Lift Up Your Hearts!

I'm sure there must be a legitimate reason behind the new Federal Trade Commission rules for bloggers, but it looks pretty nonsensical from my perspective, another example of one-size-fits-all rules that inconvenience millions in an attempt to collar a few offenders.  It invites comparisons with the TSA's airport screening, except that I'm a lot more worried about terrorists than about those "I lost 300 pounds on this simple diet" ads.

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday took steps to make product information and online reviews more accurate for consumers, regulating blogging for the first time and mandating that testimonials reflect typical results.  Under the new rules, which take effect Dec. 1, writers on the Web must clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products.  Testimonials will have to spell out what consumers should expect to experience with their products.  [From the Hartford Courant, October 6, 2009]

So here goes.  I suppose I'll have to put it in my About link, too.

I have no idea what others should expect from anything I review or comment on.  I'm one person, not a research laboratory.  You may love a book I find objectionable; you may dislike the recipe I say is fabulous.  Such is life.  Sometimes I get books for free, from publishers, which I'll acknowledge in the review, but no small tip is going to make me say I liked a book when I didn't.  (So far, I've received all of one book this way, and I haven't read it yet, which is why you haven't seen any such acknowledgement.)  I also get incalculable return from Lime Daley, but I like to think that's because of my familial relationship with the owners, not because of any endorsements I make on this blog.

I don't mean to pick on the FTC; they have a tough job.  But I'm much more interested in disclosures, say, of gifts given by textbook publishers to school boards, or from pharmaceutical companies to doctors.  When Internet bloggers attain the respect, authority, and power of doctors and school boards, when it takes more than common sense to realize their reviews might not have universal applicability, then I may be convinced of the need for regulation.  I won't be in that category anyway. 

Thirty years ago we entered the world of adventure gaming.  We had graduated by that point, so I believe it was my brother who first hooked us up to the University of Rochester's computer system, on which was installed ADVENT, the one, the true, the original computer adventure game—running on a DEC-10, I'm pretty sure, though my memory is misty on the details.  After ADVENT we moved on to the original Zork, which was just as much fun.  No devotee of today's high-action, graphic-heavy, semi-realistic games will ever understand the delight of those simple, text-based games.  (The links will take you to Wikipedia's description of the games, but I'd avoid them if you ever think you might play them yourself.  The ADVENT—Adventure—entry especially gives too much away.  And if you're wondering why the name was ADVENT rather than Adventure in those days...believe it or not, it's because "Adventure" has too many letters.

What was truly wonderful about the games was the social interaction.  One of my favorite memories is of the houseful of relatives who had come to share Thanksgiving with us.  We had a borrowed terminal and the old-fashioned type of modem—new technology then—into which one fitted the telephone handset after dialing in and hearing the carrier tone.  We took turns typing commands into the computer, and everyone participated in solving the puzzles, each person contributing his own special knowledge and way of thinking.  The idea of "cooperative games" leaves a bad taste in my mouth, being associated with the misguided self-esteem movement in public schools some years ago, but these, truly, were cooperative games, in which we all won and to which everyone had something to contribute.

The game went on well into the night—that is to say early morning—though we were not all of us fully conscious the whole time.  I, for one, had a month-old daughter to tend, and retreated upstairs for whatever sleep I could get, though I stumbled back downstairs with her every time she awoke to nurse.  My father, too, tended to fall asleep, though he chose to doze in the living room chair with the game going on around him.  This rarely hampered his puzzle-solving abilities.  During one game (this may have been during the Zork years), the crew was stuck on this riddle:  What's tall as a house, round as a cup, and all the king's horses can't draw it up?  Dad was asleep, and they didn't want to disturb him, but they'd grown desperate.  This was well before the days when one could google the answer to nearly everything.  So they shook him gently, and when he showed signs of consciousness asked him the riddle.  Immediately he responded with the correct answer, and went back to sleep.  In some ways life was more fun before Google. 

On the other hand, it was through Google that I discovered that the original (or close to it) ADVENT and Zork are available to play online!  (Along with many other classic games, some good, some decidedly not.)  I'm not exactly recommending them, as even a brief trip down memory lane sucked up more time than I can afford, at least for solitary play.  Worse, the "save/restore game" feature doesn't seem to work.  That may be the fault of my computer settings, but I'm not working to solve the problem because it leads me away from temptation.  Other than that, however, ADVENT is all I remember—I haven't tried Zork yet—and I highly recommend it as a party game for a group of three to eight people.  On the condition, that is, that they agree not to resort to the Internet for hints and puzzle answers.  The joy is in the process; rushing to the end only subverts and diminishes the fun.

