Happy Independence Day

My younger daughter sitting on a cannon at Fort Ticonderoga, where we beat the British in 1775.

Rev Wright uses bad grammar

even though he knows better.

"White folk done took this country," Wright said. "You're in their home, and they're gonna let you know it."

He had a good education.  His father was a clergyman and his mother a school principal.  I bet they didn't talk like that around the family dinner table.

I knew it couldn't just be me!

Dell had computer problems, and I had Dell problems.

In the past five years, we have had serious problems with two Dell computers.  The latest one, after a year of use during which it never worked properly, had a defective motherboard.

I figured it was something to do with me, considering how little I know about computers.  The only thing I actually know about them is:  I need one!

You know how, when you take your car in for service, the mechanic tells you the flugelhorn is defective and the rubella needs a new part, and you try to nod sagely like you understand what he is talking about?  I have the same lack of understanding the most elementary facts about computers.  However, most cars work.

Now imagine you purchase a new car, which is fine but has four perfectly square wheels.  But you are told it's fine.  It's supposed to work that way.

Makes you crazy, doesn't it?  The hell with you, Dell, including all the supercilious Indian male-supremicist outsource guys with ununderstandable accents.  Bad cess to you!

Mother and Dad, High Street, Columbus, OH

This is the earliest picture I have of my parents together. He is wearing spats. Yes, spats! On a warm summer day in the Midwest, a man is wearing a jacket and tie and a woman is wearing a light summer dress. Neither is wearing a T-shirt which says FCUK, or for that matter, anything else. And yet they are smiling!

You go, U S ambassador to Australia!

How did this guy ever get appointed?

Tracking a missing library book

or paying a "restocking" fee.

I, too, use more than one library, and sometimes return books to the wrong library.  The fees can really mount up.

When I worked in the library I always told the pages, who were temporary minimum wage high school students, that they were the most important employees in the library.  Pages put the books away, and a book put away in the wrong place is a book which for all practical purposes has ceased to exist.  Inter-library cooperation with shared databases has helped the situation greatly, but does not benefit the person who needs the only copy today, for instance for a report due tomorrow.  This happens more often than you would think.  For instance, with summer reading assignments.  The week before school begins in the fall there is not a copy of any of the books on the list to be found within 10 miles, either in libraries or in bookstores.  The kids who think ahead take them out of the library on the first day of vacation and then take the book on vacation with them, generally leaving it somewhere.  It falls into the lake, is buried in the sand of the beach, or left in a hotel room.

Meanwhile, libraries get tough on people who don't play the library game.  The library game has two moves:  1) check out a book or books; 2) return it or them in a timely fashion.  I have mastered move 1, but have trouble with move 2.   A large part of my motive for using the library is to avoid having any more books take up permanent residence in my home, which is groaning with books.  They have overflowed their shelves, filled the nightstands, piled up on tables and counters, moved into boxes stowed in strategic locations, and now reside in piles on the floor, their last redoubt.  So why don't I return library books in good time, like a decent citizen?

There are root causes for this, as for other forms of crime.  I used to work in libraries, you see, and everyone who works in libraries has at least 50 outstanding overdue books.  That's because we are fine-exempt.  If a book really gets lost at home--I'm talking years, here--we insiders remove it from the database, eventually.

But we get tough on ordinary citizens who don't return their books, and charge them restocking fees.  Someone has to obey the laws, you know.

However, pages being temporary and poorly paid high school students, they sometimes misplace books, so I would check the shelves if someone were going to charge me $100 for a lost book.

Death of a food critic

Egon Ronay, 94

My favorite quote:

He inspected airports, motorway service stations, hospitals, schools and park cafés on behalf of the ordinary public, for whom his round blue seals of approval, stuck on a window or a door, soon became a sine qua non of dining. He found Lyons Corner Houses very acceptable. To check transport cafés he would even don an anorak and cap, while the Rolls was parked around the corner. 

So how's all that pork working out for you, West Virginia?

I've always had a great fondness for West Virginia. A large percentage of mother's clients came from there to work in Columbus's factories, and while in Columbus, they often got in trouble, with the law, with their wives, and with other West Virginians in rundown bars, which we called beer joints. That's where mother came in. My uncle claimed that there was a tunnel leading from West Virginia straight to mother's office.

