548 Revisiting the Robie House

For days my very patient, focused, meticulous husband has been in his studio playing "paper dolls," or "paper house" as the case may be. When we were in Chicago we visited Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House (see my blog about the trip here). Last week he started putting together a paper model--I think it has 138 pieces, many very tiny, requiring intricate folds and careful cutting with the x-acto knife. He has spent untold hours on a project that would have had me in a puddle of frustrated tears in 15 minutes. Don't ever buy this for a child!


Robie House Cut and Assemble

"From the Publisher: Now model builders as well as lovers of fine architecture can construct an accurate three-dimensional model of the Robie House, and thereby discover for themselves the harmonious interrelationships of parts and numerous other design details that make this home a world-famous architectural masterpiece. Printed in full color on sturdy card stock, the two-foot long model comes complete with step-by-step instructions and exploded diagrams. A series of multi-level horizontal planes includes balconies, platforms, a porch and entrance court, while easy-to-follow directions clearly explain how to cut, fold and glue walls, doorways, windows, roof and other features."

The Amazon site lets you click through a few pages and enlarge. This is not a project for sissies!

547 Why are drugs cheaper in Canada?

“. . . if you want Canadian pharmaceutical prices in the US, the steps you must follow are clear. You must cut your standard of living by 20-30%. You must reform your ludicrous product liability laws. And you must squeeze pharmaceutical industry profits through price controls and dominant purchaser policies, thus causing lower levels of pharmaceutical investment and innovation, getting cheaper prices for medicines already discovered at the cost of prolonged pain and suffering for victims of diseases we cannot yet cure or control. And you must restrict patient access to the latest and best medicines in order to keep costs low.” Read the entire paper from AIMS here.

546 The Scots-Irish--are they the secret GOP weapon?

Before I began looking into genealogy about 10-15 years ago, I had no idea who the American Scots-Irish were. Didn't know that my father's family had arrived here in the 1730s, or that he was descended from a cultural group that was the foundation of American-style democracy. James Webb has written a lot about the Scots-Irish, and has a new book, "Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish shaped America," (Broadway, 2004). I had read up on their contribution to our wars, our presidency and our customs in "Albion's Seed," a 1989 book that catalogs the contributions of four waves of British Isles immigration.

In today's Wall Street Journal Webb writes that the Democrats have ignored the Scots-Irish as a cultural group, and if they hadn't, Al Gore would have won Tennessee and the Presidency without a single hanging Florida chad. The Scots-Irish are fiercely independent, strongly pro-family and anti-government interference says Webb, and there are about 30,000,000 of them. Having only been a Republican for two years, I can point out that not all Scots-Irish escaped the Democrats, but then, I didn't know my own history either.

545 Poverty in the media

“According to the latest statistics on poverty in the United States, released in 1996 by the U.S. Census Bureau, 14.3 million children in America are living in abject poverty.” PNEWS, February 11, 1998

“Despite a glowing economy and record low unemployment, poverty is rising in the suburbs.” USAToday, April 28, 1999

''The good news is getting better, and the bad news is getting worse,'' says Andrew Cuomo, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which compiled the report. ''Smaller, medium-size cities are not participating in the new economy.'' USAToday June 11, 1999

“Unemployment is low, construction booming, housing prices soaring. But lines form every Thursday evening at the Sts. Joachim and Ann Care Service food pantry in St. Charles, where about 130 low-income residents pick up bags of groceries.” USAToday, October 18, 2004

Well, I suppose it’s nice to know that all this poverty isn’t President Bush’s fault since the media had plenty of poverty stories in the 1990s. A woman featured in today’s article is 45, divorced, has a college degree and is working for $5.15 an hour. The woman featured in a 1999 article on poverty was making over $10.50 an hour, was divorced and planning to go to college. It looks like the common denominator in poverty for women and children is single mothers, not geography or education or ethnicity. That is certainly confirmed by all the statistics the government has collected over the past 30 years.

544 Stolen Honor--stolen free speech

Remember when John Kerry wanted to stop the publication and distribution of "Unfit for Command?" This after about 50 anti-Bush books hit the market. Now he's at it again. Apparently "Stolen Honor; Wounds that Never Heal" will be shown by Sinclair Broadcast Group on 62 stations and the Kerry people are not satisfied with time to rebut, they want it pulled.