One more thing, which I hesitatingly offer to those who have absolutely no time for computer games but welcome language study:  There's a German version of ADVENT.  And a Spanish one, too.

Learning the lesson of Napoleon and Hitler.  Never underestimate Russia.  C. S. Lewis observed that mankind tends to alternate between taking the Devil too seriously and not taking him seroiusly enough.  Without making any implications on the order of "the Great Satan" or "the Evil Empire," it's a good analogy for the way we look at other countries, whether friend or enemy.  During the Cold War, for example, our fears of Russia—especially in the 1950s—were probably exaggerated, and it's likely that now we're not sufficiently worried about how far the influence such a large country with so many resources might reach.  Here's a New York Times article on the activities of Moscow's mayor, not to provoke fear, but to make us think.  The article is a bit dated, but the ideas are not.

 

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And it doesn't even mention health care.  This analysis of then president-elect Obama's upcoming challenges was written nearly a year ago.  It is left as an exercise to the reader to decide how well he is meeting them.

U.S. President George W. Bush demonstrated that the inability to understand the uses and limits of power can crush a presidency very quickly. The enormous enthusiasm of Obama's followers could conceal how he—like Bush—is governing a deeply, and nearly evenly, divided country. Obama's first test will be simple: Can he maintain the devotion of his followers while increasing his political base? Or will he believe, as Bush and Cheney did, that he can govern without concern for the other half of the country because he controls the presidency and Congress, as Bush and Cheney did in 2001? Presidents are elected by electoral votes, but they govern through public support.

 

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And now for something completely different.  A long and ususual but fascinating look at changes in Austria (and the world) since the days of Kaiser Franz Josef.

My favorite section of the newsletter we get from Wycliffe Bible Translators is where they give some interesting example of the challenges of accurate translation.  The "back translation"—translating back into English something that had been translated from Engilsh to the new language—often reveals subtleties and misunderstandings that can be quite funny.

As it turns out, one doesn't need to be documenting a rare, unwritten language to find translation humor.  Our new printer came with the following warning:

This product is supplied with a plug that has a protective earth pin.  This plug will fit only into an earthed electrical outlet. This is a safety feature.  To avoid risk of electric shock, contact your electrician to replace the electrical outlet if you are unable to insert the plug into it. Never use an earthed adapter plug to connect the product to an electrical outlet that lacks an earth connection terminal.

First we made pets of our children; now we make children of our pets.  The title of Caleb Stegall's Against Pets might make some turn away in reflexive disgust, but it is a reasoned and worthwhile commentary on the bizarre twist our relationship with animals has taken.  How far we have come from the shepherd's down-to-earth love for his sheepdog, and from C. S. Lewis's description of the ideal earthly relationship between man and beast:  Man is no longer isolated.  We are now as we ought to be—between the angels who are our elder brothers and the beasts who are our jesters, servants and playfellows. (That Hideous Strength, chapter 17.)

 

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Where have you been all my life, GK?  G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) is another one of those classic, cultural icons totally missing from my educational experience.  I guess the best thing I can say for having never met him in school is that he wasn't ruined for me, so discovering him now is a delight.  What Is America? is an essay worth reading in full, not the least because Chesterton's style does not lend itself at all to capture by excerpt.

The first principle is that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is foreign; the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong because it is funny.

Oh, and the part about the U. S. asking visitors if they're anarchists, polygamists, or support the overthrow of the U. S. Government by force?  It's true.  The other day I was looking at a 1921 ship's manifest for arriving foreign passengers, and the questions are right there, just as Chesterton reports.  To his insightful analysis of the reasoning behind such questions, I would add this pragmatic consideration:  No, they weren't foolish enough to expect a terrorist to answer truthfully, but—like the "tax evasion" conviction ploy used against American gangsters—if they couldn't convict him for throwing the bomb, they might be able to deport him for lying to the immigration authorities.