You'd never want to meet nicer, more open-hearted people. Though poor, they would give you the shirts off their backs. And they adored mother. Another point in favor of the state was that, when Virginia seceded from the Union, West Virginia seceded from Virginia. Take that, you aristocratic slave-holding planters!

Byrd was well known for bringing home the pork. Does that mean West Virginia was prosperous? Did he leave the place better than he found it?

Hell no!

West Virginia's relative median household income is 51! among the 50 states. I don't know whether this proves that Obama was onto something when he talked about visiting all 57 states.

It's tied with Arkansas at #5 among the states for poverty.

So all West Virginia has to show for his efforts is a bunch of federal buildings, highways, etc, named after the old dodderer, and the occasional statue of him.

Colonial Soldiers were better shots than the British

despite rumors to the contrary.

Exquisite ignorance

Your public education dollars at work.

Someone please buy this young lady a map of the United States.

Mother as a young woman

 

Note the stylish shoes. She was vain about her slim legs and tiny feet.

Mother and the camera

 

I had lunch with a cousin the other day, someone who had been very fond of mother, and she inquired whether I had a picture of mother. I have very few, and this is for a reason: she immediately tore up any and all pictures of her. I have a picture of a little girl with one arm--the little girl was me and the other arm was around mother and subsequently sacrificed to the Gods of Not Getting Your Picture Taken Looking Fat.

She also refused to be seen in a bathing suit, and then to try on a bathing suit, and then to go swimming altogether, although she loved to swim and was good at it. Thus she denied herself a pleasure which would have been good for her health and maybe helped her to slim down.

I am beginning to see this as a manifestation of family wackiness. The aforementioned cousin had a salad without dressing and four cups of coffee for lunch. Another cousin regularly eats a can of sardines for lunch. A third cousin met me for breakfast and had an English muffin without anything on it. I would as soon eat the box the muffin came in.

Being fat is a sin for which you must be punished by going hungry. That seems to be the reasoning. I have another theory. I think weight gain for some people is like the gusher in the gulf. Do nothing, and the oil will continue to spill and the fat accumulate. Heroic measures are required to contain the oil and curb the appetite.

I used to believe that Americans were physically slothful and that if they got up off their butts the butts would get up off them. My visit to Dublin cured me of that belief. Our bed and breakfast alndlady, Mrs. Marr, ran up and down the steps of her establishment all day every day, making beds, bring things up, taking things down, dusting, cleaning, cooking, laundering, yet she was a large woman, at least 180 lbs at 5'6. If exercise didn't keep her slim, it wouldn't work for me.

Young man in picture frame

This young man was hidden in a picture frame I bought at the same tag sale where I bought the photo of the young girl. I can't date his picture as accurately as I can hers because men's clothing styles don't change like women's do, so his picture could have been taken any time.

I fancy the two have a family resemblance, but that may just be my overactive imagination. Anyway, his picture was turned face inward within a picture frame and I only discovered it when I took the picture out to insert one of my paintings.

I must make a mental note to leave all my photographs to a library if I don't want strangers buying them or worse, discarding them.

The war against beige

There was a newspaper article in the local paper about a stylish young lady. I was unable to download it, due to some mysterious software weirdness.   Unfortunately, I only wanted to use her photo as a horrible example.  She was dressed completely in beige.  There should be rules about this.  Beige suits hardly any woman.  Particularly if you have beige hair and skin and pale eyes, you look like you are trying to disappear into the walls.  It's not that becoming to black women either, although they can get away with it better.  But why try?  Beige is boring, at best.  Even navy blue is better than beige.

Let's stamp out beige clothing.

Another old picture--mother with a friend

Old picture of young girl

 

I bought this picture at a tag sale; I have no idea who she is, but judging by her hairstyle she was photographed in the Roaring Twenties, when girls first started "bobbing" their hair. I think she's lovely, particularly her hands. It's sad that no-one from the family wanted her picture.

A tag sale of somebody's belongings tells you a lot about what their lives were like. This family reminds me of my Uncle Doc and his wife--the same sterling silver, linens, petit point, and crochet. You just know that Mrs. Tag had her women friends over for tea and cards. She probably served little cucumber sandwiches and tarts filled with cream, along with tea poured from her sterling silver teapot into her bone china cups. Her silver sugar tongs were used to serve lumps of sugar. The fingertip towels in the guest bathroom were made of real linen stiffened with starch. Her husband was probably a doctor, and they attended dances at the country club where they played golf with their friends.

