Two church meetings this weekend, and both let out EARLY. I know, that sentence makes no sense the first time you read it.
I can't really explain it. It's not like any of the speakers refused to talk, or like one of them talked like the Micro Machines guy. They were just regular old meetings that took less time than they were supposed to.
Maybe things are starting to go my way now.
My daughter loves cartooning. She has become an expert on the life and work of Charles Schultz and--I realize my objectivity might be questioned, since I'm her father--she has an admirable ability to illustrate in the style of various cartoonists. She can draw a character like Schultz would, then draw the same character like Lauren Child would.
A few years back when we first started trying to get her to learn Spanish, she was under the influence of Fancy Nancy books and declared she'd rather learn French instead. So I got a teaching-kids-French video from the library and decided to introduce her to Tintin comics. She gave up on French, but read all the Tintin books.
In my efforts to self-medicate my problems away, I try to read a lot of Wodehouse books, and sometimes I get Archie comics from the library. I've recently begun reading the James Bond books of Ian Fleming, and I was thinking about reading the Tintin books, but the movie came out and every kid in the county was reading them.
Evidently the mania has died down some, because they are available on the shelves again. I started this week with what the binding bills as "Volume 1." However, in real life there's a different "Volume 1," one that contains two controversial Tintin adventures that are busy being buried in the past (life Song of the South, based on the Uncle Remus stories I started reading to our kids this week). One of the stories is Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. Its Wikipedia page describes its controversy thus:
Sociologist John Theobald argued that instead of providing factual material on the Soviet Union, Hergé depicted the Bolsheviks rigging elections, killing opponents and stealing the grain from the people, all of which was done in order to portray them in a negative light in the minds of his young readers.Rigging elections? Check. Killing opponents? Check. Stealing the grain from the people? Check. It seems to me like Hergé did a pretty good job getting the Bolsheviks right. Which is even more admirable considering at the time it was fairly common for fellow travelers to whitewash the Soviet's excesses (like Paul Robeson telling the press Stalin wasn't going to kill Itzik Pfeffer, who Stalin did kill). It seems Theobald is angry Hergé was right more than angry the Soviets were murderous thugs.
I was a four years old when I saw Khan put that thing in Chekov's ear, and it has creeped me out ever since. (Another movie scene that still frightens me: the assembly line castrator from The Ice Pirates.) A more recent example of something I wish I'd never seen is a picture I accidentally looked at two years ago of someone shot in the head with a .50 caliber machine gun.
These are images I can't get rid of. Similarly, I have worries that I can't get out of my brain about how I'll behave in the future. I think it's pretty obvious that my borderline-subsistence level of poverty will continue indefinitely, and that my family will be completely unprepared for the coming demise of society. And how did people behave in these situations in the past? Well, I believe it was in Norman Davies's White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War, 1919-20 that I read about a Jewish father pimping his daughter out to soldiers, and of course it's in Josephus' Wars of the Jews that we read of a mother eating her own baby. And I just really, really hope that when my starvation comes, I can take it like a man. I don't want to eat my kids.
In addition to ending the penny and nickel, bringing back the Ð and the Þ, correctly showing possession by a singular noun ending in S, and ending meetings on time, I forgot about another thing I want to get everyone to do: use the name Czechia.
What's Czechia? It's the preferred English-language name of the nation most people call the Czech Republic. So stop talking about your cousin's semester abroad in the Czech Republic; she was in Czechia.
Right before I awoke this morning, I was dreaming that I was watching a newly-released version of "Return of the Jedi" that had been rewritten in some key ways.
Han had gone missing on a mission, and so Leia and Luke were wondering if they should hook up, this coming AFTER they both knew they were siblings. Also, Jesus was a character, and the part was terribly written. In one scene some doors open and two guys come in with a guy behind them that you can't see. Luke and Leia are anxious to find out if it's Han. The two guys in front step aside, revealing Jesus, who throws his hands up next to his face and declares breathlessly, "Surprise!" Then he slouches down in a chair and starts eating grapes.
I hope my writing this blog post doesn't give George Lucas any ideas.
