I'm feeling a bit butch, today...

I heard about this test via Gateway Pundit, who heard about it from Crits... naturally, I had to see for myself. My blog is pretty masculine, no? But then, I've never been much of a girly girl, have I? My idea of a hot date is a car show, dinner at the steak house, followed by the next Batman movie (or some action flick with Bruce Willis, or one of equal pyrotechnic and stunt-men flair), capping the night off with a little wrestling (with a purpose, of course). I don't wear mascara or other cosmetics, I own one skirt and wear it for weddings and funerals only, don't own a curling iron or blow-dryer for my hair, and don't own a single pair of high-heeled shoes (didn't even have any before I mashed my knee). I'd rather read Louis L'Amour than one of those Oprah Book Club selections, and would prefer weekly root canal to watching an episode all the way through of "Lipstick Jungle" or "Sex in the City," even once.

Still and all, though, I'm female. I'm definitely a broad. A dame. A wench. Double-you-oh-em-ay-en. These double-Ds are definite and definitive, with notable décolletage, most warm days.

Match that, Andrew Sullivan.

Feminism's ad result

For years, women have complained that we could not sit down and watch television without having to suffer the embarrassment of various and sundry feminine hygiene product advertisements ("Mom, do you ever feel... you know... not so fresh?").

But now, we're even. Men have complaints. Or, at least, one man has it. Andy McCarthy at The Corner asks about the latest embarrassing ads he has to explain to the young 'un.

Turnabout is... well... you know... equally gross.

Are we not men?

Well, maybe only in terms of strict phylogenetic taxonomy do I qualify... darn these 46DDs. Still, these things may interfere with my typing, and make it impossible to sleep facing downward, but the don't get in the way of my standing up for what is right, standing up for freedom wherever it is threatened, and standing in support of those who take the real risks in defense of freedom.

And so, it is with great pleasure that I answer the call from Michelle Malkin, Ed Morrissey, and others of the not-so-meek-and-mild persuasion in the blogosphere. You may notice, at the top of the sidebar, I have posted a copy of one of the more famous "Mohammed" cartoons which were originally printed in Jyllands-Posten, more than a year ago, and which, it was claimed, sparked much violence around the world.

Well, by cracky, it's time to remind people that freedom still isn't free. There are still death threats made regularly against these cartoonists, and that the "people" who would kill a man for speaking his opinion -- having already taken the life of Pim Fortuyn, Theo Van Gogh, and many others -- are still out there, and still a threat.

We must demonstrate our solidarity -- sammenhold -- with those who have been so bold as to risk all for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and all the subsequent freedoms guaranteed by protecting those first two. The least I can do is this.

Pass the word, and pass the picture onward.

What gives at Townhall.com?

I can't seem to get into Townhall.com -- no matter where I'm trying to go at the site, I keep getting redirected to a page which says the following:

The page you requested cannot be found.

We are sorry for the inconvenience.

I've tried everything from some of my bookmarked fave columnists --like Hugh Hewitt and Mike ("little milky" according to one local college professor) Adams -- to going for the homepage to striking out for the blog, and all I get is this lousy t-shirt the above message. I click on their links on that page, and voilá!, the same message.

Dammit, I was looking forward to spending the afternoon with a few wicked conservatives!


Technology has failed me, today.

Update, 15 minutes later: all better, now. It seems I need to work on my patience.

Cool animal meme

Modulator tagged all the Friday Ark boarders to follow suit on this new meme Bora, over at A Blog Around the Clock, has introduced -- cool animals.

I'll bite.


An interesting animal I had: For a while, I had a pet crayfish, named Crawdaddy Warbucks. Mom bought him from a pet store for my birthday, along with a batch of black mollies, a beta, and several other very nice, expensive tropical fish. I had no idea that a hungry crawdad could outswim and outmaneuver an entire tank full of fish. He was very lonely at the end of a week.

He got 5¢ goldfish companions, after that. They could outswim him.

