Lift Up Your Hearts!

A U. S. Department of Agriculture study has determined that watermelons stored at room temperature^* are far more nutritious than those stored in the refrigerator. Apparently its power-packed carotenoids, lycopene and beta-carotene, continue to develop after a fully-ripe melon is picked, but the process is slowed by refrigeration. What's more, refrigerated watermelons spoil faster.

The news about watermelons makes me wonder if a similar process is going on with tomatoes, which are another rich source of carotenoids. Conventional wisdom says tomatoes should be stored at room temperature rather than in the refrigerator. This means we have to eat them rather quickly here in Florida, but I can attest to the superiority of their unrefrigerated flavor.

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^*70 degrees Fahrenheit, which according to the article is "room temperature in an air-conditioned home." I wonder whose home they are talking about, and what their power bills might be. Ours is now set at 78 degrees, a real luxury considering for years it was 84, but we're older, more self-indulgent, and (most of all) this overall setting keeps the computer rooms at a bearable level. Not that 70 degrees wouldn't be really nice....

In 1971 I worked with researchers at the University of Rochester who were studying the algae blooms that were making a mess of Rochester, New York's Irondequoit Bay. At the time, the limiting factor for algae growth in the lake was phosphorous, and household use of detergents containing phosphates had fueled an algal population boom. Thanks to such research, low-phosphate detergents soon became. I presume the effect on the Bay was salutory, though I graduated and lost track of the researchers.

That was 35 years ago, but apparently we are still learning the same lessons. Please take time to read the long, but worthwhile, article from the Los Angeles Times on the frightening overrowth of toxic algae and other primitive organisms in our oceans.

I know I’m an independent sort of blogger. My need is to write, and I use the blog format because the LifeType software is so easy to use, is very flexible, and allows comments. The only reason I'm familiar at all with commercial places like LiveJournal, MySpace, and Blogger is that I have to venture into that territory to read some of my friends' blogs. So I'm really clueless about the whole blogging community thing, especially memes and tagging, which generally seem pretty silly to me.

However, a friend has this on her blog, and I like it, so I'm going to do it. I won't tag anyone, but I'd love to read your responses if you want to put them in a comment here, or on your own blog if you have one.

Note: I could answer every one of these points with "The Bible," except possibly #7 (though in some moods, who knows?), but that would be rather pointless, so I'm going to leave it out and consider other books. (More)

The good news is that Starchild Abraham Cherrix and his family finally found a judge brave enough to lift the lower court order that would have forced him to undergo chemotherapy for his cancer. The bad news is that it's a temporary reprieve; he'll have to fight the battle again in court next month.

Abraham is not the only teen who has had to spend precious energy, resouces, and especially time fighting for the right to choose or refuse medical treatment. (See also Who Will Make Medical Decisions for You and Your Family?) That he has the full support of his family in his decision matters not to the social workers; they saw that as a reason to attempt to take custody of Abraham themselves. (More)

I can't recommend the movie Lost in Translation to anyone I know. It's an R-rated film with an uninspiring story and scenes you'd rather not have in your mind. However, we watched it the other day and I enjoyed it very much, because it is set in Japan. It was fun to hear the crosswalk music (not Comin' Through the Rye, which you can hear in Swing Girls, but the tune for the other direction. I would never have noticed it in the movie if we hadn't been to Japan. It was also wonderful to be able to recognize some of the spoken Japanese words, though I was embarrassed by how much katakana I have forgotten.

Because the film is set mostly in Tokyo, it shows many of the parts of Japan I didn't care for, from the garish lights and colors to the pachinko parlors. But even those were reminders of our trip, and thus enjoyable.

If you live in the United States, you may never have a chance to see the movie, Swing Girls. It is presently unavailable in this country, and if you get it in Japan you need either a region-free DVD player or a good friend in the A-V business. But this is the movie to see for the best glimpse into Janet's life in Japan short of spending a very long time in an airplane. You'll see a school that looks very much like hers, from the physical layout to the students' uniforms to their voices and actions. Although the movie was filmed in a different area of Japan, the scenery is much the same. You'll even get to hear the crosswalk music, that famous old Japanese tune, Comin' Through the Rye. I loved the crosswalk music, though Porter thinks it would drive him crazy if he stayed in Japan very long. There's a different tune for crossing in the other direction, but I don't know what it is; it does sound a little more as if it might really be a Japanese song.

