On to Istanbul

For those of you who don't have the intestinal fortitude to read this entire blog, a glossary: OLGS stands for "Oldest Living Graduate Student". His books, his professorship, and the respect of his colleagues world wide (or at least in the UK and Israel) matter less on the domestic front. I'm waiting for the empty wine bottle with the dripping candle. And I still love the guy.

Anyway, OLGS is at it again--he's now off to Turkey. Clearly, he's trying to get in all the travel he knows will bother me before I show up in Scotland. A PhD is actually worth something.....the man is smart.

And the US State Department--the same guys who brought you weapons of mass desctruction--have declared Turkey safe, or at least not a place to avoid. Why don't I take more comfort in that?

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Israel: tourism no matter what....

OLGS went to Israel. I talked him out of it last summer, when things were pretty bad, but once he was in Scotland, and out of my clutches, he answered the call of Hebrew University to do a book talk. Based on the reports, the book talk took about an hour. The rest of the time he spent being a tourist.

We forget, amid the Middle East disaster the US has helped create, that there is a thriving tourist industry in Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, and other places. Interestingly, a lot of the tourists are evangelical Christians, following the Bible through archaelogy.

OLGS visited sites featuring King Herod, a hero to left wing Israelis. He floated in the Dead Sea. And he made a new friend.

Swimming Sectionals

Joe High School is off to the second round of Twin Cities section swim meet, the purpose of which is to identify the swimmers who will proceed to the state meet. Joe will not make it to state--there are several powerhouse swimmers from Cretin-Durham Hall, a few from St. Paul Sibley, and a couple from Southwest. But he acquitted himself well--coming in 5th in the 500 yard freestyle, and 9th in the 200 yard freestyle, placement that qualifies him for the second round. And in both, he swam his personal best--at 5:26:83 in the 500 free, and a 2:02:xx in the 200.

I never thought that I would become one of these obsessive parents who cares about 100ths of a second. But he is pleased, although, as always, he said, "I could have gone faster." I no longer ask him why he didn't--it adds nothing.

Cold enough for ya?

Finally--a Minnesota winter day. The temp is stuck well below zero, the weather guys on the radio are orgasmic about having something interesting to report, and that wonderful sense of Minnesota virtue is present everywhere. I got Joe High School to wear his puffy down jacket--otherwise an indicator of total suburban geekdom, and not cool. I can have meaningful conversations with neighbors: "Your heating bill was HOW much?" I can think idly about plugging up the draft under the doors with a throw rug. Even the old tom cat doesn't want to venture out except for his most immediate needs.

I grew up in a place that wasn't terribly cold, but did have lots of snow. While the words are different, the song remains the same. My conversations with my elderly parents in that far-away place usually begin with the weather report. "You got HOW much snow? 15 inches? Wow!" I member the snows of my youth--Six foot piles at the end of the driveways, perfect for constructing dug-out snow forts. On very cold days--15 or 20 degrees (nothing to a Minnesotan) girls would be allowed to wear pants under their dresses, receiving extra time before school actually started to take them off.

I can tell I'm approaching geezerdom. Why does everyone love to talk about the weather? Is it because we can't control it? Or are we genetically wired to be concerned about it?

Minnesota motto: It's too cold to snow.

Scottish swans--apparently not royal

Why don't we have the president's swans? It would a lot better than other things the current prexy and his gang have given us. Or maybe we should bite the bullet and have a constitutional monarch. Then there would be some limitations on what the leader of the free world could do.

Back to the royal swans. Apparently the queen does not have jurisdiction over Scottish swans, but only those in England and Wales. Click on the title of this post for some arcane info. about royal swans.

Feline victories

Life is made up of small victories. I now have one of these in the cat medication department. After months of trying to give our elderly female cat thyroid pills, and failing, I found a solution. Literally. The solution is to have the medication ground up in a fish paste solution, and then drip it carefully--not too much--on each cat kibble piece. This sounds tedious, but it's significantly better than the previous efforts.

