We just received a very cool picture in the mail, from Jonathan, and I had to share it with those of you who will appreciate it as much as I do (or nearly so).  He drew it on the 24th of this month.  Click on the preview picture for a better look.

Here is the explanation that came with the picture:

A guy operating a crane.  The line on the bottom is the tread.  The circle on his face is his ear.  The crane is hooking the controls, but it is not driving itself.

He wanted to draw Jesus for you, but said he didn't know how.  So he drew a crane.

Once again, Tim at Random Observations has provided post which I must pass on.  (Warning:  Yes, it's depressing, but worth reading, really.)  First, read his commentary, You're Just Another (Lego) Brick in the Wall... about an after-school program in Seattle, where teachers took over the children's imaginative Lego play and turned it into a chance for socialist indoctrination.  For a more direct view of the teachers' perspective, read their original article, Why We Banned Legos.

To Tim's insightful post I will only add this:  What about the parents?  Where were they when all this was going on?  Were they expecting childcare and maybe some help with math and reading from this afterschool program?  Did they know their children were getting a heavy dose of politics and indoctrination in values—politics and values possibly in direct opposition to the parents' own?  Certainly most parents would have a few issues with this part of the lesson:

[W]e explored questions about how rules are made and enforced, and when they ought to be followed or broken. We aimed to help children see that all rules (including social structures and systems) are made by people with particular perspectives, interests, and experiences that shape their rule-making. And we wanted to encourage them to consider that there are times when rules ought to be questioned or even broken....

The children were between the ages of five and nine, perhaps not the best ages at which to tell them that obeying their parents' rules is optional.  On the other hand, perhaps the teachers will eventually receive due retribution in the form of students who have decided that the school's rules are not worth following.  Alas, it's probably the high school teachers who will bear that cost.

It was the title that struck me:

Study spotlights prenatal beef consumption

I found the image of tiny babies-in-utero chowing down on hamburgers quite amusing.

But the results of a study by researchers at my former employer, the University of Rochester Medical Center, are not funny at all.  Men whose mothers ate a lot of beef during their pregnancy were found to have a risk of fertility problems three times greater than normal, with 25% below normal sperm counts.  If this is due, as many suspect, to the hormones fed to beef cattle, there is good reason to believe that girl babies are adversely affected as well.

I was going to e-mail these pictures to Grandpa W., from whose long-ago gift of amarylis bulbs these beauties are descended, but then decided to share them with all who might enjoy them, natsukashii or otherwise.

The day care debate would be only of mild interest to me, given that despite my own strong feelings on the matter, I equally strongly believe that circumstances can be complicated and parents are the best ones to make childrearing decisions for their own families—I say it would be only of mild interest were it not for the growing number of people who believe that "free" day care (paid for by taxes, of course) is the hallmark of civilization.

The other reason I present to you this article on the lastest results from the largest and longest-running study of American child care is the final paragraph.

The bad news, for families who avail themselves of day care centers, is that no matter how highly rated the center is, their children are statistically more likely to exhibit disruptive and aggressive behavior, even as late as sixth grade.  The good news is that the effect is small, and as compensation they'll have better vocabularies.

As one might imagine, those for whom any negative news about day care would be as welcome as positive news about smoking were quick to find fault with the study.  I could do so myself, noting that they would likely find even greater differences if they also considered the quality of home care, or the fact that all of the children in the study were consigned to day care centers in the form of school once they reached kindergarten age.  But it was the complaint that the study's measure of day care center quality left out important factors that drew my attention, to wit the last paragraph of the article:

The study did not take into account employee turnover that can have a negative effect on children, said Marci Young of the Center for the Child Care Workforce, which represents day-care workers.

There is no recognition in the article of the lovely irony here, for what is day care but "employee turnover" on a daily basis?

I remember the response, too.

I've written about the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine campaign before.  Now I want to share this excellent article by Gina R. Dalfonzo from Christianity Today, (22 March 07) which begins,

You've probably seen the commercials. Over the last few months, it's been almost impossible not to see them. They parade endlessly across our screens—a multitude of women of all ages, from all backgrounds—and they all have the same urgent message to share: "Tell someone that human papillomavirus causes cervical cancer. Tell someone. Tell someone. Tell someone."

