finesse comes into play, as well as a willingness to experiment a little. (Is that why so many men like to cook pancakes? I wonder... At any rate, it's the sort of cooking that rewards someone who develops a knack for it.)

I use nonstick frying pans, usually two at a time so I can keep the cakes coming. If you don't use nonstick, you might have to use more oil in the recipe, or else grease the pans. This last go-around I used olive oil, and we decided we liked it better than the veggie oil I'd used before. But we liked it with the veggie oil, too.

Added: Most cookbooks suggest cooking pancakes at high heat. My pans aren't supposed to be used at high heat, and I get fine results at the lower setting - but you might want to experiment with the higher heat, depending on your set-up.

The "Forgotten Man" in American politics

Pop quiz question #1: When Yale professor William Graham Sumner introduced the concept of "the forgotten man" decades before Roosevelt's New Deal, what did he mean by it?

Pop quiz question #2: When FDR first used it, what did he mean by it?

Pop quiz question #3: Why does it matter - enormously - that FDR twisted the meaning to his own advantage while he was in office?

Answers are in the text of "The Legacy of the 1936 Election," by Amity Shlaes, adapted from a lecture given in July, and printed in the September 2007 Imprimis. Shlaes is, among other things, the author of the bestselling history of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man.

The unexpected in Ramadi

Via Bookworm, news from Michael J. Totten, reporting from Iraq, from what used to be called the worst city on Earth (for very good reasons).

The post is well worth a read. It's longish, but I urge you to read it all, or you won't get the balanced picture.

A devoted outdoorsman

I am not a "fishing widow," but I've known of a few. This about takes the cake in the stories I've heard, though:

"Likes" to fish is a gross understatement. "Lives" might be a more appropriate substitute. On their honeymoon, Grandpa Ed bought Grandma Ruby a bunch of peaches and went fishing with a friend, leaving her to can all of the peaches. Grandma always laughs a little when she tells the story. Grandpa doesn't like that story all too much. Maybe if he'd known he'd be hearing about it for the rest of his life he'd have stayed and helped can peaches.

In that case, Grandma Ruby would probably have never heard the end of it, at a guess. 'On our honeymoon I had to help the little lady can peaches. Can you beat that?' Heh.

Changing to a semi-new subject, this evening I heard that the family of an old man who died a few days ago is requesting that anyone who comes to the funeral show up in cammo clothes. That would be hunter's cammo, as I understand it. No, I've never heard of that sort of request being made before now. It's certainly got the grapevine hopping. Some of the grapevine has it that cammo is required at the funeral. I haven't heard the radio report yet (around here, you find out about funerals by listening to the radio news), so I can't tell you what the official line is.

I've long since given up trying to understand this sort of thing. Avid hunters and fishermen have different quirks than I do, that's all there is to it, I guess.

Update: I caught the radio news. The funeral is at the cemetery, and the family is asking that those attending wear cammo clothes if possible.

Book note: The World Made New, by Marc Aronson and John W. Glenn

I will admit to a certain fascination with The Age of Exploration. Suzanne Temple is recommending a new book on the subject, which looks at how the events that followed Columbus's voyage changed the entire world.

Closed circuit for the folks who work at our bookstore: If anybody trades one of these in, I have dibs. OK? Pretty please?

Book note: The Women Who Raised Me, by Victoria Rowell

Living the Life will be featuring actress Victoria Rowell on Thursday, discussing her memoirs, in which she pays tribute to women who helped her during a childhood spent entirely within the foster care system.

The publisher's page on the book is here. A website dedicated to the book is here. A press release about the book is here.

Oh, good. When was the last time you heard anything positive about the foster care system?

(And, no, I don't know why the book is all about the women who helped her, instead of the men and women who helped her. But I doubt that Living the Life would have her on if the book wasn't inspiring, so I'm cutting some slack on that account, with apologies to the men who are kind enough to read this blog. If you've read this blog long, you know I'm huge on the value of daddies.)

Narrowing the idea of healthy

When kindergarten teachers forget who the Mom is, you get... The Food Police Go to Kindergarten.

Admittedly, some mothers are smarter about nutrition than others. But whatever happened to discreetly working one on one with a mother who is flunking in the food department, and leaving everyone else alone? Isn't diversity supposed to be good?

Besides, has swapping and sharing been abolished? (I suppose it might be. The Food Police seem to like to oversee everything...) I seem to remember that as kids we sometimes helped out kids who didn't have enough. As in, "Oh, look, here's an extra apple in my lunch bag. How did that happen? Do you want it? Otherwise I'll just have to lug it home again..." You know, stuff like that. Teachers used to approve of behavior like that, or, at the least, turn a blind eye to it. Why have they become so fussy and prissy and nosy?

OK. OK. Not all of them have. But it sure seems to be a trend... (And, OK, my fifth grade teacher was a rabid spoilsport on playground patrol. She freaked out easily, and seemed to be obsessed with the idea that a girl might get hurt on her watch - something which must be prevented at all costs, apparently, by the implementing of drastic preventive measures, such as a blanket prohibition of boys playing with girls. We thumbed our noses at that rule. Regularly. With malice aforethought. We despised her, the only teacher I remember despising, but I digress...)

Do you ever get the feeling that somehow most of the people who would have been bothersome old maids making life miserable for their immediate neighbors in eras past, have somehow drifted into positions of authority in our day and age, thereby expanding the reach of their humorless tyranny as far as possible? Sometimes I wonder.

Not that I mean that the kindergarten teachers in this case necessarily fall into that category. I'm just saying that so much of what passes for "liberal" causes these days sure seems like busybody old women who can't get along with anybody and blame it on other people not being as good as they should (by their definitions, of course). To be fair, a lot of Republicans in positions of authority seem to be doing good imitations of snippy old maids, too. Sigh. Does having power do that to people, or do people like that set their sights on those positions? Am I asking a chicken or the egg question here? Oh, never mind. I'm not sure I'm up to this sort of discussion today.

On a side note, this talk about food and school makes me think of the Japanese book Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window (available in English translation). Totto-chan's headmaster solved the problem of getting mothers to pack nutritious meals by asking them to try to remember to arrange for their child to have "something from the ocean and something from the hills" in addition to their rice. This made sure the children always had a combination of things to eat, and it also let him turn mealtime into educational time, because he'd quiz children about where their food came from. His wife would go around serving fish out of an "ocean" saucepan and potatoes out of a "hills" saucepan to anyone who had come up short that day. It was a simple system and they had fun with it.

Totto-chan broke sales records in Japan, has been translated into several language, and is still in print here in the United States. I suspect it - along with other work by the author, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi - has had more influence than some people would guess. Wikipedia has an article on the book here.

Another silly study taken too seriously

So, have you been hearing that a study published recently in Nature Neuroscience somehow proves that 'liberals' are smarter and more adaptable than 'conservatives'?

You might want to read Rigging a study to make conservatives look stupid. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine to see what the study actually tested and how it was carried out.

How people expect non-scientists to take science seriously when junk like this gets traction in the press is beyond me.

By the by, I put 'liberals' and 'conservatives' in single quotes in part because these days it seems to me that more 'liberals' are big on punishing people who don't march in lockstep as per their assigned group identity, and more 'conservatives' are in the freedom-loving, countercultural role. At any rate, the current use of the words doesn't match the traditional meanings of the words at all. (If you feel up to a lengthy, scholarly explanation, you might want to check out What Is Classical Liberalism?, by John C. Goodman, December 20, 2005, NCPA website, for starters.)

Finally, this might be related to the issue discussed in the Saletan article: Most science studies appear to be tainted by sloppy analysis, Daily Policy Digest, NCPA Idea House, Sept. 18, 2007.

