Somewhere along the line over the last few months, I got the back seat of my car back.
Those of you who have had children in the last fifteen years or so will appreciate that.
When I was a kid, back in the dark days of the 1970s, when my family wanted to go somewhere we’d just get in the car. The grownups would sit up front, and the kids would sit in the back. We had a succession of odd cars when I was a kid – several 1963 Novas in the full spectrum of bruise-like colors, for example, and at least one dark blue VW hatchback with an improbably white interior – but the one thing they all had in common was that whenever we would go on a trip my brother and I would just rattle around in the back seat like a stray thought in a cat’s mind.
You can’t do that anymore.
These days you have to have carseats for small children. Carseats that were designed by NASA to withstand shuttle launches and are about that complicated. Carseats with five-point NASCAR-approved harnesses in them. Carseats that take up pretty much all of the real estate between the driver and the trunk.
It’s a wonder my brother and I survived at all without them.
Now, I appreciate the safety aspects of the new carseats, really I do. I spent five years with a rescue squad way back when, and despite performing exactly zero acts of heroism in that time I did come away from it with a clear sense of just how much damage you can do to yourself inside of a car wreck.
That and an inexhaustible supply of off-color jokes, none of which I can remember now.
So when Tabitha was born I dutifully set up the carseat in the back of each of our cars, and when Lauren came along I added one for her. And having done so, the back seat became the exclusive province of the children. Adult passengers were simply not worth the trouble of taking out the carseats, especially the infant ones that you have to anchor to the car with rigging modeled on that supporting a frigate’s sails.
Eventually the girls graduated to booster seats, which were a whole lot easier to take out and put back in, so I got some flexibility there. And then Tabitha outgrew the booster seat, which meant that the driver’s side of the back seat looked pretty normal once you got past the layers of books and Ritz cracker crumbs.
Somewhere in the chaos of the last few months Lauren has outgrown her booster seat too. It has been relegated to a spot in the garage where we could get to it if we wanted, but likely won’t. And when I travel on my own, as I do every Tuesday and Thursday morning to Not So Far Away Campus, I look back there and see – well, the back seat.
It seems so forlorn.
Fortunately I still have that protective layer of books and Ritz cracker crumbs to keep me grounded, and on both sides of the car too.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Monday, March 28, 2011
Further Thoughts on the Rule of Law in Teabagistan
Article IV, Section 4 of the United States Constitution begins with the following clause: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.”
This has nothing to do with the modern Republican Party and therefore does not mean that the Teabaggers get to do what they want and the rest of us have to bend over and take it. Not that you would know that, given the general arrogance and tendencies of the Teabagger movement, but there you go.
Someone had to say it.
No, this particular requirement is what keeps the separate states from becoming communes, aristocracies, or even direct democracies. It is meant as a structural safeguard of the liberties of American citizens against the depredations of their own state governments – and in point of fact, regardless of what any pundit will tell you, a quick look at American history will conclusively demonstrate that the states have always been the greatest threats to individual liberties in this country, not the federal government. With a few notable exceptions, it is the federal government that has had to force the states to recognize the rights and liberties of American citizens, not the other way around.
We have no idea what this clause in the Constitution means anymore.
Republicanism – “neo-Harringtonian republicanism” or “classical republicanism” or any number of other subvariants of the term – is what this country was founded upon in the late eighteenth century. Nobody believes in it today, nor have they since the 1820s or so, when Lockean Liberalism won its half-century-long struggle for dominance in the American political mind. And yet it remains a powerful force in American law, for the simple reason that it is enshrined in the structure of government erected by the Federal Constitution of 1787, the one we still use.
Republicanism is a complex and subtle thing and even its adherents often found it difficult to define, but at its core was the simple idea that politics was an eternal struggle between Liberty and Power. It was a zero-sum game – where one gained, the other lost. And the central task for any properly constructed republic, therefore, was to set up a system whereby Power could be checked and Liberty secured.
There are any number of ways one could do this, theoretically, but the one favored by eighteenth-century republicans was structural – arranging the institutions of government so that they would check each other and prevent each other from crushing the Liberties of citizens.
A properly constructed, balanced republican government had three branches. In England, where this theory originated as far as the colonies were concerned, they represented the One, the Few and the Many – the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the democracy. In the new United States, which was for all practical purposes all Many, they represented functions rather than sociological groups. Instead of the One, the Few and the Many, we got the Executive, the Judiciary and the Legislature.
In its most simplistic form, that’s what you need to comply with the structural requirements of Article IV, Section 4.
But there’s more.
Each of these three branches must have the power to check the others, otherwise the whole point is lost. That's what the whole "checks and balances" thing you learned in fifth grade is all about, after all.
Moreover, when one or more branches begins to overstep its bounds – when they stomp on the turf of the others – that is “corruption” (a jargon term back then, not a catch-all condemnation of moral or financial sins) and that undermines and ultimately destroys a republican form of government.
A “corrupt” government is not a republican government. In order to comply with the full breadth of the requirements in Article IV, Section 4, the State government in question must not be “corrupt” in that eighteenth-century sense. There must, in other words, be a strict accounting to the rule of law – one where each branch is tightly bound by legal and constitutional principles, particularly those which force it to respect the rights and prerogatives of its sister branches and those of the citizens as well.
Which, once again, brings us back to the disgracefully un-American banana-republic junta running Wisconsin at the moment.
That this group has no respect for the rule of law has been made manifestly clear over the last two months.
They have forced through bills in the legislature without letting opponents vote.
They have forced through bills in the legislature without giving legal notice, as required.
They have violated ethics laws, electioneering laws, and campaign finance laws, even after being elected.
They have instituted their own palace guard in the Capitol to enforce their will, in opposition to the Sheriff and State Police.
They have violated the First Amendment rights of American citizens by forbidding political speech in public areas, the one thing that the First Amendment unequivocally was designed to protect.
They have violated the Wisconsin Constitution’s provisions regarding fiscal bills, quorums and legislative votes.
They have violated the Wisconsin Constitution’s provisions regarding the open access of the Capitol, not only to the citizens of Wisconsin but also to opposing lawmakers.
