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.