A tribute to JR Salzman

Gateway Pundit has a tribute to JR Salzman, a former ESPN Outdoor Sportsman of the Year who is coming back strong after losing part of an arm in Iraq. These days, Salzman is a college student majoring in technology education.

See also: ESPN article on Salzman right after he was injured. (World champion logroller, ESPY winner Salzman loses arm in combat, Sam Eifling, ESPNOutdoors.com — Dec. 27, 2006)

Gracie declares an emergency

Shortly after five this morning, our cat Gracie reached up and started moving things around on my bedside table. Sometimes she moves things around to amuse herself and sometimes she moves things around on the 'any attention is good attention' principle.

I tried to ignore her, on the principle that 'any attention is good attention' is a very bad idea to encourage. Especially at five in the morning.

I'll spare you the details of the escalation, but suffice it to say that wobbling stuff around was just an opening salvo. She soon made it clear that no amount of ignoring her or begging her to go away was going to do any good. If she had to destroy everything in the room she was going to get me out of bed. This was an emergency.

It hadn't been a good night. My husband suffers from bouts of serious and debilitating pain, and he'd had several bad sessions during the night. Neither of us had had much sleep. But an emergency is an emergency, and sometimes, after all, animals know when to be worried, so I dragged out of bed.

Gracie, upon seeing me start to sit up, had set herself up at the foot of the bed like a runner in the starting blocks at a race. When my feet hit the floor she was off like a shot, making rather remarkable speed for a cat of her age (not young) and athletic ability (not stellar). Definitely, she saw this as an emergency.

She galloped into the far side of the house, which was both a puzzle and a relief. This is not a cat known for bravery. She wasn't going to lead a charge into perilous conditions. But leading a charge she was, no question.

I got to the laundry room and found her stationed at her food dish. Her food dish had, oh, a couple or three rounded tablespoons left of dry food. About half of the bottom of the dish was visible.

"This is it?" I ask. "Your food is low? This is the emergency?"

Yep. No question. I added food to her dish and she fell to eating with a relief that was unmistakable. She ate, at a guess, about what had been left in her dish before I got there. Perhaps a bit less. But she was profoundly grateful that I had come to her rescue, all the same.

Our cat has apparently discovered the concept of a rainy day fund, which must not be touched if there is any way possible to tap into other sources of supply. Even, alas, at five in the morning.

Good thing I have a good sense of humor, that's all I can say. I'm hoping she doesn't do this again, but I had a good laugh over it all the same.

Our cat is, by the way, named for the comedienne Gracie Allen. Our Gracie doesn't provide the same sort of humor or laughs as her namesake, but she does crack me up regularly - usually during daylight hours, though, or, at least, when I'm awake, and up.

She and I need to have a bit of a chat about timing. I know all comedians struggle with timing at least from time to time, but this was ridiculous. The performance itself was pitch perfect, but it was definitely the sort of show for a matinee, I'd say... (with a yawn)...

Humble heroes honored

The Point is looking for everyday heroes to honor.

The ball's in your court.

Faith and military service

Ray Nothstine writes about spirituality on the battlefield. (Combat and Conversion, Acton Institute PowerBlog, September 12, 2007)

One of his many links is to this account from W. Thomas Smith Jr., who went to Iraq as a journalist. (‘God Bless and Semper Fi’, National Review Online, September 10, 2007)

The "Canon Wars" twenty years after "The Closing of The American Mind"

Rachel Donadio takes a look at academia's so-called "Canon Wars" twenty years after Allan Bloom's book about the failings of higher education hit the bestseller lists. There's some good news along with the bad in what, all in all, struck me as a thoughtful and thorough three-page article.

P.S. As of my post time, the article was free to the general public, but since it's in the New York Times, I don't expect that to last very long.

On things unseen

Laurie has a post featuring short passages from various books over at Fernnook Farmgirl, and this quote, from the writing of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House in the Ozarks: The Rediscovered Writings), caught my eye:

I have a feeling that childhood has been robbed of a great deal of its joys by taking away its belief in wonderful, mystic things, in fairies and all their kin. It is not surprising that when children are grown, they have so little idealism or imagination nor that so many of them are like the infidel who asserted that he would not believe anything that he could not see. It was a good retort the Quaker made, "Friend! Does thee believe thee has any brains?"

Hmmm.

Be nice, now. Just because you have a lovely new retort in your arsenal doesn't mean you should necessarily go out and use it the first opportunity that presents itself, you know.

This and that

Well, amazing. I actually got on the internet. Let's see if I can get anything drafted before I get kicked off again. (Sigh. Technology is wonderful when it works.)

Plan A for today, when I went to bed last night, was to get up early and bake some bread as a Welcome to the Neighborhood gift. Or, rather, gifts. A couple has moved into the house next door and I've only met the husband in passing, and a Baptist pastor and his family just moved to town yesterday, and I haven't met any of that family yet, even though they're only half a block away, more or less. The plan was to show up bearing gifts, see if anybody needed anything, and then probably just scoot back out of their way until they got over the exhaustion of moving.

So much for planning. My husband was ill much of the night, so we were both rather unrested this morning. When I did drag out of bed it was with sneezing and sniffling and with a swollen, itchy eye. I don't know know about you, but if I just moved into a neighborhood and some stranger showed up on my doorstep sneezing and coughing and with an infected eye and presented me with a batch of homemade rolls that she said she'd just baked that morning, I have a funny feeling I wouldn't consider it a gift quite as much as an invasion. I might also wonder what sort of neighborhood I'd just moved into. So, anyway, the re-enactment of the scene from the movie It's a Wonderful Life got put on the shelf. Not that I intended to have a ceremony or anything, but, still, the tradition of bread-as-gift for people moving into a new home seemed like a good idea last night, but not today.

Between the bug and some sore muscles from overdoing it a bit in the heavy-physical-labor department on Tuesday, I was kind of slow today, both in mind and body, so I did some drudge work I'd been putting off, both indoors and out, both personal and business. It was a good day for drudge work. The bookstore is better off because of it, too. And so's the lawn. Such a deal.

I probably should have taken a nap somewhere along the line, but I am well and truly glued to a book I started the other day, and it took up all my spare time today. It's not one I was especially excited about when it showed up in a trade-in pile, but it caught my eye and I thought I'd browse through it before putting it out for sale. Browse? I'm eating the details.

The book is a biography of Bess Truman by her daughter, Margaret Truman. The title, plainly enough, is Bess W. Truman. I'm rather fond of biographies in general, but I usually avoid those written either by employees or family members. I'm not quite sure why I made an exception in this case, but I suspect that in part it's because I've read some mysteries by Margaret Truman and know she's a pretty good writer, and also in part because I have a weak spot for books from World War II and the years leading up to it.

To my surprise (I probably shouldn't have been surprised, but I was) Margaret Truman really did her research on this. I was afraid it was going to be something along the lines of I-remember-this and Somebody-told-me-that. But, no. I'm only about two-thirds of the way through, but I feel like I've already gotten more in the way of history lessons than found in most college courses. It's also making me rethink some of what I thought I knew about that time period. At any rate, despite some awkwardness that inevitably results from the author being the daughter of the two main subjects in the book, not to mention being a main character in her own right, I'd recommend it. (It's really as much a biography of Harry Truman as it is of his wife, with a healthy dose of autobiography on the author's part.)

