Swedish school confiscates boy's party invitations

If a boy is inviting people to his birthday party, shouldn't he be allowed to invite his friends (subject to parental approval, of course)?

School officials in Lund, Sweden say no. They say an eight-year-old boy has to invite all his classmates, including the boys who don't get along with him.

Because, you know, otherwise it's discrimination.

We know this because when he handed out invitations, he didn't invite two boys, whereupon the school officials confiscated the invitations.

The boy's father has been reduced to filing a complaint with something called a "parliamentary ombudsman."

Uhm.

Raise your hand if you're glad you don't have a child in that school.

Raise your other hand if you're glad you don't live in Sweden.

(I thought the civil rights movement was all about encouraging people to judge other people on the basis of their character, instead of on the basis of irrelevant factors beyond their control. What in the world happened to that worthy goal? And how did mindlessness, of all things, take its place?)

We have babies...

We have a small herd of mule deer that makes itself at home in our yard from time to time. Last year there were a couple of fawns. This year there are a couple more. Yes, that's a buck keeping watch over them. I'm amazed how often the does take off and let him babysit, but he seems to be good at it.

I also saw one of the stray cats, Gremlin, acting frantic near the front porch yesterday, and meowing in a peculiar way. So I went to investigate. From underneath the wooden porch came the sound of very young kittens crying for mama. So we're back to meows beneath our feet. (I thought I had this area sealed off. I guess I was mistaken.)

By the way, those trunks in the pictures belong to lilacs. Every other place I've lived, it is the custom to remove a quarter to a third of the older shoots every year in lilac bushes, to keep them forever young and bushy. Around here, the custom is to prune off everything but a handful of the oldest branches, and train the lilacs into multi-trunked trees. I don't know how old these are, but they certainly go back decades.

The most important aspect of beauty

Over at A Maiden's Wreath, Mamselle Duroc writes, in The Making of Beauty, Part 2:

In Part 1 I talked about Style, Poise, and Confidence, saying that they were all extremely important to real beauty, regardless of your height, weight, or shape.

But I concluded by mentioning a fourth item, saying that it was far more important than all the others, and always achievable, even when nothing else is.

Imagine yourself ill and dying, wasting away. What physical beauty you had has long since faded in your sickness. You're thin as anything, you're pale and haggard, you look more like a skeleton than a living human being. Style is unattainable, and even a little pointless. You're not able to put on a nice pair of earrings every day, and you don't need cute shoes because you're bedridden. Poise? It's hard to be poised when you're too weak to move. Good posture and gracefulness aren't feasible. As for Confidence, you're far to shattered to face the world with your head held high. You can't even lift it.

Yet there is one quality that a woman can always have, no matter what her circumstances. Our blog's patroness, Zelie Martin, had it as she lay dying of cancer, and her famous daughter St. Therese of Lisieux had it as she lay dying of tuberculosis.

It was Love...

Read the whole post.

I stumbled across The Maiden's Wreath while, of all things, looking for something about G.K. Chesterton. I wound up at The American Chesterton Society, which has a blog, which had a post titled Young Catholic Ladies "Get" GKC, which led me to this post, in which Mamselle Duroc notes that one of the great things about Chesterton was his reverence for women.

The "About the Blog" entry reads:

A Maiden's Wreath is a blog for young Catholic ladies who incline towards the old-fashioned and traditional. The purpose is to provide inspiration and encouragement to grow in virtue and holiness.

Sounds good.

It's a group blog, quite well done from what I've seen from browsing around today. And they also accept submissions. Please pass the word to any young ladies you know who might be interested.

Chesterton on adventure

According to G.K. Chesterton, too much control means less adventure, in novels as well as real life.

Book note: Chosen Soldier, by Dick Couch

A blogger over at The Point is writing a series of posts about Chosen Soldier, by Dick Couch.

Posted so far:

I'll Never Mock that Beret Again

'Chosen Soldier': 'Our most essential warrior'

Chosen Soldier: Liberators or Occupiers?

The Saturday Review of Books...

... was probably up at the usual time, but I'm having technical difficulties, so I'm just getting to it...

Fighting "anti-science" charges against conservatives

At The Point: An Artful Response To The Anti-Science Rap?, J. Clinton is asking for discussion on the central points in Science Without Experiments by Jim Manzi (NRO, June 12, 2008).

Links: Get 'em while they're hot

I've been adding links like mad to the sidebar again.

On the other hand, some of the old links I haven't visited in months. For a couple/three of them, I'm no longer sure what they go to. There's the name - but I can't associate it with anything. (Not a good thing.)

I've started to check out old links, and have been deleting a few, and I intend to delete several more, to get the links list down to a more sane length. And, of course, some of the newbies might not survive 'probation'.

Browse now, or forever hold your peace.

Is that a Friesian...

... doing dressage? (Via this post, which has more horse and rider photos, most of them more the sort of horse I expected to see at a dressage competition.) As if I have a clue about dressage competitions??? :) I don't know for sure that it's a Friesian horse, but it looks like it to me. (And if it's the same horse as the one in the second half of this post, we have our confirmation. ... pause while your hostess googles... Ah, here we have more evidence, at a "news" page at Mary Kehoe Dressage...)