These efforts involved trying to get her to swallow the pill. Let's just say that for an indoor cat she has very sharp claws. Then we tried grinding up the pill ourselves and hiding the pill dust in cream, ice cream, chicken soup, anything. She would eat the delicacies, and leave the pill crumbs. Then I tried giving her the fish paste by itself, heating it up a little to release the irresitable eau de haddock. She would look at me and laugh, in her funny cat way. She's smart, for an old broad.

The fish paste mechanism costs $60 a bottle, and she will go through a bottle a month for what I hope is a long life. The vet warned us, menacingly, that if we didn't do something, she would die. And indeed, she was down to about five pouds, with a ratty looking coat. Now she's sleek, and while not precisely fat, she no longer looks like a cartoon alley cat.

It's worth it. She's a good cat. And, I'd probably do something foolish with that extra $60 a month, anyway.

Wisconsin in Scotland--Students Arrive

Apparently the pub directly outside the manor house in Dalkeith has a banner, Welcome University of Wisconsin Students, flying proudly out front. Conveniently located, the pub allows students to stumble home in about 100 yards. You can take the students out of Wisconsin, but you can't take Wisconsin out of the students....they drink wherever they are. The first official event for them was a one hour lecture on responsible drinking. All faculty were also required to attend....

Scotland Forever

Students arriving at Dalkeith are greeted by a piper. I suspect Scotland has raised more money from the tourism/piper industry than it ever did from coal or oil. But bigger even than the pipes is the Scots diaspora--from the 18th century on, an overwhelming number of people left Scotland for greener pastures (actually, any pastures), in Canada, the United States, and Australia. Scratch almost anyone in these places, and you'll find a displaced Scot. So maybe the students have a genetic thrill to the sound of the pipes.

Bush comes to Minneapolis

As part of his initiative for American competition, Bush showed up in front of a hand-picked audience of 3M employees yesterday. He said nothing, promised nothing, but had his piacture taken with the well-scrubbed, nice looking 3M types, several of whom were black. That boy never misses an opportunity to pander to almost anyone. That's why he's so popular with the hard right types--the plutocrats clear their throats, and GW bends over. It's kind of like a wind up toy--they cough, he bends....

Journey to the Northern Counties

OLGS has arrived in Scotland, and is exploring the castle. Joe High School (the swimmer) and I will join him in March--after the end of the Minnesota High School League's swimming season. Joe will attend Dalkeith High, which may be even less tony than Minneapolis South High. We shall see. There is apparently a pool....

Keep in Touch

My mother, who apparently sees this blog as a window into the lives of her children and grandchildren, complained that I hadn't updated these postings recently. I do wonder why I haven't. I am working incredibly long hours, volunteering at swim meets, and trying to read a book or two once in a while. But there's got to be a reason. Is it because there's nothing to say? Are world and national events so demoralizing that I shrink from tackling them, even at the most superficial level? Possibly, but right now I'm too tired to tackle even that.

I talked with a colleague who was at one time a stalwart in the Minnesota Atheists. This has to be a fairly small, but enthusiastic, affinity group. But she eventually backed off, even though it was pretty clear she still supported the aims of the group. "Too social", she said. Too many activities.

And that may be my problem. Too much going on that absorbs the attention but doesn't really produce anything, either materially or intellectually. I could tell you about all the swim meets that I've attended since I last discussed them, or OLGS's trip down memory lane in New York with Joe College Grad, his long-lost cousin, and his sister. I could describe what he saw at PS 107 when he visited Joe College Grad's first grade classroom. I could whine about the difficulty of figuring out whether I should keep working at an independent contractor, or go to Scotland for two months. I could complain about the noise where I work, a place that is devoted to legal publishing and writing, but where writers and client interviewers are housed among very loud sales types, who spend hours doing nothing and talking about it excessively while the writers who are actually developing the product have to apologize to clients over the phone about the noise. End of rant.

Upstate New York

Thoughts about blogging--you can see where your visitors are--sort of, although people coming in on MSN always come through Redmond, Washington. A few of my readers come from upstate New York, around Syracuse, Rochester, and Utica. After the Hudson River Valley, that area of New York is one of my favorite places. Parts of it are a little flat for my taste, but that's how I felt before I lived in Minnesota, and really knew what flat could be.

