Framed

Goodness

This kind of nobility helps sustain my faith in the basic goodness of people.

Who Knew?

Of course, I knew that now is the month of Maying when merry lads are playing and all that.  And I knew that in most of the world outside of the U.S. it is a day to commemorate labor.  But I didn't know this:

By the way, today is also Loyalty Day in the United States, declared by every U.S. president every year on this day since 1958 as an anticommunist counter to May Day.

I think I'd rather be with my bonnie lass upon the greeny grass.

Free Range Kids

A few weeks back, I posted some commentary about Lenore Skenazy, the New York City mom who let her nine year old son ride the subway alone.  I was not the only parent motivated to write in support of her and what seemed to me to be a perfectly reasonable act on her part.  So many have written to her that Skenazy has started a blog on the subject called Free Range Kids. 

I expect some people will be outraged by what they incorrectly perceive to be an insouciant attitude on her part toward children's safety.  I suppose some will be aghast that she *gasp!* put a picture of her son on her blog.  And I'm sure that some, like me, will be amused by the implicit comparison of our children to cattle and poultry. 

But as recent events in Texas have so painfully shown, children are often far more at risk when they are under the care of their parents and their parents' friends and living in small towns than they are when riding the subways of New York.  Ironically, the alleged rape and abuse of  the kids in that "church" compound in Texas was actually facilitated by their parents' refusal to let their kids interact with the outside world.    

Expelled

I haven't seen Expelled yet, and if I do it will either be by sneaking into the theatre or by buying a stupidity offset credit as suggested by PZ Myers.   I've been exploring the American Family Association website of late, however, and I note that the film is prominently advertised there.  Reason enough to stay away, I guess.

I've already seen the trailer, and what really bugged me was Ben Stein's likening of the theory of "intelligent design" to those of scientific rebels like Galileo. Mr. Stein, I knew Galileo.  Galileo was a friend of mine.  Mr.  Stein, you're no Galileo.

Messed Up

There's something messed up about a country that humiliates women who take money for sex in Washington and takes college field trips to brothels in Nevada.

Ladies

I found these lovely posters of Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter by clicking on a banner ad at The Drudge Report, which took me to the website of "The Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute."

They made me think of this observation by Fran Liebowitz:

Lest you get the impression that I am totally opposed to the word lady I rush to assure you that I think it is a perfectly nice word when used correctly. The word lady is used correctly only as follows:

A. To refer to certain female members of the English aristocracy.

B. In reference to girls who stand behind lingerie counters in department stores, but only when preceded by the word sales.

C. To alert a member of the gentle sex to the fact that she is no longer playing with a full deck. As in, "Lady, what are you–nuts or something?"

D. To differentiate between girls who put out and girls who don't. Girls who put out are tramps. Girls who don't are ladies.  This is, however, a rather archaic usage of the word.  Should one of you boys happen upon a girl who doesn't put out, do not jump to the conclusion that you have found a lady. What you have probably found is a lesbian.

With respect to Malkin and Coulter, I'm pretty sure (C) is the correct choice here.

Kids

We let our twin sons walk to and from school in the first grade. In the second grade we let them ride their bikes there.  In the summer before third grade, they went to sleep-away camp for the first time.  We let one son ride Amtrak alone from Ohio to Massachusetts at age 12, and then from Ohio all the way to California at 13.  We let our other son go to France as part of an exchange program to live with a French family we did not know when he was 14, and then bid him goodbye as he embarked on another exchange program to Egypt on his 15th birthday.

So I really can't relate to the controversy that has attended the publication of this story about a nine year old riding the New York subway alone.

And yet . . . I am aware that there are a number of people who think that letting your kid do such a thing is tantamount to child abuse.  I have a neighbor who wanted to install a huge mercury vapor streetlight in his fenced, suburban backyard because he feared his kids might be abducted there.  I watched as a mother of one of my sons' classmates fretted about sending her high school aged son to a school-sponsored Model United Nations conference in Kalamazoo because he had never been away from home before.  I know a high school senior who has never been allowed to walk or bike the one-mile distance over suburban 25 mph roads between her house and her school.  And my own brother thought my sending my son to Egypt (under the auspices of the U.S. State Department, no less) was positively reckless.

I blame the media for all this irrational fear.  Every time CNN touts runs a breathless story about this season's Missing Pretty White Girl® people come to assume that abductions and child molestation by strangers is a common occurrence.  It galvanizes viewers, which is of course what the media want--but it makes cowards of many of us in the process.  So bravo to those parents who risk being thought of as grossly derelict by allowing their kids to experience the big wide world.