My aunt and uncle were the Jewish equivalent of this Roman Catholic couple. They just went to different country clubs and celebrated different holidays. My aunt actually had a room--a small one--filled with shelves to house her sterling silver belongings. Of course the household help polished the silver.

Nowadays these sterling silver teasets are in thrift shops and antique stores. The good ones are valuable, because of the workmanship and the value of the silver, but silver-plated ones are available cheaply at the Good Will. No one wants to polish this stuff any more. The women who would have been hostesses are doctors themselves nowadays, or lawyers. Or they work in "development." All my female cousins work in "development" nowadays and instead of hosting teas with rich buttery desserts they are spending their few spare hours working out.

Here's me

in a building that had just recently been built,at Ohio University, in Athens Ohio, which they are now tearing down because it's falling apart! True!

No-one has quite succeeded in tearing me down yet, though.

Is anyone surprised that Tony Hayward was "replaced"?

Anyone?

BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg said that Hayward would step aside from daily involvement in BP's oil spill response.

Let's admit that Hayward is as guilty as Osama bin Laden and works for a big, evil, capitalist foreign entity.  he has been told that he is liable to criminal prosecution.  Why must he be publicly shamed?  What purpose is served by putting him through an auto de fe on the floor of Congress?  Not the purpose of getting at the truth.  It's to allow Congressmen to swan around, get their self-righteous on, and get their ugly faces on camera.

It's humiliating to me, as an American, to have these disgusting public servants posing and preening for all the world like the prosecutors of Law and Order.  I have no doubt they are all crooks.  Obama too, the big tough Chicago bully.  His behavior is nauseating and not befitting the dignity of his office.

Peter DeVries once said that he had been taught in church to believe in the omnipotence and omniscience of God and the total depravity of man, and he still believed in one of those things.  Me too.

True...

but politically disastrous.

Today is the anniversary...

of the Battle of Bunker Hill: June 17, 1775.

The United States government takes over a foreign company

Why not?

Having cut their teeth on American automobile manufacturing and banks, whet their appetites taking over health care, the Chicago Gang found it the work of a moment to blackmail BP (which Obama persists in calling British Petroleum even though they have changed their corporate name)into setting up a trust fund. It used to be called extortion but is now known as The Chicago Way.

If only they could be as tough as that with Iran!

The British Constitution

in a nutshell.

I've always loved Great Britain, the land of Shakespeare, P G Wodehouse, Winston Churchill, Jane Austen, and--don't laugh--Mary Poppins.  As a child, I loved to read books about English children who had crumpets for tea and celebrated Guy Fawkes Day.  I have no trouble adopting the Pilgrims and Puritans as ancestors even though they didn't grow up in Pinsk.

The United States would never have developed as it did and become the country it now is without its British heritage. Our Constitution grew out of theirs.

Since Mr Charm has a PhD in British History, I knew  the British had a constitution, albeit an "unwritten" one.   But this post clarifies the British Constitution and I found it interesting.  I also liked the idea that the oak tree, the national tree, symbolizes the British Constitution.

Read the whole thing. It's admirably clear.

Getting the shingles vaccine

My father had shingles recently.  It was very painful, so he recommended that I (and everyone else who had had chicken pox) get the vaccine.

I'm not going to recount the hassles that I underwent, except to mention that I got advice from both my private insurer and Medicare that was contradictory.  I finally got the shot, which I paid for myself and then struggled to get reimbursed.  This was two years ago, and provided a foretaste of what Obamacare has in store for us.

Now I am trying to get an infusion of Reclast, having found out that women with osteoporosis in their hips, which I have, should either get preventive treatment or start picking out something becoming to wear at the funeral.  Because, apparently if you break your hip all that remains is to choose a casket and line up pallbearers.

The local hospital offers these infusions, but refuses to administer them except under a maze of stringent rules and restrictions which make it almost impossible to actually get the drug.

Medicare can't decide whether Part B or Part D covers these infusions, and doesn't care, preferring that patients break their hips and die so they can streamline their patient lists.

I would like to fight this monster, but it has so many tentacles that I don't know which one to tackle first.

Welcome to reality

The job situation hits new graduates hard.

