Weekly Links We Like to Link to - Kansas, Hippies, and Early-Early Education

• Carry On, Wayward Synthesizer. A ten year old girl plays everything but the vocals at a keyboard recital. Better, I must say, than even I would at my advanced age.
  

• Our planet. Our resources. Our present. Our future. Our grandchildren's future. Their grandchildren's future. Too much to change. Not enough time to get it right now. Why should we bother? (NYT. May require registration. h/t to Scot McKnight.)

Some choice selections:

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do...

Wendell Berry... argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s... was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives — the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the “split between what we think and what we do.”...

For Berry, the deep problem standing behind all the other problems of industrial civilization is “specialization,”... Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: we’re producers (of one thing) at work, consumers of a great many other things the rest of the time, and then once a year or so we vote as citizens. Virtually all of our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals to agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher, entertainment to the media, care for the environment to the environmentalist, political action to the politician.

As Adam Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor has given us many of the blessings of civilization. Specialization is what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this same division of labor obscures the lines of connection — and responsibility — linking our everyday acts to their real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams running crimson with heavy metals as a result.

• Some of these ideas have been flowing through my head for the last year (regardless of the fact that I now have a daughter that we are trying to raise well and intelligently). The Chicago Tribune has an article about recent childhood development findings and the value of early intervention for toddlers and pre-schoolers. It's worth a read and reminds me of Jonathan Kozol's contention that middle- and upper-class kids will always have a clear (and, to be honest, unfair) advantage over their poorer counterparts because they will have received intense education from an early age, whereas most minority and poor students in the US will enter school largely unaware of the relationships of letters, social relationships, or certainly the process of schooling.

My side of the argument is that we need to give parents the tools to raise their children right. The more we take kids away from the parents of the poor, the more that raising children will become the government's (and teachers') jobs. And that is a disservice to everyone involved.

Weekend Links I Like to Link to - Sly, Supermax, Will-to-Power

Dance to the Music - Again! Sly and Some of the Family Stone are back. But don't call it a comeback. It's not as exciting.

We have a friend who spent years in a supermax prison. They say it doesn't fit the legal requirement of what cruel and unusual punishment is, but if altering a person's psychological state drastically by keeping them in solitary confinement for years at a time isn't cruel and unusual (or at least cruel. It should be unusual), then what is?

I always feel a bit squeamish about telling my kids that they can do anything that they set their minds to. Partly because the truth is that no one can. Everyone faces several limitations. Another reason is that it builds a sense of uber-competition and narcissism.
We need to, in some ways, have our children and youth appreciate their own sense of uniqueness and giftedness and what they can give out into the world and their communities.
This video is an example of what happens when, say, those kids grow up and become - say- the executive branch of the United States government.



H/t to I Am Josh Brown.

Disappointment at Resentment

I was severely depressed by the ten point gap in Pennsylvania's Democratic primary.

I was confused by the fact that little over half of the polled Hillary voters in Pennsylvania replied that they would vote for Obama if he won the primary. About a quarter said they would vote for McCain (Really?). I found that sad. Are these Democrats saying this? Or just people who flipped over for her? I doubt it very much if more than forty percent of those voting are not Democrats and would rather throw their vote away than vote for Senator Obama. Despite all the mudslinging and dirty, dirty politics (and, gawd, that tone of condescension), I would still vote for Clinton in a heartbeat because I don't think our nation could last another four years of this Republican disaster (possibly the biggest Republican disaster since Goldwater let the Old Guard start to take over).

And I was extremely dismayed by the fact that we are still duped by negative ads. We say we hate them, but, apparently, we vote by them. From the NYT (It's at the 7:30 pm spot):

Voters are telling exit pollsters that they didn’t much like that flurry of negative ads in the last few days. And yet a majority said those ads were very important or somewhat important in their decisions. This is evidence of what political operatives often say — that people say they don’t like it when candidates go negative and yet they do pay attention to it. In other words, it works.

I fear that we may not be ready for positivism, creativity and resolutions any time soon.

But this took the cake for me: "The race factor in PA Primary." An excerpt:

Exit polls from [Tuesday's] primary... asked voters if the race of the candidate was important: 19 percent said yes, while 80 percent said no.

Of those who said yes, 59 percent voted for Mrs. Clinton and 41 percent voted for Senator Barack Obama.

Of those who said no, 53 percent voted for Mrs. Clinton and 47 percent voted for Mr. Obama.