And they have done so in violation of court orders.
In fact, their latest stunt was such an egregious violation that it rises to the level of a fundamental crisis.
To recap:
The main thrust of the plan instituted by Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) was never financial. It was political. By destroying public-service unions, he simultaneously rid himself of an organized opponent and weakened the Democratic Party in the process. But in order to get this through the legislature, he spent weeks claiming that this move was an integral part of the budget process – that it was, in other words, a purely fiscal bill.
Under the Wisconsin Constitution, all fiscal bills must be passed with a quorum of legislators in attendance. Democratic senators withdrew from the state, making the quorum unreachable, and so the situation remained for some time.
Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) then had his cronies, minions and lackeys in the legislature strip out the union-busting parts of the budget bill, repackage them into a separate bill and pass it without the quorum necessary for a fiscal bill. Leaving aside the obvious question as to whether this was constitutional (which could only be true if it were not a fiscal bill and the Teabaggers had been lying all along) or not, the fact is that they forced this bill through the legislature without complying with any number of open meeting laws.
Laws passed by the legislature and signed by the governor do not go into effect in Wisconsin until the Secretary of State – an elected official – has them published in the Wisconsin State Journal, the newspaper of record in this state.
Given the momentous issue at hand and the shady, underhanded way in which it was foisted off on the citizens of Wisconsin, a Wisconsin state court agreed that the methods involved in the passage of the bill raised serious questions of law, and ordered the Secretary of State not to publish it.
Cue the Teabaggers.
The Senate Majority Leader, in what he has publicly and proudly labeled an end run around the courts, ordered the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau to publish the union-busting bill on the legislature’s website on March 25.
The Secretary of State - who should know, after all - has clearly stated that only he has the statutory power to “publish” legislation in the Constitutional sense of the term. The Legislative Reference Bureau itself agrees, noting that its putting the bill on the legislature’s website was a “ministerial” act, essentially notifying the Secretary of State of the existence of the bill officially, and therefore did not rise to the Constitutional level of “publishing” the bill. In other words, the people who actually know what they are talking about all agree that the union-busting bill is not legally valid and won't be until the restrictions imposed by the judicial branch of the Wisconsin state government are lifted.
Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) and his cronies, minions and lackeys in the legislature disagree and intend to move forward enforcing the provisions of what is not, legally, a law.
All of this means that they have deliberately and knowingly violated a court order to get their pet project forced into law, and will now deliberately and knowingly force Wisconsin citizens to conform to what is merely their diktat, in violation of currently valid law and court decision.
This, in eighteenth-century republican terms, is corruption.
It is one branch of the government stomping on the turf of another, with the explicit consent of the third.
As such, it is a violation of the republican form of government demanded by Article IV, Section 4 of the United States Constitution.
And it is typical of the way this banana-republic junta operates.
At some point, given current trends, the State of Wisconsin will no longer have a republican form of government, and at that point it would be appropriate for outside powers to step in and remove those who have brought this upon the Badger State.
And won’t that be interesting.
This has nothing to do with the modern Republican Party and therefore does not mean that the Teabaggers get to do what they want and the rest of us have to bend over and take it. Not that you would know that, given the general arrogance and tendencies of the Teabagger movement, but there you go.
Someone had to say it.
No, this particular requirement is what keeps the separate states from becoming communes, aristocracies, or even direct democracies. It is meant as a structural safeguard of the liberties of American citizens against the depredations of their own state governments – and in point of fact, regardless of what any pundit will tell you, a quick look at American history will conclusively demonstrate that the states have always been the greatest threats to individual liberties in this country, not the federal government. With a few notable exceptions, it is the federal government that has had to force the states to recognize the rights and liberties of American citizens, not the other way around.
We have no idea what this clause in the Constitution means anymore.
Republicanism – “neo-Harringtonian republicanism” or “classical republicanism” or any number of other subvariants of the term – is what this country was founded upon in the late eighteenth century. Nobody believes in it today, nor have they since the 1820s or so, when Lockean Liberalism won its half-century-long struggle for dominance in the American political mind. And yet it remains a powerful force in American law, for the simple reason that it is enshrined in the structure of government erected by the Federal Constitution of 1787, the one we still use.
Republicanism is a complex and subtle thing and even its adherents often found it difficult to define, but at its core was the simple idea that politics was an eternal struggle between Liberty and Power. It was a zero-sum game – where one gained, the other lost. And the central task for any properly constructed republic, therefore, was to set up a system whereby Power could be checked and Liberty secured.
There are any number of ways one could do this, theoretically, but the one favored by eighteenth-century republicans was structural – arranging the institutions of government so that they would check each other and prevent each other from crushing the Liberties of citizens.
A properly constructed, balanced republican government had three branches. In England, where this theory originated as far as the colonies were concerned, they represented the One, the Few and the Many – the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the democracy. In the new United States, which was for all practical purposes all Many, they represented functions rather than sociological groups. Instead of the One, the Few and the Many, we got the Executive, the Judiciary and the Legislature.
In its most simplistic form, that’s what you need to comply with the structural requirements of Article IV, Section 4.
But there’s more.
Each of these three branches must have the power to check the others, otherwise the whole point is lost. That's what the whole "checks and balances" thing you learned in fifth grade is all about, after all.
Moreover, when one or more branches begins to overstep its bounds – when they stomp on the turf of the others – that is “corruption” (a jargon term back then, not a catch-all condemnation of moral or financial sins) and that undermines and ultimately destroys a republican form of government.
A “corrupt” government is not a republican government. In order to comply with the full breadth of the requirements in Article IV, Section 4, the State government in question must not be “corrupt” in that eighteenth-century sense. There must, in other words, be a strict accounting to the rule of law – one where each branch is tightly bound by legal and constitutional principles, particularly those which force it to respect the rights and prerogatives of its sister branches and those of the citizens as well.
Which, once again, brings us back to the disgracefully un-American banana-republic junta running Wisconsin at the moment.
That this group has no respect for the rule of law has been made manifestly clear over the last two months.