An interesting animal I ate: Over the years, I've had the opportunity to feast upon ostrich, llama, elk, buffalo (well, technically, bison) and beefalo, as well as many of the redneck requisites: alligator, opossum, squirrel, rabbit, turtle, deer, rattlesnake, bear, and -- I'm sorry to say -- I even ate a beaver, and I still can't bring myself to think that it's all it's cracked up to be, guys.

An interesting animal at the Museum: Does the

John G. Shedd Aquarium count as a museum?

Years ago, my family returned to Chicago for a weekend visit, and hit the coolest of the museums -- the Field Museum of Natural History and the Shedd Aquarium. It was one of those trips made indelible in memory, not the least by making eye contact with a dolphin kept all alone in a tank, with nobody for companionship and nothing for amusement but an Astroturf-carpeted cylinder as a back-scratcher.

I looked at the beast, and -- I will swear to this until my dying day -- it looked right back at me with a look of desperate loneliness in its eye. As a young teen I knew there was nothing I could do to make its situation better, but it was still all I could do to keep from pounding on the door to the back, staff area of the place and demanding that they get into the tank and play with the dolphin.

My visit to the aquarium was, thankfully, not much longer, and I came home feeling heartsick about the whole thing. After telling my mother what I thought I saw, she told me she had felt the same way about the lonely dolphin.

It was less than a month later that the newspaper informed us that the animal had died in captivity, and within a year, the Shedd and other aquariums were re-examining the way they kept intelligent, gregarious creatures. While I'm still not crazy about seeing the beasts in captivity, I'm happy to say the lot of cetaceans in Chicago is much improved.


An interesting thing I did with or to an animal: As a young, aspiring Michelangelo, I created portraits in watercolor and oil paints, and in ceramic, of our Labrador Retriever, Satan. I don't know what happened to the watercolor, but the other two works remain in the family collections. And, they're really not bad art, even by adult standards.

An interesting animal in its natural habitat:

computer mouse

Okay, that's a cheat. How about this?:

bee on a blanket

There has been a lot of talk over the past summer, about the dying away of honeybees. Granted, they aren't indigenous to this continent, they've made themselves at home all over the place, and I haven't seen any shortage in my neighborhood. They're still buzzin' about in Pop's flower garden.



Now, it's your turn to go all animal!

Pageturners, politics, and pretentious pinhead publishing wonks

Over at the Corner at NRO, Jonah Goldberg brings up an interesting question as a challenge to a statement made by Pat Schroeder: who reads more -- liberals or conservatives? He answers it, at the end of his post... and I won't spoil the surprise. Just go and read.

And then, Consider This, Señora: I know of a conservative man who reads an average of eight books per month, of all varieties, from advanced mathematics to history to trashy fiction (which he usually tosses down in disgust somewhere about midpoint, when he realizes that David Brin really was at his best in The Practice Effect, and has gone downhill from there, or that the characters in that "great beach read" he was handed by a neighbor will never develop a third dimension, no matter that the book has nearly two thousand pages for the opportunity to arise. Under such circumstances, he's learned to stick mostly to non-fiction.

His wife would probably reach the mean for conservatives, but then, she spends more time in the process of creating works of art than she does reading. They are both very well-traveled, yet of middle income.

Their daughter, who usually stands in the "moderate-to-somewhat-conservative" section of the political pool, is a book glutton. She just finished reading Stephen Hunter's implausible yet thrilling Pale Horse Coming and Audie Murphy's To Hell and Back (simultaneously, for the heck of it, and because she'd heard that Audie makes an important appearance in the silly novel), meanwhile nibbling on a few pages of the collected works of Lord Byron and refreshing her Latin with an old textbook's series of exercises and a battered Langensheidt's (not that it is really helping. She just wanted to see if she still has the right to wear the t-shirt on which is printed an image of a toga-wearing John-Travolta-knock-off and the words, "LATINAM DISCO"). That's just since last Friday night. (It helps that she doesn't sleep much in the summer.)

And, now, on to some Janet Evanovich, Elizabeth Peters, and a little Hopalong Cassidy online.

