Lift Up Your Hearts!

Dana Summers is one of my favorite cartoonists, partly because I like his cartoons and partly because he's a local boy.  Not a native, but few of us Floridians are.  He creates editorial cartoons, produces the strip The Middletons with Ralph Dunagin (also a Central Floridian and editorial cartoonist), and—the inspiration for this post—is the creator of the Bound & Gagged.  So, for Heather, who is tandem nursing and currently expecting...

Eternal Vigilance Is the Price of Liberty

Whether you attribute that quotation to Wendell Phillips, Thomas Jefferson, or Patrick Henry, it's the truth, and no less true when it comes to the rights of parents to educate their own children. (More)

Our spam filter usually works really, really well, but the stupid spammers are getting more and more clever, and there were two when I awoke this morning.  I deleted them, but those of you who use feedreaders will no doubt see them.  In case you were wondering, my posts were shanghaied—the spam came from Shanghai, China.  (Thanks, Feedjit!)

More disturbing, however, was that in the process of deleting them I discovered two legitimate comments that had been marked as spam.  I fixed that, but one was in made January and the other in February, so they don't show up in the Recent Comments list.  My apologies to Peter V and Stephan; click on their names to see the posts and their comments.

Last year when we went to Switzerland we tried several new Swiss dishes, but somehow missed raclette.  To make up for it, this trip we ate raclette four times, and lest you think we tired of it, we were inspired to purchase our own raclette set.

I call it our Swiss souvenir, though in point of fact I bought it from Amazon.com, in order to get one that didn't need a power and plug converter, and to save carrying it home.  Although this is a Swiss appliance (manufactured, alas, in China), it appears to have been super-sized for the American market:  the little pans are perhaps twice the size I was expecting.

Friday night we had our first raclette party, and though there are some modifications I would make next time, it went well.  I found raclette cheese at Whole Foods, but it was French raclette cheese, which may explain why it was softer and not quite as flavorful as that which we ate in Switzerland.  No matter; we spiced it up with the raclette spice and seasoned sea salt that did make the journey from Basel to Florida in my suitcase.

The cool thing about raclette is that, like fondue, it is a community cooking experience.  There's a bit of preparation involved, but the actual cooking is done by the guests as you all converse companionably around the dinner table.  Each person places a slice of cheese in his little pan and sets it under the grill to heat.  When the cheese is melted and bubbly, he  scrapes it out onto small, boiled potatoes (okay, so that part of the cooking is done in advance), seasons the mixture, and then digs in.  Accompaniments are traditionally pickled onions and cornichons.  (We substituted baby dills for the latter.)  One of our Swiss hosts cooked bulgoki on the top part of the grill, which was delicious.  I wasn't that ambitious, but did use the top of the grill to cook marinated green beans and mushrooms.

Dessert, of course, was Swiss chocolate.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver,  Steven L. Hopp, and Camille Kingsolver (HarperCollins, 2007)

When we were visiting Janet, a friend of hers was reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  The friend wasn’t totally happy with it, but it sounded intriguing enough that I borrowed it from the library when we returned. (More)

Happy Palm Sunday, one and all!  The choir sang for two services today, so we had double the fun.  Those of you who live up north are really missing a treat—real, whole palm branches, and all the better if you whacked yours off one of the palms in your backyard last night, as we did.  :)  We started the service outdoors, and then the whole congregation processed around the church singing All Glory, Laud and Honor (Episcopal Hymnal chorus/verse version), led by the rector with his guitar, and through some miracle and a little help from modern technology we were actually together and in the same key as the piano and organ when we entered the church.

The rest of the service was good, though not quite what I would have liked.  I prefer Palm Sunday to be Palm Sunday, but often, as it was today, it is celebrated as Palm/Passion Sunday, because so many people don't attend the midweek Holy Week services.  Doing that, you pass from the Triumphal Entry to the Resurrection without having passed through the Last Supper, Gesthemene, and the Crucifixion, which is a rather significant omission.  So we give Palm Sunday short shrift as a concession to the reality of modern living.  Sigh.  But it was good, anyway, and although the framework was the same in both services, they were different enough to keep the second from feeling like a repeat:  one was Rite I, the other Rite II, and there were even two different sermons.

I hope your experiences today were as good! 

One of the strangest and most difficult aspects of interacting with other people is discovering those areas which you consider to be so basic, so foundational, so obvious that you don't even think about them—until you run up against someone for whom they are not basic, and maybe not even important.

For me one of those givens is that you don't take food from a common dish and then put it back, and if your hands touch something on a common plate you take it, even if you didn't mean to.  Thus I find it particularly unnerving to watch at church potlucks, or <shudder> restaurant buffet bars, as folks violate those maxims repeatedly and egregiously, with no consideration for those behind them in line.  I'm not speaking particularly of children here; the adults are just as likely, sometimes more so, to be the offenders.

This raises two questions:  Is this really a matter of fundamental hygiene and common courtesy, or merely a particular, culture-specific custom?  I do hope not the latter, or I may have to stop eating away from home.

and

What are the habits that seem perfectly normal and natural to me, yet cause in others the stomach-turning reaction I experienced this morning?