They have forced through bills in the legislature without letting opponents vote.
They have forced through bills in the legislature without giving legal notice, as required.
They have violated ethics laws, electioneering laws, and campaign finance laws, even after being elected.
They have instituted their own palace guard in the Capitol to enforce their will, in opposition to the Sheriff and State Police.
They have violated the First Amendment rights of American citizens by forbidding political speech in public areas, the one thing that the First Amendment unequivocally was designed to protect.
They have violated the Wisconsin Constitution’s provisions regarding fiscal bills, quorums and legislative votes.
They have violated the Wisconsin Constitution’s provisions regarding the open access of the Capitol, not only to the citizens of Wisconsin but also to opposing lawmakers.
And they have done so in violation of court orders.
In fact, their latest stunt was such an egregious violation that it rises to the level of a fundamental crisis.
To recap:
The main thrust of the plan instituted by Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) was never financial. It was political. By destroying public-service unions, he simultaneously rid himself of an organized opponent and weakened the Democratic Party in the process. But in order to get this through the legislature, he spent weeks claiming that this move was an integral part of the budget process – that it was, in other words, a purely fiscal bill.
Under the Wisconsin Constitution, all fiscal bills must be passed with a quorum of legislators in attendance. Democratic senators withdrew from the state, making the quorum unreachable, and so the situation remained for some time.
Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) then had his cronies, minions and lackeys in the legislature strip out the union-busting parts of the budget bill, repackage them into a separate bill and pass it without the quorum necessary for a fiscal bill. Leaving aside the obvious question as to whether this was constitutional (which could only be true if it were not a fiscal bill and the Teabaggers had been lying all along) or not, the fact is that they forced this bill through the legislature without complying with any number of open meeting laws.
Laws passed by the legislature and signed by the governor do not go into effect in Wisconsin until the Secretary of State – an elected official – has them published in the Wisconsin State Journal, the newspaper of record in this state.
Given the momentous issue at hand and the shady, underhanded way in which it was foisted off on the citizens of Wisconsin, a Wisconsin state court agreed that the methods involved in the passage of the bill raised serious questions of law, and ordered the Secretary of State not to publish it.
Cue the Teabaggers.
The Senate Majority Leader, in what he has publicly and proudly labeled an end run around the courts, ordered the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau to publish the union-busting bill on the legislature’s website on March 25.
The Secretary of State - who should know, after all - has clearly stated that only he has the statutory power to “publish” legislation in the Constitutional sense of the term. The Legislative Reference Bureau itself agrees, noting that its putting the bill on the legislature’s website was a “ministerial” act, essentially notifying the Secretary of State of the existence of the bill officially, and therefore did not rise to the Constitutional level of “publishing” the bill. In other words, the people who actually know what they are talking about all agree that the union-busting bill is not legally valid and won't be until the restrictions imposed by the judicial branch of the Wisconsin state government are lifted.
Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) and his cronies, minions and lackeys in the legislature disagree and intend to move forward enforcing the provisions of what is not, legally, a law.
All of this means that they have deliberately and knowingly violated a court order to get their pet project forced into law, and will now deliberately and knowingly force Wisconsin citizens to conform to what is merely their diktat, in violation of currently valid law and court decision.
This, in eighteenth-century republican terms, is corruption.
It is one branch of the government stomping on the turf of another, with the explicit consent of the third.
As such, it is a violation of the republican form of government demanded by Article IV, Section 4 of the United States Constitution.
And it is typical of the way this banana-republic junta operates.
At some point, given current trends, the State of Wisconsin will no longer have a republican form of government, and at that point it would be appropriate for outside powers to step in and remove those who have brought this upon the Badger State.
And won’t that be interesting.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Things That Annoy Me: A Sampler
It’s been a stressful 2011 so far, what with the various and sundry assaults on American values perpetrated by the banana-republic junta running Wisconsin these days. And stress only exacerbates my normal bent toward sarcasm, cynicism and refusing to suffer fools gladly.
So I’ve been a real treat to be around these days, let me tell you. Ask anyone.
As I do not anticipate this changing anytime soon (hey, just this weekend Governor Teabagger’s chief minion violated both the Wisconsin Constitution and a court order in his quest to get his union-busting bill turned into law, and neither he nor Governor Teabagger [a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries] can understand why anyone finds this objectionable), and as I have become more aware than usual about just how many things there are in the world that have no business being in a well-constructed universe, I have decided to present a list of non-political things that annoy the hell out of me.
Just to shake things up, you see.
So…
1. Jewelry made by cutting up old coins.
I collect coins. My entire collection might buy a night at the local Holiday Inn here in Our Little Town, so it’s not like I’m cornering the market on numismatic treasures here, but I do rather like old coins. They have an artistry that you don’t generally find in modern ones and they are a bit of portable history – you can pick them up and wonder where they’ve been and how they got to you.
Destroying them in the name of costume jewelry is just morally febrile.
2. Waking up at 7am on a Sunday morning when there is no earthly reason to do so.
I have never liked mornings. Well, no, that’s not quite right. Mornings are fine, from midnight to 4am. It’s the 4am to noon shift that bothers me. And since morning people have taken over the world and demand my presence during those hours during the week, I look forward to not seeing those hours on weekends.
Seeing them anyway, with nobody forcing me to do so, is therefore Right Out.
This was never a problem when I was younger. I once spent an entire semester with my alarm set for 1pm to avoid sleeping through lunch, in fact. But that was a long, long time ago.
Man, this getting old thing really stinks sometimes.
3. Being asked to do useless work for free.
I don’t mind volunteering my time for worthwhile causes – I’ve done that all my life. And while I have no particular driving need to engage in productive labor at all times, I have always tried to give value for wages received. Further, if my employer prefers I waste my time doing useless things for wages, that’s their problem not mine.
But when I am required to I do useless things on my own time – time I am not allowed to work but must still account for, without receiving compensation for such accounting – that I find objectionable.
I don’t think that plan was very well thought out.
4. The sheer cussedness of small plastic objects.
Ever since my children were born, the house has been inundated by small plastic objects of dubious value, many of which came with meals. And you know, I could handle those.