Why believe in consumption smoothing when retirement continues to exist? Isn't retirement just the lumping together of leisure at the end of a lifetime? Instead of working twenty hours per week until he dies, the typical worker works forty hours per week for half his life, then zero for the other half. Why move all your leisure to the end of your life, when your children are grown and gone? Probably because you're moving work to your prime physical years, when you can earn the most for your effort. And consumption smoothing has to do with expenditures that are evened out over such a lifetime of unequal earnings, but if leisure is itself something consumed, consumption smoothing is a theory based on a giant exception.
Reader loonysuse writes:
My husband has a celebrity crush on [Courteney Cox].Both my wife and I grew up with dads who had celebrity crushes (both for Sandra Bullock, actually), but my wife would never tollerate an openly-declared celebrity crush by me. In fact, she subconsciously sniffs out burgeoning celebrity crushes and snuffs them out. Any time I say an actress looks nice, my wife says, "I don't think so. I think she looks horrible." An interesting trait. I guess it's doing its job, since the number of celebrities I've run off with is still zero.
What signals a celebrity crush? I guess it would be anyone whose work you'd watch solely because he's in it. For instance, I don't think I'd normally want to watch "New Girl," but the presence of Zooey Deschanel makes it more appealing to me, because even if the show sucks, hey, 22 minutes of a pretty girl is better than nothing, right?
"Zooey Deschanel? Really? She looks horrible. Her bangs are terrible, and her voice sounds like a cancer survivor, and she dresses like a vintage hobo." Still doing its job.
Where would we be without a free press? For starters, we'd never know that Courteney Cox drank a bowl of ranch dressing.
Thank you, First Amendment!
WALMART CASHIER: Do you want your milk in a bag?
A RANDOM STRANGER: Yes, thanks. I have a bit of a walk ahead of me. I parked on the other side of the mall.
WC: You parked on the other side of the mall?!
ARS: Yeah.
WC: Then just take your cart.
ARS: No, that's all right.
WC: I'm serious. You should take your cart.
ARS: But then the cart is a half-mile away.
WC: Our guys go around and collect them.
ARS: But that will make the prices I pay at Walmart go up.
WC: No, our guys do it.
We were sitting around, not doing much, wondering how many stuffed dogs our family owned. So we gathered them up for a family picture.
Back Row (L to R): Barkers, Heart Doggy, Donut, M&M, UPS, Bubble, Grem, Snoopy, Santa Fe, Porkchop, Cuddles Jr., Finn, Lavender.
Front Row (L to R): Cuddles, Caramel, Mint, Fido, Sundae, Spot, Spunky, Curly, Chocolate, Candy, Cupcake.
The answer is 24.
I like to get library books for my kids. I try to get things from genres or subjects they might not explore. Usually they are happy with the results. I got James Marshall's Fox books for my son, and he loves them. I got Patricia Finney's I, Jack, and our kids never laughed more for a book.
Of course, there are misses. My daughter didn't really enjoy Bulu, African Wonder Dog, and I've written before about the terrible fight she's put up against some Greek mythology books. But for the most part, I do a pretty good job getting books they'd like that they don't yet know they'd like.
A few months ago, I came home from the library with a kid biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine. My daughter looked at it with a somewhat jaundiced eye. To allay her worries, I told her, "I have an adult biography of her I'm going to read soon. Maybe we should read them at the same time and we could discuss them." She thought that was a great idea, and thus was born our Daddy/Daughter Book Club.
Like most American book clubs, we nearly shut down for lack of interest. She returned the Eleanor book to the library because it was due before I had room in my reading schedule for my version. But we kept the idea, and have recently begun in earnest.
I'm reading Gilgamesh, by Stephen Mitchell, and she's reading Gilgamesh the Hero by Geraldine McCaughrean. I'm still not sure if she likes it or if it's more like an assignment for her. I have to remind her to do her reading, but she used math manipulatives to build a model of Uruk.
(Uruk is the city at the top of the picture. The triangular prism is Shamhat, hiding behind a bush next to a river, and across the river is Enkidu.)
Upcoming pairs in our book club series include:
We have a bit of an epic poetry theme going on for the next bit, but we'll eventually get out of it. (At the very least, we'll soon run out of epic poems to read.)