The family, as a whole, would probably blow the curve -- but then, half the kids are liberal, so the curve is pretty much irrelevant. Their kids read piles of books, too. This is a family which will continue to keep print media in business for many generations, I think.

There is a chance that Schroeder has made the number one classic mistake (other than never get involved in a land war in Asia) of assuming that, because conservatives don't always buy as many books as liberals, they don't read as much -- forgetting that conservatives don't waste their own cash when there's a perfectly good library in the neighborhood....

To heck with the arrogance of a political hack trying to make her way in the print world. Tell her to shut up and publish. We'll take care of the rest of the business.

What means this "proper English?"

Over at Volokh, they've been having a right rollicking discussion of "proper English."

I'm in favor of restating the argument "is this proper English?" as "is this precise language?"

Adaptation of usage is commonplace in a living, ever-changing tongue, and sticklers (as I often show myself to be) have a right to become a little upset by some of those changes. For example, the regular application of "momentarily" to mean "presently" (soon), and "presently" to mean "currently" seems to chafe many. Words do change, and presently is now returning to its earlier (pre-16th century) usage. I've ultimately come to think it's funny. We've gone rather round our hindquarters to reach our elbow, linguistically.

But, while the meanings and uses for certain words change, this is usually effected by intellectual laziness or by lack of comprehension of the substance behind a definition. In other words, change comes through misuse of a perfectly good tool for communication.

I'm sure a sensible fellow wouldn't encourage his sons to use a belt sander or angle grinder to, say, carve the spindles of a bedpost -- especially if he had a perfectly good lathe and appropriate cutting tools right across the room at the time. So why would a laissez-faire attitude strike that same man, when it comes to tools to make himself understood?

I suppose it is because most people are only craftsmen, artisans within a certain medium, and care not a whit for the other trades. I do not know the difference between a capacitor and a microprocessor, and would not know how to use either one, whereas my physicist father can tell me in precise terms what the purpose and position should be for each. My father, though, sees no difference between a French chef's knife and a gardening trowel.

If one does not pursue an art, one does not value its equipment. When one does not value the thing, it stands a very good chance of being misused, abused, and, eventually, destroyed.



And so it is: every person speaks. I suppose every person moves, as well -- out from bed in the morning to face the dawn. That does not make him an athlete. And speech does not make a person a poet or an orator.

It just makes him a user -- and often, abuser -- of the tools.

The more I think about it, the more I believe I should attempt to rescue from the scrap heap those words long forgotten, terms loved and used by Chaucer and Milton and Shakespeare and then set aside as modernity crept in. The old tools may be a bit rusty, but they have not had their edges ground away into dull, flat uselessness. I can restore them.

I will get to it anon.

NYT gets one 66.6% correct -- maybe

AS several bloggers have pointed out over the past 48 hours, the New York Times described the individuals arrested after the latest spate of attempted bombings in the UK as from the "disenfranchised South Asian population."

Mark Steyn answers the first part of that description:

Tim Blair provides a fine example of why The New York Times is an unreliable guide to the ways of the world:

In July 2005, four suicide bombers killed 52 people on London’s transit system, and another set of attacks failed two weeks later, bringing home to Britain fears of homegrown terrorist attacks among its disenfranchised South Asian population. Witnesses said the two men in the Glasgow attack were South Asian.

My dictionary defines "disenfranchised" as:

to deprive of a franchise, of a legal right, or of some privilege or immunity; especially : to deprive of the right to vote

The "South Asian population" are British subjects with as much right to vote as Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. If the Times is merely using the word to mean more generally "deprived", the July 7th bombers didn't exactly hail from the ghetto: Shehzad Tanweer rode around in his dad's Mercedes. Omar Sheikh, who's supposed to have plotted the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, was an English "public" (ie, private) schoolboy and a London School of Economics alumnus. The four would-be suicide bombers who attempted a follow-up Tube carnage on July 21st 2005 were discovered to have "more than £500,000 in benefits payments" from the bountiful British welfare state in their bank accounts.

