Here's a Riddle For You

Here's the riddle:

Let's examine some numbers readily available from the Census Bureau's 2004 Current Population Survey.... There's one segment of the black population that suffers only a 9.9 percent poverty rate, and only 13.7 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor. There's another segment that suffers a 39.5 percent poverty rate, and 58.1 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor. Among whites, one segment suffers a 6 percent poverty rate, and only 9.9 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor. The other segment suffers a 26.4 percent poverty rate, and 52 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor. [Source]

Okay, what distinguishes the high poverty and low poverty groups?

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Answer: Marriage.

The only thing that surprises me is that the poverty rates aren't higher for the children of unmarried mothers. I'd be willing to bet that many of those that were technically above the poverty line weren't above it by much.

St. Crispin and St. Elizabeth, Pray for Us

Today is St. Crispin's Day. You can hear Kenneth Branagh's rendition of Shakespeare's Crispin's Day speech online here. (Link via The Corner.) I highly recommend the movie this is taken from. For that matter I also recommend Oliviers WWII-era version. I just like Henry V; it always makes me proud to be English, which is odd, as I'm not English. We can all cry "God for Harry, England, and St. George!" though, can't we? AT least we can when the English aren't killing Catholics for being Catholic or letting Islamofascism breed unchecked in their cities, that is; and on that last maybe we should be asking St. George to protect them.

EWTN's Almanac is listing today as the day honoring St. Elizabeth, the kinswoman of Our Lady and mother of John the Baptist. I thought her feast day was November 5, and Catholic Online backs my memory up. But what the heck, we can ask her to pray for us both days. She may be a lesser Biblical figure and we may know next to nothing about her, but I'm rather fond of her all the same. I've heard her called a patron saint of those who become mothers later in life, and I haven't given up hope of being one of those myself. I also like that Elizabeth recognized holiness when she saw it, and the Visitation, with its lovely image of two pregnant women embracing, is one of my favorite mysteries of the rosary. Uncle Pookie has suggested that I also like Elizabeth's story because her husband was struck dumb; to that I have to say: "No comment."

What Historic General Are You? I'm JC (The Other One)

Julius Caesar You scored 59 Wisdom, 81 Tactics, 59 Guts, and 41 Ruthlessness!

Roman military and political leader. He was instrumental in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. His conquest of Gallia Comata extended the Roman world all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, introducing Roman influence into what has become modern France, an accomplishment of which direct consequences are visible to this day. In 55 BC Caesar launched the first Roman invasion of Britain. Caesar fought and won a civil war which left him undisputed master of the Roman world, and began extensive reforms of Roman society and government. He was proclaimed dictator for life, and heavily centralized the already faltering government of the weak Republic. Caesar's friend Marcus Brutus conspired with others to assassinate Caesar in hopes of saving the Republic. The dramatic assassination on the Ides of March was the catalyst for a second set of civil wars, which marked the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire under Caesar's grand-nephew and adopted son Octavian, later known as Caesar Augustus. Caesar's military campaigns are known in detail from his own written Commentaries (Commentarii), and many details of his life are recorded by later historians such as Suetonius, Plutarch, and Cassius Dio.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 33% on Unorthodox You scored higher than 84% on Tactics You scored higher than 70% on Guts You scored higher than 27% on Ruthlessness

Link: The Which Historic General Are You Test written by dasnyds on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

This is a really fun quiz. I don't know why they never had quizzes like this in the women's magazines I used to read as a girl.

Something to Think About

Like a lot of Americans, I attended a non-Muslim religious service this weekend. I think all of us who did (not to mention those who exercised their right not to participate in any religion) should be asking ourselves how long our right to do so would last under Muslim rule. Would we be as free and accepted as the Coptic Christians? As free as Dutch cartoonists and filmmakers? As free as British office workers, etc.? (Oh, but if only those British would just be more understanding!)

I think we all know the answer to how free we'd be under Muslim rule--we'd be free to be good little dhimmis. We'd be free to do as they tell us; with luck we might be almost as well off as Muslim women.

Another question we should be asking ourselves is how long beautiful testaments to our heritage--religious, artistic, historical--will last in a predominantly Muslim Europe? Will the Christian-themed paintings in the Louvre last as long as the statues of the Buddha did in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan?

Why This Was Probably My Last Summer To Wear Shorts

Because of Mississippi's hideously hot and humid summers, I grew wearing shorts all summer, every summer, and, except for school hours, much of the spring and fall and some days in what we ironically call our winter as well. But this summer I found myself thinking about giving them up.

For one thing, this summer I discovered that skirts can actually be cooler than shorts. For another, the past year and a half or more, I've been doing a lot of thinking about modesty in dress, and I'm not sure most shorts make the cut. I've also sometimes found myself thinking about how Americans never dress up any more and what that and the tendency of so many adults now to dress in juvenile ways says about us. And then there's my age (35) and my noticing that the old and late-middle-age women I see now don't seem to look as neat and well-put-together as old women used to when I was young. And then there was the Wednesday evening I stopped off at mass on my way to do the shopping and only realized as I walked into the church I was wearing shorts; it was a nice Liz Claiborne shorts and vest set but I felt bad wearing shorts to church, and then I started to wonder why it was okay to wear them elsewhere but not to church. But none of these are the reason.

No, I can recall the moment the decision, such as it is, was made. I was in Wal-Mart, headed for the check-out, when I saw a woman, probably in her early-thirties, of average attractiveness, probably with a kid or two at home, and she was wearing shorts. They weren't too short or too tight. They were normal shorts that came at least half-way down the thigh. On the outside of the thigh, that is. On the inner thigh, they were bunched up so high, the cloth was resting against her crotch. On both of the inner thighs. I know not every woman's shorts ride up that badly and that most women would have done one of those covert "pull the fabric down" moves before they rode up that high, but that visual got to me. Somehow shorts just haven't seemed appealing to me since.

Something Beautiful to Start the Day

BBC News has the winners of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, and they are stunning. You have to click on the small picture to enlarge, as the small pic doesn't show the whole thing; even if I were on a slower computer that took a little time to load, it would be worth the wait.

I Weep for the Future

Back in the fall of, I believe, 1989, I saw a greeting card for sale that congratulated the recipient on her (/his?) divorce. Self-proclaimed liberal though I was at the time, something just didn't seem right about that. Age and greater experience (especially my ten years of marriage) have persuaded me that it most definitely was wrong; as Chesterton might say, their having a right to make and sell that card is in no way the same thing as being right in doing it.

But it wasn't as wrong as this: Divorce parties. I'm well aware of the need for ritual to mark even the most unpleasant of life stages (former neo-pagan, current Catholic--I grok ritual), but celebrating the failure of a marriage is both repugnant and irresponsible in the message it sends to everyone around you.

What's next, abortion parties?

Black and White Is So Much Easier Than Grays

I think Thomas Sowell may be one of the most brilliant people in America--he's surely among the most brilliant columnists. I say that not because I usually agree with him (although I'll admit people sharing my views tends to give me a favorable opinion of their intelligence!), but because I've so often, while reading his always reasonable columns, said to myself, "I've never thought of that before, but he's right."

But I'm not sure about something of his I just read (it's five days old but I just read it today), in which he lumped "growing legal restrictions on building anything that existing residents in a community don't want built" in with the "spoiled brat politics" that thinks anything we personally want automatically overrides what other people want.

At one time, courts took seriously the 14th Amendment's
guarantee of equal rights for all, regardless of where they lived and voted.
Courts even enforced the 5th Amendment's guarantee of property rights.

In other words, local voters and local politicians
could not arbitrarily deprive other people of the right to come in and buy and
use property as they saw fit, simply because some planning consultants or
planning commissions preferred that they do otherwise. But Constitutional
protection of property rights is no longer "in the mainstream" of fashionable
legal thinking. ...

The only way the government can give current
residents such a guarantee [that their neighborhood will never change] is
to take away other people's property rights, which exist precisely in order to
keep politicians at bay. [Source]

I agree, mostly--property rights are very important, and I'm sure we've all read news stories about people having their property rights infringed upon by government that made us angry, and surely noone wants government to have the power to seize any property it wants and reserve to government agencies the sole right to determine that property's use--and yet shouldn't local people have some say over how their neighborhood or town is developed? Most people don't want a strip club built between the public elementary school and a popular day care center, even if the club owner does own the land it's to be built on. Shouldn't neighborhood residents be able to veto a pornographic book shop in their neighborhood? What about a toxic waste dump or even an ordinary garbage dump? What if a majority of people in a town had rather have small shops clustered in a downtown area, rather than having one big, less centrally-located mall--can't they make local policies that encourage what they want and discourage or forbid what they don't?