 

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Books:  The Original Plug-In Drug.  Everyone from parents, teachers, and librarians to corporations and the Federal Government laments that children do not read for pleasure anymore.  What little unstructured time they have is sucked up by television, video games, and computers.  How do we get children to read more? is the question of the age.  I'm here to question that question.  I'm an avid, voracious reader, and in general I side with the librarians on this one:  I'm more concerned by adults who do not read for pleasure, but realize such habits begin in childhood.  I'm certain there's causation as well as correlation between my love of reading and the fact that television did not enter my life until after my seventh birthday.

Nevertheless...I feel the need to sound a cautionary note, one probably familiar to all bibliophiles, but which I'm not hearing:  It is possible for a child to read too much.  Reading, just like video games, TV, and computers, can keep people from experiencing real life.  There were couch potatoes before there were remote controls.  When I was 16, my family took a once-in-a-lifetime car trek across the United States.  Unfortunately for me, our first stop was to visit my aunt and uncle.  My uncle was as much of a science fiction fan as I was, and he had a wonderful collection of books, a large stack of which he lent me for the trip.  I was in heaven—but spent the journey seeing more of the words on the page than the fruited plains and purple mountain majesties.

John C. Wright gets it.  SFSignal asked a group of science fiction writers what books held special memories for them.  Wright's response is at the bottom of the page, and is well worth reading in its entirety because of the commentary that accompanies his list.  But the immediate inspiration for this post was the following:

The difference between a bookish person and a non-bookish person...is that our formative thoughts, memories, and ideas, the things that shaped our character, come largely from books rather than from real-life experiences.

'Tis all too true, and should not be.  Books provide contact with reality unrestricted by time and distance, and good books can and should be part of the shaping of our character.  But never at the expense of real work, real play, and the purple mountain majesties.

"Any decent society needs to defend itself from armed aggression without becoming a society not worth defending. This is never simple to accomplish."  Jim Manzi, writing in National Review Online, makes an eloquent case against the use by the United States, or any civilized nation, of waterboarding as an interrogation technique.  Most arguments on the issue, for or against, are hardly worthy of the name because they assume what they think they're proving.  Manzi acknowledges the complexity of the issue, examines the historical record, and concludes that our current situation is not one in which the tactical advantages gained by waterboarding would offset the strategic losses.

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The music is a little too red, don’t you think?  Although true synesthesia—the bizarre crossing of the senses that enables some people to hear colors and taste sounds—is rare, researchers have discovered that most of us have this ability to some degree.

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Br'er Rabbit rules!  Katherine Dalton makes a poignant case for why Uncle Remus should never have fallen victim to Political Correctness.

Of all the folk and fairy tales I know, the Uncle Remus stories are rivaled only by the Brothers Grimm as a powerful and memorable expression of a people’s mind and spirit…. They are not always predictable, and often fantastic and amoral, yet they all resolve in ways that seem right because they feel culturally and humanly true.  There is something both stirring and instructive about them.

These stories are so powerful, I believe, because they express the collective experience of many authors and editors under the stress of slavery, and so capture the essence of human nature and the human condition with the heightened understanding that comes to people in difficulty.  And like the Grimm stories, these tales are not only for children and originally weren’t even principally intended for children.  They are the stories adults loved to tell each other, back when many of us were illiterate, and had much more of a culture.

Most of what we know as the Uncle Remus tales began as trickster stories in west Africa.  They were then transformed through retellings in the American South during its slave period, influenced by American Indian and European stories, and collected by a white man during Reconstruction.  The versions Joel Chandler Harris started publishing in 1879 were stories he had heard as a young man in central Georgia.

[The character of Uncle Remus is] an old family servant and former slave who tells the Brer Rabbit tales to the little son of the family.  The child’s mother is a Southerner, the father a former Union soldier, and Uncle Remus, though a strong and even imperious character, is loyal to his white family and has a strong tie to this child.  It is a frame Harris expressly constructed to help his white audience heal the wounds of war and Reconstruction.  As such it now angers some readers, and most modern versions leave it out and let Brer Rabbit take center stage alone.  Also, because the dialect is thick, it has been softened in the more recent retellings… and Uncle Remus’s occasional use of the word “nigger” has been left out as offensive.  For children these changes make sense.