To which I can only respond, "We tried."

Many years ago, members of the Family Research Council, a Christian public policy group in Washington, DC, tried to publicize the connection between HPV and cervical cancer, and the fact that condoms are not an effective protection agains the virus.  They were trashed, bashed, and outshouted by the media and organizations such as Planned Parenthood and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), which claimed they were just trying to get people to stop having sex, and anyway the number of people who would actually get cervical cancer from HPV was so small it was not worth worrying about.

The article is quite right, and well worth reading in its entirety.  I remember both the warning and the reaction.

In Arizona, the winning team in the kindergarten through sixth grade category of the recent state scholastic chess championship must know that their victory is tainted.

The defending champions were not allowed to compete this year, because they are a team of homeschooled students, and this year they were ruled ineligible because they do not all come from the same school.  Well, duh!  It's hard to field a team when your school comprises no more than a handful of students covering a wide age span.

The rule was created, I suppose, to keep teams from being formed across school boundaries, and the one who creates a contest should have the right to set the rules.  However, it does make it clear that the intention is more about promoting schools than about encouraging excellence or chess playing.  Leaving homeschooling out of the question, why shouldn't friends who attend different schools be able to form their own teams and compete?  This isn't Japan, where school is life, and loyalty to one's school a cardinal virtue.

Update:  Here are the pictures from Janet of some of her students in Japan, cleaning the school pool.  (See comments.)

Earlier I wrote about Melissa Busekros, the 15-year-old German girl who was taken from her family to a psychiatric ward and thence to foster care because of her desire to be tutored at home in some subjects.  This morning I learned that the five children of a second family have been ordered into state custody by a German court.

The parents reportedly can regain custody of their children only by placing them in public school.

In the order, which was based solely on the parents' decision against sending their children to public school, the family also was told to pay court costs estimated at $4,000.

The judge had concluded that the children were well-educated, but accused the parents of failing to provide their children with an education in a public school. The court noted that one of the daughters expressed the same opinions as her father, showing they have not had the chance to develop "independent" personalities.

The website from which I obtained this news is not the most dispassionate and unbiased of sources, so I would be glad to hear that they have the stories all wrong.  Despite the German consul general's statement that the government "has a legitimate interest in countering the rise of parallel societies that are based on religion or motivated by different world views and in integrating minorities into the population as a whole," I know public school is not the only option in Germany, because Janet's experience tells me that private, Christian schools are legal.  Yet the arguments being brought against these homeschooling families could just as easily be used against private schools, especially sectarian ones.

So what is the truth here?

I remember a Reader's Digest article of long ago (I don't know when, but it's been many years since we subscribed) about Osama bin Laden, which was headlined, "Be afraid of this man; be very afraid."  Like everyone else, I read the article and ignored it, figuring (oh so wrongly) that those whose job was to pay attention to such things were on the ball.  I'm not suggesting a parallel between al Qaeda and the German government here, but this news makes me think of that prescient article.  I fear something very bad is going on, and those who ought to be protecting liberty will only awaken when it is too late.

Now it's Chinese food that's bad for you!  I'm especially sad that they singled out my family's favorite, General Tso's Chicken.  And how about this:

[E]ating an order of lemon chicken, which is battered and then deep-fried, is like eating three fried McDonald's McChicken sandwiches then washing them down with a 32-oz. Coke.

This article on making moral judgments is a good example of the kind of false dilemma that drives me crazy.  It reminds me of those soul-tearing questions sometimes inflicted on schoolchildren—by each other, and even by teachers—such as "If your house were burning and you could only save one parent, which would you choose, your mom or your dad?" I remember teaching my own kids that "I don't answer ridiculous questions" is a perfectly acceptable response.

The dilemma posed in the experiment is this:  "Someone you know has AIDS and plans to infect others, some of whom will die. Your only options are to let it happen or to kill the person. Do you pull the trigger?"  The premise, "your only options are to let it happen or to kill the person" is spurious, since there are always other options.  They could at least have set up a more plausible scenario, such as a sniper shooting steadily into a crowded schoolyard and you having a gun trained on the sniper—do you shoot him?  But even in that case one can shoot to disable, even though there's a chance your shot will end up fatal.