Blue vase

 

The fat kid in the family

If you lined me and my cousins up in a row, we would look like this:  1110111.  The round shape in the middle is me.  at 5'2" and 116 lbs, I was the fat kid.  Since that day, I have expanded my franchise, so to speak.

When I was a kid, I looked like a craft project made of pipe cleaners.  Then at the age of about 11, just when you need a boost, I developed a little round stomach.  I could guess what was in store for me by looking at mother and bubbe, both of whom were rotund and getting rotunder.  I  believed and did not want to believe that rotundity was inevitable. Everyone in the family helpfully suggested that I would look really great if I lost (choose one:) 5/10/15 lbs.

I fought the good fight for a long time.  Diet, exercise.  Exercise, diet.  No fat, no carbs, walk fast, walk slow, lift heavy/light weights two/four days a week.  Still, the numbers on the scale kept inching up.

I am not alone.  Everyone I know is on a diet.  And all these dieters are agreed that despite really cutting calories they are really not hungry.


For me, however, I find that when I am on a diet I really am hungry.  Very hungry.  Waking up in the middle of the night with gnawing hunger pains type hungry.  Starving.  Every day on a diet is a potential Yom Kippur.

Now here's the tough part.  I could totally forget about diets and be comfortable just as I am, except that I don't stay as I am without watching what I eat, I just get fatter.

Heredity sure is a bitch.

Obama to Netanyahu: drop dead!

Smart diplomacy.

Ill wind

We have been having some really nasty weather.  Hot, humid, sultry, with an unhelpful wind that doesn't blow anything good, but supposedly foreshadows a storm.  It's a wind that so far as I know doesn't have a name, like a mistral or Santa Ana, but should.

My plants look like they've died of heat exhaustion, and no wonder.  I can almost see them panting for water.  I'm thirsty myself.

I wish  the storm would come, but when it does, we will probably have another power outage.  We had one earlier in the week, and were just comfortably settled down with our candles and flashlights to do a bit of grumbling when the power came back on.

Not forgotten

D-Day, the start of the liberation of Europe, 66 years ago.

Helen Thomas, lovable bigot

The ethnic background that dare not speak its name.

Nowhere in the controversy concerning Helen Thomas is her ethnic origin mentioned. She's not Welsh, like Dylan Thomas, she's not Jewish, like Michael Tilson Thomas.

She is what Tim Blair calls a Presbyterian.

If a Jew suggested that the Palestinians need to go back to Egypt, from whence they came, I'd hate to hear the ruckus.

Breaking news from 1972

Good grief! Nixon was as bad as George W Bush.

or maybe not.

Ironically for that administration, the crew seemed to have concerns about making sure such job offers were legal. A handwritten note penned in the corner of the memo notes, “Malek: This must be fully approved by AG before any action is taken.”

That's pretty ironic, all right.

News that's unfit to print

Down the memory hole.

Dancing

 

This makes me so angry!

Red light cameras are taking over Delaware.

There are red-light enforcement cameras at 47 intersections in Delaware, and the state is adding 10 more cameras this spring. The first cameras were installed in 2001 in Wilmington. In 2009, the cameras caught about 61,000 violations and generated more than $5 million in fines. The number of violations has dropped in recent years, and DelDOT says the cameras have led to a 15 percent decrease in accidents at intersections covered by red-light cameras.

I don't believe accidents have been reduced. That's bull****. This is nothing more than a scheme to shake money out of the pockets of Delaware residents. If I had wanted to pay more in unreasonable charges I could have stayed in New Jersey.

What I want to know is, what's the total take, and how do they split their ill-gotten revenues with the company that provides the cameras? I hear it's fifty-fifty. Oh yes, and is this "provider" a local business, or foreign?

And can citizens plead not guilty and have their cases heard, and possibly reversed, in court? Or is there an automatic presumption of guilt?

Flotilla megillah

Question:

[T]here is a lot of noise of how this raid was especially outrageous since a "Nobel laureate" and a "famous writer "were travelling on one of the ships; how exactly should that give a ship immunity from boarding?

Simple: famous people are much, much more important than clods like you and me. Famous people should be treated much, much better.

Good question

Little Miss Attila attempts to answer:

Folks, what the hell is so much less delicate about the Gulf of Mexico than ANWR, where we could drill much more safely than in the Gulf? Nothing—that’s what.