So the next editor of Webster's might like to include a new New York Times definition of "disenfranchised": "complacent liberal assumption designed to reassure readers that they can fit this story into all the old cliches about the usual root causes"

At the time of that publication, those arrested had been recent immigrants, with real property (they had money enough for nice cars), education (several of them were physicians or medical students), and were from Jordan and Iraq... not exactly "South Asian." So, wrong on two counts about these guys' backgrounds (and many of the 7/7/05 bombers were even voters, having been born or naturalized as British subjects).

Well, now we learn that at least one of this recent spate of deadly doctors came from India and another from Pakistan, and, without citizenship, they're temporarily disenfranchised until or unless they apply for and receive citizenship in UK. So that's 2/3 accurate. But wait! Is either qualified to vote back home in their respective countries? Maybe this brings them back down to just being "South Asian," a score of 33.3% accurate.

Still, not bad, for the NYT.

But the Times is not the only journal to miss a few facts: somehow, according to the WaPo, the only tie they all seem to have is that they're "foreign physicians." Funny how they all have names like Mohammed and Abdulla, and, yet, have no common ground except their having become doctors without boundaries.
(HT: CQ)

Update: Christopher Hitchens has an observation about a further subject not accurately dealt with, in MSM coverage of the London car bombs: the target was women.

Instapundit calls for a ban on cats!

Hoky smoke, Bullwinkle! First it's the puppies in the blender, and now Glenn Reynolds cries out "Ban cats!"

Will the man stop at nothing?!

Just for that, I'm posting an extra catblog, this week, since Peanut has her own response:


I am shocked! How could any man be so eeeevil as to want to ban us seriously cute li'l thangs?


I've been thinking as hard as I can, and now I have a plan.


Mom's gonna FedEx me to his place, and I'm gonna chew him up and spit him out like that big, nasty hairball I left for Mom... uh... she doesn't know about that, yet, though, so don't tell her until after I'm on the road.


Don't forget to visit Modulator's Friday Ark each week, and support the blogs of the many cats who won't be banned, by cracky!

Building a new community

Bill Whittle at Eject! Eject! Eject! always has provocative essays posted. He takes his time and crafts beautiful works, presenting intriguing ideas and addressing half-hidden truths to ultimately leave them bare and lovely.

This particular piece (in two parts) is also quite timely. Whittle, like many of us, senses a certain desperation among many on the internet (it's in more places than just that, but we're dealing with this particular concrete set), that civilization seems to be falling apart, and there is no clear way to prevent that collapse.

Nevertheless, he sees that, throughout history there have been those who stood up for what is right and sane, for essential human virtue and decency and fairness and, well, you get the idea:

Today, when we think of virtues, we tend to think of things like prudence, chastity, modesty… pretty cold porridge. But to the Greek, the Virtues were dynamic and bold. More, Aristotle and others believed they were harmonized – that is related, interconnected, so that to not know one was to imperfectly know the rest. They were dionethic, he said, built by rationality – the virtues of understanding of substance, science, wisdom, the practical crafts and the practical mind.

And there were ethnic virtues, built by custom – courage and temperance; the property-based virtues of generosity and goodwill; honor-based virtues like pride, assertivity and control of anger; the social virtues of wittiness, honesty and friendliness; and the political virtue of justice.

These righteous individuals, who have been in ancient text called "Remnants," are what keep humanity from backsliding into oblivion. And the Remnants are always with us, secreted deep in every society, one way or another.

But look at the list of virtues in bold above, and ask yourself how you would feel about your child if they were fluent in all these? What if the political issues of the day were discussed not by how they would advance one party or the other, but rather as they held up against the list of virtues mentioned above?

What kind of society would a citizenry so educated and versed produce? I did a little beta-testing of this concept prior to posting this essay. I asked my regular readers two questions:

1. What are you good at?
2. Can you teach it?
   

With these questions, he's proposed the building of a new community, online, of and for people who believe in the classic virtues.