What they discovered about the responses of people with a particular type of brain damage may be important in helping those people and their families, but it's hard to see any general application that can come from false premises.

A friend sent me the following YouTube link.  WARNING:  Parts of the video are offensive, and if you go to YouTube and read the comments, many of them are extremely offensive.  Nonetheless, both are part of the point I want to make.  Since my commentary contains some spoilers, you have to click on the "more" link to read it.

My friend headed the link with "This nation's school system has created a nation of morons."  I couldn't agree more with her statement, but the video does nothing to prove it.  Selective editing can show anything, especially when combined with preconceived notions of what you want to prove.

It's the comments that are truly disturbing.  If the film was no doubt edited to show the stupidest responses, I'm pretty sure the comments are a random sample—though the group of people willing to comment on YouTube is not exactly representative of the world's population.  At least I hope not.  The venomous, virulent disgust and hatred they spew—often in the form of extremely foul language—is more disturbing to me than ignorance, though they display that as well.  Not that I've read all the comments, which numbered over 4000 as of this morning; a hundred or so was all I could stomach.

In A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens proclaimed Ignorance most to be feared, "for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased."  Ignorance of facts about the world is bad enough, but ignorance of other peoples and cultures is appalling, and I find that there's as much ignorance of America in other countries as there is of other countries here.

The only hope I see for either side is more and more cultural exchange programs.  And everyone should read Why the Rest Hates the West, too.

A few comments on the questions and answers:   My first reaction to the challenge of naming a country that begins with "U" was "Uganda."  Most people would say our country begins with "A."  I doubt most of the French, which asked what letter their country's name begins with, would respond, "R" ("Republique francaise").  No matter how official "United States" is, and no matter how frustrating it is to Canadians, Mexicans, and South and Central Americans, "America" is too well entrenched as a name for our country for anyone to expect otherwise.  Though I did think "Yugoslavia" was a cute answer.

I also missed the KFC question, though I maintain that "Utah" as an answer is only partly right.  The first franchise may have been in Utah, but Kentucky really deserves credit as its homeland.

Or you can substitute "Conservatives" and "Liberals" for a more general application.

This unfair generalization is based on observations I made over thirty years ago, and it still encapsulates much of what I find incomprehensible and wrong about politics.  It frustrates me that those who apparently care little about concerns that are close to my heart (suffering people, the environment, diversity, families, and freedom of choice) tend to promote policies that advance those causes, while those who speak loudly (and often even sincerely) in favor of these good things support actions that are detrimental, often disastrously so.

Just for you, my dear Northerners, I have run around the house changing the clocks, and will get up unconscionably early tomorrow.  Daylight Saving Time makes little sense in our part of the world, and it seems yet more ridiculous to make the change even earlier this year.

For those of you who might be a little homesick for Florida:

Serious collectors of anything can have serious problems when they die.  We've all heard of the numismatist whose rare coins were piously dropped one by one into the church collection plate by his widow, and the philatelist whose valuable stamps were used for postage; of antiques sold at estate sales for junk-furniture prices; of a genealogist's lifetime's worth of painstaking work tossed as worthless papers.

For $10,000, Frank Cafaro bought a collection of minerals from a Miami estate and brought it home in 50 pickup truck loads.  Then his troubles began.

"We were in the warehouse and we pulled out this box of rocks....Everything was individually labeled. Amethyst. Topaz. Uranium. The guy I'm working with says, 'What's that last one? Uranium? I think that's illegal.'"

Inside a small, lead-lined container was a glass vial containing about an ounce of yellowcake uranium, which as far as I can determine is completely legal to own.

Pawnshop owners must see nearly everything, but they don't know everything, and I can't blame Cafaro for being cautious.  Still, I think the response was a slight overreaction:

Within an hour, the Gold Mine Pawn was swarming Thursday with nearly three dozen emergency workers, including Geiger-counter-waving members of a hazardous materials team and the Marion County Sheriff's Office Domestic Security Task Force.

I wrote earlier about our failing telephone system.  We limped along for a week with all calls forwarded to one or the other of our cell phones.  Actually, it wasn't much of a limp.  It was slightly annoying not to be able to have more than one person on this end of a call, and since my cell phone has no "free" minutes (it's a prepaid plan), I was conscious of the cost of every call.  But it wasn't that much, really.  A definite plus was that the forwarding message, "please wait while we try to contact your party" effectively foiled all those robotic telemarketers!