But adults should read Harris’s original, to hear the stories as he heard them.  He took his work as transmitter as seriously as any ethnographer.  It is especially sad that the dialect he worked so hard to reproduce accurately is now blasted as demeaning, when to Harris’s mind it was integral to the stories themselves.  He felt the tales would be diminished by being translated out of their vernacular—and so with no training but a good ear, he recreated several black dialects of the mid-century in a way scholars today judge to be accurate.  This dialect is presented without irony or mockery.  The stories are told as a black man might have spoken them, not in blackface.

It's a pretty random collection of tidbits this time.  Enjoy them or ignore them as you like.

• Eat your heart out, Imelda Marcos.  People will collect anything, but I have to wonder if even Otto C. Lightner (the “collector of collections”) would pay $2000 for a pair of sneakers.

• Each man under his own vine and fig tree—in a neighborhood.  How Germany Made Us “Conservative” is a Front Porch Republic post that presents several glimpses into much that is wonderful about European life.  There’s plenty to argue with, but I offer it because it reminds me of a lifestyle that many I know in the U.S. are attempting to (re)gain.  Realization of what Europe lacks (and justifiable fear that we are losing it in this country) should not blind us to what they have of real value.  If there is any hope that we might recover that value without losing our own particular treasures, it lies in such understanding.  Mutual understanding.

  [O]utside every town are breathtaking vistas of rolling landscape with miles and miles of forests and farmland, all oriented toward local food production, hunting and forestry. Nearly every household seems involved with the land in some way or another, whether through a small garden and wood stand or a larger farm. In the backyard of many homes one still finds chickens that roam free, fruit trees that are now bearing apples, pears and cherries that will be made into jam, water barrels that catch rainfall with which families water their plants. Nearly every yard has an enormous pile of wood, stacked carefully and in perfect symmetry, already today in use as the temperatures dip into the 50s here. Also, in every backyard one sees a compost heap….

  Towns are towns: houses are generally not permitted outside the town limits due to strict zoning laws….This makes for greater population density…and hence also makes feasible vibrant regional and national public transportation systems. One enters a town defined by visible town limits, and nearly every town has at least a local baker and a local Metzger (butcher)....Store closing hours have traditionally favored small business owners who hire few or no employees, and who thus must be home to care for schoolchildren during the afternoons and in the early evening. Most businesses still close for several hours at lunch and at 6:30 in the evening.

  [O]ne family we got to know well through our church there, a family with three children, were desperate to move to America—they wanted to buy a house of their own, with a yard the kids could play in, rather than just trucking them to the local (though admittedly, very nice) park and contributing to the community garden for the next twenty years of their lives while they saved up for something that was prohibitively expensive for young people at that stage of their careers. They looked at our living experience in America, and they envied us, and the genuine and virtuous desires behind that envy are worth contemplating.



• How long could you last without saying something negative?  I tried that as a Lenten discipline once, and it’s hard.  Tim Ferriss signed on to the 21-Day No-Complaint Experiment and reports the results are life-changing.

  Will Bowen, a Kansas City minister…recognized…that word choice determines thought choice, which determines emotions and actions. It’s not enough to just decide you’ll stop using certain words, though. It requires conditioning.  Will designed a solution in the form of a simple purple bracelet, which he offered to his congregation with a challenge: go 21 days without complaining. Each time one of them complained, they had to switch the bracelet to their other wrist and start again from day 0.

  I made it 11 days on the first attempt, then I slipped. Back to zero. Then it was two or three days at a time for about a month. Once I cleared 21 days at around month 3, I no longer needed the bracelet.

  Ferriss changed Bowen’s rules a bit, to fit his own needs:

  I defined “complaining” for myself as follows: describing an event or person negatively without indicating next steps to fix the problem. I later added the usual 4-letter words and other common profanity as complaint qualifiers, which forced me to reword, thus forcing awareness and more precise thinking.

  Thus “Man, I went into the post office and had to stand behind this rude jerk for 30 minutes. What a waste of time,” would require him to switch the bracelet and restart, but “Man, I went into the post office and had to stand behind this rude guy for 30 minutes. It was a waste of time. From now on, I’ll go in the mornings before 10am to avoid the crowd” was acceptable.

  The benefits?

  • My lazier thinking evolved from counterproductive commiserating to reflexive systems thinking. Each description of a problem forced me to ask and answer: What policy can I create to avoid this in the future?
  • I was able to turn off negative events because the tentative solution had be offered instead of giving them indefinite mental shelf-life…resulting in better sleep and more pleasant conversations with both friends and business partners.
  • People want to be around action-oriented problem solvers. Training yourself to offer solutions on-the-spot attracts people and resources.