I should probably mention that the author is definitely one of those I-calls-it-as-I-sees-it type of historian, which is a bit too bad for some of the people featured in the book (including, at times, her mother). On the other hand, the book doesn't suffer from, on the one hand, the cardboard people syndrome common to many history books - which seem to pretend that it didn't matter who was in place when events happened, because, you know, the events happened to them, or something like that - or, on the other hand, the over-wartiness of other history books, especially those of the important-people-should-be-torn-down-because-it-wouldn't-do-to-leave-any-heroes-standing-or-reputations-intact school. Truman is frank and sometimes-opinionated, but not vicious, from what I've seen so far.

There are some priceless quotes and passages, but for now I'm going to finish the book before I start getting into that. From what I've read so far, I've already moved it onto my Books I Wish Somebody Would Bring Back Into Print list.

Another recently read book I moved onto that list is The Foundling by Francis Cardinal Spellman, c. 1951. It's also on my Top Ten Coming-of-Age Novels of All Time list, or would be, if I were organized enough to have such a list. More on that one later, too, but in sum, a soldier returning to America after being grievously wounded in World War One is afraid to go home and have his mother and sweetheart see him scarred and crippled and, not knowing where else to go or what to do, he wanders into a cathedral and, after a while, exhausted, he falls asleep. When he wakes up he's all alone in the cathedral. Or he thinks he is. A baby cries, and he finds a baby boy abandoned in the church. The rest of the book is about the lives that intersect and intertwine because that soldier found that baby, and also about that baby growing into manhood.

Hmmm. I'm afraid that might make the book sound sappy, and it isn't. It's a rather hard to categorize book. Some of it's drop dead funny (it has, for instance, a great passage or two on a boy overcome with gallantry while in the throes of puppy love), and some of it's gut-wrenching. It's pro-America, unabashedly. But it's not blind to her faults (much of the book is a direct assault on the racism common at the time). It's, in a way, pro-military. But it's not blind to the difficulties faced by soldiers and their loved ones. It's ecumenical, in that there are Catholic, Protestant and Jewish main characters. But it's not so ecumenical that it pretends there aren't differences between Catholic and Protestant and Jew - in fact, much of the story turns on the fact that the soldier is Protestant and the baby is declared Catholic. But it is a compassionate book. And there I go, making it sound sappy again...

(Did I mention I'm buggy and not in top form today?)

I wish I knew more about classical music, because, as it happens, much of the book also revolves around the love of music, and 'highbrow' music at that. But it's not a highbrow book. In fact, Boston elitist types get portrayed as spoiled brats when the occasion presents itself.

(Did I mention that it's a hard to classify bit of fiction?)

Anyway, moving on to one more quick note before I head off to bed... I'm not going to try doing a link tonight, or a full review either, but if any of you are participating in the Apple tribute over at Semicolon (link in my sidebar) and are looking for a book with good apple information, Shrinking the Cat: Genetic Engineering Before We Knew About Genes by Sue Hubbell has a pretty interesting chapter on the history and science of apples. At least I thought it was pretty interesting.

I'd probably quibble with one or two things if pressed for a point by point review of opinions/attitude/style in this book, but overall it's a well-above-average science read aimed at laymen, and it's got some interesting history in it, too. In addition to apples, the book covers corn, silkworms, and domestic cats, among other things.

If you need a laugh...

... this admission that making it through college did not prepare her for having a son in pre-kindergarten is both enlightening and hysterical, I think. (I think it might also help explain why more and more mothers homeschool these days, but that's a wild guess on my part. But, hey, nobody sends your child home with a letter bucket if you homeschool, right?...)

Mississippi moves forward, without much media attention

Don't you hate it when you realize that the news media has got you trained almost as well as Pavlov trained his dogs? And yet, here I am... say Hurricane Katrina and probably 99% of the time the first thought in my head is New Orleans. Shame on me. I resolve to change that. See the blog post The State Which Must Not Be Named for news out of Mississippi, which, of course, got hard hit (that's an understatement), but which hasn't been whining like the media darlings of Louisiana. Kudos to Mississippi.

hat tip: Bookworm

Added: The blogger who wrote "The State Which Must Not Be Named" has several other good Katrina-related posts. I've been browsing through the archives here. If you're interested on "man on the ground" reporting and commentary, you might want to check it out.

Double death grip: or, don't get attacked by a moray eel

Via Pipsqueak, thanks to a technique called cinefluoroscopy, which is some sort of moving X-ray image, plus high-speed video, researchers have found that the auxiliary jaws in the throat of a moray eel don't stay in the throat as presumed. No, as it happens they leap into the main mouth area and help grab the prey. Info and X-ray pictures here (Moray Eels Attack With Two Jaws, by Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News, Sept. 5, 2007).

Yinga. I predict outbreaks of moray eel play-acting amongst families with small boys once this news gets out. Does anyone want to bet against it? (Yikes.)

I had no idea that moray eels had two sets of jaws, so the fact that the second set is extendable/retractable is a surprise on top of a surprise for me.

Wanted: movie recommendations

Danielle Bean, Catholic mom and author, has asked for movie recommendations. Go tout your family-friendly finds here. (She's not looking just for kid-friendly flicks. Good-to-watch-as-a-couple films are wanted, too. And... well, go check it out.)

As of my post time, there are 73 comments over there, and we are talking an eclectic mix, including several that appealed to the menfolk of the household.

A Bloggityville Apple Fest

Semicolon is celebrating apples throughout the month of September, and Sherry is inviting readers to share in the fun with links and comments. And recipes. Among other things:

...this month I’ll be writing, in addition to the regular posts, about apples in literature, apple quotations, the history of apples, apple recipes, apple crafts, apple activities, apples in books for children, varieties of apples, and who-know-what-else —-all about apples. If you’d like to post about apples and link here, there will be a linky after each apple post where you can add a link to your apple idea or recipe or post...

Book market watch: I am a Mouse, by Ole Risom

I don't know how many people have walked into the bookstore over the years and told us, while handing over some books they want to trade in, some variation on 'We threw the kid's books out. We didn't figure anyone would want old kids books, and we didn't want to waste your time.' Whereupon your humble booksellers try not to scream or whimper, especially when the barterer adds that the books were in reasonably good condition, but were simply "out of date."

Now, books that are trashed are one thing. I don't like handling torn and filthy books, and neither do most people. But those "out of date" books sometimes are in pretty fair demand in the market, even in just fair condition in some cases. Sometimes they aren't, it's true, but children's books from a generation or two ago that have gone out of print can sometimes go a bit bonkers price wise, at least now and then, because there are a whole lot of people who crave to hold in their hands a copy of a book they loved as a child. Or they crave to give it to a beloved grandchild or something.

Board books can be especially likely prospects because the supply tends to be short. They aren't always printed in big batches to begin with, and babies will chew them into ruin.

As a case in point, in today's stack of used books for which I'm checking market prices is a copy of a Golden Sturdy Book, sort of a board book supreme, almost ten inches tall and almost five and a half inches wide, with sturdy cardboard pages, and wonderful, colorful illustrations by John P. Miller. The copyright is 1964. The title is I am a Mouse, and it's by Ole Risom. Risom, upon checking, did several books along this line.

The I am a Mouse title is in scarce supply, and the prices today pretty much start at $22 and range up from there, with the majority being between $25 and $50, but with several above that. This could change tomorrow (or even later today), but even on the sites that specialize in cheap used books the prices are up in this range.

The prices for I am a Puppy are also pretty good today, but if you want solid gold, find yourself a copy of I am a Bear in good condition. As of post time, on my usual sites there is only one bookseller with a copy for sale, and they're asking ninety bucks for it, and that's while admitting that it's foxed (i.e., has got brown age spots), and the spine is almost worn away and it's being held together after a fashion with tape, "but all boards are intact and beautiful." That's a c. 1967 book, by the way. There's no telling if anybody will bite at that price, but I wouldn't be surprised. I've seen crazier things happen once someone has decided to get his hands on a treasure from his youth.