What? Biased media? With about 90% of journalists, entertainers and TV reporters claiming to be Democrats, what in the world are they whining about? Fox News starts to climb the charts and you'd think the world was coming to an end. After what CBS tried to do with Dan Rather's phony Bush documents? They haven't even had their wrists slapped--they've only been buried under an avalanche of bad press and tons of e-mail.

One day I looked at the campaign coverage on one page of the USAToday. The column inch and photo size were about equal, but oh, the verbs! In the Bush column were "taking aim," "charge," "takeover," "attack," "misrepresent," and "alleges." In the Kerry column were "said," "plans," "builds on" and some other innocuous verbs.

And then the Kerry campaign has Michael Moore and F-9-11 appearing in theaters as a documentary rather than fiction, and being shown by professional organizations purporting to support freedom of speech, the American Library Association (which said nothing about Kerry trying to shut up a publisher).

And by the way, have you been able to find Dr. Laura anywhere on your radio frequency? All she said was gay couples shouldn't adopt infants and that got her removed from anything except the most remote, inconvenient time.

Update: Sundance is running a film on George Bush's faith. It's owned by that well-known arbiter of American morality and faith, Robert Redford. Sundance is doing a two week anti-Bush blitz. The CBC (Canada) is running a very anti-Bush "documentary" while whining about Sinclair Broadcast Group. All timed for the election.

543 How Academics make Policy

Mary Grabar, a college professor, vividly describes her graduate school experience. Having entered school as a moderate in the early 1990s who supported Bill Clinton, she learned that the aging, tenured 60s liberals are anything but liberal. What she found was scoffing at the very idea of meaning, of truth, or indeed of value in the study the great works of the past. What she found was the family portrayed as an institution of evil, child pornography not only tolerated but sanctioned, and feminists mocking fetuses. So when the twin towers came down, she’d already seen academe imploding.

"As with Zell Miller, my conversion was solidified by 9/11. That event made very clear the danger of the ideas promoted by theorists like Noam Chomsky, Richard Rorty, Edward Said, and Peter Singer. That is the one thing the students taking over campuses in the 1960s realized: the arguments made in the halls of the academy, contrary to the conventional wisdom about the isolation of the ivory towers, have very real impact. The graduates become journalists, teachers, parents, and government workers. The political ideologies do not begin with the peasants, the workers, the average citizens. They start with the slick talkers, the ones who deliver their messages in measured tones, with thousands of footnotes. They then become policy.
Like the protestors and journalists referred to by Miller who enjoy their right to attack others with words, the academics enjoy the privilege of disparaging their own government because some have the courage to defend them.

Senator Miller [at the Republican Convention] was right to call attention to this evil within our own borders and among our own citizens. We need the straight-talking principled man from Appalachia to tell us this. We have had too much obfuscation from those who are undeserving of their doctorates and J.D.'s."

542 Reverting to adolescent behavior

Derek, a seminary student with a blog, writes about camping with 3 friends: “We packed up my car, got down there while there was still daylight and put up the tent and got the fire started. It's funny how four grown men can instantly revert to being 14 years old again when in total isolation, with no women around and a fire going.”

I think the opposite must happen with women. They revert to 14 when there is a man around. A few weeks ago at our local pub where we go on Friday night, there was a loud, hilarious table next to us, five women and one man. He had a wan smile, and was nodding politely, as they screeched and roared and told jokes on themselves, all with the hand movements of a drunken choir director, and bouncing the topic like a basketball. The young man got up to go to the rest room, or maybe out to get some fresh air. The noise level dropped immediately. I heard the women in hushed tones start talking about what they really cared about. Gone was the “I’m-out-here-having-a-good-time” façade, and it was down to the nitty-gritty of career stress, teen-age children, and negligent husbands. When the guy came back, so did the game faces and the merriment.

Interesting. I could give other examples, and you could come up with ones to disprove it. But I’ve seen this behavior in committee meetings too, causing some men to wish they’d lower that glass ceiling smack on the heads of their female colleagues.