It’s the ones that are supposed to be useful that really tick me off.
For example, we have a drawer full of plastic containers – the sort of things that you use to store leftovers in while they rot and then you have to throw them away. This drawer is full to the brim with such containers. No matter how you stack them, no matter how you arrange them, there is always one that sticks up and prevents the drawer from closing. And if you take that one out, another steps up and takes its place. I think I could take all of them out and the drawer would still stick on something.
Don’t even get me started on the vegetable crisper tray in the fridge that twists like an Escher print whenever you try to close it.
Someday I’m going to slam the fridge door closed anyway and just accept picking plastic shards out of my food for the rest of the afternoon as the price I had to pay for that moment.
5. The grocery store shrink ray.
When did food packagers decided that the proper response to rising costs was not to raise prices but instead to keep prices the same and shrink the package? All that happens is that the packaging-to-food ratio gets higher and higher and the usefulness of each individual package gets lower and lower.
And have you ever tried to make an old recipe based on those new packages?
A new can of tuna is 5 ounces. The old ones were 6.5 ounces. Chocolate chip bags are now 12 ounces instead of 16. And so on. So now I either make do with less or buy two packages and try to figure out what to do with the leftovers.
Just raise the prices.
That’s enough for now.
So I’ve been a real treat to be around these days, let me tell you. Ask anyone.
As I do not anticipate this changing anytime soon (hey, just this weekend Governor Teabagger’s chief minion violated both the Wisconsin Constitution and a court order in his quest to get his union-busting bill turned into law, and neither he nor Governor Teabagger [a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries] can understand why anyone finds this objectionable), and as I have become more aware than usual about just how many things there are in the world that have no business being in a well-constructed universe, I have decided to present a list of non-political things that annoy the hell out of me.
Just to shake things up, you see.
So…
1. Jewelry made by cutting up old coins.
I collect coins. My entire collection might buy a night at the local Holiday Inn here in Our Little Town, so it’s not like I’m cornering the market on numismatic treasures here, but I do rather like old coins. They have an artistry that you don’t generally find in modern ones and they are a bit of portable history – you can pick them up and wonder where they’ve been and how they got to you.
Destroying them in the name of costume jewelry is just morally febrile.
2. Waking up at 7am on a Sunday morning when there is no earthly reason to do so.
I have never liked mornings. Well, no, that’s not quite right. Mornings are fine, from midnight to 4am. It’s the 4am to noon shift that bothers me. And since morning people have taken over the world and demand my presence during those hours during the week, I look forward to not seeing those hours on weekends.
Seeing them anyway, with nobody forcing me to do so, is therefore Right Out.
This was never a problem when I was younger. I once spent an entire semester with my alarm set for 1pm to avoid sleeping through lunch, in fact. But that was a long, long time ago.
Man, this getting old thing really stinks sometimes.
3. Being asked to do useless work for free.
I don’t mind volunteering my time for worthwhile causes – I’ve done that all my life. And while I have no particular driving need to engage in productive labor at all times, I have always tried to give value for wages received. Further, if my employer prefers I waste my time doing useless things for wages, that’s their problem not mine.
But when I am required to I do useless things on my own time – time I am not allowed to work but must still account for, without receiving compensation for such accounting – that I find objectionable.
I don’t think that plan was very well thought out.
4. The sheer cussedness of small plastic objects.
Ever since my children were born, the house has been inundated by small plastic objects of dubious value, many of which came with meals. And you know, I could handle those.
It’s the ones that are supposed to be useful that really tick me off.
For example, we have a drawer full of plastic containers – the sort of things that you use to store leftovers in while they rot and then you have to throw them away. This drawer is full to the brim with such containers. No matter how you stack them, no matter how you arrange them, there is always one that sticks up and prevents the drawer from closing. And if you take that one out, another steps up and takes its place. I think I could take all of them out and the drawer would still stick on something.
Don’t even get me started on the vegetable crisper tray in the fridge that twists like an Escher print whenever you try to close it.
Someday I’m going to slam the fridge door closed anyway and just accept picking plastic shards out of my food for the rest of the afternoon as the price I had to pay for that moment.
5. The grocery store shrink ray.
When did food packagers decided that the proper response to rising costs was not to raise prices but instead to keep prices the same and shrink the package? All that happens is that the packaging-to-food ratio gets higher and higher and the usefulness of each individual package gets lower and lower.
And have you ever tried to make an old recipe based on those new packages?
A new can of tuna is 5 ounces. The old ones were 6.5 ounces. Chocolate chip bags are now 12 ounces instead of 16. And so on. So now I either make do with less or buy two packages and try to figure out what to do with the leftovers.
Just raise the prices.
That’s enough for now.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Judge Me By My Fur, Do You?
We spent today at the 4H cat show. It was an experience.
The 4H club the girls belong to is fairly typical of such things in that it offers its members a number of Projects with which to occupy their time. There are drama Projects, photography Projects, and even – for the more rurally-inclined – farm animal Projects. But for anyone who knows Tabitha at all, it should come as no great surprise that she chose to do the cat Project.
And a good thing, too, since we happen to have a couple of those laying about the house, which is not something we could say about farm animals.
Today was the “fun show” – a sort of trial run where the judging would be a bit less harsh and the categories a bit less strict. Mostly it is intended to get the kids used to the idea of how these shows run and get the cats used to the idea of being in them.
Last night we went over to the County Fairgrounds and helped set up the show in one of the buildings – tables, chairs, and an astonishing number of wire cages, mostly – after which we came home, cornered Mithra like a rat in a trap and gave her a bath.
This morning we took our still annoyed cat over to the building and deposited her into her cage, where she plotted ways to exact revenge while the rest of the place got organized.
In the next cage over was Madame Lace, Lauren’s stuffed kitty. The younger 4H-ers were allowed to bring their toys in for a separate contest, and they were treated just like the big cats, with judging and everything.
Madame Lace came home with a silver medal, which isn’t bad for a stuffed animal.