I'm not talking about a small minority trying to inflict its will upon the whole neighborhood or town; I'm wondering about cases where the majority want something--should they have no say?

We allow restrictions to be placed on property for public safety (even though I own it, I'm not allowed to burn my own house down on a whim, for fear of setting the neighbors' houses on fire; I'm not allowed to pile raw sewage in my yard no matter how much I may want to, factories aren't allowed to dump waste products even on their own land, etc.), and we zone areas for residences or businesses; industrial areas may even be separately zoned from other businesses. Is it really going that much further for a majority of townsmen to vote that they don't want a particular kind of property development in their area?

This is a hard thing to determine. I think we can all agree that when someone wants to do something on his property that will clearly endanger the lives or health of the people nearby, then those people should have some say over whether the property owner gets to do that thing. But when it comes to property uses that aren't physically dangerous, it gets gray very quickly.

It seems either side is open to abuse. Under a system where we usually decide for the individual property owner's right to do whatever he wants, you could get, say, the sex toys shop in an area where most residents don't want anything like that. But under a system where we allow town or neighborhood planning commissions a great deal of leeway we could get people whimsically forbidding anything for any reason. It's not hard to imagine the freedom of small groups or individuals getting trampled under such a system, even if the planning commissions remained faithful to what a majority of locals wanted. Add in the probability of planning commissions representing, not the will of the majority, but the will of a small elite, and I'm much less sure I want them to be able to decide what property owners can do with their property; the will of a majority of residents is one thing, but the will of a tiny group of "experts" pretending to represent the will of the majority is quite another thing.

And this is not even getting into the will of the most directly affected versus the will of the somewhat less close-by people. For example, I read an article a good while back about Wal-Mart wanting to build a store in a "nice" neighborhood somewhere. Many people in the "nice" neighborhood were deadset against having a Wal-Mart in their neighborhood, but people in the surrounding, "less nice" neighborhoods were mostly for it; the former didn't want increased traffic in their nice area and were worried about "not nice" people coming into their neighborhood to shop, while the latter were eager for low prices and like the possibility of new jobs. Much as the "nice" people's snobby attitudes set my American populist hackles rising and make it hard to sympathise with the most directly affected neighborhood, shouldn't they have some say in what happens to their neighborhood? But then what about the larger area, who did want the Wal-Mart? Like I said, it gets gray quickly.

Thomas Sowell is probably right, and we should err toward protecting property rights when there's conflict; I certainly don't want there to be less respect for them than we have now, when the government can use public domain to seize your property, not just to build a publically necessary highway or dam, but to build a baseball field. But that doesn't mean it won't sometimes be hard to look at the outcome of some of those conflicts and think that the majority of residents got screwed over by the property owner.

More Crunchy Talk

There's a short piece at Likelierthings.com about the argument between Jonah Goldberg and Rod Dreher over Dreher's "crunchy-granola conservatism"; it's hashed out more in the comments.

Callanetics Review

I mentioned a few posts ago that I started doing Callanetics and said I might post again after I'd done ten sessions, to see how Callanetics' "10 years younger in 10 hours" claim holds up.

It should go without saying that nothing can make you younger--relentless march of time and all that--but Callanetics can firm you up faster than anything I'm aware of. It won't make you fit, it won't make you lose fat, and it won't improve your upper body strength. It will firm you up noticeably in an amazingly short time, though, so the "10 hours" claim isn't mere hype.

I'm doing Callanetics three times a week, and I've now done ten sessions. I've lost about one and a quarter inches off my waist and about three and a half inches off my hips. My underarm area (not the triceps, but where ladies who aren't super-thin get a little roll of fat between their bra and the edge of their arm) has firmed up considerably. (This is odd actually, because I assumed when I started that the underarm tightener exercise wouldn't work and it still doesn't feel as if it's doing anything to that area.) I think the sides of my thighs are starting to slim up. My abdomen is MUCH stronger than when I started. I still can't do the full set of reps on the stomach exercises, but I never thought I would improve this much so fast. All of these results in about three weeks and without the loss of one pound; and to be honest, there were two sessions where I was running short on time and had to cut my session short, so my time spent is well under the "10 hours" of the claim.

Callanetics also lives up to its claim to be easy on the back. I don't have back problems myself, but I have tried to assess it as if I did and as far as I can tell there's no strain on the back. There's more talk about back safety in the Callanetics book; I believe there was even another Callanetics book specifically for people with back problems.

There is strain on the neck, however, when you do the abdomen exercises. Callan Pinckney claims it will disappear after a few sessions, and for me at least this seems to be the case. She does recommend putting your hands behind your neck if it's a problem for you, and of course it helps if you try not to pull with your neck.

As for the other negatives, in the reviews I read before I purchased the DVD, I saw that some people didn't like the instructor's manner or her accent and that they thought the exercises were boring and the looks & musci laughably dated. I like the instructor, think the look of the hair and leotards holds up much better than most '80s area stuff, and don't mind the music (it reminds me of Mister Rogers neighborhood for some reason). As for boredom, well, most exercise is boring, that's why people prefer to sit on the couch watching Andy Griffith reruns; right now I'm too busy trying to improve to be bored by this, but when I start to get bored, I think the great results will keep me at it for quite a while after.

The only other "negative" I can think of is that it seems a little odd to have the relaxing stretches before the final exercises; it may be because of my experiences with yoga exercise, but it just seems the tape ought to end with the relaxing lower back stretch. On the other hand, I love the placement of the ab exercises immediately after the warm-up; with this you don't have to go through the tape dreading the ab part.

Upshot: I definitely recommend this exercise video and the accompanying book. It may be nearly twenty years old and the exercises may seem odd, but it works.

Crunchy Cons

I saw today on The Corner that Rod Dreher's book, Crunchy Cons, is in galleys already. You can pre-order it from Amazon, although that may not be the crunchiest choice.

I posted about the whole crunchy con thing once before; I have links to the original articles and try to give the gist of Jonah Goldberg's objection to it as a category.

This Makes Me Very Tired

I don't know why but I skimmed an article about the state of trendspotting or "coolhunting", and the whole thing made me want to lie down with a book--preferably one that hasn't been on a bestseller list for a hundred years or so--and forget about the outside world. But someone might spot me, and then EVERYONE would be doing it.

Today, fads ping across continents and disappear so quickly
that the coolhunter, even the whole notion of "cool," has become
passé.

Fortunately we can show our contempt for "cool" by buying the brands favored by the all the other people who are also immune to the lure of cool new fads.

Every big-city scenester or bored teenager on the planet
has a blog or mass e-mail anointing the moment's hot restaurants, hobbies and
handbags. Add to this, mass obsession with celebrity style and global
corporatization and you can get nearly the same chai latte or
straight-off-the-runway skirt in Columbus, Ohio, that's available in Manhattan
or Milan.

One nation, under advertising, with liberty and blandness for all.

Trend-spotting has, in essence, become just another trend.
Consequently, the most successful trend forecasters are repositioning themselves
as something more than mere arbiters of taste. They're now social scientists
with a hipster edge.

So they're no longer people who spend every waking moment trying to stay a few weeks ahead of rapidly passing fads, they're cultural anthropologists.

IN a way, this desperate need among advertisers to "divine"
our intimate truths has indelibly linked consumerism to culture. Now, there's
hardly time to discover and explore a new experience or a new approach to living
without also considering the new line of products, technologies or services that
has been tailored to that discovery. Life is being captured, repackaged and sold
back to us as quickly as we live it.

How can the effectiveness of trend forecasting be measured,
anyway, when the line between a genuine societal trend and one manufactured by
media and advertising is now so blurred?

Am I the only person who finds this scary? No, not the possibility that corporations may find it hard to assess the effectiveness of their trend forecaster, but the linking of culture and consumerism. Why do so many of us now equate who we are with which trends we choose to follow and what we buy to show we're in on that trend?

And if we are going to define ourselves by what we buy, do we really need the Color Marketing Group to tell us what colors to buy it in?

The value and lifespan of information changed rapidly in the
late 1990s. Just as Internet access and download speed rocketed, so did the
transfer of ideas, making what was "cool" obsolete from the moment it was
discovered.

"It used to be that you had to have the Louis Vuitton Murakami
purse," says Buckingham. "Well, now you can get the $10 version on [Manhattan's]
Canal Street. So when you talk to teenage girls, they say they buy the fakes
because it's all about just showing you know the trend — not even the value of
the trend itself."