541 Librarians, right and left, blogging

I APOLOGIZE FOR THE BLOGGING DRY SPELL. I just can't take my eyes off the polls and the political blogs right now. The fact is that nothing in American libraries is of any importance at all, when compared with keeping the White House away from John Kerry. Conservator

“. . . entering an Amtrak bathroom is like hermetically sealing yourself in a Tupperware lady's demo container full of boiled eggs she forgot in the trunk of her car: the waftey scent is stale, sweet and rotten. Even though I attempt to hold my breath throughout my bathroom visit, I had to breathe at some point so I was forced back to my seat.”
Vox Lauri

Helped patron make color copies of Cambodian money. It had to be double sided and look exactly like the real thing. Probably going to be doing time in a Cambodian prison for making fake 1000 Riel notes worth a quarter. Right Wing Librarian

Somewhere between the odds that I will have a child prodigy (250:1), and being audited by the IRS (100:1), is the chance that I might meet a fellow Republican librarian. Knowing this, lightning strikes and meteor showers seemed too scary to investigate.
223 to 1, according to the latest Library Journal, (10/04) is the ratio of librarians that have contributed to John Kerry’s campaign as opposed to Dubya. Tomeboy

Got into another debate over at LISNews today. It can feel very pointless if you think about the fact that the election on Nov. 2 doesn't really decide anything. It will decide who is President but no minds will be changed, ALA will still be ALA and our profession will still be on 'the left bank of the mainstream'. Shush

Like many people, most of my visits to the DMV have involved getting angry. (Except in Missoula. God bless those blissed out Mountain Folk for the effect they had on my nerves.) Many visits have involved the customer service representative subtly trying to pin the blame on me for something that I couldn't have known, or was their fault. It's hard to tell whose fault infamously bad service is: ours or theirs. We go in there grumpy and expecting bad service, so we get it. People come to the library with the same expectation sometimes. NextGen Librarian

On my favorite book: The truth, like many another slice of reality, is more complex: I have many favorites; among them the book I am reading now and the last one I finished; then there are all those wonderful books whose titles I can manage to remember and connect with their actual contents after the last page has been turned. A good answer to the question would be ‘all of them,’ but people, being people, always want to know The One. Perhaps this is because we live in a monotheistic society—even our atheists disbelieve in a single god, and because we are also competitive: everything has to come down to a final entity, a Grand Prize Winner. Library Dust

I'm at that age when a woman's fancy turns to thoughts of hormone replacement therapy.
Lipstick Librarian

540 Two Classes One Reunion

At the end of the month we're driving to Indiana to attend a reunion of my husband's high school fraternity. I think the last time they got together was about 10 or 12 years ago, although we've seen a few individuals over the years. They all attended Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis. In 1997 I wrote about our 40th class reunions, and how two classes that had been so different 40 years before, had become very similar.

Our Differences

Our schools couldn't have been more different. His school--Arsenal Technical High School--has a beautiful 76 acre campus in the middle of Indianapolis. Founded in 1912 at the site of a Civil War arsenal, its architecture spans a century and a half, from the old officers' barracks and guard house to the concretely ugly contemporary. Its neighboring residential area, once the glory of Indianapolis, was already shabby in the 1950s, but is now experiencing a renaissance. Tech's course offerings from technical to college prep were breathtaking, ranging from stagecraft to orchestral instruments to Greek. The school had 8,000 students when my mother-in-law attended in the 1930s, but was around 5,000 when my husband graduated in 1957. His school was larger than my home town. He says, and his classmates confirm, that they were so well behaved that you could hear a pin drop when the entire student body met for assembly.

Mt. Morris High School where I attended had only 52 graduates in 1957, was even smaller when my father attended in the 1920s, and our school, as a high school, no longer exists. The building is now a junior high school and the senior high students are bussed to Oregon, Illinois, to attend classes with our former nemesis and biggest rival. Its low profile, 1950s style architecture neighbors a retirement center to the east, a cemetery to the west and a cornfield to the south. The only foreign language offered at MMHS was Latin (for which I'm thankful--it's an excellent foundation), and we had no art classes, unless you count "industrial arts." Tech's lunch room staff was larger than our entire faculty! And we were never as quiet and well behaved as those city kids.