Broken down by race, 13 percent of whites said race was important to them, and 75 percent of those voters sided with Mrs. Clinton. Of the 66 percent of whites who said race was not important to them, 58 percent voted for her.

Huh??

You mean, around 10 percent of white voters voted against Obama because he's not white? Because he's black?

Wow.

I mean, Wow.

I know the flip-side of the argument. That black crowds are going out by the droves to vote for Obama. That that has to be racially-motivated. That that proves that racism goes both ways and, in fact, because a larger percentage of blacks are voting for Obama (cf, the Old South) than whites voting for Clinton means that blacks are in fact more racist than whites in this instance.

But African-Americans have been the disproportionately outside people for some odd 300 years in this country. They should have a right to vote for someone they know will represent them as a people group, and not just the establish status quo (i.e., White, Upper- and Upper Middle-Class Males). Females (who have been repressed for, say, before the history of civilization) also have a right to vote for someone who they know will represent them.

Why are white males so flippin' unwilling to see that we are already privileged, even when we're poor?

It's Earth Day. Please Don't Eat Our Planet.

The Golden Arrow.

Click here if the file above doesn't work. h/t to Eugene Cho.

Speaking of stuff and our wanton buying and wasting of massive amounts of ultimately and quickly disposable crap, I was thinking of what to do with that Jumpstart-the-Economy check that most of us will be getting in about a month or so and what to do with it. The design of this waste of taxpayers' future selves (and, yes, our children's and grandchildren's too) is to give us more money so that we may spend more money, so that our businesses will once again flourish and again, us with them. That would make a lot of sense... if you had a third grade education.

But neither our economy, nor businesses, nor international corporations work as simple as that anymore - if they ever did. But this is not the time nor the place to launch into another tirade about how our "goods" are manufactured overseas and how such a disproportionate percentage of the profits from the purchase of said "goods" goes to a small percentage of overly-wealthy executives who most likely won't funnel the money back to the US either. Yeah, not the time.

But this is what I suggest that we do (and I'm hoping to persuade my wife of this. Not that she'd be against it. I just haven't brought it up yet [the worst way to blog, btw]): Use those 600, 1200 or so dollars and start climbing ourselves out of debt. Because the money that is being thrown away on debt is really a cornerstone issue of why we are in so much financial trouble to begin with. Not only is our economy based on the theory and practices of consumption, but it has become a victim of consumption. Our monies and resources are being used up and spit out into the great flaming garbage piles of the world.

So, maybe, while we're waiting for that little bonus check to come in (really, a parody of what a losing CEO of a Fortune 500 would get in a dreadful year) we should contemplate how we can begin consuming (and throwing away, and polluting, and destroying our economy and thinking) less and how we can contribute more to a more sustainable (right, the buzz word right now) way of living and doing things.

My God, I'm starting to sound like a hippie.

Used to be...

When she was younger and would be able to fall asleep on my shoulder rather than almost exclusively in her crib, other fathers with more fatherly experience would advise me to treasure these moments. These moments of your little child clutching your shoulder, fixing her face into the shape of your neck, resting. They are precious. They are fleeting. They will not last. She will soon be a holy terror, without the holiness.

Listening to her breath bob up and down like forced waves or a sleepy Miss Piggy (she used to have a breathing problem that we still aren't too sure about, but it seems to have resolved itself finally; so, God is good), watching her back expand and retreat slowly, noting her deep icy blue eyes lost to the world as they are covered by a heavy drape, and looking at her little mouth curve in lazy smiles and frowns - it was all so and too wonderful for me.

It was a good thing. And like all other good things, its days are numbered.

She learned to crawl on my birthday, one month ago. Let's call that day Day 1. Of Armaggedon.


Before, my wife and I used to be able to do activities while she was awake. All we needed to do was spend some time with her, make her feel loved and appreciated, read to her, change her diaper. And feed her. Comfort her when her gums were splitting open with new aspiring teeth. That sort of thing. But generally, she was pretty self-sufficient. If she was feeling particularly angst-y, we could plop a Baby Einstein video in. Baby Einstein - either to its credit or our detriment - worked in a magical way that no other drug or affection has been able to replicate.

It used to be so easy.