Liberals believe certain places or objects which must be venerated in defiance of reason.  Muslims venerate Mecca, liberals venerate ANWR.  Muslims cannot tolerate pork, liberals cannot tolerate Guantanamo. I could go on, but you get the idea.  None of this makes any sense, or is intended to do so.

If you violate the Muslim creed you are an infidel.  If you violate the liberal creed, you are a fascist.

End of discussion.

What my site is worth

How much is yours worth?

That's more than I thought.

Beach scene

Bessie Coleman

I am re-posting this, in honor of Memorial Day:

Bessie Coleman, aviation pioneer

Every Memorial Day, black men and women aviators fly in formation over the grave of Bessie Coleman, dropping bouquests of flowers on the grave of the first black woman ever to earn a pilot's license.
Coleman was born in 1892, the twelfth of thirteen children. The family earned their living picking cotton. It was an impoverished existence, and as her siblings reached adulthood two of them left for Chicago, where opportunities were better.

Bessie Coleman followed when she grew up. She trained as a manicurist and got a job at the White Sox Barber Shop, situated on the Stroll,an 8-block section of State Street where black-owned businesses flourished. It was there that she encountered Robert S. Abbott, the editor of the Chicago Defender, a prominent newspaper read widely in the black community.

She developed a desire to become a pilot, inspired by stories of the derring-do of the Wolrd War I flying aces. This was an unthinkable ambition for a black woman at the time. Yet Abbott saw something of the potential in Bessie, and offered her financial help to attend a French flying school. He guessed that she would make great copy, and he was right. On her return from France with her pilot's license, she was greeted by representatives of both the black and white press.

Beautiful and flamboyant, she became an overnight sensation. Barnstorming and stunt flying were all the rage at the time, and no one's exploits were more daring than Coleman's. She became a hero to the black community, who dubbed her "Queen Bess." Her ambition was to start a flight school for black people, to encourage them to follow careers in the promising new field of aviation.

Her career was fraught with peril: many of the barnstorming stunts were daring and dangerous. Coleman also suffered from a lack of sufficient funds and therfore often relied on decrepit and unsafe planes. In California, on February 4, 1922, a plane she was piloting stalled at 300 feet, smashing into the ground. She suffered multiple injuries which landed her in the hospital for three months.

Undaunted, she relocated to Texas and resumed her barnstorming career. She had previously performed in the North, to appreciative white audiences. She now visited venues mainly in the South, where African Americans were her most enthusiastic fans. They opened their homes and hearts to her. Colemans' beauty, skill and daring inspired her African American fans.

According to her niece, "The airplanes she was flying, they were just old things....They weeren't worth a darn." The lack of adequate funds did not stop her, however, from planning a flight in Jacksonville, FL. in a ramshackle plane.

Coleman was planning a parachute stunt, so she went up to scout the territory with her mechanic, William Wills, at the controls. Wills lost control of the plane, and Coleman, with neither seat belt nor parachute, was hurled to her death. She was 34 years old.

Her influence, however, lived on. Within a few years William Powell founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club, both to honor her and to inspire other African Americans to follow her example. Her dream lived on, and still lives on to this day.

In 1995, a stamp honoring her was issued by the United States Postal Service.

Remembering Dunkirk

Seventy years ago.

Old men forget.... Shakespeare, Henry V

Not these old men, apparently.

 

 

 

Keeping the boot on BP's neck

Would that be the jackboot?

I don't much like it when our leaders start threatening boots.  What next, whips and chains?

I won't be visiting Pinsk, thanks

Even though my Russian grandmother, (known as bubbe) came from there.

I looked up the blasted place on Wikipedia because my grandmother's ancestral home seemed to have been moved from Russia to Belarus while staying in the same place.  Apparently Pinsk was conveniently located for purposes of invasion, subjugation, and wholesale pogroms.  Consequently, bubbe was fluent in Polish, Russian, and Yiddish.

Bubbe actually had nothing bad to say about the place.  Mostly she talked about her memories of rowing down the river.  She never mentioned her parents or siblings, possibly because they were executed by the Nazis. 

In 1939, the population of Pinsk totaled 30,000, of whom 27,000 were Jews. Most of them were killed in late October 1942, after their deportation by the Nazis from the Pinsk ghetto.^[3] Ten thousand were murdered in one day.