As an avid fan of mystery stories, I’m sure I would enjoy The Da Vinci Code, especially since I’m attracted to Robert Langdon by name alone.  As a rational human being, however, I’m reluctant to open its pages.  Not knowing any better, I’ve enjoyed such quasi-historical movies as Amadeus and Braveheart, learning only later how fast and loose the productions had played with the facts.  Now it’s too late:  the false images are burned into my consciousness, and it will be difficult, if not impossible, to replace them with the truth.

That’s the worst of historical fiction.  At its best, it provides a wonderful gateway into the fascinating field of history itself, breathing life into the dry and confusing swirl of names, dates, and places that normally overwhelms us in school.  But truth should never be sacrificed on the altar of art; if you want to tell the story your way, make up your own characters—don’t lie about real people and events.  The Teaching Company, one of my favorite educational organizations whose products I highly recommend, produced two complimentary lectures on fact and fiction in The Da Vinci Code; because we were specifically given permission to pass them on to our friends, I’m posting links to them below.  If TTC complains, I’ll take them down.  They’re each about half an hour in length.

Who can say why one book becomes a best-seller and another doesn't?  Who could have predicted the Harry Potter phenomenon?  (Certainly not his creator.)  No doubt there are many reasons for the wild success of Dan Brown's fiction, not the least of which is the intriguing stories.  Ross Douthat, writing in The New York Times considers another factor: Dan Brown’s ideas speak to the heart of American popular religion today.

It isn’t just that he knows how to keep the pages turning. That’s what it takes to sell a million novels. But if you want to sell a 100 million, you need to preach as well as entertain—to present a fiction that can be read as fact, and that promises to unlock the secrets of history, the universe and God along the way.

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.”

In the Brownian worldview, all religions...have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.

The polls that show more Americans abandoning organized religion don’t suggest a dramatic uptick in atheism: They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who’s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they’re making or how many times they’ve been married.

These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, he serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah—sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.

But the success of this message...can’t be separated from its dishonesty. The “secret” history of Christendom that unspools in “The Da Vinci Code” is false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling...nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—jealous, demanding, apocalyptic—may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.

The Teaching Company lectures

• Fact and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code:  Constantine and the Formation of the Christian Canon
• Fact and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code: Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene

• A chance to excel?  A school district in Colorado is eliminating both grades and grade levels in a radical attempt to help its students learn.  In theory, students assume more responsibility for their own learning, and take as long or as short a time as they need to advance from one level of the material to another.  This has enormous potential for good, though I’ll withhold judgement until I see whether or not it truly encourages students to learn more, faster, or if administrators will be content with results like a first grade classroom that took a year “to create—and refine—a classroom code of conduct…which includes items such as "don't hit people" and "we will not play with hair."
• Food for thought.  From Percival Blakeney Academy, a thoughtful look at homeschooling through an analogy with home cooking.

  [Wh]at about a family eating a meal planned by the mom but cooked by a housekeeper or cook? Or a takeout meal served at home on one's own dishes? Or a frozen lasagna baked in your own oven with bakery bread and your own salad? Or a make ahead meal prepped in a commercial dinners-to-go kitchen by the mom from their menu card and then cooked up weeks later at home? Which of these is home cooking and which isn't? Is there a difference between home cooking and eating at home (and does the difference matter)?

• The Great Homeschooling Divide (or one of them).  Here’s a mom who effectively voices the position of those who homeschool because they believe public/private schools aren’t good/affordable enough.  My gut reaction is, these people don’t GET homeschooling AT ALL.  But that’s unfair.  Finding no suitable alternative is a legitimate reason for homeschooling, as long as it’s understood that if every school were suddenly, magically perfect for everyone, many of us would still insist on home learning.  To borrow from the above-mentioned analogy, I don’t care how great the restaurant is, it will never replace the family dinner table.
• In case you thought your state's homeschooling requirements were onerous.  Educating Germany, a website in English—though some links are to articles in German—in support of educational freedom in Germany, in which homeschooling your children is likely to result in having them forcibly removed from your home.
• Legislation, sausage...and textbooks.  Did you ever thumb through your child’s textbook and lament, “Who writes these things, anyway?”  Turns out that’s a dangerous as wondering what went into the hot dog you just swallowed.  More so, maybe.  A former editor at a major textbook publisher tells what you don’t want to know.