Our similarities

Our reunions had more similarities than our schools. Hard working local committees make these class reunions work. If there are no local people committed to the project, it just doesn't happen. The Tech Committee has quite a challenge finding addresses for over 700 people, many of whom have changed names, addresses and careers several times. The MMHS class had a much better rate of attendance with 37 classmates attending compared to 85 from the Tech class of 1957. His class has lost 34 members in death (1997)--that the committee has confirmed. My class has lost four.

Both groups assembled a large table of memorabilia for the reunion--annuals, a confirmation class photograph, snapshots, athletic sweaters, personal items. Tech's publications were a little more slick--they had an award winning school newspaper published by their journalism classes which even after 40 years looks quite professional. The MMHS class, however, had a signature quilt made in 1954 with all our names, our teachers' names and the current slang expressions embroidered on cloth blocks sewn together. That was a far sighted 14 year old who organized that project!

Both classes gathered for a reunion photograph. Bob's group was rather dignified and well-behaved, squinting in the bright sunlight on their beloved campus the day following their evening reunion. My class had a few stand-up comics who played off each other and kept everyone laughing. They must have driven our teachers crazy 40 years ago. The smiles in our MMHS picture taken at dusk in the White Pines State Park, the site of many school-related picnics, certainly weren't forced.

The Classmates

Each class had couples who met in school, dated and then married. The difference is that in Bob's class if you ask, "How did you meet," she might say, "We sat next to each other in zoology." My classmates Sylvia and Nancy and Mary Jane can say they met their husbands in grade school. Our classmates' marriages produced many children and now they are showing pictures of grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. One Tech couple at the reunion needed to hire a babysitter for the grandchild they are raising. One MMHS classmate showed a family picture that was almost half the size of our class.

Tech and MMHS classes both had a girl who was equally a friend to boys and girls, probably not an easy honor then when the preferred status was "going steady." I chatted with Bob's classmate for awhile and knew immediately why everyone in the class loved her. "I wish we'd known each other in high school," I told her (even though she had dated my husband).

On Growing Older

Sad stories were told in both groups. I think I met more guys downsized out of jobs in their 50s at Tech's reunion, although I didn't ask the same questions of my own classmates. Like me, many of the women began their careers after child-rearing and listened with envy to tales of buy-outs and early retirements. At our 25th and 30th reunions, divorce was the major personal loss. At the 40th it was the loss of parents, with at least three of my classmates losing a parent within the past six months. One Tech man told me his father died 13 years ago and he misses him more each day.

Surgeries, cancer, heart medication and portable oxygen kept our groups from getting too frisky. Two Tech men told me about hip replacements and were thrilled to be walking with no pain. One construction worker who had traveled from Florida to be at the Tech reunion proudly showed us his first pair of athletic shoes because after surgery he no longer wears a built up shoe. A Mt. Morris classmate had postponed knee surgery to be there and traveled in pain from California.

When we stopped by the Alumni Dance at the Moose Lodge in Mt. Morris after my reunion, we left after 5 minutes because of the smoke and noise. Nor did we go to the Indiana Roof Ballroom for the Tech Alumni dance. We love to dance, but unlike 40 years ago, these two alumni like our sleep more when facing a long drive home.

One thing was clear at these reunions: success touches us in a variety of ways. All our classmates were successful. Some had achieved the traditional definition--money, power, status or recognition. All the people I met or with whom I renewed acquaintance had overcome adversity, or followed a dream, or achieved a goal, or had provided needed friendship and compassion, or had been a faithful caregiver. The two classes that were so different in 1957 had become one by 1997.

539 Cooking to Hook Up--Another Quiz

Here’s the page that describes how Brain Syndicate worked with the authors of the book, Cooking to Hook Up. I took the quiz and came out a hybrid Academic/Career Girl. Thanks to Paula for the tip.

She is a hybrid of: Academic Girl Career Girl Click on the pictures below to read more: Take the 'What Kind of Girl Is She?' quiz at CookingToHookup.com

"Ann Michaels and Drew Campbell, the authors of Cooking to Hook Up were married in 1997. Despite a shared fondness for vodka martinis and cutthroat Scrabble, they soon realized they were better writing partners than life partners. Their no-kids-no-foul marriage dissolved in 2003 and the fact that they didn't argue over a single CD should tell you something."