(Oh, you say you have a copy in a box somewhere? May I politely suggest you try to remember where you put that box?)

Georgia's bloody and brutal past

Melik Kaylan writes about the The Museum of the Soviet Occupation in Tbilisi, Georgia. 'Occupation,' of course, is a very polite word in this case.

Submit yourself for inspection: John Edwards' health care vision edition

Uhm. Off the top of my head, I don't think making doctor visits mandatory is a good idea in a supposedly free society like the United States of America. Silly me, right? And I'm sure that for our federal government to require mental health evaluations would - somehow - be perfectly harmless, right?, and never mind that (as far as I know) everywhere else that something like that has been tried the folks in power have cheerfully declared people who oppose them mentally ill and in need of rehab (or worse). Shudder.

Thanks but no thanks, Senator. Last time I checked, the United States was still run by fallible human beings, with a heavy skewing toward the power mad in the upper levels. This, I guess, is how most governments in most places in most times are run, but the genius of American government is that it was set up with this in mind, and with an eye toward limiting the damage that wannabe tyrants (let us call them the overt dictators) and zealous do-gooders (many of whom fall into the covert dictators column) can do during any given citizen's lifetime, and from there forward into posterity. As it happens, the chief tool in keeping damage to a minimum is keeping the jurisdiction of government limited and the power of government curtailed. It's a quaint idea, I know, but it has tended to work reasonably well when given a chance. Or, at least, it's tended to beat the alternatives tried thus far, as far as I can see. And it does take human nature, warts and all, into account, which has probably saved us more than a bit of grief. (Call it preventive medicine, if you like.)

And, uhm, not to belabor the point, but last time I checked doctors were human and fallible and prone to enthusiasms and convictions, too. There are pros and cons to that, I think. (As an aside, I love how Richard M. Cohen, the author of Blindsided: Lifting a Life above Illness, mounted a campaign to, as he said, hijack his body back from his doctors. Been there, done that, hated that we had to remind a doctor or two that if it wasn't his life, it wasn't his life to do with as he pleased. But facts are facts, and some doctors are arrogant, and they can easily be in a position to harm you. This is not to mention that the revamped, abortion-and-euthanasia-are-OK-if-you-pause-before-proceeding Hippocratic Oath probably doesn't help much. See also, for instance, The Cruelest Irony of All: When "Those Who Heal You Will Kill You")

I know it's quite possibly unreasonable of me, but on top of all that I simply don't like the idea of, in essence, being sent to the vet by a well-meaning shepherd trying to keep his herd healthy. Not that I have anything against being healthy. And not that I don't know that's caricature. But... I've read some history and I want the freedom my ancestors had. Silly me again, right?

So, by all means, Senator Edwards, tout preventive care. Tout away. Preventive care is good, on the whole. And if you feel like launching a private initiative - a commune, a co-op, an insurance company, a club, a society, an apartment building, a new, planned community, whatever - which requires a person to agree to go to the doctor regularly as part of opting in, launch away. And may you prosper at it.

But when you start taking taxpayer money to do it, then we start to part company.

And that "...you can't choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years..." business? Sorry. You've lost me. I can't see where the government has the right to force people into medical offices for scheduled maintenance, all the more so since it would violate the religious convictions of many, and the common sense of others.

And don't get me started on what I think about some bureaucrat looking into his crystal ball recommended schedule and telling me what to do based on that...

BTW: Do you ever get the idea that some Democrats (like, say, John Edwards, possibly) read the dystopian cautionary tales of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley and thought, "Wow. If I could be leader in a society like that, everything would be great!"? I do. The Clintons, for instance, have repeatedly made me think of Animal Farm, especially the repainting the messages on the barn theme, with the 'some animals are more equal than others' theme coming in a close second.

For the record, I'm pretty sure that Orwell and Huxley and company were trying to warn their utopian-dream-addled generation about the dangers of too-powerful leaders and too-pervasive government, etc., amongst other things. They were not advocating Big Brother leadership of grown men and women, even if any given Big Brother in question really and truly thinks it is for our own good. For the record, I'm with Orwell and Huxley on this.

For the record, I'm a fair bit concerned about some of the current Republicans with power, too.

FYI: For a brief rundown on what Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In The Age Of Show Business (c. 1985), saw as important differences between what Orwell and Huxley feared, see this post at philosophical society. com. It's not a minor point, if Postman's analysis is correct.

Well, for instance, from the foreword:

...Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preocuppied with some equivalent of the feelies... As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.' In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right...

Hmmm. I'm going to have to mull this for a while. And I might have to check out that book. And maybe reread some classics. Hmmm.

What do you think?

New Europe, etc. (updated)

Joseph M. Knippenberg, after years away, revisited the Europe of his youth. Only, of course, it wasn't the Europe of his youth anymore. He shares some of his observations in Rip van Knippenberg on the New Europe.

I found that article via this post at No Left Turns, wherein Peter Schramm says he'd like to have some conversations about it.

The ball's in your court...

P.S. What do you think of Knippenberg's suggestion in passing that since English is the new lingua franca, perhaps we should use the term lingua anglia? My first thought is that it might be more accurate for the present, but that I like the term lingua franca because it ties me to a world before my own time. (Several worlds, actually, since there have been, and are, several lingua francas, each with its own background and impact. But for me I always think of the founding of my country, and how if back then you wanted to be a major player internationally it really helped if you knew French.) Silly, I know. But there it is. I like words and phrases that keep history alive, or at least remind you of it.

I'm willing to be flexible, though. If lingua anglia caught on I'd use it, I think. ;)

Certainly I like it better than the clunky, if reasonably descriptive, “vehicular language," which reportedly means the same thing as lingua franca.

P.P.S. According to The Penguin English Dictionary, Second Edition, linga franca in the plural is either linga francas or linguae francae. I prefer the former, just because even folks like me can look at it and know that it's the plural form of linga franca. But, again, I'm willing to be flexible... :)

Update: Via Peter Lawler, this post by Patrick Deneen is also about impressions from a recent trip to Europe, and has generated some back and forth in the comments between Knippenberg and Deneen, among others.

Providing well for murderers

I certainly don't want England to go back to the days of drawing and quartering, but this is surely going too far in the other direction? (Via A Stern Punishment Awaits, at Expat Yank, which has some other links.)

The nuns and their vastly expanded monastery

I guess I kinda, sorta had it in my head that monks lived in monasteries and nuns lived in convents. I guess I was kinda, sorta wrong, as At A Hen's Pace explains in this post about her visit to a monastery she'd stayed at years ago.

A quote for today

From Demetrios Stratis, writing at Asbury Park Press:

No one is imposing religious beliefs on anyone else when a religious organization decides what may or may not take place on its private property. The imposition of dogma and the crushing of First Amendment rights come when a Christian ministry is forced to violate its own religious beliefs to appease a political agenda.

"Well, duh," you say?

Some folks in New Jersey need a reminder.

Some background.

hat tip: The Alliance Alert

"Obama Blames Katrina Survivors for Shattered Faith"

We have a liberal friend who fell all over himself getting himself active in Barack Obama's campaign for President of the United States.

This friend and I have canceled each other's votes from the time I started casting ballots. We both know this. I have been known to cast my vote with a remark to the effect that 'there, I've done my duty, canceling out So-and-so's vote.' I think he knows that, too. I suspect he's done the same thing back. But this is America, and we're both civilized, and there doesn't seem to be much of anything to do about it. We simply come down on different sides of the political fence, and we get there by entirely different reasoning techniques.

