Small town life . . . enough to make a shy, bald Buddhist reflect and plan a mass murder
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Ask Questions for God
at the Blue Pyramid.
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He shoots, he scores
Happy Halloween
from Grethe, the queen of all things small (this is a squash that's about 6 inches tall that she carved).
Pumpkins
We got our pumpkins yesterday and had fun in a corn maze. We thought we knew where we were when we were inside the maze, but when we came out we realized we were all mixed up.
Cooking today
From Null Hypothesis. Do too many cooks spoil the broth? An experiment.
"The totals for the broth scores are seen in Table 1. Broth with one cook was very salty. With two cooks, there was a tasty broth, but a bland aftertaste. With four cooks, there was a superb taste, with a very tangy, vegetable-rich soup that was well seasoned. Eight cooks created a tasty soup, but with a very strong aftertaste, and finally, 16 cooks made an 'awful' soup, over-seasoned, thick, lumpy and over-cooked, and one chef sustained whisk wounds."
Small town life
Voting here is different.
Monitoring the vote
Become a Mystery Voter (anywhere) or a Votewatcher (in battleground states).
To be silenced or not
Debi Smith, a homeschooling mom from Oregon, writes about being refused tickets to see Bush because she is not a Bush supporter and her subsequent participation in the peaceful Bush UnWelcome rally in Jacksonville that was overrun by riot police.
"Suddenly, an officer within the line of riot cops ordered the crowd to move back two blocks to 5th Street. They allowed about four seconds for this to sink in and then started pushing us back by moving forward in a line. The sidewalks could not contain the sudden movement of people, and subsequently the streets became crowded and chaotic. If their desire for us to move had been communicated earlier, or if that portion of the street had been blocked off to begin with, people probably would have, in general, respected it, even though we were in our legal right to be in the vicinity. But instead, the authorities in charge chose to create confusion and conflict instead of wisely diffusing it ahead of time. And the result was an unnecessary melee: sudden gunfire; people running, falling, being shot with pepper bullets; children upset by the gunfire, and coughing from the pepper; women who were carrying their children being grabbed and pushed violently; people daring to ask questions being forcibly pushed and intimidated. It must be reiterated, this event was organized to be peaceful, non-violent, and family friendly. And, even though there was a mixed demographic on the street, the event remained non-violent and relatively peaceful…except for the actions of a few of the less than restrained riot cops. Riot cops, who were, we have to remind ourselves, taking orders from a higher command."
and later
"Yes, I blame this neo-oppression on the Bush cabal, I blame the media, but I also blame myself, and everyone else like myself, who just hasn’t had the time, or taken the time rather, to pay sufficient attention. To question. To reason. We were born into very fortunate circumstances—our country having fought long and hard for the opportunity to be self-determining, democratic, and free. Yet we have mostly squandered that gift by our inattention and often slobbering focus on all things material. It’s we the people who’ve handed over our power to the media, to corporations, to the government. We’re the ones who left the store, leaving the door wide open and the keys in the till."
What I want to know is
was every rest stop in Oregon closed when I was there? I could see that there were plastic garbage bags in the cans and the coke machines were plugged in at ones I passed, but there were metal concrete barriers blocking the entrances. Is there a vast bathroom conspiracy? Maybe it's related to the people who put up all those "US out of the UN" signs along I-5.
I went there and back
just to see how far it was. We're leaving for what my father calls "the land of the blue tarps." He should know, he used to live there. We do have a blue tarp and a roll of duct tape in the trunk.
And if you don't know Debris, written by the late more-than-great Ronnie Lane, you really should.
Before I go
I don't have time to read it all, but the first page looks sadly true.
''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .
''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''
Road trip
Going on a trip to Oregon. I will torture myself, er work out, with some of this. Except for the pull-ups. I highly recommend this awesome exercise, the boot-strapper. Oh, it looks simple enough. But just try it for yourself.
Band names I like
Dogs die in hot cars. Handsome boy modeling school.
Halloween
or Satan's Birthday, depending on how you look at it. I must prepare one of the masks for myself.
They have left the building
Elvis and Belushi impersonators don't mix well with drinking, high-speed chases, and the VFW.
'The men later went to the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Crystal and police were called at 10:55 p.m. with a report that "Elvis" had collapsed outside. He was twitching as though he were having a convulsion, Oyaas said.