Anticipation

I was born in 1960 in the last year of the Eisenhower administration.  There was a big scary country called the Soviet Union; there were cars called Oldsmobiles, Edsels, Ramblers, Plymouths and Studebakers; and there were small vinyl discs that would play one song if you put it on a record player at 45 rpm.

All those things are gone now.  Some clever prognosticators have been thinking about what else I might expect to see disappear during my remaining years on the planet.  Here's what they predict.

By the time I'm 50, repair shops where you can get things fixed or mended will be gone, as will payphones, ashtrays, and regulations on advertising.  I'll miss the payphones; I suspect that no matter how long I live, I will never get used to the idea of being electronically tethered to the rest of the world through a cell phone.  I'll mourn the loss of advertising regulation and see it as yet another example of the corporate takeover of American life, but I also suppose I'll be occasionally amused by the absurdity of advertisements (which I will apply directly to the head).  I couldn't care less about ashtrays.

At 55, I may no longer have access to a landline telephone, a fax machine or daily delivery of a newspaper.  I guess I'll get my communication and news through a computer, but that thingee called a mouse will be gone.  Oh yeah, receptionists and Russian democracy will also have gone the way of the dodo by then.  The only receptionists I'll miss will be the pretty ones, and as for Russian democracy, I guess you can't miss what you never had.

By the time I'm 60, there will be big changes.  Copyright, secretaries, DVDs, libraries, butchers free parking and Taiwan will be found only in history books.  I've been to Taiwan.  It's nice.  Too bad.  But the loss of libraries will hurt most.  No matter how well information is digitized, indexed and made searchable, nothing will ever replicate the experience of wandering in a library's stacks and being reminded of how much stuff I still don't know.

When I'm 65, both Paris Hilton and the Maldives will be gone. 

At my 70th birthday party, I will ramble on nostalgically about keys, free roads, trade unions, desktop computers, work-free weekends, radio, waistlines, spelling and the Great Barrier Reef.  I hope I can book a flight to Australia before then.

Upon hitting the three-quarter century mark, I will live in a world without Microsoft, Bangladesh, oil, coins, a middle class and Rocky movies.  That last one's hard to believe.  Oh yeah--if I haven't taken that vacation to the Aral Sea by then, I guess I should just forget about it.

When I'm 80 years old,   paper money, wallets, glaciers and the British royal family will live on only in my dimming memory.  I never quite understood why people make so much fuss about the Windsors, but I'm sure something even more diverting will occupy the tabloid imagination by then. Of course, there won't be any tabloids.

If I make it to 85, I will celebrate the extinction of neckties.  I never liked the damn things.

I'll probably start to slow down a bit by the time I'm 90.  I will no doubt have turned into a curmudgeonly old man, boring my grandchildren to death about things that just aren't around anymore, like newspapers, Google, and Cher.

95 will be a great age, I'm sure.  Both physical pain and ugliness will be things of the past.  I'll look and feel great.  There will be no country for old men, though, since nation states will have all but vanished.

And should I live to be 100, death itself will be extinct.  Yippee.

Daily

I sent an e-mail to my wife this morning: "Good news, honey.  I've finally found a church we can join."

It seems that Pastor Paul Wirth, who leads (I'm not making this up) the "Relevant Church" in Ybor City, Florida, has announced that in an attempt to address the area's high divorce rate, he has exhorted his married congregants to have sex every day for a month.  As the church states on its website:

People are not having enough sex. An epidemic of breakups prove the needs that lead to a great sex life are being overlooked. Dirty dishes, frumpy clothes, and a lack of authentic connections are killing the romance. A great sex life is a challenge and takes focus, determination, and planning. Some say it’s an unrealistic goal, but we disagree. We believe you can have a great sex life, in fact we believe God wants you to have a great sex life.

Well, praise Jeebus.

Leave it up to a church, though, to make something delightful seem like a chore.  That bit about "focus, determination and planning" sounds a little grim, like saving for retirement or remodeling your laundry room. 

I hope someone is keeping track of whether this idea actually works, because while it's easy to make fun of, who knows?  It just might work.

Set Phasers to Stupify

This is outrageous:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Astronauts aboard the International Space Station apparently have access to a gun.Russian Cosmonauts carry a gun on their Soyuz space capsule, which is attached to the space station.

If the Ruskies got a gun, then why don't we have phasers?