Oh, look - here's another one, and this one's definitely Friesian. (Via The Friesian Horse Association of North America.)

And here's a YouTube video from a dressage performance. It's a bit slow in places, but a real treat when the horse gets to extend his trot and otherwise show what he's got.

And here's another YouTube video: Beautiful dancing Friesian Stallions in Germany.

Another YouTube video: Friesian Horses Running in Snowy Pasture.

Another YouTube video: Friesian Horses Running Free. It features a couple of mares and their foals getting a bit of a run.

OK, I see I could spend a lot of time doing this, because there appear to be lots and lots of Friesian posts and videos and websites to check out. Parents, please note: Some of the Friesian horse videos I found on YouTube weren't suitable for well-mannered folks, much less children. You'll want to pick the videos your kids see, I think.

P.S. For more on horse breeds, see the Breeds of Livestock website hosted by the Department of Animal Science at Oklahoma State University.

Summer reading picks: church edition

Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City has a list of recommended books for summer reading. They are obviously C.S. Lewis fans around there, but also list "Patrick O’Brian’s novels of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars," and "Anything by Jane Austen," and the "Miles Vorkosigan series by Lois McMasters Bujold, for sci-fi fans," and lots of other books, nonfiction as well as fiction, for all age groups. It's a pretty wide-ranging list.

A note: They recommend the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters. I am a fan of the early Amelia Peabody books. I had to stop reading them in public because I kept collapsing in laughter and embarrassing myself, not to mention the people around me. Overall, I found them great fun (and that's saying something, because I have an aversion to all things mummy-related, and Amelia adores mummies, and so they keep popping into the storyline, to my distress). However, to me the later books didn't seem to stick to the same standards, and I found them disappointing, and occasionally offensive.

Does your church have a reading list for the summer? Or do you know of a worthwhile list online at some other church? Let us know in the comments, please.

Book note: Recipe for Murder, by Lisa Harris

Recipe for Murder by Lisa Harris (Heartsong Presents Mysteries, Barbour Publishing, 2008) is an enjoyable cozy mystery featuring a couple of lively older sleuths (amateurs, and rookies at that). Widow Pricilla Crumb is in her 60s, and cooking at her unmarried son's hunting lodge in Colorado. She invites widower Max Summers, an old friend of hers, and his daughter to the lodge, because she wants to play matchmaker between her son and Max's daughter. Meanwhile Max, retired after 35 years in the Air Force, is becoming strangely attractive...

Pricilla is a busybody, but a responsible one. She even confesses to murder - when she thinks she killed somebody accidentally with food poisoning after perhaps not checking an expiration date. When she finds that she's innocent, and finds that she doesn't have a lot of faith in local law enforcement, she decides to uncover the killer. Max, thinking she's in over her head (a good guess), joins forces with her.

The book is full of humor. On top of that, Max and Pricilla and their children remind me of people I know. (How nice, to have regular folks, and families, in a mystery.)

Pricilla is a mystery fan, which adds to the fun.

Lisa Harris has a website here. She blogs at Heart of Africa.

There's an interview with her here, in which she talks about Recipe for Murder, and its evolution. It sounds like there are sequels waiting in the wings. Oh, good.

I am on a cozy mystery reading jag, and so is a friend of mine. Any suggestions on what to add to our to-be-read stacks? (If you're also looking for suggestions, a reader left several recommendations in the comments at this post.)

So, what do a baseball bat and...

... a 300-foot ocean-going research vessel used by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have in common? See this video to find out.

Too cool.

I'm not sure you could pay me to get on the thing. But wow. What cool engineering.

Rest in peace, Irena Sendler

I did a post on World War II Polish heroine Irena Sendler back in March 2007: Suitable For Mixed Company: A tribute to a brave and caring lady.

She died last month at the age of 98. See a Glenn Beck video tribute to her here.

Still laughing, almost four centuries later

I'm a fan of Dutch Masters in general, and Rembrandt in particular, especially the paintings that are laced with humor or good cheer.

So I'm tickled by this story: Rembrandt Laughing.

How many artists today would even try to make a self-portrait this engaging? I ask you? Thank goodness Rembrandt wasn't of the 'sullen is cool' school! How much the world would have lost had he chosen to be 'more sophisticated' (so-called).

The Federal Landlord Map

It's hard to understand how much land the U.S. government owns in this part of the country - but this map helps put it into perspective.

Congratulations to Mark Mossa, SJ...

... who is now an ordained priest. More pictures here.

Two reports from the Sons of Norway convention

Lars Walker and Connie Peterson both went to the Sons of Norway District One convention in Mankato, Minnesota. If they met, I don't know. (It seems unlikely.) Lars recounts his adventures here, Mrs. Peterson here.

A mystery garden

I finally bought flowers and planted them in the front flower box and flower patch yesterday. It's a small patch out under a lilac tree by the front gate, but a large box - the box is as wide as the living room that sits on the other side of the wall.