Swing Girls is not great art, but it's a fun story with no objectionable parts if your children can't read. If they can, be warned that the English subtitle translation of the Japanese contains a few four-letter words. Whether the Japanese itself was offensive, I don't know.

Home Education Magazine has a great article by Deborah Markus called Being a Cheerful Rebel. Sometimes being a nonconformist feels great, and sometimes it just feels lonely. Sometimes you love explaining your lifestyle choices to others, and sometimes you wish they'd just mind their own business. But ready or not, the questions will come, and Markus has some good suggestions for preparing to meet them. My favorite is

Don't Apologize: Stand strong. If you don't seem firmly convinced of the rightness of your course of action, why should anyone else? Especially someone who's never heard anything but conventional wisdom on the subject, all of which disagrees with you?

St. Peter knew something of the pressures of being outside the mainstream, and he had good advice, too:

Always be preparied to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence; and keep your conscience clear.

[R]esistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modestly in their sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. Even further, to ensure that one's children work hard at becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.

None the less, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition. It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it needs children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service.

True power remains with individuals. Ultimately we have the power to shape and even change lives. It is unleashed when families with young children control access to or eliminate television in their homes; when those children are educated at home or in private schools where their family's beliefs are upheld, not in state schools where the values of the state are taught; when people stay married in good times and in bad; when quality time with children is quantity time; when people are valued more than things; and when parents, not children, rule.

We always expected our children to surpass their parents; after all, they have the advantage of standing on our shoulders, and of learning from our experience. And there's no question that they have, particularly in the academic and spiritual domains.

So I should not have been so surprised to find both of them carrying our family unconventionality further than we ever imagined. (More)

Jonathan loves going to church, so I'm not at all sure what he meant by this proclamation, but I thought it worth recording.

I've mentioned before that Jonathan is highly verbal, especially for a two year old boy. I hate stereotypes and the judgement of individuals by the average characteristics of a class they happen to belong to, but people will insist that boys aren't verbal creatures, so I like to mention the obvious counterexamples.

In Jonathan's case there are clearly both environmental and genetic factors. His parents have always spoken to him pretty much as they would to anyone, no baby talk allowed. Sometimes you think he couldn't have a clue what they are talking about, but it's amazing what he picks up, and his vocabulary has always been extraordinary. (More)

While doing a Google search for a friend's blog, I came upon this exchange on someone else's blog. To be fair, I know nothing about the blogger, and haven't yet taken the time to read her other posts. My reaction is based solely on her post and the subsequent comments. But it shocked me so (and the comments even more than the original post) that I'm inviting comment here—by anyone at all, but especially by those who think they know what to expect from someone calling herself, "Little Miss Reformed." (More)

When Larry Summers, then President of Harvard, dared suggest that genetic differences between men and women might, in general, predispose them to greater abilities in different fields, I had no problem with that. When he was pilloried and forced to resign, I was appalled (though not surprised) at the continuing evidence that liberals aren't necessarily liberal, those who call loudest for tolerance aren't tolerant, and "academic freedom" is an oxymoron. If the presence of a Y chromosome instead of an X can make differences that are visible and obvious, to insist that it can't possibly make more subtle differences, and to forbid inquiry into the matter, is as bad as the Catholic Church in Medieval times. Worse, because I don't think the Church ever claimed to be open-minded.

Yet as fast as Harvard tried to distance itself from Summers' heresy, there are more serious worms in its own apple. (More)

The Visitation, by Frank Peretti (W Publishing Group, Nashville, Tennessee, 2003)

I believe it was Samuel Goldwyn who said, "If you want to send a message, use Western Union." He had a point. Great writers manage to convey many messages through their works, but people who start writing with a message in mind tend to write mediocre novels.

I find Frank Peretti's stories entertaining, and better than much so-called Christian fiction; certainly worlds better than the popular LaHaye/Jenkins Left Behind series. There's no doubt that his writing style and technique have improved considerably over the years, too. But Peretti always seems to have a particular axe to grind. One of his best books, Monster, still has specific points about evolution/creation and the perils of genetic engineering which he makes rather heavy-handedly. The Visitation suffers from the same problem, and more. (More)