One detail of the Wikipedia entry interested me because bubbe had talked about it.  She had an expression, in  Khmelnytsky's tsiten,   meaning a long, long time ago,  not within living memory. She might have been referring to the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, so remote were the events being mentioned.

Today I learned that this was a reference to Bohdan Khmelnytsky:

During the Cossack rebellion of Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1640), it was captured by Cossacks who carried out a pogrom against the city's Jewish population; the Poles retook it by assault, killing 24,000 persons and burning 5,000 houses. Eight years later the town was burned by the Russians.

Not a nice place to be a Jew.  I won't be visiting.

Sixth grade love affair

by the talented Johnny Virgil.

And I always used to wonder why the little boys pulled my pigtails.  It was love, sixth grade edition.

Tasty snack

Now that we are discussing the topic of food, I want to mention a snack that bubbe (and I) liked.  It was very simple.

Take a clove of garlic, cut it in half, dip it in salt, and rub it all over a piece of good bakery rye bread.   The bread has to be strong in texture to resist the assault with the garlic.  Do not try this with Wonder Bread.

I don't know whether this snack is Russian, Jewish, or simply poverty-inspired.  If you like raw garlic, you might like it.  I like raw garlic.  I have been known to make pesto with so much garlic it brings tears to your eyes.  Mr Charm and I like it that way.

Bubbe also made a hot cabbage soup that was good.  And beet borsht with sour salts.  Does anyone use sour salts any more?  I haven't seen them for sale in years.

Bubbe and I did not always agree on cuisine.   I thought fat was disgusting.  Bubbe used to make chicken soup with circles of fat floating on top.  I hated them.  I also disliked the carrots and celery bits floating in chicken soup.   All I really wanted to eat was the noodles.  It was tough eating just the noodles or matzoh balls while avoiding the other ingredients of the soup, which perhaps explains how there was so much soup left when I finished.

I also would not eat anything glued together with mayonnaise.  That left out tuna salad, potato salad, and chicken salad, for openers.  Who knows what's in that stuff? I still won't eat chicken salad unless I make it myself and know what's in it.  (It is good with curry powder, raw celery, and green grapes.)

My grandson won't eat any food that touches another food on his plate.  I sympathize.

What was he doing on MSNBC?

What, indeed?

Falling into a trap. that's what.

The Civil Rights Act Paul was (belatedly) discussing was passed in nineteen-something-or-other when Rand Paul was in diapers.  It is settled law,  and any controversy about it is as dead as mutton.  Deader.  No-one is proposing to amend it in any respect:  not the Democrats, the Republicans, the rogue State of Arizona, the Catholic Church, the Ku Klux Klan, the Boy Scouts of America, nobody. 

Why resurrect a dead issue?  To elicit a damning sound bite from a man who talks, not in sound bites, but in philosophic terms.  Gotcha there, Rand!


Rand Paul needs to learn to give snappy answers to stupid questions.

Yeah, I'm sick of politics too. Lets discuss my ancestors

I'm becoming boring around here.  The world is going to hell in a handbasket, but that's no reason for me to feel depressed, is it?

So let's switch the discussion to my female predecessor's lawless ways with neighborhood greenery.  Bubbe, for example, used to scour the neighborhood in search of sorrel, which I understand is a weed.  So you could say bubbe was weeding her neighbor's gardens without permission.

I never saw her picking the stuff, but she would leave the house with an empty paper sack and return with a sack full of sorrel.  With this she made a cold soup called shchav, which nobody liked.  It wasn't vile, it just wasn't that good, as it tasted like soup made of weeds.  Nobody much liked it but we all ate a moderate amount when it was served in order to spare ourselves the inevitable criticism of our eating habits.  I guess bubbe was ahead of her time in championing locally grown food.  Or weeds.

What is it about these ethnic foods that makes people so irrational?  Some relatives of mine who have Swedish relatives are forced to eat lutefisk, which unlike sorrel soup really is vile.  For openers, it's made with lye, and it's all  downhill from there.  I wouldn't even want to be in the same room with it.