538 Mrs. Bush's Winning Cookie Recipe

Family Circle featured the favorite cookie recipes of Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Kerry. Mrs. Bush's Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Cookie won with 67% of the vote. Here's the recipe. As soon as I lose 10 pounds, I'll try it. My husband would eat one, leaving me with 95.

Makes: about 8 dozen cookies. Bake: at 350° for 12 to 15 minutes.

1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) butter, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups light-brown sugar
3 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla
3 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons cinnamon
3 cups quick oats (not old-fashioned)
2 cups chopped walnuts
1 1/2 packages (8 ounces each) chocolate chunks (3 cups)
2 cups coarsely chopped dried sour cherries


1. Heat oven to 350°.
2. With electric mixer, cream butter and both sugars.
3. Beat in eggs one at a time, then beat in vanilla.
4. Add flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and oats; slowly beat until blended.
5. Stir in walnuts, chocolate and cherries.
6. Drop by tablespoonfuls onto cookie sheet covered with parchment paper.
7. Bake at 350° for 12 to 15 minutes, until golden brown.

The cookie poll has been accurate for the last four elections, according to the Bush Cheney site, which posted this recipe. However, you'll still need to get out and vote.

537 The Lesbian Candidate

After I've just told you what a great profession library science is, I'm going to report that reference librarians actually get questions like this:

Is it Dick Cheney that is the lesbian presidential candidate?" Reported by Matthew, who gave up a nursing career to become a librarian and is probably wondering why.

Both Edwards and Kerry brought up Cheney's lesbian daughter during the debates, one of the cheapest, most obnoxious political tricks I've ever heard of. They were trying to frighten their wild-eyed, right wing strawmen who may have been in a closet for the past six months and could then be deterred from showing up at the polls due to their fear of homosexuality. And then Mrs. Edwards, who up to this time (Thursday) had seemed like a rational, nice person, tried to psychoanalyze Mrs. Cheney because she was upset the Democrats were using her child for political gain.

What sort of hatred is it that makes a man, no two men, use an opponent's daughter for a poster child for the speaker's own bigotry? As another blogger pointed out, Bush didn't bring up that Kerry, a Roman Catholic, had had his first marriage annulled, making his own daughters, . . . what, quasi-illegitimate due to their parents' failures?

This is really rock bottom slim and sludge, folks.

Update: James Taranto at OpinionJournal Best of the Web comments, Oct. 15:

John Kerry's gratuitous mention during Wednesday's debate of Dick Cheney's gay daughter has become the most talked about moment of the debate, and it looks as though it's backfiring on the Kedwards campaign. True, most gay activists seem untroubled by Kedwards' gay-baiting, apparently on the (no doubt accurate) theory that a Kerry administration would be far friendlier to their policy agenda than the Bush administration is. And it's anyone's guess whether the publicity for Cheney's daughter will suppress turnout among conservative Republicans or lead conservative Democrats to remain in the fold.

Update: Jean Vennochi, Boston Globe, Oct. 19:

There is no way to prove it, but I agree with conservatives who argue there was nothing accidental about Kerry's reference to "Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian" during the last debate. It followed an earlier mention by his running mate, John Edwards. Whether the intent was to discourage evangelicals who oppose homosexuality from turning out in large numbers for Bush or to remind voters in general of GOP hypocrisy on the topic, two mentions of Mary Cheney are not political accidents. They are political calculations. . .

Go ahead, liberals, start howling: What is worse, you say, refusing to admit you were wrong to invade Iraq or refusing to admit you were wrong to invade the Cheney family's privacy? On the merits, of course, Bush's refusal to admit wrongdoing in war is much more serious. But the merits don't always prevail, in court or politics. Like it or not, Kerry's willingness to use Mary Cheney in a political forum and unwillingness to apologize for doing so gives less-than-committed Kerry voters time -- two weeks -- for second thoughts.

536 Just A Few Best Sellers

Just A Few Best sellers
from the Wall Street Journal
October 15, 2004

It’s “Good to great” and then
“Who moved my cheese?”
“Discover your strength,”
“Da Vinci Code,” please.

Harvey McKay and
Carolyn Kepcher
Arthur Agatston and
Sharon Lecter.

Rosabeth Kanter
R. Kiyosaki
Liz Tucillo and
Jean Sherman Chatzky.