Not until I was writing the date on a customs form did I remember this most numerically felicitous of days.

I found this joke on the official Pi Day website:

 (More)

Since—ta da!—we expect our fourth grandchild in October , and since choosing a baby's name has an aura of sacrament in the Daley household, and since others have already begun making positive suggestions, I hereby offer an article on baby names not to use.

Ancestry.com's Bad Baby Names on the Brain features the book, Bad Baby Names: The Worst True Names Parents Saddled Their Kids With—And Now You Can Too!  I don't know if the article is open to the public or requires a subscription; in case of the latter, I present just a few of the 2,000 or so names, culled from census data, that I would rather not use when speaking of our newest grandchild:  Title Page, Magenta Flamingo, Ghoul Nipple, Mann Pigg, Mary A. Belcher, Deuteronomy Temple, Hell Grimes, Lucifer Carmendo, Sandwich Green, Mayo Head, Tuna Fish, Fanny Pack, Major Nutt, Warren Peace.  Some people have no imagination; names like Octavio and Quintin clearly indicate birth order (though the one present-day Octavio I know is an only child; go figure), but the authors also found, as first names, "every number from one to twenty, by tens to a hundred, and thousand, million, billion, and infinity."  I know our Puritan ancestors were fond of naming their children after virtues (Love, Prudence, Patience, Charity, Endurance), and sometimes after circumstances associated with their lives (Fear, Wrestling), but who would name a child Lust, Wrath, Greed, Avarice, Envy, Sloth, Wrath, or Pride?

Take a moment and be thankful for your parents' wisdom.  Even if you've always hated your name, you now know it could have been much, much worse. 

I've known the Agony of Defeat often enough when it comes to the sport of e-mail balancing, but today I glory in a victory:  My Inbox is empty.

That's rare enough, but not enough to merit a blog post.  Although it seems to balloon to over 100 e-mails with unconscionable ease, and sad to say even 300 if I blink, I can usually whack it down to manageable size, even briefly zero, with a little sustained effort.  And some cheating. (More)

I had hoped to bring you video of tonight's launch of the space shuttle Endeavour.  Night launches are rare and beautiful.  However, although Endeavour had a successful launch, my view was completely obscured by a generally-overcast sky.  So my best view was the same as yours:  that provided by the television cameras.  Only I'll bet none of you were actually up at this hour watching.  I wouldn't have awakened just to see it on TV, but any launch is worth seeing, and even the chance of a night launch is worth arising for.

It was almost worth getting up to see another phenomenon:  twilight at 2 a.m.  The clouds were low and reflected back so much city light that I could have been excused for thinking I'd wandered into the Land of the Midnight Sun...were it not for the 62-degree temperature.

Two years ago, Andy F. alerted me to a National Review article by Rod Dreher entitled Crunchy Cons.  This was actually a reprint, the original having been published 'way back in 2002.  Andy suggested I might enjoy both the article and the opportunity to turn it into a blog post, and he was right.  It's not his fault it's taken me so long to write.

Dreher has a book of the same title that I haven't yet read, so I'll only be commenting on the article.  But the book's subtitle nearly says it all:  How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party). (More)

As Janet has mentioned (in her comment on My Lenten Disciplines), nothing sends me to sleep faster than staring at the television set:  broadcast show, DVD movie, or even a Teaching Company lecture that I'm particularly interested in seeing, it matters not.  There's something about the experience that triggers the sleep reflex in me.  Oddly, it's a particularly pleasant sleep, too—perhaps it hearkens back to childhood days of drifting off to the incomprehensible yet comforting sound of adult voices.  Thus I couldn't help noticing when two consecutive comics (Baldo and Hi and Lois) in my morning routine hit that nerve.

For those of you who don't read Heather and Jon's blog, I can't resist posting this view of life through the eyes of a four-year-old living in a geek house in this new century:

We happened to get two pictures in the mail, and Jonathan was holding them and looking at them. Then he piped up, "How do you get pictures to look like this?" Like what? This is a 21st century boy—he meant how do they get on paper.

It's another one of those things I lived without just fine, thank you, though now I wonder why I waited so long.  Blame an outdated sense of the cost of webcams; I never imagined I could buy one for under $100, much less under $30.  But thanks to Stephan, Janet, and Best Buy, I'm all set.

It has been great to be able to see Janet when I talk with her, as well as for her to be able to initiate phone calls.  Now I'm having double the fun (or five times as much, depending on how you calculate it) because another of my favorite families has joined the video Skype crowd.  I'm sure the excitement will wear off after a while, but for now I'm enjoying lots of smiles, hugs, I-love-yous, what's-happening-now, and best of all those dear faces and voices.  I love to get those quick little text messages that say things like "Hi! I finished my math and am now going to do writing," with plenty of music note and hugging teddy bear emoticons.

And this morning?  This morning I was the delighted one-person, long-distance audience for a cello concert!