When he got up, he said, "Viva Las Vegas!" and started singing Elvis show tunes, Oyaas said. When he was released from the hospital and was sobering up at the Crystal jail, he sang, "Jailhouse Rock," according to Oyaas.'
Dead thoughts
"Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life."
Brooke Shields, during an interview to become spokesperson for a federal anti-smoking campaign.
And now that I'm looking at Project Gutenberg
I see that Moby Dick is one of the top 100 books in the catalog. Which reminds me of that damned Fountainhead I'm trying to read. I did get a few more pages in today when I was waiting for the neighbor I took to her eye doc appointment. So why does it remind me of the Fountainhead? Because when I was in school there was this guy who lived down the hall who had to read Moby Dick for an English class and absolutely hated the book. He finally pledged that he would not leave his bed until he finished, not even to go to the bathroom. He didn't succeed. That's how I'm feeling about my chances of finishing.
For the nitpickers
If you're bored you can proofread something for Project Gutenberg.
Annoying customers
I can't say "of the day" because they are frequent customers. Women who want a straw to drink their coffee. "Can I have a straw for that?"
Funny customer of the day
A tourist (from Europe) ordered a cup of "that brown water you Americans call coffee."
Not so small town life
Bumpersticker I saw in Eureka:
Jesus was a liberal.
Gatto
"Compelling evidence exists that we are meant to be unique individuals who live in harmony with other unique individuals: think of the harmony of snow falling, but the brilliant oneness of each snowflake; think of the harmony of beach sand, but the brilliant oneness of each sandgrain; think of the harmony of a field of grass, but the brilliant oneness of each blade in shape, and even hue. Are we that way, too? Consider your own fingerprint, unlike any on earth, your unique signature – can you think of a reason for evolution to produce such a signal unless the organism is one of a kind? And if you think of God instead of evolution it will be even easier to deduce a purpose in all of this. If people are inherently sortable into a few categories – as industrial civilization makes them out to be – then the fingerprint is a crazy detail, it only makes sense as a guide to the individual experiment that each of us is."
No, we're not all the same. More here on how he bought some land sight unseen and what happened.
The Fountainhead
I am reading this book now. I am finally more than 50 pages into it, after 2 earlier attempts. How can I describe the deadly boring prose? The card-board cut-out characters, either the "heroes" or the "villains?" The predictability of it all? I probably can't, but here I am at page 143:
'A column entitled "Observations and Meditations" by Alvah Scarret appeared daily on the front page of the New York Banner. It was a trusted guide, a source of inspiration and a molder of public philosophy in small towns throughout the country. In this column there had appeared, years ago, the famous statment: "We'd all be a heap sight better off if we'd forget the highfalutin notions of our fancy civilization and mind more what the savages knew before us: to honor our mother." Alvah Scarret was a bachelor, had made two million dollars, played golf expertly and was editor-in-chief of the Wynand papers.'
Open to just about any page, it's pretty much the same.
Madame La Cheney (private citizen) strikes again
"The Education Department this summer destroyed more than 300,000 copies of a booklet designed for parents to help their children learn history after the office of Vice President Dick Cheney's wife complained that it mentioned the National Standards for History, which she has long opposed."
From the LA Times.
Unsurprisingly, the Times wasn't able to interview the staffers involved in the incident, but did run this quote from a retired UCLA History prof.
"That's a pretty god-awful example of spending the taxpayers' money and also a pretty god-awful example of interference — intellectual interference," Nash said. "If that's not Big Brother or Big Sister, I don't know what is."
The booklet only referenced the National Standards for History, and that was enough to set her off. The booklet also refers to Cheney as ' "noted author and wife of the vice president." Two books on history that she wrote for children are mentioned in the booklet.'
I suppose it's apparent why the booklet didn't mention her lesbian erotica?
Fabio speaks
"The soundtrack to 'Indecent Exposure' is a romantic mix of music that I know most women love to hear, so I never keep it far from me when women are nearby."
Tons of other quite funny words of wisdom from models, including gems like this:
"I wish my butt did not go sideways, but I guess I have to face that." -- Christie Brinkley
How can you face your sideways butt? Flexibility must be key.
Small town life
Bumpersticker I saw today:
My dachshund can beat up your honor roll student.
Holy Texan
Pastor gets probation for 2 years after he bites a cop's finger.