That doesn't mean that I'm above trying to point out to him, from time to time, what I don't like about today's Democrats and their faith in big government. Heh. (The linked post is satire, folks. Please, don't read it literally. Thank you.)

A different stance in France

France, whatever else you might say about it, has had a reputation for producing impressive and world-changing individuals from time to time. French President Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be shaping into that sort of Frenchman. Certainly he's doing an impressive overhaul of France's foreign policy.

For the record, overall I have a soft spot in my heart for France. Attempts to mindlessly French-bash in the comments here will be cheerfully stonewalled. That's not to say that I'm not appalled at some of what goes on over there. It is to say that I think the country has its pros as well as its cons, and also that I suspect that the agenda-driven media types too often try to boost the wrong people and policies at the expense of the more decent sorts. I could be wrong on that, of course.

Added: I didn't know this but the word stonewall is sometimes used in Britain in an altogether different way than I'm used to hearing it used. According to The Penguin English Dictionary, Second Edition, in addition to meaning 'to obstruct or delay parliamentary debate' or 'to be evasive or obstructive,' stonewall also can be used to mean "to bat excessively defensively and cautiously in cricket."

Classiness, then and now, American troops edition

Peggy Noonan has a nice column on American troops then and now, and what memories they tend to leave behind them.

I think she's on to something. I have met some individuals serving in the American military who lacked class, but it always surprises me. On the whole, the ones I've met are just the sort to inspire an old man to offer a toast decades afterward.

More good stuff through a straw

My husband has suffered from severe face pain off and on for twelve years. More on that later, but for now suffice it to say that there are periods, sometimes very long periods, when he cannot chew, indeed can barely manage to get liquid in his mouth and then swallow it. This presents a few challenges, to say the least. It's hard to keep him alive under such conditions, and harder still to provide a balanced diet, much less to provide one with enough substance and fiber to keep his digestive system from suffering along with his face. I've learned long since to not keep tallies on the bouts, but merely to dig in when I have to, and to refuse to let them beat us. It's the old one day at a time thang (except when it's the one hour at a time thang, except when it's the one minute at a time thang, except when...). Every time we get thrown back into this nightmare, I try to come up with more and better options for food through a straw. I am, alas for you, one of those by-guess-and-by-gosh cooks, who makes things up as she goes, and rarely keeps notes. I am thinking of changing that, by the way. I suspect there's a need for a cookbook for this type of specialty cooking.

Anyway, in rough form, here are some things I've concocted this last go-around...

=If you dump a can or two of fruit into the blender, juice and all, and puree it, you get a pretty good drink. We like mixing peaches with pears, and also experimenting with other combinations. Sometimes we add a bit of fruit juice to make it even thinner. Prune juice, to my surprise, mixes well with several types of canned fruit. We have joked about starting a business something along the lines of an espresso bar, but featuring pureed canned fruit. Honestly, it's pretty good stuff. Sometimes we add fresh fruit, but the canned is much easier and faster to work with, on the whole.

=We have been modifying our split pea soup recipes around here, making them lighter. I started out using ham, as per tradition, and then switched to carrot in lieu of ham, but since then I've skipped the carrots, too. I vary the recipe from time to time, but basically I put a bunch of water in a large saucepan, add a couple of chicken bouillon cubes, add dried split peas which I've rinsed under the faucet (usually two-thirds green peas to one-third yellow), some onion (dried, frozen or fresh, doesn't seem to matter), a pat or two of butter, some salt, some pepper, a few flakes of dried red pepper (I do mean just a few, five or six does for us, thanks), and maybe a sprinkle of garlic, and let the whole mess sit at a low boil until the peas fall apart. I stir from time to time, but I don't know if that's necessary or just for the fun of seeing how things are coming along. When it's done cooking, I let it cool slightly and then put it in the blender. Lately I've been adding a bit of pearl rice at the front end, and letting it cook along with everything else. It disappears during the pureeing, and I like to think it boosts the nutritional profile some. At any rate, I use more broth and less peas than I used to, which makes it easier to sip. This being split pea soup, it still manages to get thicker and somewhat solid on the bottom as it sits, but overall, if you use a fair amount of broth and then puree the soup, it works great through a straw.

=I have also been making various types of asparagus soup. In short, you add asparagus to water, cook it with whatever else suits your fancy, and puree the whole shebang before you eat it. My favorite so far was essentially a potato and onion and asparagus soup. I usually buy baking potatoes and use them for everything, but there was a sale on red potatoes, so I used those. I peeled and chopped a few potatoes, peeled and chopped half of a yellow onion, added half a bag of frozen asparagus bits, some chicken bouillon, butter, salt, pepper, a few flakes of red pepper, and... and I don't remember what else, if anything... and then boiled that at something between a low boil and a simmer until everything was soft, let it cool slightly, and then put it in the blender, etc. Asparagus by itself I'm not terribly fond of, but cooked up with potato moderates it to my taste.

=I also had good luck with a cauliflower soup: I dumped some frozen cauliflower in a pan, added about the same amount of chopped potatoes, a pat or two of butter, some salt and pepper, and enough water to cover, cooked until soft, added milk, pureed.

=I also made sip-able rice pudding. I put pearl rice into probably twice as much water you'd usually use to cook rice, added raisins, butter, sugar, cinnamon, a wee bit of vanilla and nutmeg, and cooked at something between a low boil and simmer until the rice was soft. Then I stirred in milk, and then pureed it. It's not the loveliest thing after it's pureed, but it tasted pretty good, and you could eat it through a straw. A side note: I made more than we could eat right away. You don't want to know what happens to drinkable rice pudding that sits too long in the fridge. Mercy.

By the way, when I say that I cooked something at between a low boil and a simmer, what that really means is that I spent much of the cooking time trying to find a setting that kept it at a low boil, and therefore what I cooked quite possibly seesawed between a high boil and something less than a simmer. Luckily, most soups are amazingly forgiving of such ineptness.

Previous related post. (Be sure and read the first comment. We haven't tried that yet. I'm pretty sure that if I were reduced to eating through a straw, I'd definitely try it, but my husband is balking... and I have to admit that I'm not keen on trying it as long as I can eat the food in question the usual way... :)

Wishing store-bought dish drainers were of better design

Yesterday I shelled out ten bucks for a new plastic drip tray [aka drain board] for my dish drainer. It is identical to the one I had to throw out because the feet of the rack dug holes into it.

The drip tray, you see, is built on numerous parallel slats. This is as fine as far as it goes, but if you put the rack in the center of the tray - where it looks like it belongs - the pointy little feet of the rack are smack dab between slats. Hence, unless you remember to keep the rack off-kilter when you're using it, the feet concentrate the weight of the dishes between the slats, and the plastic gives way, and you get wells, and the wells make themselves permanent. The wells collect water, so if you don't remember (or decide not to bother) to lift up the rack mid-drying and sop up the water, you get water deposits like mad in them. More to the point, when your dish rack is sitting in wells, it is sitting lower than it ought to, and thus any glasses you have on the outside prongs hit the tray, and so do the plates you have in the plate slots. This is not my idea of ideal air drying, thank you very much.

There is another problem with these rack and drip tray combos that are available around here. (It's a major brand, too. Go figure.) My drying rack has eight prongs on the outside, to put glasses over. Four are on the sink side, four on the side opposite that. If you put glasses on the sink side, you're OK, because the rim of each glass hangs out over the sink. If, however, you take a glass straight from rinsing and put it on the far side, the rim hangs over the counter instead of the drip tray. What is the point of a drip tray if not to catch drips, I ask you? So why in the world are they made too narrow to accommodate drips coming from glasses put on the prongs made for glasses?