I can't say that I'm bothered by girls opting for cheap knockoffs bags over the genuine overpriced handbag (although making your own version seems better than buying the knockoff), but why buy even the knockoff (or make your own copy) if you don't genuinely like the thing? I guess if your life is all about following trends then it doesn't matter what you like, only what other people like; and with our current ten-second attention spands causing trends to change so quickly, anything you can do to save money so you can afford to buy the next trendy purse a few weeks from now is okay.

But as for grumpy old me, I'm starting to wonder if, as a nation, we're not either too rich or too shallow. If we weren't so rich, we couldn't be continually replacing handbags, decorative kitchen canisters, etc. as the next trend comes in. And if we weren't so shallow we wouldn't care whether our neighbors think our stuff is out-of-date or not.

Reading this article and contemplating the speed of fashion not only made me tired, it put me in mind (as so many things do) of something G. K. Chesterton said: He said that the Catholic Church is the only thing that can save us from the degrading slavery of being a child of our times. Of course he was talking about succumbing to intellectual fads, but I think it still applies. If we focused more on eternal matters, we would care less about the passing trendiness of a particular kind of coffee or style of slacks; if we defined ourselves in light of eternity, we wouldn't need to define ourselves by the kind of cologne we buy or purse we carry.

Christmas Came Early (At Least the Gift-Giving Part)

It has been said that bigotry is the inability to conceive seriously the opposition to a proposition. If that's so, there's one thing I'm a thoroughgoing bigot about: Calvin & Hobbes was the best comic strip EVER! There can be no contrary opinions on this. Bloom County? Liked it a lot, but there's no real comparison; besides which, it was largely topical humor and will cease to be funny as people cease to get the references. Get Fuzzy? Read it every day, but still, no comparison. Uncle Pookie's beloved Dilbert? I like it, but please!

This week we saw The Complete Calvin & Hobbes in Sam's Club, I called it "my precious", and Uncle Pookie insisted on buying it for me. In theory I'm the sensible-spender member of the team, but it took only about two breaths for him to convince me we should purchase it. It's a great set. Three volumes containing all the strips and the cover and spot art from the previous collections. Hardcover, good-quality paper, heavy as all get-out, and the papers packed between the volumes smelled like the inside of a leather bookbag. The outside of the books is a nice earthy orange color with brown end cloth, and the strips are set on an off-white page with a narrow light-brown outline, so it looks a bit as if they are cut-outs pasted into a scrapbook. The only bad thing is that the books really aren't convenient for reading in bed; they do lie flat, though, so on that alone they beat paperbacks.

Per the rules of the house, I must now eliminate my much-read paperback Calvin & Hobbes collections. This presents a dilemma: Give them to the library for others to enjoy or cut them up for decoupage?

Yet Another Reason to Check Out Bearing Blog

I stand second to no one in my regard for sweet potatoes, and bearing blog's Savory Sweet Potato Pie has been added to my repertoire of sweet potato cookery. Okay, I have to admit it's a very small list, as my favorite way to eat sweet potatoes is baked (I just throw them in the oven when I'm baking something else) and served with butter or butter and cinnamon; bearing blog's recipe is a nice addition though.

I made it for Sunday dinner this past week. I halved the recipe (not by choice, but because I happened to have only two potatoes), and I made it crustless, because as an adult I've come to prefer crustless pies and quiche (chicken pot pies excepted). It was tasty; the bite of the freshly ground black pepper--I used a lot--went really well with the sweet potato. Next time I'd like to try sauteeing the minced onion in butter before I add it; I think that might be even better.

Misc. Things Seen Around the Web

This is seriously cool*--amphibious houses, that rise and fall with water levels in the event of flooding. A good-sized--and growing--chunk of the Netherlands is under sea level. Problems are kept in check by a system of canals, pumps, and dykes (must not repeat bad Bernie Rhodenbarr joke, must not repeat... ) and, until now, limiting construction in flood zones. They're now testing waterproof home designs, and more power to them. (Link via Arts & Letters Daily)

*Note: Auntie Suzanne is a person of questionable coolness who tends to equate cleverness with coolness.


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Seriously NOT cool (see above): the My Scene Bling Bling Barbie. Why not just call it Streetcorner Barbie and tattoo her price list on her tail, like that Yale girl from the limerick?

The saddest thing here is that this is obviously another attempt to make Barbie look more like the Bratz dolls, which, as I understand it, are supposed to represent underage girls. This kind of thing makes you wonder who won the sexual revolution, women or dirty old men.

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As I've brought up the subject of immodest dress--i.e., I've mentioned contemporary Barbies--here's the two best articles on modest dress I've ever read: Don't Wear That Mini to Mass and Drawing a Hemline, both by Benjamin D. Wiker. The former, obviously, is about immodest dress in church, and the latter is mainly about immodest clothes on campus.

Full disclosure (pun intended): Although I agree with Wiker's points, I did get a kick out of "Berkeley Guy" back when he was doing his thing. But then I don't find nudity offensive, just immodest clothes.

Unfortunately, some of what's touted as modest clothing by some American Christians is aesthetically offensive--all shapeless jumpers and the most dowdy dresses you've ever seen (really, the Amish are more stylishly and flatteringly attired, which is odd as some of it seems to be an attempt to attempt to imitate the Amish)--and seems to be motivated more by an idea that the body is bad than by an idea that it is too precious to share with everyone who walks by. For some talk about beauty and modesty, see Regina Schmiedicke's article, Modesty and Beauty--The Lost Connection; this is probably the third best article on modest dress I've read, although do read this response to it.

FWIW, Schmiedicke's point about how, historically, people of higher status have worn more clothes than low-status people is accurate. It has lasted into modern times. In the early 1980s, the novelist and literature professor Alison Lurie published a fascinating book on clothing and how what people wear reveals social status and attitudes. (I've often thought it would make good reading for fantasy writers who are designing their world's clothing.) She talked about well-off people wearing more clothing--as well as better quality clothing and/or harder-to-clean clothing--as a probably unconscious sign of wealth, even in the '80s. I think it still holds true even today, when many women of all socio-economic classes are walking around skimpily dressed.


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Yet another in the long list of lawsuits I wouldn't have filed: an Oregon woman is suing her doctor and his clinic (presumably they have more money than he does personally) because the doctor convinced the woman that the way to cure her lower back pain was to have sex with him. Apparently more than one time, as the article mentions "treatments".

I wonder if she's any relation to that woman a while back who complained to her state's medical board because her doctor told her she was too fat and needed to lose weight. Stupidity/gullibility and whiny complaining are often related.

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Over the past year or two, there have been so many news stories about policemen being called on elementary school children that when I drove by the local elementary school last winter and saw a cop car in front I thought, "Oh, some little girl must have brought non-safety scissors to school."

Yesterday I saw a news story about cops being called to break up a fight between two six year-olds fighting over a pacifier. But this time I actually felt some sympathy with the caller (in this case, the mother of one of the boys, rather than a school official), when I heard why she called: she said she didn't want her son's school to accuse her of child abuse when they saw the marks on his face. Given the excessive nosiness of schools nowadays and the hell that a false accusation of child abuse could make of your life, I can kind of see it. But that just shows another set of problems.

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This isn't on the web (except as it relates to some opinion pieces I've read on government waste and "compassionate conservatism", etc.) but last week someone told me my husband and I should have filed for the hurricane-related food stamps. I pointed out that we didn't need them. "But you still should have filed, you could get up to $300 worth."

I again pointed out that we didn't need them, as we hadn't lost much food and could afford to buy food. The person didn't seem to get what I was saying and kept saying it was for anyone who'd lost food. "But I didn't lose much, I was careful to use up as much of the perishables as I could before I started using our non-perishables, and I figure what we lost is just a consequence of the risk we take living in a hurricane-prone area, and it's not as if we can't afford to buy more."

I never did get through, but then again I bit my tongue (as a politely brought up Southern girl, I do that a lot) and didn't point out that the government doesn't owe support to people who can help themselves, because I was afraid the person I was talking to might have applied for them and I didn't want to be offensive. But the whole thing was shocking to me, because it was coming from someone I wouldn't have expected to have such an attitude. It made me worry about how many other people are helping themselves to disaster relief they don't need.

I Can't Believe I'm Posting About This...

...because I hate women who talk about nothing but diet and exercise. But here goes.