The judging for the actual live cats was rather drawn out – Tabitha had to cart Mithra to three different judging areas over the course of the morning, and at each one the judge would pick her up, maul her up and down and then deposit her back into a cage, whereupon Tabitha would extract her from that cage and put her back into her original cage.
Still, when all was said and done everybody had the same number of fingers and eyes as they did when they woke up that morning, and with that many cats in an enclosed space you have to count that as a victory.
Mithra didn’t win any medals, unfortunately, though she was named “Miss Bashful” and awarded a ribbon. Tabitha handled her quite well, and we just might survive the more serious cat show scheduled for next month.
The 4H club the girls belong to is fairly typical of such things in that it offers its members a number of Projects with which to occupy their time. There are drama Projects, photography Projects, and even – for the more rurally-inclined – farm animal Projects. But for anyone who knows Tabitha at all, it should come as no great surprise that she chose to do the cat Project.
And a good thing, too, since we happen to have a couple of those laying about the house, which is not something we could say about farm animals.
Today was the “fun show” – a sort of trial run where the judging would be a bit less harsh and the categories a bit less strict. Mostly it is intended to get the kids used to the idea of how these shows run and get the cats used to the idea of being in them.
Last night we went over to the County Fairgrounds and helped set up the show in one of the buildings – tables, chairs, and an astonishing number of wire cages, mostly – after which we came home, cornered Mithra like a rat in a trap and gave her a bath.
This morning we took our still annoyed cat over to the building and deposited her into her cage, where she plotted ways to exact revenge while the rest of the place got organized.
In the next cage over was Madame Lace, Lauren’s stuffed kitty. The younger 4H-ers were allowed to bring their toys in for a separate contest, and they were treated just like the big cats, with judging and everything.
Madame Lace came home with a silver medal, which isn’t bad for a stuffed animal.
The judging for the actual live cats was rather drawn out – Tabitha had to cart Mithra to three different judging areas over the course of the morning, and at each one the judge would pick her up, maul her up and down and then deposit her back into a cage, whereupon Tabitha would extract her from that cage and put her back into her original cage.
Still, when all was said and done everybody had the same number of fingers and eyes as they did when they woke up that morning, and with that many cats in an enclosed space you have to count that as a victory.
Mithra didn’t win any medals, unfortunately, though she was named “Miss Bashful” and awarded a ribbon. Tabitha handled her quite well, and we just might survive the more serious cat show scheduled for next month.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Meet Me In St. Louis
The Gateway Arch is both bigger and smaller than I had thought.
This week being Spring Break, we decided that it would be a good idea to get out of town for a while – to forget about the madness that infests the government here in Wisconsin and just try to relax a bit. Of course given said madness and the upcoming raid it is launching on our household income, we couldn’t get too, too far out of town, nor could we escape for very long. But every little bit helps, and to be honest you don’t need a year at a private island in the tropics to have a good time.
And three cheers for that, I say.
Ever since Christmas 2009, when saw the Gateway Arch in the distance as we drove back from Chattanooga, Lauren has wanted to go to St. Louis. St. Louis, it turns out, is not all that far away from us – certainly doable in a day’s drive with time left over to have some fun once you get out of the car. And there’s more than the Arch, so you can have all sorts of good times there.
Sounded like a winner.
So we packed everybody up into the car and headed south through Illinois toward Missouri.
Illinois is a long state. A very, very long state. Long and flat. Flat and long. It has untamed vistas of flat land, where you can gaze long into the distance at how flat and long it is. It is the Mount Everest of flat. It is the lightning flash of long. But we were well stocked with books, movies, snacks and – as a last resort – conversation, so it went well.
We got to St. Louis well before our hotel check-in time, so we decided to go straight to the Arch.
Fortunately, it’s not hard to find.
You don’t realize until you get right up onto it, but the Arch is phenomenally big – 630 feet tall, according to the many and various pamphlets, signs and rangers all eager to impart this particular bit of information, and with a fairly mighty cross-section at ground level. And so full of Teh Shiny! Its stainless steel coat glistens in the sun and provides all sort of dramatic camera angles for the curious.
We got there in time to buy tickets to go up to the top, but we had a couple of hours to kill before our scheduled tour time. Fortunately they’ve thought of that and had several well-stocked gift shops for us to browse through (both girls bought necklaces with Arch-related pendants) as well as a nifty little museum of western expansion that you could wander around in for free.
Eventually they let us in.
To get to the top of the Arch you have to wait in a series of lines, each one just long enough to make you wonder about the whole idea. And then you watch a short little film about the railroad bridge just to the north of the Arch – why they choose that moment to watch a video about that particular subject is just one of those National Park Service mysteries best left unexplained – and then you get into the elevator/tram thing that takes you up.
Here is a hint: do not go to the Arch if you are claustrophobic.
The tram car that takes you up is a cylinder about four or five feet in diameter and about that deep, with five seats arranged around the edges. If your group is less than five people, they will assign you new friends for the trip in order to fill up the car. You will get to know them fairly well in the five minutes it takes to get all the way up to the top.
You can spend as much time as you want up at the top, but really about twenty minutes is all you need. For one thing, it’s a lot like Niagara Falls in that it truly is spectacular and awe-inspiring, but after a while you realize that nothing changes. You’ve seen it. And for another thing, it’s very small up there. The floor is arched – it follows the exterior contour – and the top is only about eight feet across from window to window, which seems like the world after the tram car, but still.
It also sways noticeably in the wind, of which there was a copious supply that day.
We spent our allotted twenty minutes up there and then trammed our way back down and out, off to the hotel.
The hotel we stayed at was a fine place and one that catered directly to families with children, to the point of providing not only free breakfast but also free dinners with everything a child could want (hot dogs, chicken tenders, nachos, baked potatoes, carrot sticks, and so on) as well as free drinks for mom and dad, which somehow we never got around to trying.
There was also a pool, which for Tabitha and Lauren is just the acme of the travelling experience, and so they spent several hours each night splashing about in the pool along with enough other kids to open a private elementary school. There was fun to be had.