It used to be that she would eventually go to sleep if we let her alone enough, because she had no other options. She had nowhere else to go, unless she decided to keep turning (and every once in a while, get a limb stuck between two posts and in need of rescue). Eventually, if all is taken care of, her boredom would get the best of her and she would enter the dream world of infants, possibly facilitated by one of the plush elephants from the Baby Einstein world. You see, it used to be easy.


Nowadays, however, she gets into every thing. Every. Possible. Thing. She stands up in the crib; so putting her down for a nap usually entails taking her out in her stroller until she conks out from all that exposure to the sun and vehicle exhaust. It used to be easy.

Resultingly (beat that, OE), she is constantly tired and cranky. Her high-maintenance is at a peak generally by the time I get home, although I am assured that she has never, for one moment while I was gone, let up or allowed her mother to find a moment's rest. I only have the baby for her first waking hour and her last three hours (some of which may be in that pseudo-sleep stage where she merely pretends to sleep but is really playing Godzilla in her crib, practicing terrorizing all of the other pre-K kids by taking their lunch money and organic granola and yogurt), so I cannot complain too much. But, c'mon! It used to be easy.

I'm not so sure of what I'm doing all the time with her. So, sometimes, she screams in my ear. And I run out of tricks to calm her down. It used to be easy.

She also walks. But it is highly assisted walking. The sort of walking that she does merely by putting it in her mind that her legs are going to goose-step in a rapid succession to a particular place, but her core doesn't yet know how to respond. So we give her a little moral and physical booster by holding her little hands aloft, so that she remains vertical, or at least at a bit of a slant (she walks like an over-joyed version of a cartoon character with purpose). My back hurts.

It used to be easy.

She's entirely social and aware. She laughs an excitable and contagious laugh whenever she encounters another pre-adolescent. But sometimes she seems like she wants nothing to do with members of her own family. She screamed bloody murder when my brother came to pick her up one time. If we hadn't learned our lesson then, she may have done the same with Jen's family (she certainly gave the cringing 'I'm ready to scream' look).

There was a time, it used to be easy.
When she was younger and would be able to fall asleep on my shoulder rather than almost exclusively in her crib, other fathers with more fatherly experience would advise me to treasure these moments. These moments of your little child clutching your shoulder, fixing her face into the shape of your neck, resting. They are precious. They are fleeting. They will not last. She will soon be a holy terror, without the holiness.

Listening to her breath bob up and down like forced waves or a sleepy Miss Piggy (she used to have a breathing problem that we still aren't too sure about, but it seems to have resolved itself finally; so, God is good), watching her back expand and retreat slowly, noting her deep icy blue eyes lost to the world as they are covered by a heavy drape, and looking at her little mouth curve in lazy smiles and frowns - it was all so and too wonderful for me.

It was a good thing. And like all other good things, its days are numbered.

She learned to crawl on my birthday, one month ago. Let's call that day Day 1. Of Armaggedon.


Before, my wife and I used to be able to do activities while she was awake. All we needed to do was spend some time with her, make her feel loved and appreciated, read to her, change her diaper. And feed her. Comfort her when her gums were splitting open with new aspiring teeth. That sort of thing. But generally, she was pretty self-sufficient. If she was feeling particularly angst-y, we could plop a Baby Einstein video in. Baby Einstein - either to its credit or our detriment - worked in a magical way that no other drug or affection has been able to replicate.

It used to be so easy.

It used to be that she would eventually go to sleep if we let her alone enough, because she had no other options. She had nowhere else to go, unless she decided to keep turning (and every once in a while, get a limb stuck between two posts and in need of rescue). Eventually, if all is taken care of, her boredom would get the best of her and she would enter the dream world of infants, possibly facilitated by one of the plush elephants from the Baby Einstein world. You see, it used to be easy.


Nowadays, however, she gets into every thing. Every. Possible. Thing. She stands up in the crib; so putting her down for a nap usually entails taking her out in her stroller until she conks out from all that exposure to the sun and vehicle exhaust. It used to be easy.

Resultingly (beat that, OE), she is constantly tired and cranky. Her high-maintenance is at a peak generally by the time I get home, although I am assured that she has never, for one moment while I was gone, let up or allowed her mother to find a moment's rest. I only have the baby for her first waking hour and her last three hours (some of which may be in that pseudo-sleep stage where she merely pretends to sleep but is really playing Godzilla in her crib, practicing terrorizing all of the other pre-K kids by taking their lunch money and organic granola and yogurt), so I cannot complain too much. But, c'mon! It used to be easy.