Last winter I bought the Callanetics exercise DVD (it is a copy of the 1986 videotape) after I read positive reviews of it online. I also read the Callanetics book, first from the library and later from a thriftstore-purchased copy. I tried the exercises, and I could do the warm-up and stretches fine and the pelvic and the standing leg exercises without too much difficulty, but the abdomen and the hip exercises were another story. The abdomen ones were even harder than ordinary crunches. The hip exercises were hard to understand and when I got in position to try them, I found myself looking down at my leg, unable to move it at all. I tried the tape a few times, and just kept finding myself staring down at my immovable leg. Until the last time, when I found if I leaned over more than was really right I could just get my leg up and move it, barely. But by that time I was frustrated with the whole thing and gave it up as too difficult for me. (To be fair, I was also entering yet another off phase in my twenty years-long on again/off again relationship to exercise, and everything else got dumped too.)

Fast forward to last week and the beginnings of my annual pre-birthday insanity (an Auntie Suzanne tradition since the age of twelve.) I decided to start my short routine of upper body strength exercises again on MWF, but I need something for TTS. Why not try Callanetics again--when it doesn't work out I can go on to something else.

Since I'd figured out how to lift my leg, I managed to get through the tape--sort of. A day after my first session I was passing the mirror and thought, "something looks different--aah, just my imagination" and kept walking. After the second session, I thought my hips looked smaller, but of course that was impossible, so I told myself I must be imagining it. Still they do look a bit smaller... Immediately after my third session I looked in the mirror, and they were smaller. It seemed unbelievable, but I was sure I wasn't imagining it.

So then I thought, well why not prove it, get the measuring tape; I'd measured myself for a skirt last week, so I had a day or two pre-Callanetics measurement. I put the tape around my hips and it read two inches smaller than last week. I stared in disbelief for a moment. That is utterly impossible, I thought. I must be doing something different, I'm standing funny or holding the tape wrong or unconsciously sucking in or something. I adjusted the tape slightly, slumped slightly, and blew out to make extra sure I wasn't holding in and re-measured. The tape moved a little. It now read almost two inches smaller. Which is still very hard to believe.

The idea that any exercise program could take more than an inch off your hips in only three sessions is amazing. And I can't even do the whole routine! My abdomen is too weak to even think about doing the full number of reps on any of the belly exercises, and although I can do the hip exercises now, I'm not doing them perfectly or doing the full count. So it's doubly amazing.

The Callanetics book and video slogan was "ten years younger in ten hours". That's a pretty silly claim of course, but maybe after I've done ten sessions I'll post again about what it can do in ten hours. (For the record, it doesn't actually take a full hour to do a session.)

Give Me the Good Old Days

This past Sunday there was an article in the Telegraph that I'd like to say is unbelievable, but which, given our degraded modern society, is all too believable: Women bypass sex in favour of 'instant pregnancies'. According to the article, an increasing number of fertile women in their 30s and 40s are turning to technology to get them pregnant, either as their first resort,or as their almost-first resort when the good old-fashioned way doesn't work immediately. Seems they're too busy to "diary in" frequent sex or, in some cases, any sex at all. At no point anywhere in the article does anyone ask how people who are too busy for sex are going to have time to take care of a baby, or how people unwilling to rearrange their schedules the small amount necessary to allow for extra sex (an activity with immediate payoffs for both people) are going to handle the constant disruptions a baby brings (disruptions that often have no immediate reward.)

Shake That (Coded?) Stuff

EWTNs World Over has its interview with Clare Asquith, author of Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare up on its audio page. (When the sound file comes up, skip forward just over 8 minutes to get to the interview.)

I heard about Asquith's book just over a month ago, and while there does seem to be some evidence to support the speculation that Shakespeare was Catholic, any talk of hidden codes in Shakespeare sets my brain on "Suspicious". I participated off and on for years in a Usenet discussion group about Shakespeare, and between that and my other reading, I'm well aware of the phenomenon of nutcakes and their conspiracy theories about Shakespeare, which often do involve codes hidden in the plays. The author of the plays is secretly Edward DeVere and everyone in England knows it but no one is allowed to say it, so there's a massive number of coded references to DeVere's authorship concealed in the plays (presumably so everyone in the audience can nod knowingly); the author of the plays is Marlowe, the author is Bacon, the author is Queen Elizabeth's illegitimate son, the author is Queen Elizabeth's lover, the author is Queen Elizabeth, etc. Many of the people who hold these views are out-and-out fanatics--can't change their mind and won't change the subject--and are sometimes rather too much like the other conspiracy theorists (for example, Area 51 or obsessive JFK assassination people) for comfort.

Asquith, however, sounds surprisingly sane and well-balanced. She says part of what opened her mind to this view of Shakespeare's plays was seeing how seemingly innocuous plays were used to convey dissident political messages in the Soviet Union. (Other reasons were her own English Catholicism and the new, non-Protestant takes on English history of the time.) She makes the idea of discreet Catholic references seem reasonable. I still don't wholly buy it, because, besides the danger of publically supporting Catholicism over Protestantism (which meant questioning the legitimacy--in both senses of the term--of the Queen), I just don't think playwrights work that way. There may be a little something to what she's alleging and, even if there's not, her book may provide an interesting look at Catholic sympathizers in Elizabethan society, so I am open to reading it--not buying it, but reading it.

For a World Over program about Shakespeare's possible Catholicism, listen to the interview with Dr. Paul Voss (production date 8/17/01.) It provides an easy, enjoyable introduction to the subject and also explains in passing why Calvinists never wrote tragedies.

Cultural Tourism

The Reuters story yesterday about an Israeli couple fined for kissing during their wedding ceremony in India amused me in a mean-spirited way. The couple, who as far as I can tell are not Hindu, decided they wanted a traditional Hindu wedding in Pushkar. They proceeded to embrace and kiss while the priest was chanting vedic hymns, which outraged the presiding priest and other priests as well--one called their public kissing "cultural pollution". I have no problem with PDAs, but good for him.

I don't usually go in for the lefty cries of "cultural theft" or "cultural appropriation". Healthy cultures adopt things that are useful or even just likeable from other cultures, they always have done, and no one called it theft until recently. But when Westerners decide to pick up spiritual things from other cultures because they're oh so quaint and picturesque and closer to nature than us, etc. and then do it in a shallow way that mocks the tradition, I cringe and start considering using the t word myself. The most notorious example of what I'm talking about are the people who go to a weekend workshop, come home with a certificate, and proclaim themselves "genuine Native American shamans." But I think wanting a picturesque Hindu wedding when you're not Hindu or even willing to respect the mores of the local people who are comes pretty close to the attitude.

Hurricane Rita

Hurricanes can highlight our selfishness. I confess my main feeling toward Hurricane Rita is one of relief; I don't wish anyone in Texas or SW Louisiana any harm, but I'm glad it's not coming for my area. Viewed from the national level and from a purely practical standpoint, it would be better for Rita to hit here again--this area of the country is already messed up, why add another messed-up area to the national burden?--but I'll bet nobody on the Mississippi Gulf Coast or SE Louisiana is looking at it that way. I know I'm not.

Wall Street to the Contrary, Greed is Not Good

There's some interesting discussion of price-gauging over at Caelum et Terra. I don't know as much as I probably should about economics. It seems to me that things work better with a free (or mostly free) market, but I think it's crucial that we have decent people in the marketplace. The internal restraints that people trying to be decent put on themselves can check capitalism's excesses without having to resort to the nearly always doomed government controls on economic freedom.

I'm reminded of something I read by William F. Buckley:

Every ten years I quote the same adage from the late Austrian
analyst Willi Schlamm, and I hope that ten years from now someone will remember
to quote it in my memory. It goes, "The trouble with socialism is socialism. The
trouble with capitalism is capitalists."

Maybe that doesn't mean what I think it does, but I think it means that if we let our greed and self-interest dominate us we create the ugly side of an economic system that generally works pretty well. Capitalism works because it allows for human nature (our desire to seek our own self-interest, to take care of our own family, to have our own stuff, to keep the fruits of our labors) more than socialism does, but then the trouble with capitalism becomes fallen human nature (greed, selfishness, desire for power over others, choosing temporary goods over longterm goods, general sinfulness.)

Home-schooling Bestsellers

The WSJ recently had an article on what homeschoolers are reading.

Home-schooling is sort of like a college student's virginity:
People figure it's a mark of religiosity, but nearly as often it's just personal
taste, or a lack of better options. The majority of families who home-school are
conservative Christians, to be sure. But another sizable portion are secular
counterculturalists, and then...anyone far from a school.

I'd argue that conservative Christians are counterculturalists, but let that go. What's interesting is that book choices overlap. Both groups favor books about children behaving in a self-sufficient way, both like the Narnia books and love Laura Ingalls Wilder and George Alfred Henty.