  I got a hint of things to come when I overheard my boss lamenting, "The books are done and we still don't have an author! I must sign someone today!"

Many years ago, Porter attended a course taught by Bill Oncken, which added at least two phrases to his vocabulary:  "Don't be a monkey-picker-upper," and "Feed it, or shoot it, but don't let it starve to death."  The first advises against meddling in tasks (monkeys) that don't belong to you, especially after you've delegated them.  The second requires you to work on tasks, or scrub them, but never let them languish.

I have a backblog of over 100 items about which I want to write—and that's only the ones in my bookmark list, which are less important than those on my mental list.  Flush from success with whacking my e-mail inbox from over 200 down to less than 30, I feel Bill Oncken's ghost hovering over my shoulder and challenging me to take on the backblog.

If these were real monkeys, the ASPCA would have had me arrested months ago.  Some of them have already died of starvation; all I must do is dispose of the bodies.  Some intrigued me at one time, but I now don't find them worth the time and effort; these I will happily execute with a click of the delete key.  Some remain healthy enough to go into a "priority pen" until they can be tended to properly...after I extend Oncken's options a step further:  I intend to take most of these monkeys and turn them loose to forage on their own.

Thus I am reviving my "Casting the Net" series, and you will see, in the coming days, posts with several short comments and associated links.  I hope to put in enough detail to enable readers to decide quickly whether it's a subject worth pursuing or ignoring, but you won't get the detailed commentary and quotations I normally like to include.

It's either that, or declare blog bankruptcy.

You'd think the apprehension of a brazen sex offender would be an unqualified cause for rejoicing, but the Swiss government is already being excoriated for nabbing Roman Polanski and holding him for possible extradition to the U.S.

Elsewhere in Europe, however, reactions to Polanski's arrest were swift and damning. France's minister of culture, Frederic Mittterrand, says he is "stupefied" and is demanding Polanski's immediate release. The country's highest officials are already talking to Swiss and U.S. officials in hopes of ending the detention, it was reported Sunday.

The Swiss Directors Association is also condemning the act, calling the arrest as "a grotesque farce of justice and an immense cultural scandal." Directors and actors worldwide have begun circulating petitions calling for Polanski's release.

I don't care how many film awards the man has won, nothing excuses the rape of a 13-year-old girl.  I don't mean he can't be forgiven, and I don't mean it's not understandable that a man might be driven onto dark paths following the spectacular and much-publicized murder of his wife and son.  There are mitigating circumstances that his lawyer could justifiably raise at his trial.  But why should he be exempt from justice because he is an artist, and famous?  And why should France, a country I love and respect in many ways, and of which Polanski is a citizen, wish to harbor a child molester?  That seems much more worthy of Europe's condemnation than the molester's incarceration.

Too much politics lately.   Time for something lighter.

Here's what looks like a Japanese game show where the contestants must wake up, get ready for school, and be out the door in less than five minutes.  That's just a guess—the only words I understood after "three, two, one, go!" were "bento" and "sandwich."  I love it for the reminders of Japan, and for the really cool lunch the mother makes for her child to take to school.  Note the Japanese way of quick shirt-folding.  Can any of my Japanese-speaking readers (all one and a half of you) tell me what on earth she is doing with the shirt? And why that would be part of a normal morning routine?

I never did understand brushing one's teeth before eating, though.

Until recently, Cairo had a refuse-collection system unlike any you'll find in the United States, but it worked—and might even be commended for its efficiency and environmental responsibility.  Cairo's households enjoyed free or inexpensive garbage collection, right from the door, by the zabaleen ("garbage people"), an impoverished community of Egyptian Christians living in an area of Cairo known as "Garbage City."   The collectors and their families then sorted the trash, reusing, repairing, and recycling what they could, and feeding the organic waste to their livestock, primarily pigs.

Sanitation workers do not generally enjoy high status anywhere, and the zabaleen are despised not only for their jobs, but also for their poverty, their religion, and their willingness to keep pigs as livestock.  However, as even American cities discover during a protracted sanitation strike, we do not do well to devalue other human beings, least of all those responsible for keeping us from suffocating in trash. 

