Winged Avenger

Awesome. Makes your starling-in-the-head story look kind of tame, doesn’t it, honey?

To Read this Weekend

More a note to myself than to you.

Let’s Spend on Broadband and the Power Grid

I’m rewriting the same paragraph over and over (Since You Asked)

Survival tips for the Middle Ages

From the other Kristol

A fun little Op-Ed from the New York Times: The Endorsement From Hell

[T]he endorsement of Mr. McCain by a Qaeda-affiliated Web site isn’t a surprise to security specialists. Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism director, and Joseph Nye, the former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, have both suggested that Al Qaeda prefers Mr. McCain and might even try to use terror attacks in the coming days to tip the election to him.

Talking Points

Dooce wrote a post last week about American politics and was barraged by thousands of comments, hundreds from conservatives who 1) felt insulted for being called selfish because they oppose universal health care, 2) insisted that they had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, had never taken a dime from the government, and everyone else can choose that path, too! and 3) adamantly maintained that allowing people to choose which charity to give to is a much more cost-effective means of distributing money to the less fortunate than any bureaucratic institution could ever be.

Rebuttals (that none of them will ever read):

1) There is no reason to oppose universal health care; it will not be a mandatory program. You can opt out if you have private coverage. What you’re really supporting with that argument is a system that denies children necessary asthma medication because their parents (who both work full-time) can’t afford to buy it as often as they need. Yes, there was a government program in place the kid who don’t qualify for Medicaid and whose parents can’t afford coverage. It was called SCHIP. Bush vetoed its extension last year. While he extended coverage on previously enrolled children until March 2009, very few of the (state-administered) programs have been accepting new enrollments for more than two years.

2) How about some perspective: If you have ever relied on police, firefighters or EMTs to come to your aid in an emergency, you’ve taken a dime from the government. If you’ve ever eaten a chicken breast produced at a plant overseen by government meat inspectors, you’ve taken a dime from the government. If you have ever attended a public school, driven on a public street, watched Sesame Street, or checked a book out of a library, you’ve taken a dime from the government. If you’ve ever used municipal water or sewer systems, or strapped a child into a car seat and driven in a crash-tested car, you’ve taken a dime from the government.

The federal government does not just fund those storied welfare queens and donate aid to ungrateful foreign governments. We’re all in this together. Isn’t it better to err on the side of generosity, possibly enabling the occasional system-abuser rather than allow the unspeakable poverty of 1950s Appalachia return?

3) We’ve actually tried that altruism-based system before; it was called the Nineteenth Century. For further reading on the matter, please examine the works of Dickens, Charles J. H. (1812-1870). Cliffs Notes version: it didn’t work.

More notes to myself

Feel-good story about France’s far-reaching efforts to boost its stork population. Quite a successful program; they’ve gone from 9 breeding pairs in 1983 to 270 pairs today. I especially like the schoolchildren’s efforts to repair nests during the birds’ migration.

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The best ratio (so far) for Kung Pao Tofu sauce is:

1 cup vegetable stock
3 tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons corn starch
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon habañero sauce (2 t if using Tabasco)
1 soy sauce (only if the peanuts aren’t salted and you’ve forgotten to salt the tofu)

Food blogs worth visiting regularly:
Fine Furious Life
Evolving Tastes

Is this gorgeous-looking rum bundt cake on Design Sponge worth making even though it calls for both cake and pudding mixes? Am I being a snob? Or am I just easily swayed by its sculptural qualities?

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You know someone at The Wall Street Journal hates you when this is the photo they use to illustrate a story:

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They Feed the Lion
from Philip Levine’s New Selected Poems, Knopf

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of the creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,
They Lion Grow.

Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
“Come home, Come home!” From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.

From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
They grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.

From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.

One of a kind

I always thought we’d make up. One of these days we’d see each other at the Superstore or on Spring Garden and we’d both apologize — her for having no compassion for a broke illegal scrambling to make enough to pay my share of the power bill, me for refusing to pay rent for the summer months (after they’d forced me out of the apartment five months earlier).

We were great friends for that first year of university, a dozen girls living in a truly golden time, full of curiosity and open to possibilities.

I thought once she’d calmed down a bit, and we’d both grown up, we could laugh about the misunderstanding. We had a strong foundation.

Fast forward six years.

I stumbled across the obituary accidentally, and then I was sure I’d read it wrong. It is with great sadness that we announce the untimely passing of our beautiful daughter and sister….
Ten weeks ago she was cheerfully teaching in Japan, and today I went to her funeral.

But I still think I must have read it wrong. No one was ever more alive than she.

Six

I’ve had a post about depression in teenage girls half-written for a few weeks, but those jollies will have to wait because Colleen has tagged me! I’m IT!

Six random fact about me:

1) I’ve ridden two elephants. I can’t remember the circumstances of the first time (something to do with the circus), but the second time, someone was holding an elephant exhibition in a strip mall parking lot in my hometown. They’re more bristly than you think.

2) I read the obituaries in several newspapers every day, and collect interesting names therein. Birth announcements, too.

3) I also collect marbles.

4) When I was born, exactly two weeks past the due date, I got stuck in the birth canal, and no amount of pushing could budge me. So my mother’s obstetrician— the famed Christiane Northrup herself— pulled me out with forceps, blacking my eye and breaking both my collarbones. I haven’t broken a bone since.

