Lift Up Your Hearts!

Blackberry = Crackberry?  The iPhone is more addictive and targeting children!  Well, maybe that wasn't Apple's intention, but they did make their phone so easy even tiny kids can use it.  My brother tipped me to a New York Times article on parents who use their iPhones to pacify whining offspring, and the toddlers who consider the phone to be the best toy in the toybox.

Instead of writing about how impressed I am with the tiny kids' abilities (and I am), or how depressed I am about yet another video addiction in chidren's lives (ditto), I'll use the context to mention our own toddler/computer story.

One day Heather discovered two-year-old Faith sitting at the computer, typing away in their Open Office word processing program.  She assumed Jon had set it up for her, but that was not the case.

No one knows how she did it.  This is no consumer-friendly iPhone, nor even Windows, but a Linux-based system only a geek could love.  Go, little geeklet!

Nothing shows American individualism like the days between Thanksgiving and the end of the year, when everyone is free to celebrate the holiday of his own choosing—ancient or modern, major or minor, traditional or made-up—as long as he follows the Two Cardinal Rules:

• Don’t assume everyone else wants to celebrate the same holiday you’ve chosen, and
• Spend lots and lots of money!^*

I reach into the grab bag and choose:  Advent, all twelve days of Christmas, and Epiphany.  Perhaps New Year’s Day as well.  None, technically, involves spending a lot of money, but we generally manage to do our part, and so far this year has been no exception.

For the purposes of this blog, the operative word here is holiday.  I am attempting to take a break for the season.  I seriously doubt I won’t post at all, but do expect a significant reduction in the number and length of posts.

May whatever holiday(s) you celebrate bring you blessing!

^* The money doesn't have to be spent selfishly, despite what the television ads may lead you to believe.  I recommend considering some version of the Advent Conspiracy.

This resolution comes straight from George MacDonald, via his novel Robert Falconer.  It expressed the “divine law of [Falconer’s] activity,” and I wish to make it my own.

The phrase spreads before me a vision of quiet, effective work punctuated by seasons of true rest, the antithesis of modern society’s frantic—and often ineffectual—labor, and equally frantic striving after (unrestful) recreation.

Another author who captured this vision was J.R.R. Tolkien, in his short story, Leaf by Niggle.  At one point in the story, the protagonist is in a purgatory of sorts, and I love this description of what happens in him:

It could not be denied that he began to have a feeling of—well, satisfaction:  bread rather than jam.  He could take up a task the moment one bell rang, and lay it aside promptly the moment the next one went, all tidy and ready to be continued at the right time.  He got through quite a lot in a day, now; he finished small things off neatly.  He had no "time of his own" (except alone in his bed-cell), and yet he was becoming master of his time; he began to know just what he could do with it.  There was no sense of rush.  He was quieter inside now, and at resting-time he could really rest.

 (More)

So, this headline popped up in my news feed today:

US, Israel, PA fail to reach agreement on settlement freeze

and my immediate thought was, "Why is Pennsylvania negotiating directly with Israel?"

The more I learn about Julian Assange, the more I like Terry Jones.

They're both inconsiderate, irresponsible idiots in my book, though each started with good intentions and the belief that his actions were righteous and courageous.  But Jones had the grace to back off when he saw that his Koran-burning threat stunt was endangering innocent lives around the world.  Assange is using the threat of further, more dangerous WikiLeaks revelations to fend off prosecution on, among other things, rape charges.

There is a place for whistle-blowing, and shedding light in dark places sometimes requires great courage and controversial actions.  But if you want to be a hero rather than a two-bit blackmailer, it’s wise to break no more laws—civil and moral—than absolutely necessary.

One who lays his life on the line for the sake of others may be a hero, but the sacrifice of other people’s lives, even for a great cause, is a less clear path.  That’s why the right to make such decisions is generally given to regulated, designated authorities, like the military or police forces.  Being made up of human beings, they may make disastrous mistakes, and can be corrupted, but on the whole they are safer holders of that power than unregulated, untrained individuals and mobs.  There’s a good reason vigilante action is feared—and illegal.

Don't you just love it when an otherwise obscure reference clicks in your mind?

First, one of my favorite non-family blogs, The Occasional CEO, has a post entitled Steampunk in Pictures.  Steampunk, Wikipedia tells me, is a subgenre of science fiction.  Wait—I cut my teeth on science fiction, and I'd never heard of it?  Turns out steampunk came of age during the 1980's and 90's, when our kids were cutting their teeth and I was too busy to keep up with that part of my former life. (More)

...and I believe it.  But my Personal Economic Indicators indicate a booming economy.

I dislike shopping in the best of times, and December is not the most pleasant of months to shop, even when one doesn't have to deal with heavy coats and boots.  Yet sometimes need will drive me out to the stores, and I had hoped that with all the bad news about unemployment and and bankruptcies and poor retail sales, there might come compensation in the form of a less-crowded shopping experience.

But I went out today, and all indications are of an economic boom in full swing.  Very heavy traffic in the middle of the afternoon—I didn't think it could get worse, but proved myself wrong by still being on the road when rush hour began—and stores full of shoppers.  Buyers, too, if the checkout lines were any indication.