I'm not so sure of what I'm doing all the time with her. So, sometimes, she screams in my ear. And I run out of tricks to calm her down. It used to be easy.

She also walks. But it is highly assisted walking. The sort of walking that she does merely by putting it in her mind that her legs are going to goose-step in a rapid succession to a particular place, but her core doesn't yet know how to respond. So we give her a little moral and physical booster by holding her little hands aloft, so that she remains vertical, or at least at a bit of a slant (she walks like an over-joyed version of a cartoon character with purpose). My back hurts.

It used to be easy.

She's entirely social and aware. She laughs an excitable and contagious laugh whenever she encounters another pre-adolescent. But sometimes she seems like she wants nothing to do with members of her own family. She screamed bloody murder when my brother came to pick her up one time. If we hadn't learned our lesson then, she may have done the same with Jen's family (she certainly gave the cringing 'I'm ready to scream' look).

There was a time, it used to be easy.

The apartment is anything but childproof. And we don't have enough vertical space to move everything three and a half feet off the ground. Which means that we have to watch her. All. The. Time.

She's in an in-between stage right now. In between a dependent aloofness and an independent aloofness. In between needing to be carried and needing to walk on her own. In between an almost permanent smile to a shifting curiosity.

It's a foreshadowing. This is what her teenager years will be like.

Life used to be easy.
The apartment is anything but childproof. And we don't have enough vertical space to move everything three and a half feet off the ground. Which means that we have to watch her. All. The. Time.

She's in an in-between stage right now. In between a dependent aloofness and an independent aloofness. In between needing to be carried and needing to walk on her own. In between an almost permanent smile to a shifting curiosity.

It's a foreshadowing. This is what her teenager years will be like.

Life used to be easy.

The Waste Land, the Seriel, pt. 3

Unreal City,	60
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.	65
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!	70
'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!	75
'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!'
II. A GAME OF CHESS THE Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out	80
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;	85
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended	90
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,	95
In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale	100
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
'Jug Jug' to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms	105
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.	110

Some more thoughts on postmodernism/deconstructionalism

I'm not sure if I'm postmodern. In fact, I rather doubt it.

But I also wouldn't consider myself to be modern, nor pre-modern (for example, I don't doubt much of technology, nor do I believe that rats are made out of rotting meat left in the corner of my hut).

So, what my arch-nemesis Stanley Fish is talking about in the article I linked to yesterday (with key lucid phrases encapsulated as such: "Richard Rorty... declared, 'where there are no sentences, there is no truth … the world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.' Descriptions of the world are made by us, and we, in turn, are made by the categories of description that are the content of our perception. These are not categories we choose — were they not already installed there would be nothing that could do the choosing; it would make more sense [but not perfect sense] to say that they have chosen or colonized us. Both the 'I' and the world it would know are functions of language. Or in Derrida’s famous and often vilified words: There is nothing outside the text. [More accurately, there is no outside-the-text.]") can be, for me, better summed up in a couple sentences from one of the posts in Scot McKnight's ongoing review of Roger Olsen's Reformed and Always Reforming.

[P]omo (postmodernity/postmoderns) is skepticism about grand narratives so that everything is local and particular. Some pomo folks, hard postmodernity, is deconstructive as it unmasks the power behind truth claims.

The softer kind — that which is picked up in some, if not most, postconservatives — is that all truth claims emerge from a narrative context. And here’s a very important point, and one that the critics of both emerging and postconservatism fail to appreciate and opt instead for a bludgeoning instrument:

“knowledge may be relative even if truth is not” (127). “This is not relativism but recognition of the relativity of perspective inherent in all human thinking.” “Truth may be objective, but knowledge never is.”

As I'm reading bits and pieces of this series, I completely see myself within the realm of the postconservative (not to be confused with neo-conservative) Christian - as well as the Emerging (esp. emerging-from-conservative-evangelicalism) Movement.

Just a heads-up. I should probably change my masthead descriptor of myself, eh?

The Light Above Cities

The following poem, written by Jay Leeming and found in his book Dynamite on a China Plate: Poems, is stolen from Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac public radio broadcast. Hat tip to Jeffrey Overstreet.

The Light Above Cities

Sitting in darkness,
I see how the light of the city
fills the clouds, rosewater light
poured into the sky
like the single body we are. It is the sum
of a million lives; a man drinking beer
beneath a light bulb, a dancer spinning
in a fluorescent room, a girl reading a book
beneath a lamp.