Otherwise, New York has it all. Snow, seasons, water, and a central position in American history. In fact, I wrote an MA history thesis on a little-known(but culturally important even today) aspect of US religious history that flowered in this part of New York. And there's the Erie Canal, which, as every sixth-grader knows, was critical to development of New York and the US.

I used to take the Lake Shore Limited from Poughkeepsie to Rochester. In those days the train arrived in Rochester in the middle of the night, and I was always worred about missing the stop and ending up in Buffalo. So I would wake up around Syracuse, and watch the lights from the Thruway and the tiny towns flash by. Those little towns have been there since the American Revolution and before, settled by Massachusetts Yankees who couldn't stomach the enforced rectitude and poor farm land of New England. That probably gave the place an interesting edge.

The only passenger train going across Minnesota is the Empire Builder, named for James J. Hill. That train, unlike James J. himself, is almost always late, sometimes by many hours or even days. The visonaries who built the railroad across upstate New York after the Erie Canal would have been horrified. But that was then....

You can't get there from Here

Every state in New England, at least northern New England, claims to be the grandpapa of this saying. A flatlander visiting Vermont, or Maine, or Massachusetts, or New Hampshire, so the story goes, asked a native how to get to the next town. The response, "You can't get there from here," delivered with the flat vowels and unpronounced r's of New England, has become legendary. Part of the reason it's legendary is because it's actually true, at least in spirt.

But the native had it all wrong. It's not, "You can't get there from here." Rather, the phrase should be, "If you don't know how to get there, you don't belong there." Exhibit A: if you are driving along a major city street, say in a large city (for New England) like Worcester, you will not be able to identify the street on which you are driving. You will see the names of all the cross streets, but the name of the street you're currently on will remain unattainable to you. You might luck out and see it on a diner sign, or a pizza parlor, or a grinder shop. But the city fathers in Worcester have decided that if you don't know where you are, you don't deserve to find out. And in this they are right in step with the rest of northern New England. No wonder the place has flat population numbers. People get lost, give up, and leave.

And have we talked about those things the English call roundabouts? Next time.

Home for the Holidays

I just had a moment of sheer terror. Joe College Grad assured me that he would call last night to provide flight info. There was no call--a late night buzz of his cell phone went unanswered. Then, OLGS tried to call him a few minutes ago. No answer. I had visions of Joe lying in an alley in New York, the cell phone ringing uselessly. Then I tried to call. He answered, and there was the noise of an airport behind his voice. He is flying out of JFK, on a DC-9 bound for Billings, of all places. He sounded bored, sleepy, and a little annoyed that we were bothering him. He sounded wonderful.

Death Penalty

There's been another state-sponsored death--this time in California. The victim was a gang leader who supposedly saw the error of his ways and spent his years on Death Row writing children's books and generally promoting a more positive approach to life than the one he espoused during his gang days. Some opponents of this execution cited Stanley Tookie Williams' turn-around as a reason to not execute him. And, while well meaning, they have it all wrong. Whether or not someone deserves the death penalty, or merits clemency in the application of that penalty, is not the issue.

Rather, the real issue is that the death penalty itself, and not its application, is wrong, wrong, wrong. It is unconstitutional, violating the prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment." It makes us an outlaw among "civilized" nations, putting us among the ranks of places like Saudi Arabia, Singapore, China, and other monuments to barbarism. It weakens us as a culture, making us vengeful and petty. It is very expensive to administer. It has been demonstrated that the application of the death penalty is often based on incorrect evidence, poor lawyering, and racism. The list of reasons to abolish the death penalty is huge.

The reasons to keep it are few, and can easily dismissed. It has been shown that there is no deterrent effect. Many victims' families say that that the death of the perpetrator of the crime does not bring them relief.

And then there's the incredible inconsistency in the arguments. The proponents of the death penalty are often the same folks who beat their breasts about the right to life and the evils of the pro-choice movement. If life is so sacred at its beginning, what possible reason can there be for making an exception to end it at the behest of the state? There's some real faulty logic going on, as well as a sickening pandering to our most base instincts. Just because a few individuals would like revenge doesn't mean that we as a society should accomodate them--it has been shown that there is no social benefit, and a lot of social cost.