The good news is that I only spent $12.87 total on flowers.

The bad news is that the selection was limited this late in the season.

The good news is that there were still some healthy plants left.

The bad news is that some of these didn't have proper stickers. Some of them I don't even know what sort of flowers they are, much less what color the blooms will be. I wound up buying what looked healthy, that looked like it had a sort of leaf that suggested it could survive in semi-sun, and didn't cost too much.

At first, I tried to sort plants by potential height and spread, and color, etc., but I finally gave that up, since I don't have a clue on some of them. In the end, I just jumbled them up any which way and stuck them in the soil, more or less evenly spaced, but staggered, for artistic effect.

I have done this before.

Sometimes it works.

Really.

Not always. Perhaps not even often. But sometimes it works. Really.

Wish me luck. Overnight, bugs took some of the leaves down to veins on one variety. We have deer in the neighborhood now, too. So now it's a waiting game. We'll see what survives, and then we'll see what it is, and then we'll see how well it goes with whatever else happens to survive.

And then we'll see if I need to move anything, to make it workable.

This could be interesting. :)

Honey rolls

Our current favorite roll 'recipe' is loosely based on the following recipe from the back of a Western Family Bread Flour bag. I put 'recipe' in single quotes, because I tend to get a bit free form when I cook, especially when I bake bread. At any rate, I've never made the glaze, I've never tried the heart-shape business, I usually make the rolls smaller than they suggest, I sometimes make crescent rolls, but I sometimes make buns along the lines of hamburger buns, to use to for deli sandwiches.

I almost always substitute whole wheat flour for some of the bread flour (sometimes just a quarter cup, but usually more than that), I never measure the flour (I just keep adding until it feels right), and I don't measure the honey (who likes to scrape away at a measuring scoop or cup that's got honey stuck to it?) and rarely use a whole quarter cup. I don't follow the orders or techniques given, and I usually use what is called the sponge method (you make a batter, and let that rise, stir it down, and then add more flour to make a regular dough - from there you follow the directions for the regular dough). I don't always use 2% milk, either - I've used whole and I've used skim, and everything in between. (Did I mention that I'm pretty free form when I bake bread?)

But, all in all, otherwise I stick pretty close to this recipe. ;)

Well, OK, I also mix brands a lot. But it's their recipe, and I've gotten good results with their products, so, if they want to specify Western Family, who am I to quibble?

Heart Shaped Honey Rolls

Rolls:

1 cup Western Family 2% milk

1/4 cup Western Family honey

2-1/2 tsp Western Family yeast

1/4 cup Western Family butter, melted

2 egg yolks, beaten

4 cups Western Family bread flour

2 tsp Western Family salt

2 Tbsp Western Family granulated sugar

Glaze:

2 Tbsp Western Family honey

1/2 cup Western Family butter, melted

2/3 cup Western Family powdered sugar

1/2 tsp finely chopped lemon peel

Directions:

Warm milk and honey slightly. Add yeast and let stand until foamy. Blend in melted butter and egg yolks. Transfer mixture to large bowl.

Blend together bread flour, salt and sugar; add to yeast mixture. Mix until mixture forms dough. Knead dough until smooth, about 10 minutes. Place dough in a large, oiled bowl and cover. Place bowl in a warm place until dough doubles in size.

Punch down and form into 12 evenly sized balls. Make a 1/2-3/4" cut into center of the ball from one side to make the heart shape. Place on a greased cookie sheet. Cover loosely and rise until doubled in size.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Bake rolls until golden brown, about 15-20 minutes. While rolls are baking prepare glaze. Combine honey, melted butter, powdered sugar and lemon peel. When rolls are removed from oven, liberally brush with glaze. Serve warm.

Makes 12.

I usually don't use a greased cookie sheet, if I have baking parchment paper on hand. It's a luxury, but it makes for better results, and easier clean-up. I usually bake the rolls spaced out in shiny, rectangular cake pans, instead of on cookie sheets, the theory being that maybe they won't overbrown as easily that way. (This is just a guess. But it seems to work. For me.) And we don't necessarily serve them warm; they're just fine at room temperature. I freeze most of them. They thaw wonderfully in the microwave.

These are tasty enough and moist enough I often eat them plain - no butter or anything. They work great with peanut butter. Or ham. And lots of other stuff.

Anyway, for all my experimenting with variations, these days this is the main recipe from which I vary - and early on I did follow it to the letter (except for the glaze, and the cutting to make heart shaped rolls), and the results were very good.

Flat bread, Norwegian style

Here's a recipe and tutorial for Norwegian Flat Bread, aka Flot Brod. It comes with a historical side note:

...The immigrants made a lot of these, wrapped them in towels and took them along with them on the ships for food. They stay fresh pretty long and after they are not fresh, you can dip them in coffee to soften them up or chew them – they are still food!

I haven't tried making this yet, but it looks do-able. I think I'll only eat them fresh, though (or try freezing some). Pioneer spirit is fine in its place, but...