I've never read Henty, although I've read some praise of him, but I really enjoyed Wilder's Little House books when I was a child. Much better than the TV show, which I also liked. When I wasn't reading the books, I would look again and again at those wonderful pencil illustrations by Garth Williams. If I'm ever blessed with a child--not likely, as, to quote Raising Arizona, my womb is a barren and rocky place where Uncle Pookie's seed can find no purchase--the complete Little House set goes on the Books for Baby list. I figure they'd not only be fun to read aloud but would help reinforce my "you don't have to have lots of expensive toys like the other kids to be happy" indoctrination. (I have a little bit of Calvin's dad in me.)

Pro-choice or Faux-choice

Before I became a Catholic, I was pro-choice. I would not have become Catholic had I not been able to accept the Church's views on this matter, so obviously my opinions have changed a lot; I am now sorry for my attendance at the one abortion rights rally I attended and for any influence I may have had on anyone else's views. But one thing I can say in my defence (sort of) is that at least I was genuinely pro-choice. I believed that only the pregnant woman herself should have the right to decide whether or not to end her pregnancy, and I believed that only the individual in question should determine whether he or she would be sterilized. Forced abortions and sterilizations horrified me.

I make a point of saying I was genuinely pro-choice, because some people in today's society say they are pro-choice, but really aren't. The most obvious example is people who claim to be pro-choice, but who refuse to condemn China's coercive population control program or, worse, approve of it--people like Molly Yard, former president of NOW, whom the Associated Press is reporting has just died. But there are others. Parents who say they're pro-choice, but who force their teenage or college student daughters to abort. Judges who offer convicted women time off sentences if they agree to sterilization or insertion of Norplant. People who claim to be pro-choice and then grumble at who gets and stays pregnant. Or who talk only about the boons of not having children, while seeming to find it hard to fathom that many women would prefer to keep their children. Or who talk as if people who choose to have large families are doing something wrong. Or who don't want to hear others talking about abstinence or Natural Family Planning (or, in extreme cases, even the Fertility Awareness Method). Or who don't want pro-life people to be allowed to talk at all.

People who are genuinely pro-choice may not be where they should be in their views, but at least they're not forcing or subtly bullying women onto operating tables.

(For some interesting listening on China's population control program and American responses to it, listen to Steven Mosher, author of A Mother's Ordeal: One Woman's Fight Against China's One-Child Policy, talking to Marcus Grodi on EWTN's The Journey Home. The episode is dated 4/28/2000.)

"Defenestrating princesses are a little unusual!"

This website is mostly sewing related, but if you click on the "Assault on Dragon Castle" page, you can see the greatest toy I have ever seen in my life!

Teenage Pregnancy

The bearing blog (a pretty cool blog I found a while back--an engineer turned SAHM and homeschooler writes about whatever takes her fancy) has a post with a couple of questions about sex ed programs that "work". Just a taste: "It isn’t self-evident that the programs that best reduce teenage pregnancy are the same programs that best reduce STI rates..."

Just a quibble on my part--and it would be a quibble with nearly everyone who discusses this subject, not just with bearing blog--but teenage pregnancy is not necessarily a problem. Unmarried teen pregnancy is a problem. Teenagers used to get pregnant all the time; the difference was that they got married--either before pregnancy or, hastily, after a pregnancy but before the birth*. At least one of my grandmothers married in her early teens (first baby arrived one year and one day later) and went on to have a long, apparently happy marriage. Go back far enough and we all have teenaged mothers and fathers in our family tree.

Of course, many people would argue that teenagers shouldn't get married, because they're too young or because it's hard for people who haven't been to college to support a family. To the first I say "bollocks". As to the latter, I think there's something wrong with a society that makes it so difficult for a young man to support a wife and child. But it's only hard, not impossible, especially if the couple have the support of their extended family.


*Cute story: My mother reports that her grandmother told her that, "When a couple get married, their first baby can come at any time, but after that it always takes nine months." This was coming from an elderly, Victorian-era woman in the 1950s, in the backwoods of "socially conservative" Mississippi, in a family with multiple Baptist ministers. Hasty marriages have been around for a while.

Our Lady of Sorrows, Pray for Us

Today commemorates Our Lady of Sorrows, patron of Mississippi. Women for Faith & Family have a couple of nice pictures and the words (Latin & English) to the Stabat Mater Dolorosa.

Misc. Observations Spurred by Hurricane Katrina

Not everything about losing power is bad. It's easier to get to bed on time when there's no electric lights and a dozen forms of electricity-dependent entertainment waiting for you. People sleep better without LEDs all over the house lighting things up and street lights pouring through the shades.

Then there's the fact that situations like this bring out the best in most people and we get the opportunity to see neighbors and strangers doing good.

And then there's the greater family togetherness when everyone's not in different rooms pursuing separate hobbies. On that front, check the papers nine months from now for news of a baby boom in the affected areas.

***

In the '90s I started making a solar cooker after reading how in The Tightwad Gazette; I made the mistake of starting before I had all my supplies gathered, and I ended up abandoning the project. Every summer since, when I'd ponder whether having some particular dish was worth heating up the oven (and thus the kitchen), I'd wish I'd finished it. While we were without electricity, I really wished I had a solar oven. With one, we could have had normal meals; had our tap water been contaminated, we could even have used the solar cooker to boil water, instead of relying on bleach.

***

I discovered that, when cooking on the grill, I could get two meals from one portion of charcoal. When I took the cooked food off the grill as usual, I put a lidded, all-metal pot with food inside in the grill and shut the lid. Four or five hours later, the food was cooked. You're a bit limited in what you can cook this way (especially if you only own one all-metal, lidded pot), but any hot food makes a change from peanut butter sandwiches or summer sausage and canned fruit.

***

I learned that if you paint the sides of a can of soup with non-toxic black spray paint and put the can in the sun for a few hours in the middle of the day, you can have hot soup without cooking.

***

I was surprised how quickly the human body adapts to heat. Mississippi writer Jack Butler once described our summers as a hundred days at a hundred degrees and a hundred percent humidity; trust me, we usually make abundant use of the air-conditioning and electric fans, and I've never gone more than a few days without electricity--that time was from Hurricane Frederick, when I was a child. Tuesday and Wednesday sweat poured off me all day (Monday was relatively cool because of the storm), but on Thursday I felt much more comfortable and on Friday I was perfectly comfortable. It has made me rethink our use of air-conditioning and my reluctance to walk anywhere during the day in summer because "it's too hot".


***

In our society it's easy to live cut off from your community--not participating in local events, shopping outside of your area, preferring national or world news to local news--most of the time, but in a natural disaster local news and resources become highly valued.

***

It's amazing how used we are to having news--local, national, & international--available at the flip of a switch. Lying in the dark Wednesday night, I felt very cut-off. No long-distance phone service, no cell phones working, no electricity for internet or TV news, some area radio stations down, no newspapers, no mail. At that point people were sending messages with people driving out of town--a bit like runners or troubadours carrying news. Things quickly began normalizing--a satellite phone was found, more people bought generators as they came into town, the local newspaper got out an edition, the long-distance service came back on Friday, and so on. But for the first couple of days, we were in a more old-fashioned state, and it felt odd.

***

I gained a newfound appreciation for the electric washing machine--specifically its ability to wring out the water from clothes.

***

It's odd to go into a grocery store and all the refrigerated sections are empty and there's no produce (or only cabbage and a small amount of fruit), nothing but non-perishable food. It wouldn't seem odd if we weren't such a prosperous country that we have been able to take stores full of all the food we want, whenever we want, with no waiting (other than the line to pay), for granted. It is so ordinary to us that I sound dorky for mentioning it, but it really is an amazing thing to waltz into a grocery store any time we want and know it will almost certainly have everything we want. It beats the heck out of waiting in line to buy bread, a la the former Soviet Union.

***

Unexpected pleasures are even better than they would be usually. When you weren't expecting to have tea at all, sun tea (I prefer brewed) made from inferior quality tea and poured over the last of the ice from your rapidly thawing freezer can be more enjoyable than good tea is usually.

***

I've changed a lot with age and becoming Catholic. Two things recently brought that home to me. We went through distribution lines several times to get ice (you couldn't buy ice at the store), and one of the centers was set up to get people through as quickly as possible, so we couldn't tell them we only needed ice, not food, without stopping the line. I felt bad about taking food other people needed more, but once upon a time it would have hurt my pride even to take the charity ice.