In a misguided effort to stave off a swine flu epidemic, Egypt ordered that all the pigs be killed, even though the disease is not, in fact, spread by pigs.  By the law of unintended consequences, Cairo's citizens are now more vulnerable to disease than before.  The zabaleen no longer collect the trash, and the government's effort to replace them with multinational corporations has largely failed.  The poorest of the poor have lost their only livelihood as well as their source of food, and Cairo's streets overflow with filth.

I don't write this to belittle Egypt or the Egyptian government, but as a warning.  Our country has a problem:  Our healthcare system, once arguably the best in the world, is falling apart.  (We can disagree over the causes, or even the definition, of "falling apart," but that's not the point here.)  There's no shortage of wrangling over what the intended consequences of a federally-imposed health plan might be, but whatever shakes out of that debate, I fervently hope that we will consider the possible unintended consequences before killing off the pigs.

(Sources used for this post included The New York Times and Wikipedia.)

Today marks our Constitution's 222^nd birthday, in honor of which I present another depressing civics quiz.  The questions are drawn from the test prospective U.S. citizens must pass, and if these standards applied to all, apparently 97% of Oklahoma's public high school students would be in danger of losing their citizenship.  I'm sure no one is under any illusions that the problem is limited to Oklahoma.  Here are the questions; for the answers, and what percentage of the students surveyed answered each question correctly, see the original article.

1. What is the supreme law of the land?   
2. What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?
3. What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?
4. How many justices are there on the Supreme Court?   
5. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
6. What ocean is on the east coast of the United States?
7. What are the two major political parties in the United States?
8. We elect a U.S. senator for how many years?
9. Who was the first President of the United States?
10. Who is in charge of the executive branch?

What I find interesting about this quiz is that, although I did get answer every question correctly, I would say few if any of my answers were due primarily to what I learned in school, but rather to merely living life.  When it comes to history and politics, I admit to being abysmally ignorant; I wangled my way out of Pennsylvania's required semester of American Government by taking an extra year of independent study physics.  (Don't ask me why they let me get away with that, but I trust the Statute of Limitations covers it somehow.)  I loathe politics in general and other than voting am shamefully neglectful of my civic duties.  Yet even with my notorious lack of observational skills, I couldn't avoid learning enough to pass the test.  Perhaps my additional years on this planet do count for something.

My Swiss family doesn't let me forget that "universal health care" does not necessarily mean a system like that in the United Kingdom.  For this I am grateful, because of the horror stories that keep emerging from that system, such as the cases of Charlotte Wyatt, Leslie Burke, Linda O'Boyle, Jayden Capewell, and too many others to write about.  It's worth looking at alternatives, and T. R. Reid's The Healing of America does just that.

I haven't read the book; my opinion is based on the New York Times review. There's much I don't agree with in the review, and I'm sure in the book also, but I like the gimmick:  Reid had shoulder problems that were interfering with his golf game, and he decided to present the case to 10 different doctors around the world.  The results?

• When Mr. Reid presents his shoulder to his own orthopedist in Colorado, the doctor is quick to recommend a shoulder replacement. It will cost his insurer tens of thousands of dollars (assuming it agrees to pay), with unknown co-payments for him. Risks include all those of major surgery; benefits include a restored golf swing.
• In France, a general practitioner sends him to an orthopedist (out-of-pocket consultation fee: $10) who recommends physical therapy, suggests an easily available second opinion if Mr. Reid really wants that surgery, and notes that the cost of the operation will be entirely covered by insurance (waiting time about a month).
• In Germany, the operation is his for the asking the following week, for an out-of-pocket cost of about $30.
• In London, a cheerful general practitioner tells Mr. Reid to learn to live with his shoulder. No joint replacement is done in Britain without disability far more serious than his to justify the expense and the risks, and if his golf game is that important, he can go private and foot the bill himself.
• In Japan, the foremost orthopedist in the country (waiting time for an appointment, less than a day) offers a range of possible treatments, from steroid injections to surgery, all covered by insurance. (“Think about it, and call me.”)
• In an Ayurvedic hospital in India, a regimen of meditation, rice, lentils and massage paid for entirely out of pocket, $42.85 per night, led to “obvious improvement in my frozen joint,” Mr. Reid writes, adding, “To this day, I don’t know why it happened.”

I don't know what happened in the other four countries, but this sample is sufficient warrant for questioning "best practices," wherever we are.  Maybe second opinions ought to be obtained in a second country.