Mother, on the other hand, only liked flowers.  In the neighborhood I grew up in, there were alleys behind every row of  houses.  This was where the garbage cans lived, right next to the detached garage at the very rear of the property.   These alleys were only scenic if you enjoyed looking at garages and garbage cans, but mother loved to stroll down them.   Neglected and unloved plants lived alongside these garages, some of them interesting or valuable.  Mother had her own paper sack as well as a trowel, and she helped herself to some of these plants.  Her justification for this was that no-one wanted them anyway or they would have planted them somewhere else.

So far as I know, she was never discovered, and she had some interesting and beautiful plants in her garden, a win-win proposition as far as she was concerned.

Consequences of North Korea's unacceptable behavior

The international community is getting tough.

Important officials from all the countries are going to stand in a circle, hold hands, and boo simultaneously.  Moreover, they will frown meaningfully.

You want tough?  We'll show you tough!

Perfect description of an empty suit

When I read this, it made me want to holler:

He already had the résumé to be a shoo-in candidate. Rich kid, Harvard (editor of the Crimson), reporter at The Washington Post, Yale Law School (editor of the law journal), almost two decades as attorney general, the perfect knowledge-class candidate of the kind favored by modern Democrats.  Yadda, yadda, etc.

One of those Best and Brightest Harvards who have been screwing the country over for the last 16 months.  Self-righteous.  Pompous.  Full of himself.  Perfect.

Mercy, please. 

Link thanks to Instapundit.

Elevating the tone of political discourse...

in the Connecticut Democratic primary.

"He was a coward ... and he's clearly a liar...."

If a Republican said this, would it be name-calling?

My rose bush

Complaining about Greeks

Are Greek civil servants overpaid?

To cut the deficit, Greece must reduce Easter and summer bonuses for its civil servants.
Easter bonuses? Summer Bonuses? They get bonuses because the weather changes?
I wonder if they also get "showing up on time" bonuses, too.

To answer the question:  In my experience,  many civil servants --not all--get paid for showing up at all.  Doing something while at work is considered extra. And they are fireproof.

Seashore, Florida

Jack Reacher's creator lives in a Spartan apartment

Lee Child emulates his hero.

Mr. Child lives in a two-room apartment in the Flatiron district that's architecturally stark, wrapped in white and bereft of rugs, curtains, side tables or accessories.

But he cheats:

Then there's Mr. Child's other apartment on a lower floor, where he keeps many of his possessions. Smaller in size but similar in layout, this writing office has lots of visible books, New Yorker cartoons, Reacher paraphernalia and a "technology museum" consisting of all his old cellphones and his first laptop.

In addition:

He ... has the resources to prevent the sensibilities of his wife of 35 years from getting in the way of his pursuit of what he calls this "aesthetic challenge." She currently spends most of her time at their homes in the south of France and Rye, N.Y.

My readers know that I am obsessed with Mr Child's hero, Jack Reacher, and how he maintains his spartan style without carrying with him a change of underwear.  He does bring a toothbrush with him.  But what of toothpaste, which he never mentions?

Successful teacher

I recently read a book called The Devil to Play by Jasper Rees. It describes how the author masters (sort of) the French horn, after many years of playing the instrument in school.  I've never played a musical instrument, except the piano, at which I was supremely untalented.  I never realized how difficult it is to play the horn and how easy it is to play it wrong.  In the future I will regard horn players with wonder and awe, like mountain climbers.
I can't imagine doing something so difficult.  It's tough enough to sing in a choir, where there are lots of other performers to cover up your mistakes. It takes a lot of courage to face an audience, no matter what kind of performance.

There's also a lot on the history of the instrument,  and the literature written for it, which I considered fascinating.

This is by way of introduction to my main topic, which is how to be a good teacher. In the course of his book, Jasper Rees quotes reports by the various teachers who attempted to instruct him on the horn, and they are always very positive.  Each instructor invariably remarks on how much Jasper has improved during the course of the term.  At the rate he was improving, I'm surprised he did not become a famous, indeed a world-renowned, performer.

As some of you know, I take art lessons.  My art teacher looks at all the student work at the end of a session and invariably says something encouraging; the mastery of color has improved, this shape is well done, etc.  I am sure he sometimes teaches incredibly untalented clods, but you'd never know it by his critiques.  I guess teachers are in the encouragement business, not in the hopelessness business.  Tact is of the essence.

Kvetch*-in-chief

Tell us how you really feel.

Via instapundit.

A kvetch is someone who is always pissing, whining and moaning about something.