Wednesday we went to the City Museum, and for the record if you have children between the ages of 4 and 12 and you have not been to the St. Louis City Museum then you should drop whatever you are doing immediately and – RIGHT NOW, I said – book travel arrangements to correct this situation.
It’s not really a museum so much as it is an exploration center. Every nook and cranny is filled with tunnels, passageways, and slides. The airspace is glutted with wire mesh tubes – thick wire, almost rebar in some places and actual metal tubes in others – that take you from one room to the next and one floor to another, although if you want to go floor to floor there are slides that will do that faster, some of them three or more floors long.
It is impossible to keep track of people in this place, and after a while you just stop trying.
There is a room set up to look like a skateboard park where the kids can slide around and run along the world’s biggest pencil – maybe thirty feet long, with an actual rubber eraser.
There’s a room full of sponges that you can stack up into towers and encase victims within.
There’s an entire section set up like a carnival storefront, and another corner of the building dedicated to architectural decorations – giant metal, marble or concrete letters, gargoyles and entire facades, plus stained glass windows as well.
There is a human-sized hamster wheel.
There was a darkened maze full of people that we could see through a window but never did figure out how to get into.
There was a magic show. Tabitha got to be an assistant on one of the tricks, which pleased her no end. She took a magic class a couple of summers ago and has since developed a nice little routine of her own, so it was fun for her to be part of a professional show.
And if the inside isn’t enough, there’s always the outside – a tangled web of towers, stairs, passages, wire mesh tunnels and assorted multi-story slides, at the bottom of which is an immense ball pit where the brave and hearty might try their mad dodgeball skillz.
It was while we were outside that Lauren convinced me to go up to the airplanes.
The museum has two light aircraft mounted about fifty feet in the air, and when you see the insides you realize that they are reminiscent of nothing so much as the wreck that features so prominently in Madagascar. They are accessible only through the aforementioned maze of stairs, ladders and wire mesh tubes. Indeed, to get from the one to the other, you have to crawl through one of those tubes – and then to get to the nearest slide back down to earth you have to crawl through another.
It was an experience.
And we didn’t even make it to the rooftop displays, which were closed for the season.
We spent the whole day there, really, and we could have gone back the next – at least Lauren could have. Tabitha is just getting to be on the tall side for some of the exhibits, which she found a bit off-putting, but even so, she’d probably have gone back if we had asked.
But we didn’t ask, because we had only one more day in St. Louis and there were other things to see.
We spent Thursday morning at the Old Courthouse, which is right across the street from the Arch and thus visible from above when you’re up top.
It’s a lovely building, really, with a giant Rotunda full of art and glory. If you stand exactly in the center on the floor the acoustics are such that you can speak to every part of the building without really raising your voice. You can hear the difference just by stepping on the spot and then stepping off of it.
The Old Courthouse is famous in part because the Dred Scott case started there, and the girls got to sit in the actual courtroom.
Most people who take American history classes are familiar with the outcome of the case when it hit the US Supreme Court in 1857 – how Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion declared that blacks could never be citizens of the US and how they had no rights which a white man was bound to respect. It’s quite possibly the most appalling decision ever made in an American court, and the main impetus for the Fourteenth Amendment a decade later (you know, the Amendment the Teabaggers are trying to repeal because they find it inconvenient).
Few people remember that when the case was first tried in front of a St. Louis jury, they found for Scott and set him free. Not that it helped him, of course, but it is worth remembering anyway.
On the recommendation of our friend Pat who grew up in St. Louis, we had lunch at a place called Amighetti’s, in the Italian neighborhood known as The Hill (which is, as advertised, on a large hill). It was a capital suggestion – great food at reasonable prices in bulk quantities.
The “gooey butter cakes” we got from Gooey Louie’s afterward are apparently a St. Louis delicacy, and having finally had enough room to eat mine only 24 hours later, I can see why. They are exactly what they sound like, and they are good.
We spent our last afternoon at the St. Louis Science Center, which I am sure is a fine museum but by that point we were all rather tired, and the place was packed. A good time was had nonetheless.
Lauren already wants to know when we’re going back to St. Louis.
This week being Spring Break, we decided that it would be a good idea to get out of town for a while – to forget about the madness that infests the government here in Wisconsin and just try to relax a bit. Of course given said madness and the upcoming raid it is launching on our household income, we couldn’t get too, too far out of town, nor could we escape for very long. But every little bit helps, and to be honest you don’t need a year at a private island in the tropics to have a good time.
And three cheers for that, I say.
Ever since Christmas 2009, when saw the Gateway Arch in the distance as we drove back from Chattanooga, Lauren has wanted to go to St. Louis. St. Louis, it turns out, is not all that far away from us – certainly doable in a day’s drive with time left over to have some fun once you get out of the car. And there’s more than the Arch, so you can have all sorts of good times there.
Sounded like a winner.
So we packed everybody up into the car and headed south through Illinois toward Missouri.
Illinois is a long state. A very, very long state. Long and flat. Flat and long. It has untamed vistas of flat land, where you can gaze long into the distance at how flat and long it is. It is the Mount Everest of flat. It is the lightning flash of long. But we were well stocked with books, movies, snacks and – as a last resort – conversation, so it went well.
We got to St. Louis well before our hotel check-in time, so we decided to go straight to the Arch.
Fortunately, it’s not hard to find.
You don’t realize until you get right up onto it, but the Arch is phenomenally big – 630 feet tall, according to the many and various pamphlets, signs and rangers all eager to impart this particular bit of information, and with a fairly mighty cross-section at ground level. And so full of Teh Shiny! Its stainless steel coat glistens in the sun and provides all sort of dramatic camera angles for the curious.
We got there in time to buy tickets to go up to the top, but we had a couple of hours to kill before our scheduled tour time. Fortunately they’ve thought of that and had several well-stocked gift shops for us to browse through (both girls bought necklaces with Arch-related pendants) as well as a nifty little museum of western expansion that you could wander around in for free.
Eventually they let us in.