RICHMOND, Texas (AP) -- A minister convicted of biting a police officer during a traffic stop avoided two years in prison after a judge gave him 10 years of probation and ordered him to enroll in an anger management program.
And this doesn't seem like one of those "might have been justified" things. The pastor's license plates were expired.
New Alfie Kohn
"That so few children seem to take pleasure from what they’re doing on a given weekday morning, that the default emotional state in classrooms seems to alternate between anxiety and boredom, doesn’t even alarm us. Worse: Happiness in schools is something for which educators may feel obliged to apologize when it does make an appearance. After all, they wouldn’t want to be accused of offering a "feel-good" education.
Not much chance of that, though. Children these days are likely to be on the receiving end of a curriculum specified by powerful and distant others. Those in poor neighborhoods can count on having to sit through prefabricated lessons, often minutely scripted, whose purpose is not to promote thinking, much less the joy of discovery, but to raise test scores.
Students tend to be regarded not as subjects but as objects, not as learners but as workers. By repeating words like "accountability" and "results" often enough, the people who devise and impose this approach to schooling evidently succeed in rationalizing what amounts to a policy of feel-bad education."
The joy of discovery can be a good reason to keep on living.
I'm warning you now
Don't look at this if you're swallowing hot coffee right now.
Overeducated
Nigella Lawson weighs in on higher ed, multiculturalism, and elitism.
"I should start with the premise that I don't think a degree makes anyone a better person. I don't even think it makes you a cleverer person. Intelligence is not measured by exam or diploma, although it's certainly true - or was - that a university course would tend to offer more to those who are, even remotely, academically inclined.
But the way the education system is going, it would be more honest simply to raise the school leaving age to 22. University is just something you do when you've finished your A-levels, no matter how badly you might have done or how bored you've been doing them.
To suggest to those who are not cut out for even rudimentary academic life that university might not be the best place for them, is to consign them to non-person status."
More presidential goodness
The house of God
is a place W. doesn't frequent on a regular basis. Is he a submarine Christian, surfacing only for special occasions?
"What most--including many of the president's fiercest supporters--don't know, however, is that Bush doesn't go to church. Sure, when he weekends at Camp David, Bush spends Sunday morning with the compound's chaplain. And, every so often, he drops in on the little Episcopal church across Lafayette Park from the White House. But the president who has staked much of his domestic agenda on the argument that religious communities hold the key to solving social problems doesn't belong to a congregation."
Spam
My son's (he's 15) spam today included "free lingerie--for good girls only."
Fresh-baked Cake
Time for Pressure Chief.
'McCrea first hit on the balance in the early '90s when he conceived the group in his hometown of Sacramento, Calif.
He hated the prevailing grunge sound of the day, which he refers to as "that dumb wide-load sound that masquerades as rock. I didn't buy its low self-esteem. If you hate yourself so much, why are you on a stage turning your amp up to 11?"
McCrea made Cake's sound consciously dinky in reaction. "There's a cheap, crappy sound to some of the tones we use," he says, "right next to things that are profound."'
Not-so-small town life
We were over in the medium-sized town of Fortuna at a store. There were two girls near us, probably 12 and 7 or so. The younger one stepped up onto a display of lipsticks and the rack rocked back and forth. The older girl told her to watch it because it looked like it was going to fall. The younger one said, "If it did, I'd just sue the store."
Autodidact
A self-taught sculptor from Brazil, Yure Berkeley Lima de Alencar, is creating a dinosaur sculpture for the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, N.Y.
"In addition to commissions, Alencar works on his own projects, restores sculptures and helps other artists with various steps in the sculpting process, such as constructing armatures, making molds and casting.
The father of three daughters from a previous marriage, Alencar also works with local children. Last year, he led a summer camp in which he taught the young participants to create their own bronze sculptures from start to finish.
As a boy, Alencar said he sometimes got in trouble in school for drawing during class. He did his first sculptures — of dinosaurs — in the first grade, and he also created a model of the neighborhood block that contained his school."
Cure
for insomnia. Just read Wikipedia.
"The control paradox states that a live or conscious man will also be controlled either by others, or by himself, so the idea of control will be operating on him. Certainly, medically speaking, man needs a certain number of control systems to keep working, but this is more a philosophy about whether or not we are completely free even if we possess free will.
It could easily be rephrased: No man is free from freedom, because even when he is free from the control of others, he is under his own control."