As for the first problem, i.e., the pointy little feet digging wells between slats business, I have a theory that if I'm extremely careful to always move the tray to where the feet sit on top of a slat before I weigh the rack down with dishes, that I can make the tray last a lot longer. It looks funky, being off-kilter like that, but it's either that or having plates and glasses hitting the tray as time goes on. I also have a theory that furniture coasters placed under the feet might do the trick. Since I have a track record of forgetting to align the rack just so, I am seriously considering the furniture coaster route this time around. I really think that should work. I would, however, appreciate it if I weren't required to be ingenious to keep a product from going bad in short order.

As for the second problem, i.e., the design that puts drips on the counter, I've learned to put my glasses on the sink side first, and then move the mostly dry ones across if I have more glasses than will fit on the sink side. Again, though, why in the world should I have to be going to the extra work when simply making the drip trays big enough to accommodate dishes put on the rack would do the trick?

I am thinking of making my own drip tray, perhaps of painted wood? Something, at any rate, that is large enough, and also strong enough to not warp under ordinary use.

Have you had this problem? How did you solve it?

So, how's your August going?

I have been rather unwell, my husband has been very sick indeed, an aunt died, we couldn't make it to the funeral, one of our favorite bookstore customers died of a stroke, a few days later another longtime customer died in an accident, the computer I rely on to get on the Internet and to read e-mail has only been working when it feels like it, and for a few days there I couldn't post even when I tried because I kept getting kicked offline.

In the good news department, I'm feeling considerably better, and my husband has had several good days mixed in with the bad this last week, so I think he's on the mend, too. And we're still laughing. Some of the time, at least. Or perhaps I should say that we remain persons of good cheer. I wouldn't want you to think we've gone loopy, when we haven't.

I am, however, a bit behind in my work (not to mention totally uninformed about current events outside my community), so the blog break resumes now...

Conversation Ball, and learning from Olivia, etc.

Amanda Witt learned a few things from some young ladies at church camp this year. I don't think you can guess what.

Taking yourself off the map

Do you ever get the feeling that the fine folks at Google lead remarkably sheltered lives, and simply don't realize they could get somebody killed or kidnapped by making it easy for just anybody to find someone's house? Sigh. Apparently they've now made it so that if somebody types in your phone number, Google will provide a map to your house, unless you remove your number from the list.

I checked our business and residence numbers. The residence didn't show up (I suspect my husband got us off the list earlier and just didn't mention it). Our business number, on the other hand, had so many wrong addresses attached it wasn't even funny. Some of that is because we've moved the bookstore since we got the phone number. And some is because we've had some sort of phone book curse, that has had us listed wrong in multiple phone books in multiple ways over the past decade or so (including one phone book that put us in the wrong town altogether, which was really a cute mistake, I thought). A funny thing about phone book curses: the wrong listings seem not only to acquire a life of their own, but somehow seem capable of swamping the correct listings. Here's hoping you never get attached to a clerical error that doesn't ever seem to go away no matter what you do. We've reached the point that whenever a new phone book comes we make a game of seeing whether the most recent attempt at correction told hold, or if an old error came back from the dead, or what. (When you don't know whether to laugh or cry you should laugh, right?)

Open letter to present and future historians: Dear Historian, Phone books are another first draft of history. They do not necessarily prove that a business existed when and where the phone book says it did. Trust me on this. Besides the typos, there's the fact that old listings for defunct businesses have been known to hang around, advertising what have become phantoms. I'm sure you can verify this if you apply just a bit of effort. Sincerely, K. Judson.

Anyway, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that what Google and others are doing, in effect placing international bulls'-eyes on people who only wanted local attention, will speed the demise of landlines altogether for private parties. At the very least, I expect fewer and fewer addresses to show up even in local phone books. In the meantime, you just might want to see if you can get yourself delisted.

In a slightly related vein, the other day while I was waiting in line at the bank I was treated to a bank official trying her best to get an ex-hippie to understand that these days it makes sense to not put the driver's license number on checks - that it used to be the in thing, but thanks to a spike in identity thefts it really isn't done anymore. The ex-hippie kept saying that it was so convenient to have it there in case a store clerk asked for it, and the bank official patiently kept trying different ways of explaining that she thought it was a very bad idea. They were still at it when I left, but I think the bank official was beginning to give up.

I can't remember the last time I wrote a check, to be honest with you. For what I do in the way of transactions, cash or plastic work just fine, thanks. Someday maybe I'll learn that newfangled all-electronic stuff... but I doubt I'll ever go back to checks. Time will tell.

Added: My husband says he did delist our personal number at Google maps. There was a several day lag between his filing for delisting, and the actual delisting, but eventually it worked.

What it costs to book speakers

The fact checking continues on some book manuscripts I'm proofing. One of the things I had to find out was how much it costs to book a middle tier motivational speaker these days. The ms said this character made four and sometimes five figures a speech. It looks like that guess turned out to be right on the money.

I spent more time than I probably should have this morning just scrolling through that list and others on that website, marveling at who charges what for a speech, and also at the sheer variety of speakers being advertised.

The Saturday Review of Books...

...is up at Semicolon.

Shooting stars galore this weekend

It's Perseid meteor shower time again.

Already? Where did the time go?

Alas, poor Yorick: Mule deer edition

People who lived here before us left behind some animal skulls as yard decorations. Not my thing.

But the deer that come through our yard from time to time are taking care of it. They are eating the skulls, bit by bit.

This is not a dainty procedure. When they want a better angle, they roll the skull around. They also whack it mightily with their hooves to crack it and break bits off.

I guess they want the minerals.

The first time I saw the fawn eating on it, it struck me as a bit strange, even creepy. I'm not sure why that is. I'm used to it now. More or less. Kind of.

I can't help wondering how many of our fossil finds were chewed out of all resemblance to their original state before they were fossilized. I presume paleontologists take this sort of thing into account? (I'm presuming ancient animals also needed minerals, and got them where they could.)

Picture note: Taken mid-July of this year, out a back window of our house.

Laundry safety

Part I

A few weeks ago, while hanging around at the laundromat, I was reading in a magazine (I can't remember which magazine), and in this magazine somebody claiming to be an expert was bemoaning that people washed and then tumbled dried towels and underwear in the same load of laundry. This person was claiming that we cause lots and lots of disease in this world by not sorting our laundry according to germs. This person seemed to think that it was especially bad that we put our underwear and towels in the same dryer loads, tumble dryers apparently (she claimed) being just world-class germ distributors.

If we killed germs as we washed, it would be different, she said. If we washed more germs away than we do, it would be different. But, she said, we don't kill them and we don't get rid of enough of them.

Her claims of how much disease we were causing this way struck me as probably a bit extravagant, but... then again, after I got home, I realized that I already do sort some of my laundry by germiness. For instance, I will not wash socks that came off of feet with athlete's foot with my dishcloths. OK, sometimes I won't even wash socks that came off healthy feet with my dishcloths. It grosses me out. Or, if someone's been really sick, I usually wash his or her clothes separately. Or, anything that comes in contact with manure gets special treatment, and isn't washed with other things. Or, cleaning rags don't go in with certain other things, because I don't want to risk having any residual chemicals getting into places they shouldn't. Etc.

I'm not hard and fast with these rules, but, when it's not too much trouble, I do tend to segregate loads to prevent cross contamination. I just hadn't thought about it, not really.

So, for what it's worth, some expert writing in some major magazine claims we'd be significantly healthier overall if we didn't distribute our germs throughout our laundry. I haven't the least idea how much weight to put to that. Ball's in your court.