To get to the top of the Arch you have to wait in a series of lines, each one just long enough to make you wonder about the whole idea. And then you watch a short little film about the railroad bridge just to the north of the Arch – why they choose that moment to watch a video about that particular subject is just one of those National Park Service mysteries best left unexplained – and then you get into the elevator/tram thing that takes you up.
Here is a hint: do not go to the Arch if you are claustrophobic.
The tram car that takes you up is a cylinder about four or five feet in diameter and about that deep, with five seats arranged around the edges. If your group is less than five people, they will assign you new friends for the trip in order to fill up the car. You will get to know them fairly well in the five minutes it takes to get all the way up to the top.
You can spend as much time as you want up at the top, but really about twenty minutes is all you need. For one thing, it’s a lot like Niagara Falls in that it truly is spectacular and awe-inspiring, but after a while you realize that nothing changes. You’ve seen it. And for another thing, it’s very small up there. The floor is arched – it follows the exterior contour – and the top is only about eight feet across from window to window, which seems like the world after the tram car, but still.
It also sways noticeably in the wind, of which there was a copious supply that day.
We spent our allotted twenty minutes up there and then trammed our way back down and out, off to the hotel.
The hotel we stayed at was a fine place and one that catered directly to families with children, to the point of providing not only free breakfast but also free dinners with everything a child could want (hot dogs, chicken tenders, nachos, baked potatoes, carrot sticks, and so on) as well as free drinks for mom and dad, which somehow we never got around to trying.
There was also a pool, which for Tabitha and Lauren is just the acme of the travelling experience, and so they spent several hours each night splashing about in the pool along with enough other kids to open a private elementary school. There was fun to be had.
Wednesday we went to the City Museum, and for the record if you have children between the ages of 4 and 12 and you have not been to the St. Louis City Museum then you should drop whatever you are doing immediately and – RIGHT NOW, I said – book travel arrangements to correct this situation.
It’s not really a museum so much as it is an exploration center. Every nook and cranny is filled with tunnels, passageways, and slides. The airspace is glutted with wire mesh tubes – thick wire, almost rebar in some places and actual metal tubes in others – that take you from one room to the next and one floor to another, although if you want to go floor to floor there are slides that will do that faster, some of them three or more floors long.
It is impossible to keep track of people in this place, and after a while you just stop trying.
There is a room set up to look like a skateboard park where the kids can slide around and run along the world’s biggest pencil – maybe thirty feet long, with an actual rubber eraser.
There’s a room full of sponges that you can stack up into towers and encase victims within.
There’s an entire section set up like a carnival storefront, and another corner of the building dedicated to architectural decorations – giant metal, marble or concrete letters, gargoyles and entire facades, plus stained glass windows as well.
There is a human-sized hamster wheel.
There was a darkened maze full of people that we could see through a window but never did figure out how to get into.
There was a magic show. Tabitha got to be an assistant on one of the tricks, which pleased her no end. She took a magic class a couple of summers ago and has since developed a nice little routine of her own, so it was fun for her to be part of a professional show.
And if the inside isn’t enough, there’s always the outside – a tangled web of towers, stairs, passages, wire mesh tunnels and assorted multi-story slides, at the bottom of which is an immense ball pit where the brave and hearty might try their mad dodgeball skillz.
It was while we were outside that Lauren convinced me to go up to the airplanes.
The museum has two light aircraft mounted about fifty feet in the air, and when you see the insides you realize that they are reminiscent of nothing so much as the wreck that features so prominently in Madagascar. They are accessible only through the aforementioned maze of stairs, ladders and wire mesh tubes. Indeed, to get from the one to the other, you have to crawl through one of those tubes – and then to get to the nearest slide back down to earth you have to crawl through another.
It was an experience.
And we didn’t even make it to the rooftop displays, which were closed for the season.
We spent the whole day there, really, and we could have gone back the next – at least Lauren could have. Tabitha is just getting to be on the tall side for some of the exhibits, which she found a bit off-putting, but even so, she’d probably have gone back if we had asked.
But we didn’t ask, because we had only one more day in St. Louis and there were other things to see.
We spent Thursday morning at the Old Courthouse, which is right across the street from the Arch and thus visible from above when you’re up top.
It’s a lovely building, really, with a giant Rotunda full of art and glory. If you stand exactly in the center on the floor the acoustics are such that you can speak to every part of the building without really raising your voice. You can hear the difference just by stepping on the spot and then stepping off of it.
The Old Courthouse is famous in part because the Dred Scott case started there, and the girls got to sit in the actual courtroom.
Most people who take American history classes are familiar with the outcome of the case when it hit the US Supreme Court in 1857 – how Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion declared that blacks could never be citizens of the US and how they had no rights which a white man was bound to respect. It’s quite possibly the most appalling decision ever made in an American court, and the main impetus for the Fourteenth Amendment a decade later (you know, the Amendment the Teabaggers are trying to repeal because they find it inconvenient).
Few people remember that when the case was first tried in front of a St. Louis jury, they found for Scott and set him free. Not that it helped him, of course, but it is worth remembering anyway.
On the recommendation of our friend Pat who grew up in St. Louis, we had lunch at a place called Amighetti’s, in the Italian neighborhood known as The Hill (which is, as advertised, on a large hill). It was a capital suggestion – great food at reasonable prices in bulk quantities.
The “gooey butter cakes” we got from Gooey Louie’s afterward are apparently a St. Louis delicacy, and having finally had enough room to eat mine only 24 hours later, I can see why. They are exactly what they sound like, and they are good.
We spent our last afternoon at the St. Louis Science Center, which I am sure is a fine museum but by that point we were all rather tired, and the place was packed. A good time was had nonetheless.
Lauren already wants to know when we’re going back to St. Louis.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Of Thee I Sing
The Wisconsin State Capitol Rotunda has excellent acoustics.
As it is Spring Break here in Baja Canada for both us and the girls – the first time our Spring Breaks have coincided since Lauren started school – and since Kim and I are forbidden to do any work today under pain of administrative exile and mountainous paperwork should we be discovered trying to be productive, we figured we’d go up to Madison and participate in some democracy.
It’s an American thing.
