Lift Up Your Hearts!

We've lived in Florida more than 20 years and haven't yet mastered the art of gardening in this climate.  After a year or two of being defeated by nematodes, giant grasshoppers, and the need for daily attention, we pretty much gave up, until inspired to try again by Heather and Jon, who managed to get a few good things to grow even at their zero-yard city apartment. (More)

With all due respect for everyone's personal choices, and with free acknowledgement that in our diversity of educational options lies our strength, here's an excerpt from today's Frazz for a moment of homeschooling joy:

I did place an order on Amazon.com this morning...but somehow I doubt that's what brought down the system.  Whatever; it has been unavailable for a few hours now:  "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable."  Just another reminder that we are too dependent on infrastructure over which we have little or no control: water, sanitary services, electrical power, grocery deliveries, police protection, mail, phone, and Internet services.  Our ancestors had plenty of worries that we don't, but they dug their own wells, buried their own sewage, grew and/or hunted their own food, and protected their families with their own weapons, and lived among neighbors who could help out when needed.

Communities still share what they can during times of trouble, but for the most part, if we lose one or more of the basic services, so do our neighbors.

Thanks to John C. Wright for bringing to my attention Story Time by Andrew Klavan, in City Journal.

Read it. It may frustrate you, it may make you despair, it may inspire you; it will certainly break your heart.

Where there is no vision, the people perish. (Proverbs 29:18)

Let me write a nation's songs, and I care not who writes its laws. (various attributions)

As I said before, I'm not always curmudgeonly.  Here, for your morning's delight, is an inspiring story from the blog, "Et tu?"  What happens when an introverted mother of three children under four, whose only much-needed time for solitude comes when all three kids are napping simultaneously, finds this time interrupted again and again by neighborhood pranksters who repeatedly ring her doorbell and run?  No, this is not a sordid tale of mass murder; I said it was a happy story.

Read the What first, then the How (with further details). (More)

Here's a scary article for you:  Emily Gould's Exposed, from the May 25, 2008 New York Times Magazine.  Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur) would definitely appreciate this story of one woman's venture into a world of publishing unfettered by editorial oversight and subsequent free-fall into the Dark Side of Blogging.

I slumped to the kitchen floor and lay there in the fetal position. I didn’t want to exist. I had made my existence so public in such a strange way, and I wanted to take it all back, but in order to do that I’d have to destroy the entire Internet. If only I could! Google, YouTube, Gawker, Facebook, WordPress, all gone. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for an electromagnetic storm that would cancel out every mistake I’d ever made.

Another sad story about a naïve teenaged girl molested by someone she met on MySpace? Not at all. Just an imprudent adult woman seduced by the delights of seeing her thoughts in print.  Scary.

In a previous post, which was primarily about something else so I won't link to it here, I said:

Having experienced the higher-level coinage of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, and the European Union, I wish the United States had the sense to supplant (not just supplement) the dollar bill with dollar coins.  (And maybe the $2 and $5 bills while we're at it.)  But the mountain of paper used to print dollar bills comes from Massachusetts, where the Crane Paper Company has a stranglehold monopoly on the business.  The $1 bill has a lifespan of under two years and represents about 45% of the U. S. currency production, so it's no surprise that Massachusetts politicians don't like dollar coins.

I've mentioned the idea of getting rid of the lower-denomination bills in favor of coins, and while women generally don't seem to mind, I am likely to get a negative reaction from men.  I think this is because women's wallets almost always have a place for change, but men's wallets rarely do.  Porter carries his change in a small coin purse (something like this) which keeps the coins handy and protects his pocket.  But most men I've talked with tend to keep their change loose in their pockets and then dump them in a jar or on a dresser at the end of the day.  This system works because our coins are worth so little. (More)

My feminism tends to be of the on-again-off-again sort.  As a child—thanks to parents who encouraged me—I never considered any good character trait, activity, or occupation to be off limits because of my sex.  I didn't think much about feminism back then; I just acted, becoming the first girl to break the sex barrier in my high school's stage band, and the only or one of just a few girls in some of my science classes.  This sounds tame and silly from a 21st century perspective, but it was a big deal back then.