Michael F. Moore loves
Ms. Kitty Kelley
Lemony Snicket
John O’Neill Corsi.

Malcolm Gladwell,
Staff of the Daily Show;
Stephen Lundin and
Bob Dylan you know.

Maeve Benchy, Jim
Collins Harry Paul ;
Sophie Kinsella,
Tom Roth Phil McGraw .

“How full is your bucket,”
“We got fired,”
So many new books
Read ‘til you’re tired.

535 Whose turn to clean the bathroom?

Yesterday I was reading a summary of one of the left-wing Bush bashing books, this one about his dangerous, evangelical religion, and decided to look up the publisher, Pluto Press, which was an arm of South End Press. Although I was not surprised by the mission statement of South End, I got a chuckle out of the “cleaner in the bathroom” story. It just sounds so. . .so. . .70s. And it was, of course. After the Vietnam war protests died out (until this year), the founders decided to go into publishing. They are still around, finding readership for their blather, but are probably getting smarter about the bottom line.

". . .we started with a clear mission statement. We knew what our purpose and principles were and why. It was on paper for future collective members to see, it was on the copyright page or the back page of the books we published. No matter what the financial situation was, no matter what the internal problems were, our goal was to get those political books out. The book publishing decisions were informed by what we thought would be a contribution to analyzing U.S. institutions, to the left broadly defined, to what we referred to then as “totalist” politics (recognizing the important of race, gender, and class), and to visions and strategies for radical social change."

". . .we were committed to our principles but flexible about tactics. For example, in the beginning everyone had to be part of every decision made, including what cleaner to use in the bathrooms and the font size of each book. Later, we delegated decision making and autonomy within work areas, mostly by instituting a yearly summer policy-making retreat."

I remember those policy making retreats from work and church. If you ever want to create grass roots support for your own ideas, you gather people together for a retreat, serve them nice box-lunches, and have them come to your conclusions and plans in small groups.

534 What Librarians do today

If you’d like an exciting career battling technological advancement, choose “library and information science.” I truly loved being a librarian, but technology and our devotion to it is one of the reasons I retired early (and my own thrifty behavior of putting 15% aside for TIAA-CREF all my working years). So here’s a brief compilation of what a day looks like for a librarian:

Krafty Librarian writes:
“. . .the systems librarian and I are working on our server and various problems. I replaced the tape drive Friday and we were able to do back ups for the weekend then all of a sudden on Monday it failed. What was the point of me replacing our broken tape drive when they sent us crappy refurbished one that would work better as a paper weight?”

Shoe frets:
“I am putting Mozilla on them as soon as I get a chance, and taking off IE. There will be no choice. I don’t want a lawsuit because some doofus a million miles away stole a patron’s credit card number. Besides, Firefox and Mozilla are better browsers anyhoo. And the kids love the tabbed browsing. Oh, how I wish I could get a Linux system running. It would ease my fears some. It would ease my fears a lot.”

Tangognat worries:
“Am I missing something, or did some of the search functionality vanish from the redesigned American Memory site? I thought there used to be a way to search by limiting your search by medium. So if you only wanted to search and retrieve photos or audio files you could do that. Now that option seems to hidden, under the option to browse specific collections. If I browse Books and other printed works, I’m then given the option to run a search limited to those formats. I was really confused, probably just because I expect very different things from the labels “browse” and “search". .

Family Man Librarian speaks for all: ". . .librarians are not that great at marketing themselves. By marketing, I don't mean shameless self-promotion. Instead, I'm talking about making clear to their institutions how integral and vital their role and the role of libraries is to their success and to society in general, especially in this digital age. Over and over and over again, I am reminded of how persistently overlooked and underrepresented libraries and library issues are in the general scheme of things in my local environment. It's incredible, especially given the facts...like huge (and growing) library website statistics, huge (and growing) use of online resources, huge influx of people in the library. . ."

And these youngsters don’t even comment on the 10 or so meetings a week or the parts of your job that gradually get outsourced to state, regional or national consortia and committees. Still, it’s a great life. Some libraries even have books.

533 Only two states left

If this registration chart is correct, the only states left where you can still register to vote are Connecticut (14) and California (15). Millions have disenfranchised themselves already through sloth, apathy and carelessness. Their places in the voting booth will be taken on November 2 by those who vote more than once (no ID required), and those who are dead and have sent stand-ins.