I have to admit, when I look at my own resumé, I see little to recommend me to this community. I am a Jill-of-all-trades and have mastered none. I can wield hammer, pliers, screwdriver, saw, drill (and they don't have to be power tools, but I can work those, too), shoot a bow and arrow with moderate accuracy, these days, and have myriad other basic skills, but no marketable area of excellence and expertise. I write moderately well, but know there are many others much better at it than I, and begrudge them not.

I have yet to seriously contribute to my own community. The stint I served as a substitute teacher was long ago, far away, and short-lived.

I'm good with furry and scaly animals, but will never be a veterinarian. I can make soap from ashes and animal fat. Not that I want to. I'm pretty adept at planning gardens, but, due to a long list of disabilities, I'm not so goodly a farmer and weed-puller.

I have a hellaciously large library of useless books -- who else needs Fran Striker's Tom Quest series in first edition, or a coverless, marked-up copy of volume I of The American Treasury of 1004 Folk Songs: a Musical History in Two Volumes, 1700-1899? anybody? anybody? Bueller? I lean toward the impractical.

My paintings and drawings have been good, but the effort to produce them leaves me an unpleasant person, dwelling too long within the darker parts of my mad self. I have had to surrender the habit until I can find a better way to live with myself. That is why I write.

Still, I'm told that, for a crazy woman, I've managed to keep remarkably balanced over the past couple of years -- without the help of chemicals. I'd say that means I have a superabundance of good luck. Or, maybe I've been suffering from undiagnosed old-lady-toxoplasmosis euphoria, today.

I'm also told that, when pressed for personal advice, I'm occasionally -- nay, often -- right. I also make good popcorn, and, according to both children and a handful of experienced adults, I give really great hugs.

I wonder if hugs are enough to make me a citizen in good standing in a community such as the proposed Ejectia!? If not, is it the sort of place I'd want to live?

Alabama student takes down dinoboar

lgf has the picture.

But looking at the image, I can't see any teeth on that monster.

Of course, it was killed in Alabama. It might have had its teeth fall out long ago, since in Alabama the Tuskaloosa.



Update: In case anybody wonders, I'm not yet convinced that the photo is a genuine representative of a "Hogzilla". It looks a little to me as though the kid is a bit far behind the rest of the shot. I may be wrong, though.

Update: My seester says she watched a show on Hogzilla, some time ago, in which it was pointed out there was a fish farmer in that general area who had been experimenting with feeds designed to accelerate and exaggerate growth in his fishies, and it was likely that Hogzilla had either eaten a mess o'fish food or a mess o'fish who'd been fed that food. This monster may have been of a like disposition.

Further, some of the experts in the comments and elsewhere seem to be of the same opinion as mine, regarding the placement of the shooter in the image. The kid is a little farther into the background, elbow on knee, so as to slightly exaggerate the size of the beast in front of him, but it does not appear to be fauxtography... just gaming the shot a bit. Kind of the reverse of the standard tourist picture of the guy holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa or picking the nose of one of the dead presidents at Mount Rushmore.

What's the difference?

Ed Morrissey asks the question of "what difference exists between this and the hate-crimes legislation that I opposed two weeks ago."

The case in question is of Jonathan Paul, member of the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front -- a radical anti-scientific-research, anti-development, generally anti-human organization connected to PETA -- standing trial for arson terrorism. This is, right here and now, different from plain arson due to the intent to force the majority population, by fear, to follow the radicals' agenda.

The acts of which Paul stands accused are attempts to undermine this constitutional democratic republic's rule of law. His action isn't aimed at anybody special -- it's aimed at everybody. This is a deliberate threat to our entire free nation, in much the same way as any other treason, petty or grand.

But in a later post, Morrissey says

I'm starting to think that hate crimes and terrorism designators both take us down a dangerous road. If the criminal act doesn't carry enough deterrent through normal penalties, then increase the penalties for everyone who commits them -- whether it be battery, arson, or murder. Let the motivation prove the crime rather than become a crime in itself. Otherwise, we invite a thought-police mentality that will ensnare American liberty more than it does evil.