Twenty-first century puritans

Puritans enjoy making sure that others don't enjoy themselves too much.

Happy Mother's Day

 

Still waiting for an answer...

to a good question.

[I]f Mexico is so worthy of all this pride and ...respect, how come almost everyone one of those Latino kids’ relatives hauled ass outta there…?

Here's another one for you: Why is it okay for Mexican Americans to carry on like this, but when American Jews stick up for Israel they are accused of their first loyalty being to Israel?

Are Jews too white, too middle-class, too boring to qualify for victim status?

Now I'm worried

Created by Oatmeal

Is there an antidote? Or a vaccine? If not, I'd better not associate with any zombies.

British tax dollars at work...

screwing everybody up.

* Attempts to measure the ash's density were hampered because the main aircraft used by the Meteorological Office for this purpose had been grounded as it was due to be repainted.

* Computers at the Met Office, which earlier forecast a 'barbecue summer' last year and a mild winter for this year, produced a stream of maps predicting the ash would cover a vast area, eventually stretching from Russia to Newfoundland. But across almost all of it, there was virtually no ash at all, and none visible to satellites.

* Though there was some ash over Britain at times during the ban, the maximum density measured by scientists was only about one twentieth of the limit that scientists, the Government, and aircraft and engine manufacturers have now decided is safe.

How to be obscene without really trying

A fashion trend I've missed.

You have to click on the link. This is a clean blog.

Safe for work--if you work in a house of ill repute. Otherwise, not so much.

Musician

 

What's wrong with Silicon Valley?

Apparently, lots of things.

Check the link if you want the whole story.

Here's the part that interests me:

Immigration, long a pipeline for new talent and brain power, is slumping badly, partly because of a crackdown here at home, partly because other countries got tired of exporting their best and brightest, and decided to offer their local engineers similar benefits and lifestyles (seen Infosys’ stock chart lately? How about Bidu?) Without new talent, ideas and innovation stagnate.

This doesn't compute. The last I heard, we had 300 million people here in the US. Surely some of those are of school age; some are even attending our universities.
Yet we have to import brainpower from third world countries?

Meanwhile, our college students are studying Grievance Studies, Tampon Science, Make-Up-Your-Own History, Leadership, Education for Social Change, and the Soap Opera as an Art Form. In their spare time they practice attending public events and shouting down speakers they don't agree with. When they graduate they are barely fit for retail or working for the government. The truly unemployable go on to attend law school.

On the other side of the world, people who have to study by candlelight are learning medicine, chemistry, physics, and engineering. Having learned something of value to the modern world, they then come here, taking jobs no American will do, because said American is functionally illiterate but chock full of self-esteem.

What's wrong with this picture?

Soup mug

 

Tulips, Longwood gardens

 

Acrylic painting.

Committee for a better looking Congress

Some of the Republican newbies are much better looking than the current lot.

Above, Tim Burns and Scott Brown.

Next: John Murtha and Carl Levin.


and the ever-popular Babs Boxer:



Unfair, I know. Superficial, I admit to that. But which would you rather look at for several years on the evening news?

I rest my case.

Another, pointless, useless, but expensive way to prevent terrorism...

just like airport "security."

Has the installation of  cameras in Britain been effective?  Is London now crime and terrorist free?  And where do the strapped taxpayers of New York City get the money for $30,000 cameras?

Spend a lot of money, inconvenience lots of people. with no, or negative,  results.  What's not to like?

Oysgevarfene gelt.

Thanks to Instapundit for the link.

From the local throwaway newspaper, a must miss

Jill Sobule belongs to a rare breed of artists....[T]]he Denver-born songwriter/guitarist/singer has tackled such topics as the death penalty, anorexia, shoplifting, reproduction, the French resistance movement, adolescense, and the Christian right.

Hanging out with Betty and Veronica

A friend and I were lamenting about how far away our families are. Then we got to talking about friends taking the place of family. Which got her to why neither of us has a group of friends that all get together and have good times together. I don't have such a group and neither does she. When I was in college back in the twentieth century I had such a group, but of course members of the group were always falling out--getting married or engaged, moving out of state, or getting arrested. (They didn't really get arrested, but I wanted to see how many of you were paying attention.)

We decided that what we really wanted was to hang out with Betty and Veronica down at the malt shop. Is that too unreasonable a request?