Second thing was that, after I found out about the horrible things that had been happening in New Orleans (when long-distance service returned Friday), I was able to offer genuine prayers for the souls of the people terrorizing their fellow citizens. I've always been a little more attached to the "some people need killin' " school of thought than befits a Catholic and, as I'm not a naturally forgiving person, my prayers for my enemies have usually begun with a prayerful request that I be able to mean the prayer. People who prey on other people after a natural disaster are the lowest of the low and I think they should be dealt with harshly to discourage others from doing the same, but they, like all of us, are souls in need of divine mercy and I'm glad that I was able to mean it when I prayed for them.

***

I know it's fashionable to criticize capitalists, but there's nothing like having no stores open for two days (and then only a few open for another few days) to give you an appreciation for them. And as for the ones who opened up here before they got generators up and running and had to let only a few customers into their darkened stores at a time and "ring them up" by writing barcodes down on a piece of paper for later entry into their computer systems, it's hard to think it was a purely monetary decision on the part of the managers. I may sound naive, but considering how inconvenient the whole thing was for the stores and how their regular sales were diminished by only being able to allow a few people in at a time, it's hard not to think there was some idea of providing a service behind it.

I know the idea of service inspired the local radio station, which operated for a week without advertisements, just so people could hear local news--things like whether we need to boil water, a local nurse is driving to a dialysis unit north of us and can carry passengers who need dialysis, that sort of thing.

***

MREs are wonderful! I'd only ever heard of them in the context of complaints, but having sampled a couple, I think that either the quality has improved greatly or the complaints were coming from soldiers who got tired of having only MREs for too long. Each MRE has an entree, a snack (such as bread and cheese or peanut butter and crackers), a dessert, an instant drink mix, salt, sugar and creamer if the instant drink was coffee, a tiny container of hot sauce or packet of pepper, two pieces of breath-freshening gum, a high-quality plastic spoon, paper napkins and a moist towelette. The entree is heated in an ingenious little pack, just by adding a tablespoon or two of water to the bag; if your instant drink was a hot drink, you also get a bag for heating the drink. Everything is vacuum-packed in high-quality plastic, and it's lightweight and relatively small in volume. The main bag everything comes in can double as an emergency water carrier. Our military must be the best-fed in history, and as the old saying goes, an army travels on its stomach. Can you imagine how the Roman generals would have loved to have had MREs for their men?

***

There are exceptions, but I usually only go to mass on Sundays or holy days of obligation. During the time since the hurricane, I went to First Friday mass and a couple of daily masses, and it was good to know that, even during a time when everything else is different from your usual life (no traffic lights, for instance) the liturgy is still there, the same.

A New Fantasy Author on My "To Read" List

Ignatius Insight has an interview with Tim Powers:

http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2005/tpowers_intvw_sept05.asp

I've heard the name before but never come across any of his books. But his novels sound interesting and one comment of his made me suspect I might like the man:

I was on a panel once in which a woman said, "Dracula is
actually about the plight of 19th-century women," to which I replied, "No,
it’s
about a guy who lives forever by drinking other people’s blood – don’t
take my
word for it, check it out."

Our public library is still closed and its online catalogue is down, but I'll be checking for Powers as soon as I can.

In Memoriam: 9/11/01

Michelle Malkin has, as expected, an excellent collection of links:

http://michellemalkin.com/archives/003516.htm


And here's a collection of pictures:

http://www.september-11th.us/Archive.html

The Real Lesson

There are a lot of lessons to be learned from Hurricane Katrina, most of them related to preparedness, but I think the real lesson is what I found in Thomas a Kempis' The Imitation of Christ Friday night:

It is good for us to have sometimes troubles and adversities: for they make
a man enter into himself, that he may know that he is in a state of banishment,
and may not place his hopes in anything of this world.

God gave us the good things of the world to enjoy, but ultimately they're not what we're here for. All of the things we spend our time and energy on--jobs, homes, possessions, hobbies--can all be taken from us in a matter of moments or days. Even our loved ones can be snatched from us, though their immortal souls live on. As the whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory realized nearing death, in the end nothing matters but being a saint.

I'm going to try to remember this more often.

I'm Baaaack!

Auntie Suzanne and Uncle Pookie are safe and sound, possessed of home and health (physical anyway), and are currently reveling in the newly acquired presence of things like electric lights, fans, and washing machine. Some men visited our house half an hour ago and restored power. This time last week we were still being told it would be four to six weeks before we got power, but things have been returning to normal pretty quickly; then again, we live near a hospital, so we're among the first to get power.

Three cheers for electricity!

You Just Can't Reason With Hurricane Season

Auntie Suzanne and Uncle Pookie, not to mention a few million others, are in the projected path of Hurricane Katrina, which some say may be worse than Camille. If anyone happens to come across this and can spare a prayer or ten, we'd appreciate it.

Our Lady of Prompt Succor, pray for us.

A Moment with Chesterton (Who Was Married)

"...the wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and the princess lived happily ever afterwards: and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other." (G. K. Chesterton)

Random Thoughts

***

How high do gas prices have to get before Americans start to talk about drilling for oil in Alaska? I wonder because I figure it'll have to get to at least three times that amount before we start to talk about nuclear power. Make that ten times.

***

I read an article the other day about parents who discourage their children from entering the military--which group includes, unfortunately, parents who claim to "support the troops" and to favor the war. Now a lot of this is attributable to people thinking that they and their kind are too good for the military. "It's all right for those working class rednecks, hillbillies, and blacks, but it's not for people like us." Some of it is due to a failing sense of duty among Americans, the entitlement mentality, etc.

But I have to wonder if some of it isn't due to the fact that so many families nowadays have only one child. Many others have only two. I don't mean to suggest that people with large families value the individual children less, only to point out that the already horrifying possibility of losing a child must seem even worse to the person who has no other children. I once heard a priest on television say that parents of one- or two-child families are more likely to resist their sons becoming priests, because they fear having no grandchildren. Mightn't something similar be at work with the military enlistment discouragers?

***

Artists and others are very quick to talk about the rights of artists, but I never hear anyone talk about the duties of artists. Besides being citizens like everyone else, they have a special role as shapers of culture. Doesn't that entail some sort of responsibility to the culture?

***

Cloaks are much cooler looking than coats, but coats are more efficient at their job of keeping out the cold than cloaks. Not surprisingly more people nowadays wear coats or jackets than wear cloaks, capes, or ruanas. But why should that be in places where the winters are mild? In the USA's Deep South, where I live, a cloak can provide adequate--and sometimes more than adequate--warmth for our winters, but almost no one wears them. (I wore a ruana all last winter, and plan to have two this winter.) A bonus is that they are easier to make than coats.

***

Humans in the Mist

The London Zoo has a new exhibit.

Caged and barely clothed, eight men and women monkeyed around
for the crowds Friday in an exhibit labeled "Humans" at the London Zoo....The
exhibit puts the three male and five female "homo sapiens" amid their primate
relatives....the humans were wearing swimsuits beneath their fig
leaves.

Gosh, I wonder what the point of this exhibit could be.

"Seeing people in a different environment, among other animals
... teaches members of the public that the human is just another primate,"
Wills[a zoo spokesman] said.

and

"A lot of people think humans are above other
animals," [one of the displays] told The Associated Press. "When
they see humans as animals, here, it kind of reminds us that we're not that
special."

Ah, yes, animals=humans=animals. No difference at all. Except of course that the displayed humans have made and put on clothes, something that has never occurred to any animal in all of time. No animal has ever invented something new to give itself protection against the elements or to protect its modesty--or for that matter had feelings of modesty about displaying its genitals. Could it be that there's something going on inside humans that doesn't go on in animals?

Some people might even point out that the humans writing and reading this news story are engaging in an act that no animal can--the writer taking information from her environment, coming up with words to convey it, translating those words into abstract symbols on a page, and the readers then translating those marks into words which convey the information. (This is not even getting into the invention of paper or vast computer networks to print the marks on, or any editing for aesthetics or logic the writer may have done.) But people who would point out such things are obviously spiritually unevolved dupes of the patriarchy's humanity-uber-alles mentality.

"It turns everything upside down. It makes you think about the
humans in relation to the animals."

It might if I hadn't seen the same thing in a Charles Addams cartoon more than twenty years ago. Besides, if I were to think about how humans stand in relation to animals, that would only be emphasizing the difference between humans and animals (since animals don't think about it) and thus prove my lack of empathy to our oppressed animal brothers.

Lying About Families

Here's a good article on what spurred Daniel Patrick Moynihan's infamous report on the black family back in the '60s and the reaction to it in the decades since:

http://www.city-journal.com/html/15_3_black_family.html

And lest you think this is only about black families, remember that illegitimacy is rising in other ethnic groups as well; a couple of years ago I read that white illegitimacy has reached the levels of black illegitimacy in the early '60s (something like 24%, I think)--which were rates that greatly worried many black ministers at the time, and which unfortunately soon ballooned.

