2657 Sex Economics

"By one reckoning, boosting the frequency of sex in a marriage from once a month to once a week brings as much happiness as an extra $50,000 a year." No word in the survey if they asked men or women.

However, this item is from the LATimes newsletter of highlights and editorials, which along with a few other assorted sources (aol.com, a .edu, my sitemeter, and some spam) is getting through to my e-mail; but just about everyone else medscape.com thinks is spam.

Oh, and btw, in the Gross National Happiness indicators, happiness peaks around age 51.

Monday Memories

The Lakeside Wooden Boat Show was just yesterday (July 2) however, it brought back many memories for a lot of people. This is only the 2nd year, but like classic car shows, it really brings in the people, particularly in the Lake Erie vacation land. The Lakeside Wooden Boat Society also builds boats in a tent in the park so people can learn how to do it.







Lots of activity here for people learning how to create and put a finish on a wooden boat. Children and old folks welcome.


Links to other Monday Memories Players
(If you participate, leave your link in the comments and I'll post it below.)
1. Reverberate58, 2. Friday's Child, 3. Yellow Roses, 4. Janice has no MM, but a cute site to visit, 5. Beckie, 6. Lazy Daisy, 7. Chelle, 8. Tutu Bent


Click here for the Monday Memories Code, Blogroll, Graphics, & Other Information

View More Monday Memories Participants
Trackbacks, pings, and comment links are accepted and encouraged!

Lakeside, Ohio

2655 Closed until further notice

Bill Keller's mind. Unfortunately, his pie hole is open and flapping. Not only does he reveal government secrets to follow the terrorists funding during a war, but he can't stop defending his actions. What a spoiled brat.

Who died and left you President?

"The issue is your decision to publish classified information that can only aid our enemies. The founders didn't give the media or unnamed sources a license to expose secret national security operations in wartime. They set up a Congress to pass laws against disclosing state secrets and an executive branch to conduct secret operations so the new nation could actually defend itself from enemies, foreign and domestic."

Bill Keller
New York Times

2654 Thank you, Hobby Lobby

for the beautiful, patriotic full-page ad in the USAToday. It was interesting and very well done. I read every word. Here's the on-line copy.

Kathleen Denis, artist

It's new notebook time--I filled the last page of my lovely notebook with pink roses and calligraphy, and today I'll start one from Martin Designs of Ashland, OH with artwork by Kathleen Denis. The webpage doesn't seem to function but I found her name with numerous gift items and wallpaper. The calligraphic background of this notebook is a verse from "Amazing Grace."

Ashland, OH is the home of the Brethren Church, sister denomination of Church of the Brethren. The two anabaptist groups had a spat about the meaning of "being in order" and split in the 1880s from each other and the Old Order German Baptist Brethren. The college/university in Ashland has some interesting archives for all Brethren groups which I have used in my own research. A lovely town.

Update: Columbus Business First: Martin Designs went out of business in 2008 after a line of Chinese-made SpongeBob SquarePants notebooks it was selling was recalled because the spiral binding contained high levels of lead.

Kathleen Denis
Ashland University
Ashland, Ohio

2652 When to tell a secret

Sister Toldjah tells ya:

"In a rare joint move, the editors of the LAT and NYT (Dean Baquet and Bill Keller, respectively) have an editorial posted in today’s New York Times (and I’m sure it’s in the LA Times as well) which tries to answer the question: “when do we publish a secret?”

They’ve given you the long answer. I’m giving you the short answer:

When a Republican is in the WH.

That was easy enough."

You go girl.

2651 How to spot a recent illegal immigrant

"The prevalence of obesity among immigrants living in the United States for at least 15 years approached that of US-born adults." JAMA. 2004;292:2860-2867.

2650 My new margin photo

At Hugging and Chalking I have added a new margin .gif--sacbutt players on horseback. I think it is sort of cute. Take a peek and come back.

2649 The Chinese Acrobats

It was a crowd pleaser to say the least. Last night the Golden Dragon Acrobats, continued a 2700 year tradition, and 28 years of touring in the U.S. at the Hoover Auditorium in Lakeside, Oh. Hoover holds about 3,000 people, and I didn't see many empty seats. Initially, it was gasps and polite applause, but by the end of the program, people were on their feet cheering, whistling and whooping. They have been all over the country, and this morning we saw the young people in their cut-offs and t-shirts, strolling around Lakeside with their backpacks and overnight bags. Last night it was all grace, beauty and brilliant colors.

One thing is noticeable about this group--they are small, well-muscled, and very strong, but not anorexic-looking like so many American athletes who are acrobats and gymnists. Wonder what they eat?

Lakeside, Ohio

2648 Truth, Justice, and "all that stuff"

I realize he's just an American comic book character, but didn't the super heroes of the past believe in something a bit more specific than "all that stuff?" I'm reposting here for my own enjoyment my June 23 photo of my super hero in 1988.