Part II

A few weeks ago, I had another laundromat adventure. Somehow, for whatever reason, the post I wrote about it didn't get published. So... here it is, somewhat condensed:

So, I went to the laundromat, which is a nice, homey laundromat, with chairs and reading material, and I was all alone in there, reading, waiting for my clothes to dry, when some motorcycles pull up out front and the riders jump off. They look like the stereotype of bikers of the not-totally-wasted variety. A lot of people who dress like that and ride motorcycles are playing, of course. Dressing up. Trying on a role. Taking a break from being lawyers and dentists and postmasters and bank clerks, that sort of thing.

One biker came in. And another. And another. Middle-aged all, one graying. They notice me and say hello and look around and can't find a vending machine for detergent (for the very good reason that there isn't one). Sometimes I just let travelers use some of my detergent, but these men strike me as the sort that would be dismayed by such an offer. In fact, they are rather needlessly making a biggish deal about where they can buy some detergent (these are men with pride, obviously), so I point them to the Thriftway just down the street.

One guy hops on his bike and roars off to get soap, and the other two guys laughingly kid each other about who owns which shirt they're going to wash. Basic guy stuff, gently razzing one another. They get impatient for the other guy, and decide to put the clothes in the washer and get it started so they, can, like, get back out on the road three or four or five minutes sooner. Their clothes, they decide, will get clean enough if subjected to a prewash plus a few minutes of sudsy wash.

I am, by this point, pretty well convinced it's some business professionals out for a vacation, playing at being Steve McQueen or James Dean or Jack Kerouac or something like that. I mean, they were entirely proper in how they greeted me, and quite properly didn't get too close, and seemed to carry themselves fairly well in general. Habitually well-mannered, at a guess. Too well-mannered to talk trash to a lady or otherwise harass her at any rate.

So I hide my smile at their impatience and turn back to reading and they pitch their voices to hold a normal conversation halfway across the room from me. Not putting a show on for me, I mean, or I don't think so, at any rate. I've never liked loud music and so I have slightly better than average hearing for a Boomer, and sometimes a word or phrase would slip through. I didn't think anything of it when one of them told the other that somebody had shot him in the back. 'Shooting someone in the back' is a nice, common, everyday slang term, meaning betrayal. But when the other guy asked which caliber, and the other guy replied in what sounded like ammo terms...

Well, I began to doubt my ability to judge these guys.

And no, I didn't get the context. It didn't seem a good idea to appear to be eavesdropping just then...

Well, if they'd paid any more notice of me than they had, or projected any sense of menace, I'd have nonchalantly remembered an appointment somewhere or an errand I'd decided I had time to run just then. As it was, I pretended I hadn't heard, and ignored them until my dryer turned off (like all of one minute later), and then I took the clothes out normally, except for the fact that I was careful to put my husband's clothes in a stack on the folding table where I was sure they could see. See, here, fellows, I have a man who backs me up. See. Messing with this gal is courting a dedicated quest for justice that'll make you rue the day you messed with this gal. I tend to do that anyway when I'm with strangers in a laundromat, but this time I tried to nonchalantly make a point of it. (Now who was doing the person-of-unknown-depths-and-hidden-menace wannabe routine, I ask you? And you feminists can stop snickering now. I've seen you out walking with your big dogs and I've seen you put on matching t-shirts to emphasize that you belong to a group of easily enraged females. You pick your back-up, I'll pick mine...)

For all I know these bikers were police officers, or the one guy had had a violent wife who'd flipped out, or they were ER doctors, or, who knows? Maybe they were military guys, or ex-military. (Did I mention that they seemed to carry themselves fairly well in general?) Or maybe they were playing after all. I don't know. They pretty much ignored me, I pretty much ignored them, except, when I was halfway through getting my clothes folded they decided to go find a place to go eat, and gave me a friendly goodbye on their way out the door. A friendly goodbye which I returned, by the way. (Do I strike you as someone who would intentionally antagonize guys who treat bullet wounds as normal conversation?)

Rightly or wrongly, I wasn't really worried about them. Their attitude didn't seem to warrant being worried. But I did make a point of being gone before they could turn around and come back. It's not like I'm always one hundred percent right about people. (Speaking of that, this story about a famous rabbi and a 'holy man' is a pretty good illustration about getting the wrong impression from superficial things, and a reminder that what's hidden in human hearts can surprise you.)

Anyway, no harm done. Just another day at the laundromat.

[end old post]

Part III

The next trip to the laundromat I didn't have enough quarters to wash and dry all my clothes, because the washer rates had been raised 25%.

Part IV

I love my new washer. I dry the clothes on a drying rack in the same room. We're looking at putting up a clothesline out back. I'm like a kid with a new toy... :)

The proofreading project continues...

I'm nearly done with the proofreading and corrections on the second of the three books I'm trying to get wrapped up. Whew.

It's more or less down to a few fact checks that slipped through the cracks earlier... like... is the payroll and accounting department of a UK government agency called payroll and accounting? Or something else? If something else, what? I'm having a bit of trouble pinning this down to my satisfaction, so if you know, I'd appreciate it if you weighed in. If it matters any, the matter that's messed up is pensions. If it matters any, this is at a fictional British intelligence agency.

While we're on the subject, they do call accountants accountants in the UK, yes? No? Sometimes? Usually? Specifically, would that be what to call those folks who have messed up on the fictional pensions at that fictional government agency?

Next question: In the UK, what is the most likely way someone would refer to King George the Third during a conversation? Or, at least, what are likely ways? It's just in passing, but the storyline has one highly-placed government official saying he sometimes wishes he'd been born in a different era, and when asked if there's a specific era he has in mind, he jokes, "Anything pre-George-Third, I think." Is that acceptable usage in a private chat between good friends? If you're English, does it jar? Would it be better to say pre-George the Third? Or pre-George-Three? What? The gents are probably in their fifties, more or less, if that matters. I'm not interested in this case about how it's best done in written form or in formal circumstances. I'm looking for how people generally refer to that particular monarch in chats. (If you can keep it clean, how do you refer to him in conversation?)

Something else I'm still not sure on for the first book... is Ten Four - meaning Yes, sir!, more or less - an Americanism? More to the point, do Brits ever use the expression? British or not, is it a phrase you've known, or is this the first you've heard of it? For now, we've skirted the issue by replacing it with something else, but... well, it's exactly what I think this fellow would say right then, unless it's an Americanism. (He's trying to be slightly obnoxious, or cute, while giving his best friend a bad time.) Is there a British equivalent that I perhaps just don't know about?

I would like to note here that somebody else is helping check punctuation and grammar. (Just in case you were getting ulcers thinking of me heading up the punctuation and grammar department...)

Freeway bridge over Mississippi River collapses in Twin Cities

Ed Morrissey's doing yeoman work on covering the collapse of a major bridge in the Twin Cities. (Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota.)

He's asking for prayers. A lot of cars went down with the bridge, which went down during rush hour this evening.

Update: Some folks, trying to figure out why the bridge might have collapsed, have speculated that there might have been an earthquake. I don't think so. At least, there's no earthquake showing anywhere even remotely near Minnesota on the USGS's Recent Quakes map for the United States. (Updates continually.)