Then their freedom of speech has been hijacked too, not by terrorists, but by their own inaction, because if I hear any complaining about the president in the next four years, I've got a roll of duct tape I'd like to use. . .

532 If you‘re going nowhere, any road will get you there

"If someone argues that the purpose of studying mathematics is to build self-esteem, and proposes a study method that produces confident students who cannot do long division, then making the counter argument that the study method is a failure will fall on deaf ears. This is, of course, because the study method is in fact a rousing success. It produces exactly what its proponents want. It makes little sense to argue about the means, when you have completely different views about the ends."

This is actually the opening paragraph of an essay on modern architecture--postmodernism--written by Paul Mansour at Scourge of Modernism, a blog about architecture, in May 2003. (It may have been his last.)

But it recalls for me a letter in the Wall Street Journal today about what is wrong with progressive education (which apparently is not unlike modern architecture in content) written by Edwin Thompson. He writes that

Progressive education equals
whole-language
whole-math
anti-conceptual constructivism
multiculturalism
moral relativism
all of which thwart
cognitive development
and creates
followers not leaders
collectivists not individualists
pragmatists not goal oriented individuals and
numerous diagnoses of learning disabilities.

His letter is followed by one written by Bruce Bruxton, a Headmaster at a private day school. He says that all the education reforms, top down, that have occurred in the last 50 years or so have amounted to a massive failure, matched only by the failure of Marx and Lenin.

531 Bush and Kerry in Ohio--again, and again

I may be the only Ohioan who hasn’t seen President Bush or Senator Kerry. Illini Girl referred me to this article last Friday at NRO, by Kevin Holtsberry.

“If there was any question about Ohio's status as the battleground state among battleground states, the past week has put it to rest. The candidates, their surrogates, and even independent celebrities have been barnstorming Ohio. And of course last night Ohio was center stage for the vice-presidential debate in Cleveland. It appears Ohio will continue to see the presidential campaign up close and personal for the next 30 days.”

We’ve even had those intellectual giants, the Dixie Chicks, in town to tell us how to vote, and blasts from the past for aging boomers, John Couger (as he used to be known when my son was buying “records“) and Bruce Springsteen.

There was a woman sitting across from me this morning at Panera’s wearing a Bush-Cheney ‘04 t-shirt and sweat pants. She was having a very animated conversation with another woman wearing a faded pink t-shirt with no message and Capri pants. What a grasp of the campaign and issues she had! Knew all the economic figures, foreign policy, education measures, etc. Much more than all three Dixie Chicks combined.

530 Ig Nobel Prize

"The Ig Nobel award for medicine—one of the prizes given annually to scientists who have produced unusual research—was given this year to a team of researchers who had found that cities in which radio stations played a higher than average amount of country music had higher than average suicide rates. . . Daisuke Inoue of Hyugo, Japan who invented the karaoke machine, received this year's peace award for "providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other." "

BMJ, 329:817 Oct. 9, 2004,

529 Why I am a Lutheran, by Daniel Preus

From this Book
“I am a Lutheran for the same reason I am a Christian. It is not by choice but by grace. The teachings of the Lutheran Church place Jesus at the center because the teachings of the Scriptures place Jesus at the center. No other confession demonstrates such fidelity to the truths of God's Word. No other confession so glorifies Christ by placing Him at the center of all it confesses and teaches. Being a Lutheran is truly all about Jesus.”

Sounded good, so first I did a library search. Public Library.

“Why I am. . .”
a Catholic
a Muslim
a Reform Jew
an abortion doctor
not a Christian
still a Catholic.

OK. Let’s try OSU Libraries (probably 4,000,000 volumes) and OhioLink--that’s about 60 other libraries throughout Ohio, including seminaries and church related colleges, two of them Lutheran.

“Why I am. . . “
a Christian Scientist
a Communist
a conservative
a danger to the public
a democrat
a Jew
a painter
a poet
a reform Jew
antifur
great
not a Buddhist
not a Christian
not a feminist
not a Muslim
not a nudist
not a woman
not an environmentalist
only a demi-vegetarian
still a Christian
still an Anglican.