Don't Act Surprised

How we present ourselves to others has consequences. They're often predictable.


If you wear a tee-shirt with a motto that insults the viewer of the shirt (e.g., "If my dog looked like you, I'd shave his butt and make him walk backward", "You rode the short bus, didn't you?", "Bite Me") and you then approach someone to ask for help, don't act surprised if they are less helpful to you than they are to people in a non-insulting shirt. Even if it's someone who's paid to help you.


If you sport a bumpersticker that says "Bad Cop! No Doughnut!" and a tee-shirt that says "Fuck the Police", don't act surprised when the policeman who pulls you over for speeding is disinclined to let you off with a warning.


If you're a young woman or any girl past puberty and you wear a miniskirt that you have either designed to have or bought because it had attention-grabbing details (in addition to its attention-grabbing shortness, I mean) and men make crude or stupid comments about your skirt in a lame attempt to chat you up, don't act surprised.


If you're a woman and you wear a blouse that clings to the only parts of your breasts that aren't revealed by your plunging neckline, don't act surprised if some men talk to your chest instead of your face.

An Even More Modest Swimsuit

As I mentioned before, I don't have a problem with a basic one-piece swimsuit. I have seen an American suit or two advertised as a modest suit, but I did not like them, so I didn't mention them in my previous post on swimsuits; one of them looked like a knee-length wetsuit with a flowery skirt over it--not a look that would appeal to most American women, I think.

These probably aren't going to either, but I like them better than that American one:

(Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-swimsuits21aug21,0,7438130.story?coll=la-tot-promo&track=morenews)

They're pretty, happy-looking women; apparently no one ever told them you have to wear a string bikini to be attractive.

The LATimes article I took this photo from is worth skimming. It says that, thanks to the new Islamic bourgeoisie in Turkey, there's now designer headscarfs and liquor-free resorts, in addition to the really modest swimsuits. And those swimsuits are apparently more for sex-mixed groups; the article says women sometimes wear revealing suits when they're in women-only groups.

One Way to Make a Snood (AKA a Hairnet or Caul)

For some reason I'm fascinated by Regina Doman's article on liturgical dressing--all of it, the concept and the particular articles of clothing mentioned. I have no interest in liturgical dressing itself; but I like drapey fabric, simple clothes, and clothing with a somewhat medieval look, and I am interested in pattern-free clothing. I haven't made the "Mary Dress" or the "Mary Jumper", because on this particular idea I need to see a photo before I make up my mind to commit my fabric; I'm intrigued by, but not sure of, the "wings". (Eh, maybe I'll just try it anyway one day I'm bored.)

Doman did inspire me to make a snood, though. I didn't think I could because I don't crochet or knit and Doman said she could no longer find the cotton mesh she used to sew hers. Then I happened to be in Wal-Mart when the clerk was bringing out some new $1.00/yd fabric. Most of the $1 fabric is ugly, but sometimes there's something nice. This day the clerk was bringing out a weird, stretchable black net material. It's not the cotton mesh Doman mentioned, as it must be synthetic to have so much stretch, but it looked like a snood to me. I bought 1/2 yard, carried it home, let it age for a couple of weeks :-), and then when it had matured I made a snood. I've worn it several times and found it surprisingly comfortable; I also found it can look cute with some clothes but didn't look right when I put it on with jeans and a tee-shirt (then again, that day I was just trying to hide my dirty hair.)

I also found you don't really need stretchy mesh. I have thick, bra-length hair, and my hair fits into my snood without any noticeable stretching. I'm sure a non-stretch mesh would work fine. I've seen some thrift store shirts made of a cotton mesh that I think could be cut up and used as a snood; next time I see one in a good color, I'm going to try it.


How I made my snood:

I cut an 18" square of mesh, folded it into quarters, then eighths, and cut a curve on it to get a rough circle. (This was after some tedious and wholly unnecessary thought about figuring circumferences and radiuses.) I cut a narrow strip of thin black fabric--about 1/4" wide--and sewed that around the edges of the net, using my widest stitch length. (Ribbon would probably work instead of the fabric.) Then I pulled the threads until it was gathered to about my head measurement (as measured from the top of the head to the bottom, where the head meets the neck). I covered the edges of the resulting "pouch" with a length of 1/2" wide doublefold bias tape (cut to my head measurement plus about an inch), using a lot of pins to secure it before sewing. Then I just sewed it down, taking care to tuck in the ends of the bias tape when I had completed the circle.

Actually, I had meant to add 1/4" wide elastic to the band, but by the time I got to the end, the thought of threading a piece of elastic through a bias tube filled with net sewn to fabric no longer appealed to me, and I said, "**** it, I'll just hold the thing up with hair pins." I've since found a photo of Regina Doman online, and I notice her snood is held on with hairpins too. I plan to try this again sometime with elastic.

For the Thrifty: Fabric Yields from Sheets

Sheets at garage sales, thrift stores, or salvage stores can be a good source of cheap fabric, useful for everything from quilt backing (scrap quilts you plan to use, anyway, maybe not art quilts) and curtains to clothing. A young man I once met kept a photo of his cute and very nicely-dressed little girl on his desk. After bragging on the daughter, he said that his mother made the dress in the photo, as well as a lot of other clothes the girl wore. "She buys floral sheets on sale and makes these dresses, and they look like Laura Ashley dresses you'd pay a lot of money for in a store." He was right, it did look like a Laura Ashley dress. A lot of it probably depended on his mother's sewing skill, but it shows you can get good results from sheets.

I haven't done this much though. Mainly because I'm picky and seldom find ones I like, but there have also been times I wondered if a particular thrift store sheet was a good buy or not. To make that determination easier, I've figured out approximate yardages for the most common sheet sizes.

To do this I looked up a chart of average sheet sizes. Any particular manufacter may use slightly different measurements, so you have to check the tag to be sure of the measurements you're getting, but as secondhand sheets may have faded or absent tags, I thought figuring the averages would give me a helpful rule of thumb to go by on price, as well as letting me know whether a particular sheet has enough yardage for what I want.

Note: The chart I used said that its measurements for fitted sheets included top surface only, so I'm not including sides in my estimates. I haven't tried it, but I'm guessing that if you snip off the elastic and press the sides flat, you may add 6" around the edges. Depending on what you're using it for, you may lose some fabric around the edges of flat sheets, because of the hems; OTOH, if they're secondhand, the flat sheets are apt to be in better shape.


TWIN/SINGLE

Fitted--just over 2 yds of 39" wide fabric.

Flat--2&2/3 yds of 66" wide fabric.



DOUBLE/FULL/STANDARD

Fitted--just over 2 yds of 54" wide fabric.

Flat--2&2/3 yds of 81" wide fabric.



QUEEN

Fitted--almost 2&1/4 yds of 60" wide fabric.

Flat--2 & 5/6 yds (i.e. just over 2&3/4) of 90" fabric. If you were to cut the fabric up the middle, you'd have two 2&5/6 yd lengths of 45" wide fabric, for a total of 5& 2/3 yds of 45" fabric.



KING

Fitted--almost 2&1/4 yds of 76"-78" wide fabric.

Flat--2&5/6 yds (i.e. just over 2&3/4) of 108" wide fabric. Cut up the middle, that yields two 2&5/6 yd lengths of 54" wide fabric, for a total of 5&2/3 yds of 54" fabric. OR you could turn the sheet side ways and have 3 yds of 102" wide fabric; cut that up the middle and you have two 3 yd lengths of 51" wide fabric, for a total of 6 yds.



The rule of thumb: Any sheet twin-size or larger is going to give you at least two yards of fabric (although on the twin fitted it will be a narrower width than most contemporary patterns call for in their pattern layouts), so take the price of the sheet, halve it, and ask yourself if you'd pay that much per yard for that fabric. If it's close, remember that you're actually paying a bit less per yard, especially on a queen or king flat sheet.

Chesterton As You've Never Seen Him Before

An artist named Ben Hatke has illustrated "Song of the Strange Ascetic", a Chesterton poem about how if he were a heathen, he'd have fun with it, not like the gloomy-faced heathens of his day, who "do not have the faith,/And will not have the fun". Look and be charmed:

http://www.benanna.com/HouseHatke/art/art_zoom_0004.htm

Things I'm Sick Of -- A Mean-spirited List

People who hate Wal-Mart and won't shut up about it, yet who continue to shop at other big chain stores. I don't care where other people shop, but I get tired of hearing about it from self-righteous snobs (yes, I'm generalizing). It wouldn't be so annoying if more of the complainers shopped only at small businesses or secondhand stores. If Chain X is the source of all evil, how can Chains Y & Z--not to mention A-W--who do the same sorts of things, not also be evil and worthy of ire?