5) I notice misspellings, grammatical and punctuation errors everywhere; on advertisements, signs, newspapers and magazines, press releases— I just can’t escape them. Fortunately, I am able to mostly ignore errors in electronic media, and never read my own blog, so that explains away my own errata. To my shame, I have been known to correct errors on Richard’s blog. Sorry, honey.

6) I have a bad habit of romanticizing the unromantic— the latest, coolest craze (inside my head) is hoboes! Fed by recently reading Housekeeping, this article on hobo nickels, and folding neatly into my great affections for railways, Burl Ives, Snufkin, Carnavále, and my love-hate of the harmonica. Happily, I am under no illusion that I could ever make a go of it as a hobo— sure I might love riding the rails, seeing new people, watching the slow smoothing and wrinkling of the landscape, but strong, earthy smells torment me, and I’ve never been much for relieving myself outside. Once, at Girl Scout Camp, I didn’t pee for close to thirty-six hours, though there was a decent outhouse readily available (in which I had spotted a large blue-green beetle). They called my mom to take me home early.

Okay, so the rules for this meme are:

- Link to the person that tagged you
- Post the rules on your blog
- Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself
- Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs
- Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website

but instead of tagging six random people (rulebreaker!), I’m inviting anyone who’d like to play to leave their 6 in the comments. Anyone? Anyone?

Anyone?

Martyr

Just popping my head in to call your attention to this— I can’t think of a visceral-enough adjective— slideshow of Benazir Bhutto’s last moments (graphic, but worth viewing in full screen if you can). I’ve never lived in a country where citizens took their democracy seriously enough to risk death at a rally.

Are any of our 2008 candidates willing to die for their vision of the country the way Bhutto died for her own? Should that be the acid test?

Endings and Beginnings

Thirty days, thirty-odd posts, and all I have to show for it is another HTML badge.

So, what have I learned from NaBloPoMo? Not much, I’m afraid. The same lessons again and again.

1) Don’t leave posting until 11:00 or you certainly won’t come up with anything profound. There’s no guarantee of profundity at any time around here— you may have noticed— but if it’s coming, it needs more than an hour.

2) Don’t count on your software to behave the same way from day-to-day. MarsEdit stopped letting me post photos of a certain size, and it decided that I didn’t want comments almost every day.

3) Tena always has something kind to say.

I didn’t get a single hit from NaBloPoMo this year, which is kind of a drag. My blog wasn’t listed on the blogroll for almost two weeks, and now even though it’s there clicking doesn’t link to me, due to an extra ” in the a tags. I could have bugged Eden about it again, but nagging someone about a 40-hour-per-week job they do for free doesn’t seem like good karma.

I think the structure is good for me, though, so I’ll attempt a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule for December. I hope for more insight and less drivel, but I can’t promise anything there.

I’ll leave you with this article (from where, you ask? your guess is as good as mine) about sponges that I found in my archives yesterday.

Sponges may conjure visions of the soft and squishy, but some of those living deep beneath the sea build complex glass structures that are marvels of engineering.

The sponge, from the genus Euplectella, uses a host of tricks for turning its brittle, primarily glass skeleton into strong structures, researchers report in the current issue of the journal Science. In fact, scientists are looking to the sponge for new ideas in materials science and engineering.

The sponge first builds strong microscopic fibers by gluing together thin layers of glass. Then it gathers these laminated fibers together for even more strength. It’s like a bundle of sticks tied together — much harder to break than a single twig. The bundles are arranged in a grid that gets embedded into glass cement, so it becomes like reinforced concrete.

People use these kinds of techniques to build structures such as skyscrapers. But Joanna Aizenberg of Bell Laboratories says what’s amazing is that the sponge grows its lattice — and its glasswork doesn’t require the kind of red-hot furnace that human glass makers need.

“I cannot imagine how a structure of this sophistication can be produced,” says Aizenberg, the study’s lead author.

Since I had no memory of saving it, I’m as fascinated with those silent, alien creatures now as when I saved it (I think!).

All Things Bright and Beautiful

It could be the imminent arrival of young Xing Xing, but I’ve been craving an animal around the house even more than usual this past week. Although the only animal who lived in our house until I was ten was Sunshine, an Amazon Bluefront parrot my father bought her for Christmas just nine months before I was born (hmmm), my brother and I both starting agitating for pets pretty early on.

I thought I’d won the lottery when my Dad gave me a guinea pig on my tenth birthday. I nearly ruined the surprise by bursting in on him during his nap to tell him my friend Jamie Wescott had got the whole bus to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. But I didn’t notice the caged animal in the corner, and was truly surprised when he brought her out after supper.

Honey* and I were a great team. I changed her litter every day, lugging the tray all the way to the compost bin, often in knee-deep snow. My brother and I built her complex Lego mazes and she nibbled on every piece of homework I did at home that year (which made it a rare treat).

But she was just a foot in the door! For Seth’s birthday the next month he got a hamster, and a few months later my grandfather’s wife called to settle a bet: wouldn’t you love to take in a dog who needs a new home?

After that, it was an ever-changing menagerie: we had two more guinea pigs, at least four more hamsters, a tree frog, a turtle, and for a brief period, a Madagascar hissing cockroach. And, of course, Bowser, plus Sunshine who may outlive us all.

Our lease is pretty strict about pets, but there’s no anti-guinea pig clause. So maybe for Christmas Valentine’s Day, a foot in the door…

*Yes, yes, I know, what a ten-year-old-girl thing to name your pet after a food item, but I evened out the karma this week by saving Xing Xing from a lifetime of answering to Sassy *shudder* or Star Dust *shudder shudder*.