Lost in translation (updated)

The proofreading of the book I'm currently working on is down to the researching of various small details that didn't get nailed down in earlier drafts. For instance, when a Eurotunnel passenger goes through the Chunnel with his own car does he drive it onto the train himself or does staff do it? (Passenger.) Do you stay with your car for the journey? (Stay.) Do they sell duct tape in England? (They sell it on Amazon.co.uk, which is good enough for me.) Do they call it duct tape? (It appears they have the same problem we do over here, sometimes calling it duct tape and sometimes calling it duck tape, or rather, Duck Tape, as in a brand name...) Would a somewhat-Protestant, mostly-secular English gentleman of good breeding be more likely to think of it as intercessory prayer or as intercessional prayer? (I'm still a bit stumped on that last one. From the dictionaries I've consulted so far, intercessory appears to be an adjective in the U.S., but not in the U.K.? At least technically? Research continues...)

I've had a few pleasant detours trying to nail down the spelling of a French word. I still haven't satisfied myself as to whether it's permissible to spell laicisme with vowels any English speaker would recognize, or if I need one of those specialized ones with a couple of dots above it for that first i. (*Updated: see below.) But in the meantime, I've read that lever (ler-VAY) means lift, and that lever du jour (ler-VAY-dew-zhoor) means daybreak, and that lever du soleil (ler-VAY-so-LEHY) means sunrise. Day lift. Sun lift. I like that, particularly the idea of sun lift. It also sounds beautiful. I like that, too.

From another phrase book comes the info that a traveler should refer to an intensive care unit at a hospital as service de réanimation. (This particular phrase book's pronunciation guides are impossible to reproduce with the keyboard I have. Sorry about that. For that matter, I don't understand its pronunciation guide. Not in the least. I'm pretty sure that service is something like sehr-VEES, if that's of any use to you.) At any rate, I really like that an intensive care unit is more or less called a reanimation center or reanimation service. It shows proper spirit or attitude or something. :)

But then there's that word spirituel (spee-ree-TWAYL), which sounds like 'spiritual,' yes? No. According to the dictionaries I have, it means witty. [see update at bottom of post]

'Now that sounds like a misunderstanding waiting to happen,' I told myself when I read that.

This made me think of a few lost in translation misunderstandings I've bumped into in the past...

For instance, when I was on a college trip to Central America, another co-ed and myself somehow got ourselves invited to a live theatrical performance in Costa Rica. The gentleman who invited us worked at a university there, and somehow managed to have good enough references. It was, if I remember correctly, a production of Volpone (I could be wrong about that). At any rate, this gentleman was on something of a mission to prove to foreigners that his country had a world class theater company, and he took us to a show. After the show, he asked how we liked it, and I said that I had loved the show and the acting was so good it almost made up for the fact that I didn't know but a few words of Spanish. This led to him warning me that if I didn't know a word in Spanish, I must not try to bluff my way through by taking an English word and trying to make it sound Spanish. He was very earnest about this. Surprisingly earnest. Finally, he explained why.

The worst trouble he'd ever gotten into in his life, he said, was when he'd tried to be nice to a visiting lady professor from America. The woman was homesick, and so he spent time with her, and then, one day, invited her to share a home cooked meal with his family. He lived with his mother, I think. At any rate, his mama was in charge of the meal. The visiting lady professor -- trying to express her gratitude for being invited into their home -- told Mama that, really, she was awfully embarrassed about all the attention being paid to her by Mama's son.

Mama's son -- full-grown and a respected professional, definitely a suit and tie sort of fellow -- found himself dragged by the ear into the next room, where an enraged and righteous mother lit into him for bringing shame on the family for getting a woman pregnant out of wedlock. I guess embarrass is pretty close to the Spanish word for pregnant. It apparently took quite a bit of explaining before that mess was cleared up.

So, he said, I should never try to bluff my way through by giving English words a more Spanish pronunciation. I should especially never, never, ever, tell a gentleman's mother that I was embarrassed about anything.

I could see his point. Can't you?

I ran into a similar misunderstanding at a school for the deaf that we visited in Canada while on tour with Up With People. One of the first things the kids asked me (I was serving as translator), was to tell them what a certain sign meant to me. The sign consisted of holding the hands near the belly, interlocked, palms in, fingers straight, and then moving the hands in a circle parallel to the ground. 'Why, that means America, or American,' I said. (It represents a split-rail fence, if you're wondering.) They were much relieved. They'd had, they told me, a team of girls from another school for the deaf come across the border for some event, and, excited to have been told that Americans were coming to visit, had rushed out and asked the girls if they were really American. Or that's what they thought they asked. They didn't understand the fury and face-slapping that resulted... until they found out that at that particular school, somehow that sign had come to mean (you guessed it) pregnant. Good girls on a field trip to Canada did not appreciate being called sluts right after they got off the bus...

I can't remember if it was at that school for a deaf or a different one up in Canada that I made my big, televised sign language gaffe. At any rate, the concert's directors thought that it would be cool to have me stand on stage translating during the concert. The songs, however, had never been translated into song sign, and so I was on my own. Not funny. I had taken one night course in sign language. I explained that one night course does not a translator make, which idea they initially poohed poohed on the grounds that song sign is notoriously full of artistic license, or so they understood. I finally prevailed upon them to let me take some time off and go visit a sign language instructor at a college we were near at the time. The instructor and I ran into a bit of a snag on one of the signature songs of Up With People, "What Color Is God's Skin?" What color is God's was easy enough, and fell wonderfully into place as to one sign moving into another. Very artistic. Very easy to read, even from the back of an auditorium. But skin? Neither of us knew a really standard sign for skin, and the one we both had seen used (pinching the back of a hand or the forearm) didn't go with the flow of the song, and wasn't pretty, and might not be easy to read from a distance. So we made up a sign. (She agreed with the show's producers, btw, that song sign traditionally allows for a fair amount of artistic license.) We decided to have me run a couple of fingers down my cheek in a specific way. We figured that if people didn't understand it as skin, they'd understand it as face, which was close enough to the right meaning, we thought...

Fast forward to the performance. We got to the school, and there was a television news crew standing by to share the event with Canadian viewers. No pressure there, right? The crew was delighted that there was a sign language translator on stage. (It wasn't so common in those days.) I found myself not only fighting stage jitters but camera fright, with a camera right. on. me. but I muddled through pretty well, I thought.

After the concert, I was mobbed by adoring fans. Rock star city. The mob was horribly disappointed when they found out I wasn't deaf. I guess a rumor had got around... Sigh. My biggest brush with being a superstar and I have to explain they're mistaken about me... Sigh...

At any rate, at some point, quite a few kids in the mob started asking me what in the world that song was about God and color? What, specifically, did I mean by that sign with the fingers on the face? I spelled out s.k.i.n. 'Well, that makes the song make sense, finally,' they said. 'Why?' says I. 'Does that sign mean something else to you?'

They nodded, and began to spell M.o.r.m - at which time I suddenly remembered that it was the sign for Mormon. (After a founder's trademark sideburns, as I understand it.)

I think I might have mentioned this before (is it a sign of getting old, or what, if you write the same story two years apart and don't remember that until you're finished with the newer one???), but there might be an archive TV tape up in eastern Canada somewhere showing a young lady dramatically enacting "What color is God's Mormon?" in sign language. That would be me.

It's a good thing I know how to laugh at myself, that's all I can say.

Go ahead, laugh. I don't mind being the cause of a few smiles. :)

*Added: OK, I guess I probably need laïcisme. (And, no, I don't mean laïcité. They're related, but this book has a French Catholic thinking about the troubles she's had from extreme secularists, those that are anti-religious and not just interested in 'separating church and state' -- and my research, or at least my research so far, indicates that the Catholic Church sees laïcité as milder than laïcisme. This isn't my field, though, not by a long shot. So correct me if I'm wrong.)

Update: A reader clarifies things in the comments, writing: "spirituel" = "witty" in the way we would say in English "full of spirits" or "high-spirited". Thanks, coffeemama!