Low-rise pants. They look okay on some super-thin girls, but they flatter no one. Most girls look very bad in them. Women of, as they say, a certain age shouldn't go there at all. (Especially when they're pairing their low-rise pants with a cropped top that shows off their wrinkly, stretch-marked, fortyplus-year old bellies and bellybutton ring or tattoos.) I'm not so lookist to care if people look good or not, but most of these sad people are obviously trying to look good and failing really badly.


Visible bra straps. When I was a girl, only the trashiest of the trashy went out with visible bra straps, and even then it was usually the result of extreme carelessness. Now some girls do it deliberately. It still looks trashy.


Flip-flops. They're great for the beach or for public showers, and they are economical (at least they used to be); but if you're a middle-class girl in one of the most prosperous countries ever to exist and you are wearing a nice dress, buy some shoes or a pair of decent-looking sandals. Hot gluing an artificial flower or some sequins to your flip-flops do not make them formal wear. No, not even semi-formal.


The use of the word "pimp" to mean anything other than a procurer, a pander, a low-life trafficker in human flesh, an exploiter (usually of women.)


The use of the word "ride" to refer to automobiles. I first heard this word in the early '90s. It sounded stupid then and it still sounds stupid.

I, Auntie Suzanne, Recommend This Series

I recently watched I, Claudius. It's thirteen episodes (about 12 hours total) of political intrigue, treachery, corruption, and vice. I once found myself wondering if this is the period that historians with a secret penchant for soap operas study. It's very entertaining. Among its features is the delightful Brian Blessed in an unexpected role as Augustus. Watch and enjoy and try not to draw parallels between Rome and contemporary Western society--the comparisons have been made before and you'll only worry yourself.

According to the Netflix reviews (Uncle Pookie and I may not have TV, but we keep our Netflix queue humming), this BBC series has been called the best thing ever made for TV--or something like that, and I'm not sure who is supposed to have said that; but whether it's the best or not, it is certainly well worth watching. Although not for the little kiddies; I don't automatically object to little kiddies seeing naked breasts, but there's some serious decadence in this that I, for one, would not want to have to explain to a child. For teens or adults who don't want to see that kind of thing depicted, there's an abridged audiobook version, read by Derek Jacobi (who plays Claudius in the TV series), that is both considerably cleaned up and entertaining to listen to.

FWIW, I found the most striking character in both the audiobook and the TV series to be Livia. Florence King once said that there's nothing wrong with "women's studies" that studying the right women won't set straight. If even half of what I, Claudius says about Livia is true, then Livia is one of those women Miss King was talking about.

Some Sewing Links

How to Make Yourself a Dressform
(I recommend the brown paper tape version; it is easy and really cheap, and it has history behind it--the technique goes back to at least the 1930s.)
http://www.taunton.com/threads/pages/t00002.asp


Online directions for making an A-line Skirt without a pattern
http://www.geocities.com/kraftylala44/Easy_A-line_Skirt.html


Covering Our Hair
Links to directions for making headcoverings. (Some are knitted or crocheted, instead of sewn.)
http://www.fmfcorp.com/familyspot/haircover.html


Dawn's Costume Guide
(mostly SCA, but there's a section on Biblical-era costumes, such as children might wear at church plays) Tells how to draw out patterns based on your own measurements; some of the patterns could be adapted slightly to make contemporary garments.
http://www.reddawn.net/costume/patterns.htm


The Tangled Web
Another SCA or RenFaire site. Directions include how to make a chemise (which could be adapted to make a peasant blouse or a nightgown), a gathered skirt, a gored skirt, and bloomers.
http://home.aol.com/lclacemker/frameset3.html


Reconstructing History
The Beginners section has free instructions for making several period garments for the upper body. Use your own measurements to make your pattern pieces, then use one of the fabric-saving, probable period layouts to cut your pieces. (Outside the beginner's section, there's a lot of interesting historical information, plus a few how-tos; read to learn what your northern European or Japanese ancestors were wore.)
http://www.reconstructinghistory.com/beginners/index.html


Lots-o-Links Page
The above three SCA links are links I am familiar with. Here's a big collection of links to pages with SCA clothing information--at least some have construction how-tos.
http://moas.atlantia.sca.org/wsnlinks/index.php?action=displaycat&catid=10


StitchGuide
Bills itself as "the most complete online stitch reference". Has illustrations and videos to help you learn crochet, knitting, embroidery, tatting, etc. (Okay, so knitting and crochet aren't sewing, but embroidery sorta-kinda is and the videos are a cool resource.)
http://www.stitchguide.com/


About.com can be annoying, but their Sewing section has a Free Projects subcategory
http://sewing.about.com/od/freeprojects/


SewNews Magazine
has an online library of articles covering multiple sewing-related areas.
http://www.sewnews.com/library/sewnews/aalibrary.htm


Threads magazine (the source of the dressform how-to above) has a collection of articles online.
http://www.taunton.com/threads/index.asp

Shotguns and Parenting

If more fathers were like the father and brother in the beginning of the Dukes of Hazzard movie (don't look at me like that, my seeing it was something in the nature of Klingon opera*; Uncle Pookie has fond memories of Daisy Duke for some reason), maybe there would be fewer unwed pregnancies. Most young men would think twice about taking liberties if the likely consequence were a butt full of lead. On the other hand, it would also make the daughters of those fathers more desirable: something you have to work to get is usually seen as more valuable than what is free for the taking, and forbidden fruit is perenially attractive. On the third hand, it might be good for the gene pool, as only the most determined young men would break through.

As for the movie itself, it's about as good as the show--i.e. silly and about as substantial as cotton candy, but not the worst thing you've ever seen, either. Uncle Pookie found the new Daisy too skinny, though.

*Entertainment you partake of only because you are a member of a couple. From a Star Trek Deep Space Nine line about how, when you're part of a couple, you like jazz and your partner likes Klingon opera, so you compromise--you listen to Klingon opera.

Today's Chesterton Quote

There's not enough Chesterton around here, so I've dug into my collection of quotes and come up with this:

Carlyle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and
more reverent realism, says that they are all fools. This doctrine is sometimes
called the doctrine of original sin. It may also be described as the doctrine of
the equality of men.

(G. K. Chesterton, Heretics)

Bad Ideas Never Die

A while back I mentioned a news article about some neo-Nazis who'd emigrated to Israel. While their choice of a new country continues to flabbergast me, apparently their originating in the former Soviet Union shouldn't surprise anyone:

"Nearly half of the world's skinheads -- about 50,000 of them
-- live in Russia, according to a January report by the Moscow Bureau for Human
Rights. In St. Petersburg, where a brutal, 872-day blockade by Nazi troops
killed 1.7 million people during World War II, there may be as many as 5,000
skinheads, the report said; an estimated 10,000 skinheads live in Moscow, up
from a dozen a decade ago.
In 2004, neo-Nazis killed 44 people across Russia
-- more than double the previous year, Amnesty International
reported."

(Source)

I saw some American fans of Hitler once on TV--you know, the kind who teach their toddlers to give the "Heil" sign to photos of their glorious Fuehrer and so on--and, as they seemed to be pleased with their status as Americans, I kept asking, "Don't they know we fought Hitler?" It's possible they didn't; they were very insistent that Jesus wasn't a Jew, so I'm not sure their historical knowledge was up to much. But you would think a sense of the Nazis having been enemies would be everywhere in Russia, which was hit much harder by WWII than the US--and hit at home, not just abroad.

But I guess knowing your grandparents and great-grandparents fought Nazis is not enough to dampen the appeal fascism has for many people. And with their society ravaged by decades of communism, the appeal may be even higher. The Soviet Union collapsed, people in the former Soviet-controlled countries are uppity, and the economy is bad; anything that boosts a person's national pride and makes him feel a sense of belonging must look pretty good. If that person has been deprived of religious civilizing influences and if the prevailing zeitgeist has made life cheap, he may be even more likely to fall prey to this despicable ideology, even more likely to find himself thinking it's okay to join up with some other people to beat up Jews, dark-skinned people, or non-Germans/Russians/whatever.

Catholics should pray for a resurgence of Christianity in Russia. Much as I believe or hope fundamental human decency can prevail over neo-Naziism, it would be better to have religion backing that decency up.