When Feminism became a movement, however, I soon had to distance myself from it, largely because it distanced itself from me.  I was (and am) all for equality of opportunity—as much as is physically possible; I don't ever want to see men getting pregnant—but when Feminism veered into being anti-man and pro-abortion, when it denigrated the role of homemaker and made the two-income family first common and then in some cases necessary, and when it invoked "political correctness" over the very words we speak and even started calling God "Our Mother," that's when I turned away.  Not from my beliefs, which hadn't changed, but from the movement and the label.  Women were now included, and succeeding, in nearly every possible opportunity; it was time, I believed, to give feminism a rest. (More)

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen (Doubleday, 2007)

It's past time to get this book back to the library; I actually finished it quite a while ago, but have been putting of this post because I haven't known quite what to say.  It's a complex book, probably an important one, but it covers so much territory I'll never do it justice.  The book is far more than a diatribe against amateurism, but I will skip over the sections on Internet gambling, Internet pornography, privacy concerns, and the demise of an iconic record store.  Except for Tower Records—it's hard to mourn the disappearance of something you never knew existed—I'm aware of the other issues and tend to agree that they are, indeed, serious problems.  Whether or not the proliferation of amateur voices is boon or bane is a bit more complex.  (More)

I like academia. I love college campuses, chem labs, and the smell of libraries with old books. Places and institutions dedicated to the advancement of knowledge, to study, investigation, and discussion. In an odd way, I feel more at home on a college campus than in most places. They feel exciting, challenging, and yet as comfortable as a pair of well-worn shoes. That my own college experience differed significantly from my theoretical ideal did not do much to diminish my belief that a college professor had a near-perfect job in a near-perfect setting.

Pausing to let my professor friends recover from their choking fits.... (More)

I recently finished reading a book called The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom.  That's not what this post is about, because while the author, David Kupelian, does have some important insights into how our culture got to be the way it is, his tone is too strident to allow me to recommend the book with particular enthusiasm.  However, he cites his sources well, and thus I am able to give full credit for what is perhaps my favorite part of the whole book, the following great quote from G. K. Chesterton.

Sex is an instinct that produces an institution; and it is positive and not negative, noble and not base, creative and not destructive, because it produces this institution.  That institution is the family; a small state or commonwealth which has hundreds of aspects, when it is once started, that are not sexual at all.  It includes worship, justice, festivity, decoration, instruction, comradeship, repose.  Sex is the gate of that house; and romantic and imaginative people naturally like looking through a gateway.  But the house is very much larger than the gate.  There are indeed a certain number of people who like to hang about the gate and never get any further.

— G.K.'s Weekly, January 29, 1928

It is a great tragedy of our day that we have been all but convinced that the gate is all there is, that the house and fields beyond it are, and have always been, no more than a romantic, imaginative dream—at best.  Perhaps we need a Puddleglum to stamp on the enchanted fire and clear our heads.

Perhaps the strident tone of Kupelian's book is, after all, just the un-enchanting smell of burnt marsh-wiggle.

Don't take my word for it; read about Our Big News in Janet's own words (and pictures).  For the really curious, you can find a link to Stephan's blog there.  Hmmm, her webmaster is going to have to make a change, and move thduggie up from Friends to Family on the sidebar.  And while I'm at it, will IrishOboe change to SwissHarp, or maybe SwissFiddle?  Stay tuned!

In the meantime, I'm contemplating the complexities of having an international family. (More)

I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me.  It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.

— Frodo to Sam, at the end of The Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien)

Thanks to Janet reminding me (she'll have to write her own post as to why), I was able to watch NASA TV live coverage of the landing of Phoenix on Mars (and at a much more reasonable hour than she did).  For obvious reasons (the view out our front door) I pay more attention to Shuttle launches than other NASA activity these days, but watching this excitement took me 'way back.  Back to 1969 and the Apollo 11 moon landing...stories from my cousin who worked in the space program...some of the first pictures of the Earth from the moon that were treasured trophies from a Boy Scout (Explorer) program I participated in with General Electric...and even 'way, 'way back to standing on the porch with my father, watching Echo I pass overhead.

Thanks for the memories, Janet and Stephan!

I actually enjoy airplane food, perhaps because I don't eat it all that often.  It's part of the adventure of flying, and something to break up the monotony of a long flight.  But maybe next time I should wave away the attendent with the tempting tray.  Recent research has shown that fasting for about 16 hours can reset the circadian rhythms and speed adjustment to a new time zone.

At least if you're a mouse.