Yet there are others — astronomers,
thieves, lovers — whose work is only done
in darkness. Sometimes
I don't want to show these poems
to anyone, sometimes
I want to remain hidden, deep in the coals
with the one who pulls the stars
through a telescope's glass, the one who listens
for the click of the lock, the one
who kisses softly a woman's eyes.

Weekly Links We Like to Link to - This One Goes Out to All the Fly Fellows and Lovely Ladies*

Our Racist, Sexist Selves.
If we didn't know it already, our racial and gender biases go very deep, whether we want them to or not.

The University of Chicago offers an on-line psychological test in which you encounter a series of 100 black or white men, holding either guns or cellphones. You’re supposed to shoot the gunmen and holster your gun for the others.

I shot armed blacks in an average of 0.679 seconds, while I waited slightly longer — .694 seconds — to shoot armed whites. Conversely, I holstered my gun more quickly when encountering unarmed whites than unarmed blacks.

Take the test yourself and you’ll probably find that you show bias as well. Most whites and many blacks are more quick to shoot blacks, no matter how egalitarian they profess to be...

Experiments have shown that the brain categorizes people by race in less than 100 milliseconds (one-tenth of a second), about 50 milliseconds before determining sex...

Yet racism may also be easier to override than sexism. For example, one experiment found it easy for whites to admire African-American doctors; they just mentally categorized them as “doctors” rather than as “blacks.” Meanwhile, whites categorize black doctors whom they dislike as “blacks.”

In another experiment, researchers put blacks and whites in sports jerseys as if they belonged to two basketball teams. People looking at the photos logged the players in their memories more by team than by race, recalling a player’s jersey color but not necessarily his or her race. But only very rarely did people forget whether a player was male or female.

“We can make categorization by race go away, but we could never make gender categorization go away,” said John Tooby, a scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who ran the experiment.

h/t to Scot McKnight.

Generally speaking, Stuff Christians Like isn't nearly as funny as, say, Stuff White People Like or LarkNews. But I found this piece on infant/toddler's tv both true and funny (in the "Yep, that's true," sense). Being a young father really does change your outlook. Or at least what you watch.
h/t to Cubical Reverend and Jenn (with two N's) for SCL.

Ever since Stanley Fish became the head of my school and started breaking down the English Department at the U of Illinois at Chicago, I've had it in for him. Nevertheless, I find this article on deconstructionism (or French Theory) intriguing and worth a read (and someday, I'll put on my big boy pants and finish it).
h/t to Tony Jones

*That would be everybody.

So, remember the Korean drummer video?

Yeah, I caught a comment on the Youtube page that I thought was just belligerently racist and - quite frankly - a bit dated. An anachronism from the days of Fu Manchu and the 1950s, in the midst of our first Cold War war taking place in a peninsula in the North-East corner of Asia.

I replied something to the effect that I couldn't believe he (or she, as it may be) would say something like that, and how old is he - those jokes were passe long before M*A*S*H* ever came out. Now, I felt a bit bad about calling him out as a racist. This poster probably isn't a racist, but I found the language to be racist and inexcusable. Of course, I can only speak as a liberal white male, right? But I see racism all the time and it bothers me all the time.

He replies, "Oh yeah, that's the lamest comment ever on Youtube. Come on, you didn't even try to be funny."

We're speaking two different languages here. I'm worried about offending him and setting him off and furthering his xenophobia. And, seriously, his concern is that I'm not sarcastic enough? I don't work blue (and certainly not with jokes that would irritated Bob Hope in the 60's), but I try to humor him (why? Because I foolishly think that he wasn't getting it and maybe I can clue him in):

i'm sorry to offend you e********. i just didn't think that i needed to be funny in order to call you on the carpet for your racist comment.

next time i'll try to say something hilarious about your mother. 'cuz that's ALWAYS funny!

He replies (and I can't find any of his replies now, but his horrendous original comment is still there for all to see) along the lines of, "You write the least funniest comments on all of YouTube. I'm not offended. You're not even worth being offended by."

What an asshole. Now, could somebody answer me, why am I worried about him?

Weekend Links I Like to Link to - Revenge of the Red-Eye

1) Keep your eye on the drummer.

If the video of the Korean Keith Moon doesn't work properly, connect here.
h/t to Eugene Cho.