The crowd was fairly small, as befit a Monday afternoon – most of them were people similarly forbidden to be at work and therefore free to express their views to their elected representatives. There were a couple hundred of us, all told, and we marched around with our signs again, to a fairly appreciative audience it must be said. This crowd was a bit more academic than most, so they got my joke. Of course, half the fun of an obscure sign is explaining it to people, and I have enjoyed doing that over the last few weeks. So it goes both ways.
After a bit we went into the Capitol, which has descended into the welter of paranoia that defines the American condition these days – despite having exactly zero arrests for violent offenses over five weeks of protest involving hundreds of thousands of citizens, Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, Inc.) and his cronies, minions and lackeys have ordered the installation of metal detectors that the citizens of Wisconsin must now pass through to gain access to their own Capitol building. It’s all a painfully ineffective thing, if security is the actual aim, but it does do an effective job of reminding the citizenry of how little control we have over the government that supposedly represents us.
But the charade went quickly and then we gathered in the Rotunda, mainly to sing protest songs.
I know.
But unless you’ve actually done something like that, you really can’t understand the power the human voice has when lifted up with its fellows. There’s a reason why protest songs exist and continue to be sung even in this technological age – they speak to things beyond mere individual grievances, to our aspirations, our hopes, and our dreams. Lift up your voice and sing, oh people, until the heavens quake and the afflicted earth is healed.
It’s even better in harmony.
Eventually we cycled through most of the little book of songs that the organizers of today’s rally had for us and we went back outside and back to the spoken word, which for all its limitations is still better than silence.
As it is Spring Break here in Baja Canada for both us and the girls – the first time our Spring Breaks have coincided since Lauren started school – and since Kim and I are forbidden to do any work today under pain of administrative exile and mountainous paperwork should we be discovered trying to be productive, we figured we’d go up to Madison and participate in some democracy.
It’s an American thing.
The crowd was fairly small, as befit a Monday afternoon – most of them were people similarly forbidden to be at work and therefore free to express their views to their elected representatives. There were a couple hundred of us, all told, and we marched around with our signs again, to a fairly appreciative audience it must be said. This crowd was a bit more academic than most, so they got my joke. Of course, half the fun of an obscure sign is explaining it to people, and I have enjoyed doing that over the last few weeks. So it goes both ways.
After a bit we went into the Capitol, which has descended into the welter of paranoia that defines the American condition these days – despite having exactly zero arrests for violent offenses over five weeks of protest involving hundreds of thousands of citizens, Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, Inc.) and his cronies, minions and lackeys have ordered the installation of metal detectors that the citizens of Wisconsin must now pass through to gain access to their own Capitol building. It’s all a painfully ineffective thing, if security is the actual aim, but it does do an effective job of reminding the citizenry of how little control we have over the government that supposedly represents us.
But the charade went quickly and then we gathered in the Rotunda, mainly to sing protest songs.
I know.
But unless you’ve actually done something like that, you really can’t understand the power the human voice has when lifted up with its fellows. There’s a reason why protest songs exist and continue to be sung even in this technological age – they speak to things beyond mere individual grievances, to our aspirations, our hopes, and our dreams. Lift up your voice and sing, oh people, until the heavens quake and the afflicted earth is healed.
It’s even better in harmony.
Eventually we cycled through most of the little book of songs that the organizers of today’s rally had for us and we went back outside and back to the spoken word, which for all its limitations is still better than silence.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Hybridized
I have put my hybrid course to bed.
After two years of training, planning, beating my head against the wall of my own technological limitations, frantically scrambling to make up for lost time and occasionally watching the wretched remnants of false starts waft satisfyingly skyward in plumes of ash, I finally got the class up and running with two whole days to spare. It was not an auspicious beginning.
But it turned out just fine.
Between a productive if not very happy experience with Online U and some rather more pleasant and equally productive experiences with the online wing of Home Campus, it turned out that I was better trained to put together a class with a significant online component than I had thought. And if the work my students turned in is anything to go by, it turned out to be a fairly effective class. I love it when students get what I'm trying to do - it makes them happy and me seem a lot smarter than I might otherwise appear.
And the students were an awful lot of fun.
I posted their grades today and spent much of the evening clearing away the debris on the folding table that serves as a second desk in my office in order to get it all packed away. It’s a satisfying feeling, especially since I took the time to get my other two classes organized as well.
Nothing like a little temporary organization to give you the illusion of progress, I always say.
And with reality of late here in Baja Canada being something that would bring tears to the eyes of a bluebird, I’ll take the illusion for a little while. Can't hurt. Might help.
The odd thing about the class was that it was so compressed. It crammed a full semester's worth of work into half a semester's worth of time, which - if you do the math - meant that it felt like two classes for that period. And now?
I don’t know what I’ll do with my newfound time…
…first.
After two years of training, planning, beating my head against the wall of my own technological limitations, frantically scrambling to make up for lost time and occasionally watching the wretched remnants of false starts waft satisfyingly skyward in plumes of ash, I finally got the class up and running with two whole days to spare. It was not an auspicious beginning.
But it turned out just fine.
Between a productive if not very happy experience with Online U and some rather more pleasant and equally productive experiences with the online wing of Home Campus, it turned out that I was better trained to put together a class with a significant online component than I had thought. And if the work my students turned in is anything to go by, it turned out to be a fairly effective class. I love it when students get what I'm trying to do - it makes them happy and me seem a lot smarter than I might otherwise appear.
And the students were an awful lot of fun.
I posted their grades today and spent much of the evening clearing away the debris on the folding table that serves as a second desk in my office in order to get it all packed away. It’s a satisfying feeling, especially since I took the time to get my other two classes organized as well.
Nothing like a little temporary organization to give you the illusion of progress, I always say.
And with reality of late here in Baja Canada being something that would bring tears to the eyes of a bluebird, I’ll take the illusion for a little while. Can't hurt. Might help.
The odd thing about the class was that it was so compressed. It crammed a full semester's worth of work into half a semester's worth of time, which - if you do the math - meant that it felt like two classes for that period. And now?
I don’t know what I’ll do with my newfound time…
…first.
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