Ed is right. It is a dangerous road to start down -- having special laws for intent... but then, isn't that always the case? After all, the difference between plain old manslaughter and murder is often one of intent. "I didn't mean to kill him," can get a person out of jail (well, maybe with a fine and probation) nine times out of ten, if the argument is well presented. But if your intent was to kill and leave his body parts across seventeen states so he'll find it hard to rise again on Judgment Day, well, heck, see you in Marion, eh? The difference between prosecution for shoplifting and going home embarrassed is, did you really mean to run out from Victoria's Secret into the Mall's Food Court with that unpaid-for bra draped across your arm? (And, no, it didn't happen to me. It's hypothetical, okay?) Did he really need those 300 kilos of heroin for his own use, or is he a dealer? Did she drive over her ex-husband thirty-seven times because she hoped to teach him a lesson or did she just think there was something goofy going on with her left rear tire? The whole issue in most criminal cases involves intent.

A young man I once knew burned down a building in a town quite far from here, because he liked to watch those sexy fires. He is a danger to anybody who owns a flammable structure, but, by and large, that's the extent of his threat.

Jonathan Paul, on the other hand, was networking to do damage far beyond just watching the pretty colors of the flames. Intent matters.


"Hate crime" laws, on the other hand, are designed to declare or create one or more protected classes, and an act against one of those classes is not necessarily an act against the entire nation. There is often no crime other than expressing an ugly opinion -- as in the case of the Illinois high school girls.

In some ways, I see the laws describing and limiting "hate speech" and the like, as much of an assault on our free nation as Paul's fires are. It is again the tyranny of the few, and in both cases, it's done in all arrogance, by others who in reality don't give a rat's patootie about any of us, "for our own good" and for their own gain.

And, sadly, the latter of Ed's two posts rather nicely reinforces our apparently very similar opinion of those "hate crime" laws.

EclectEcon discovers underwater harvest

He's roving on the other side of the Pond, this season, and has come across mussel farms in Kilarry Fjord in Ireland.

This begs spawns* the question from a Midwesterner: how tough is the job of bivalve farmer? (scroll down)

It also brings up a simple observation: I love a man with mussels.



*There's nothing like catching yourself in an embarrassing misuse of terminology.

Free speech threatened in Finland

Finland has long had a reputation as one of the freest states in Europe. That's why it comes as a surprise to many of us that some long-standing codes codes against "hate speech" are being used to prosecute one citizen-blogger this week. Gates of Vienna has the whole story, and will continue to update everybody. Keep checking back with them.

So, a free nation is threatening to jail a blogger for speaking his politically incorrect mind. There seems to be no indication that he has incited people to go out and riot, or attack and kill anybody... there seems to be nothing more than a sense of his telling his readers "dude, these people are dangerous, and here's why." And, yet, the government is working against his free speech. How come this sounds so familiar?

I can't read Finnish, so I can't be certain Mikko Ellilä is genuinely "merely... point[ing] out that Islam is a fascist ideology that advocates killing Jews, atheists, homosexuals etc." or using stronger terms. Nevertheless, Finland just got over investigating with initial intent to prosecute a publisher who made available in print the "dread cartoons of Muhammad." The Finnish government, like the Danes only a few weeks earlier, were a hair's breadth away from fining, jailing, silencing people for printing news. They're still only that distance from it, in Finland, it seems.

This is one of the reasons I've long mistrusted speech codes. Seldom (never?) are they applied in a balanced and just fashion, for the good of all. Far too often, they're used to silence -- instead of protect -- the public.

US foreign aid buys silence of honest bloggers

In the column on the right side of my blog's main page is a series of recommended blogs for you to check out. Under "other worthy sites" I now have two blogsites listed which are no longer in action. It seems that, while Big Pharaoh has taken a job which keeps him too busy to blog, and has taken a temporary blogleave, Sandmonkey has, over the past few months, found his situation as an independent thinker more dangerous, so he has opted to save his life and freedom by completely ceasing to blog.

If you have prayers, send some his way.