If this is the situation in bad times, how will we handle the good?  Our main road (not highway) is already 6-8 lanes wide.  How much shopping, and driving, do people have to indulge in for the economists to stop saying "consumer confidence is down"?

In case you haven't seen it, check out the 12 Composers of Christmas.  (H/T musician friend Sarah D.)

It is fitting to end my November Thanksgivings with gratitude for a wonderful visit with family and a safe journey home.  Despite Heather’s prediction that I would post more about our activities than she would, you’re not likely to hear much about them.  I was too busy living the adventure to write about it.¹  Of yesterday’s voyage from Pittsburgh to Orlando I have much to say, and the illusion of time to say it.

It was a long day—nearly 16 hours door-to-door—but I can’t complain as Porter still had some 13 more hours to travel after I was safe in our own house.  If it weren’t for the final blow from JetBlue, I wouldn’t have minded at all. (More)

Being an avid reader of science fiction, I was sure that the big technological change to mark our time would be space travel.  But it’s apparently an idea whose time has not yet come, because it never took off (yes, I meant to say that) the way the science fiction writers prognosticated.

Personal computing and the Internet, on the other hand, took me—along with most of the S-F writers—by surprise, even though they were part of my world from the era of room-sized machines and paper-tape input.  I never imagined how drastically they would change our lives.  Instead of exploring outer space, we have opened the inner spaces of our world. (More)

For all I gripe about the short shrift given to public transportation in the United States, I need to take a moment to be thankful for our highways.  Vacation travel in my younger years was more picturesque, as we wandered through small towns and back roads.  But if I-95 is boring, it makes the drive between Pennsylvania and Florida immeasurably more pleasant.

Even with the inevitable traffic jam around Washington, D.C., when your objective is to get from Point A to Point B, travelling 70 mph on a multi-lane road beats without question poking along at 30 mph on a two-lane road, behind a mile-long army convoy, through a construction zone.  The only thing the latter has going for it is that it’s easier to find relief when the kids have to use the bathroom.

(If you travelled on New England’s highways yesterday, you may have a hard time believing that automobile travel could have been worse, and you might be right.  I don’t think we ever experienced anything as bad as Massachusetts/Connecticut traffic on the Sunday after Thanksgiving—or just about any Friday night, for that matter.  I refer you to my previous complaints about our lack of good public transit.)

It’s such a brilliant idea to have one, easily-remembered number to call for all forms of emergency, anywhere in the country.  (Cell phones and Voice Over IP phones have outpaced the 911 system and diminished its power a bit, but it is catching up again.)

I used to have nightmares in which I needed to call the police, or ambulance, or fire department, and kept fumbling through the phone book and not finding the number.  If I finally succeeded, then d-i-a-l-i-n-g the number took so long and my finger always slipped at about the next-to-last digit and I’d have to start over again and by that time the phone book had fallen shut and I had lost the number….

I don’t have those nightmares anymore.

For a normal, healthy person dealing only with minor illnesses—including diseases like measles and chicken pox, which were no big deal for most people—in many ways it was better to be living 50 years ago than now.

(An exception would be for normal childbirth, which had been taken over by hospitals and doctors.  Mothers reclaimed their [ahem] birthright in the late 1970s, only to lose it again, and then to partially regain it—it’s the only branch of medicine that I know to be so cyclical.)

I remember doctors making house calls, and doctors who treating the whole family as a unit, which I believe is healthier for all.  They trusted parents to describe symptoms accurately and as often as not the doctors gave advice over the telephone and saved many a trip—even when they were no longer making house calls.  They still had time to talk with their patients; none of this in-and-out-in-15-minutes assembly line stuff.

However—and it’s a big caveat—for serious illnesses and for emergency medicine, now is a much better time to need medical care.  When I was born, polio was still devastating the country and organ transplants were unheard of.  CAT scans didn’t appear until twenty years later.  From babies to bones, from tumors to head trauma—I hope never to need it, but if I do, I’ll take today’s medical technology with gratitude.

It’s just a pity we can’t have the house calls, too.

I grew up in a monoculture, which was not unusual 50 years ago.  People of other races and cultures were a topic to studied, not friends and neighbors.  I’m thankful today’s American children experience racial and cultural diversity naturally, as part of their daily, normal lives.  To our grandson, a “black lady” is a woman of any race wearing a black dress.

On this Thanksgiving Day, as we prepare for a very traditional American feast, I’ll take time to be thankful for the tremendous variety of food now available from other countries and cultures all over the world.

I’m a great fan of the locavore movement; I know from my childhood that nothing tastes as good as food that not only comes straight from a nearby farm, but also has a distinctive local flavor.  But there is also something to be said for being able to enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables in the middle of winter.

Even better is the opportunity to enjoy fruits, vegetables, spices, and prepared foods that were unheard of when I was growing up:  sushi, satay, tandoori chicken, naan, fajitas, egg rolls, mango lassi, bok choi, passion fruit, kung pao chicken … the list is long of now-common foods that were unavailable to most Americans 50 years ago.  I’d never even had a bagel till I went to college with a large crowd from New York City.

What a multicultural feast our table has become!