Still, now that it's fixed (details follow), I'm glad not to be so tied to my cell phone.  I said to Heather, "I feel like a teenager, carrying my cell phone in my pocket all the time," to which she replied, "You're not a teenager, Mom.  You still jump every time it rings."

To answer that question, I have to explain how the situation deteriorated further.  I woke up one morning to no Internet connection.  This was a little more serious than the phone problem.  After trying a few of the usual fixes, I called our local cable provider to determine whether or not there was a general outage.  That should have been a simple question, but apparently it wasn't in the script, and I had to wait through a lot of help I hadn't asked for.  You know the kind—reminiscent of bad Sunday School classes—where they tell you in painstaking detail what you already know, and when you finally get to the questions you can't answer, they drop the subject.  Still, I did finally learn that there was no general outage, and I'd need to do more work on my end.

No success—and frankly, with two very active grandchildren visiting, I had little time and less incentive to worry about it.  But Porter came home last night and we tackled the problem first thing this morning.  I won't burden you with the details of everything we did—anyone who finds this entry and has a simlar problem is welcome to ask for more information in a comment—but when we switched back to the other router, it didn't work at all anymore, either!  That was just too much coincidence.  Bottom line is that the power supply was bad.  Not totally bad, and not in a way that was detectable to any of the techs who were poking around remotely.  But when we switched power supplies, suddenly the router started acting more normally...and we had Internet access again...and lo and behold, even the phone worked!

Bearing in mind that one of this children is eight, and the other three—can anyone doubt they are related?

I know most of my Loyal Readers are shivering, with temperatures in the teens and even single digits, so you'll be glad to know that spring it on its way.  A week ago I was working in our backyard when a flock of robins came through:  bird after bird, alighting only long enough for identification before resuming their steady course—straight north.   As I stood there with sweat pouring down my face—my below-zero wind chill experience of ten days earlier barely a dim memory—I could hardly blame them.  Our highs were in the 80's and a few days later we switched the thermostat from "Heat" to "A/C."

I had an incredible experience recently.  Having been transplanted, through the woders of modern aviation technology, from our unseasonably warm Florida home to some of the coldest Connecticut weather of the season, I was a little chilled.  Our kind hosts provided a fire in the fireplace and a space heater in our bedroom, so we weren't uncomfortable, but going outside was an adventure, despite heavy coats, hats, gloves, and scarves.

That is, until I found it desirable to take some pictures of the low Old Saybrook tide.  Leaning gloveless (I had to operate the camera) against a stiff, steady blow that pushed the wind chill-modified temperature below zero, I was beyond cold.  But when my hand finally thawed, something inside me snapped—or more accurately, some internal fire ignited.  For the rest of the week, I was warm!  Forget the hat, scarf, and gloves; if all I was doing was going from building to car to building again, my coat—and that often enough not even zipped—was sufficient.

On our sledding adventure, I condescended to don hat and gloves (and zip the coat), and the chill never reached me.  What a glorious feeling, to feel the cold without being cold!

If you try to call us in the next few days, please be patient.  All calls are being forwarded to our cell phones, so it may take a little longer than usual to connect.

After 45 minutes of work with us (following much longer than that of Porter trying various things on his own), an AT&T representative supposedly determined that the SLIC (whatever that is) was bad, so they are sending us a new router.

While waiting, however, Porter configured Janet's CallVantage Linksys router to work in our system.  Supposedly.  Lo and behold, it failed in exactly the same very weird way.  Back to the AT&T helpdesk again.  Different tech, same diagnosis:  a bad SLIC.

Wait a minute.  Two routers failing at the same time, and in a peculiar way even the help techs found hard to believe?  Another long time spent on the phone, this time "further up" in the helpdesk hierarchy.  An apparently very knowledgeable man tried every thing he could, to the point where Porter now knows a lot about the insides and hidden parts of Linksys routers.  Nonetheless, the final conclusion was, "As unbelievable as this seems, it appears you really do have two routers with bad SLIC's."