Meanwhile, we might consider applying a little pressure on our own government to stop subsidizing Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and other such islamofascist thugs in that country, so that Sandmonkey may someday soon be comfortable and safe, ranting again.

(HT: Gateway Pundit and lgf)

What's in a name?

Rick Moran has taken flack for having a brother, again, I see. His sibling, Terry, who works at ABC news and blogs (fairly well, too, for a liberal wink wink) said some things comparing the two non-news race-baiting events of the season, and , while it was clear he meant well, he did miss a point or two.

But that's not why I'm here, today.

I'm not going to delve into the issues (it's really not something I'm interested in. Jeez, we have corrupt and/or idiotic prosecutors all over the place in IL, or so I hear -- predominantly in Chicago -- and nobody gets headlines the way that Nifong jackass did. BFD. And, since when does a shock jock's hurting somebody's feelings deserve to make the national news for a week?). I think enough has been said already, anyway.

But I am going to look at this name thing. Rick pointed out the buzillion (okay, just bunches of) commenters who all felt compelled to use the same lame, predictable variant on their last name. Wow. How much thought does it take to alter an "a" to an "o", and insult the Moran brothers?

I was blessed at birth with a similar sort of last name. Well, not really. But it's a name which became a target for mockery, so I sense the Morans and I share one small piece of commn ground.

Mine is a German name meaning "clapper of the bell" (at which a German friend would walk by saying "ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding"), but Midwestern kids noticed that, as our branch of the family pronounced it, it kinda rhymed with a pejorative for a severely physically handicapped person. A few even noticed that one could change a consonant and make a female anatomical reference. That, of course, didn't happen until after the kids had been in advanced health class, where they learned the names of those parts our parents had no occasion to discuss with us. But it nonetheless happened. Many times. Many, many, many, many times.

So, when somebody comes up with the same old same old, I usually try to remember the Monty Python sketch* where Eric Idle introduces himself as "Mister Smoketoomuch", and Terry Jones replies, "You'd better cut down, then." After a moment of confusion, Idle's character finally stops, repeats the badinage, laughs out loud, and Jones says, "You probably get that a lot," to which Idle says, "Never!"

Unlike Mister Smoketoomuch, we've been there, heard it. When you repeat that old stuff, we're laughing at you, not with you.

*I'd have dug up the video if I could find it on YouTube, but (a) there must be a quarter of a million Monty Python vids posted, and (b) my connection is slow. If somebody else knows where to find this sketch, I wouldn't object to a link being posted in the comments, here.

Winter sports, my style

Taking sports safety to an extreme: "Yes, you can go out on your sled, but always ride it with a grown-up, and never on slippery snow."

It looks as if Rick Moran of RWNH has been taking lessons from me in the "how to respond to winter" department. My rule of thumb is, if you don't have to go out into the icy misery, just don't do it. Every time I attempt icy sidewalks, I end up studying the treetops from a recumbent position. I count myself lucky -- this past winter, I fell a total of four times, and really only injured myself once (I dislocated my shoulder a tad. I didn't even realize it was more than a slight sprain until it popped itself back in, about a week later, accompanied by a collection of those seven words commonly used by the sinestrosphere). Rick says he is sore in a bunch of places... I hope he's planning to see a doctor, especially about his crunched elbow.

Injuries are no fun, no matter what your age. Still, we recover from this sort of thing fairly rapidly when we're kids, but once we're out of school, falls are much more dangerous.

Eleven years ago (give or take a few months), I fell on the pavement, and I'm only just this past year or so able to walk long distances without leaning upon a cane. Some of the damage to one knee is permanent. The harm to my psyche is... well, my psyche was already damaged, but it added a phobia of running after buses. I'd rather walk twenty miles than race to the bus stop, today.

And don't get me going on icy sidewalks!

The sooner the final thaw gets here, the happier I will be (until allergies kick in).

And the faster Rick recovers, the better for those of us who enjoy reading his blogs. Who knows how the pain will affect his perspective on Jack Bauer, after all?