2) Still going... Former Prez Bill Clinton acknowledges he was tickled:

A lot of the way this whole campaign has been covered has amused me. But there was a lot of fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated and immediately apologized for it, what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995.

All good said and done. Except that, according to Ben Smith,

the speech where she got in trouble for “misspeaking” about arriving under sniper fire was in the morning, she told the story more than once, she didn’t acknowledge that she misspoke until more than a week after giving the speech... and Pat Nixon visited Saigon in 1969 .

I guess it depends on what your definition of 'Is' is...

3) The Emerging/Emergent movement in the 21st Century Western Christian Church is becoming increasingly widespread. Now the Amish want in on the missiological fun.
h/t to Jesus Creed

4) First mistake: making a hit list.
Deadly mistake: putting Chuck Norris at the top of it.
h/t to Relevant

5) Also from Relevant:
This may just be too gourmet for Starbucks:
Dung Coffee (at 50 Pounds per cup, once again we poor blokes get no fun).

Update:
Apparently, the ever-thoughtful journalist Dave Barry uncovered this trend eleven years ago.
Some choice lines from his investigative reporting:

It is inhumane, in my opinion, to force people who have a genuine medical need for coffee to wait in line behind people who apparently view it as some kind of recreational activity. I bet this kind of thing does not happen to heroin addicts. I bet that when serious heroin addicts go to purchase their heroin, they do not tolerate waiting in line while some dilettante in front of them orders a hazelnut smack-a-cino with cinnamon sprinkles...

Then I thought: What kind of world is this when you worry that people might be ripping you off by selling you coffee that was NOT pooped out by a weasel?

Eliot's 'The Waste Land' - a Seriel, pt. 2

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,	20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,	25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.	30
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;	35
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,	40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,	45
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.	50
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.	55
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

Why I went away; why I came back

Part of the reason I took such a long blog-battical was because I was tired of the cynical and political turn I was taking, constantly worried about how so many of Hillary's minions are tearing up the Democratic Party and our seemingly once-invincible chances to secure the fed Executive Branch this term. And I still largely am (Oh, and don't forget the false cries of racism from the Obama-haters, who frustratingly accuse Obama and his followers of playing the race card when it's Hill and her supporters who've been preying on white fears and... but I digress. My heart's beating an angry ugly rhythm).

But I thought this was laugh-out-loud funny at 6 am. So much so, it made me eager to come back to blogging, babies!

G-d bless Stephen Colbert

Eliot's 'The Waste Land' - a seriel

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). The Waste Land. 1922.

The Waste Land

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering	5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,	10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,	15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

The Cutest Giant

The revelation struck Jen yesterday when she took our princess out to the park. It's a park that we've had our sights on for the last year and a half and had high hopes of eventually bringing our playing baby to, once the weather and her aptitude permitted. And so, for the last week, my wife brought our daughter (sometimes with daddy in tow) to this cute little baby/toddler park with the cushy ground. (Remember when we were kids and the concrete under the monkey bars was softened by jagged rocks, broken bottles and syringes? No more. The floors here are so soft, you could use them as pillows. In fact...)

Jocelyn is learning how to walk. Or, at least she gives it the ol' college try. One foot in front of another while holding on to mommy or daddy with her fingers. As she was leading the way (and she is getting really choosy about the things that she comes in contact with), she was getting excited about following a group of kids that Jen noticed were smaller than her. But apparently, these kids could move all on their own.

The three little ones are having a good time at it with a lot of back-and-forth rapport, and the mothers start talking. One of the mothers asks my wife how old our daughter is. "Eight and a half months." Jen asks in return.

"Sixteen months."

We knew she was tall. But. Wow.

Wow.

But it was connecting with other things I was noticing. While on the swings a couple days before that, she was looking and laughing at a girl beside her who had obvious verbal skills (you know, like sentences and queries and the whole bit) and I noticed that Joss had to be nearly as big.

And her neck has just started showing up. It's identifiable, no longer hidden in folds of baby-chin. It's definitely my neck. Long and skinny. But with her cute hexagon-shaped head on top of it, she looks like a pumpkin on top of a tooth-pick. And with both mine and Jennie's Irish family roots, things just don't bode well for her.

And her legs. I was changing her yesterday and noticed her legs are about as long as a Rockett's. But baby-chunky, especially in the thighs. The length, at least, is another thing she got from me.

She is, indeed my precious, adorable giantess.

God bless the little man who falls for her.