Here's one scholar's conception (in 2003) why our old "mythos" needed to be revised:

"The representation of crime and justice in the superhero mythos is predominantly derived from a conservative or "right" oriented perspective (as evidenced in the aforementioned comics code). . . Miller identifies five "crusading issues": (1) "excessive leniency toward lawbreakers," (2) "favoring the welfare and rights of lawbreakers over the welfare and rights of their victims, of law enforcement officials, and the law abiding citizen," (3) "erosion of discipline and of respect for constituted authority," (4) "the cost of crime," and (5) "excessive permissiveness" (1973, p. 143). These "crusading issues" of the political "right" are virtually mirrored by the crusades of the superhero mythos.

The messages portrayed in the comic book superhero mythos are clear. We are being told that we must preserve the status quo, or, as Superman might put it, "democracy and the American way"; threats to the status quo must be extinguished. We are presented with a world in which there is clearly right and wrong, good and evil. Good must prevail and social order must be maintained. The dominant hegemony is safe in the hands of the comic book superhero." Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 10(2) (2003) 96-108.

Well, not anymore!

Superman

A tequila soaked worm--Mexico

Read Deroy Murdock's column on the corruption of the Mexican government, which expects the U.S. to continue taking in its poor. China is eating Mexico's lunch.

Folks, this bleeding heart, oh-the-poor-immigrant attitude, especially among Christians, is like bending the elbow of an alcoholic. You are ENABLERS.

2646 This week at Lakeside

Last Saturday night (June 24) we enjoyed the Hunt Family Fiddlers who performed Celtic, bluegrass, inspirational and popular music, all while step dancing.

Mid-week we had the Chestnut Brass Company (June 28)--I didn't know that old trombones were called "sacbutts" or least that's what it sounded like when they explained the precursor to the trombone (my instrument). They used many historical instruments and had a few funny routines.

Tonight it is the Golden Dragon Acrobats from China. They are from Cangzhou, Hebeiprovince in China.

Tomorrow is the Wooden Boat Show down at the dock.

Lakeside, Ohio

2645 Do we need a LAMP to attract more students to library science?

Last time I looked, potential librarians were not in the dark. People [just talked to a library staffer last week who was choosing a different field] are deciding NOT to become librarians because of limited job opportunities and poor earning potential. Are we paying to train buggy whip makers and keep library schools afloat? Even "underrepresented populations" should be steered to more lucrative careers.

"Library Access Midwest Program (LAMP)" project, will receive $972,839 from the Federal Government through its 21st Century Librarian Program. Graduate Sschool of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois will work with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Library and Information Science to develop LAMP, a regional alliance that will attract 20 promising college students to careers in librarianship. Special emphasis will be placed on recruiting students from statistically and historically underrepresented populations. In addition to the direct effect it will have on these 20 students and their contributions to the library field, LAMP is designed to be a replicable model for other regions."

From the GSLIS newsletter, Volume 5, Number 4: July 2006

An illegal immigrant nanny can make $15-20 an hour--I'm not sure a beginning librarian with a master's will get that.

2644 Also reading at the Lake, Suomalaisia Kuvia

a book we received from Martti and Riitta (he's an architect and she's a veterinarian/academic) in 1980, dedicating it to the trip we promised we'd take in 1985 for our 25th wedding anniversary.

Well, we’re coming up on our 46th, and this year we are actually flying across the pond. On the 25th, or for the 25th, in 1985, we went to Hawaii--a fabulous trip I'll never regret. And on the 30th, in 1990 I was in the middle of re-establishing my career--writing, publishing, attending conferences, networking, etc. It was a busy time with limited vacation, plus we bought our second home and needed to sink all discretionary funds on it.

Then in 1995, my husband was establishing his sole practice. He could barely break away from his clients, and his mother was increasingly frail. In 2000 the year my mother died, we returned to Illinois so we could celebrate our 40th anniversary in the church where we were married and with my family. On the 41st, 9/11 happened and it didn’t seem a good time to go anywhere--for some time. Then in the next few years, my husband’s family and father needed us in California, so our trips combined responsibilities and travel. Last year for our 45th, we took a cruise on the Danube--our first to Europe.

So now, finally, we are ready to see Finland, and also take a trip into Russia to visit St. Petersburg. I’m reading the book that the Tulamos gave us in 1980, and am studying (or at least looking at) Russian grammar and conversation from a book published in the 50s when everyone was still "comrade."

Here are some photos of Martti's work.

2643 Also reading at the Lake, Team of Rivals

Actually, I'm listening to Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, the story of how President Lincoln packed his cabinet with some of the most brilliant minds and anti-slavery people of his era. However, the book has over 900 pages, so since I'm only on disk 10, I don't think I'll finish before we leave for Finland. The author is particularly outstanding in fleshing out the main characters with their wives, children, and close associates.

". . . The comparative approach has also yielded an interesting cast of female characters to provide perspective on the Lincolns’ marriage. The fiercely idealistic Frances Seward served as her husband’s social conscience. The beautiful Kate Chase made her father’s quest for the presidency the ruling passion of her life, while the devoted Julia Bathes created a blissful home that gradually enticed her husband away from public ambitions. Like Frances Seward, Mary Lincoln displayed a striking intelligence; like Kate Chase, she possessed what was then considered an unladylike interest in politics. Mary’s detractors have suggested that if she had created a more tranquil domestic life for her family, Lincoln might have been satisfied to remain in Springfield. Yet the idea that he could have been a contented homebody, like Edward Bates, contradicts everything we know of the powerful ambition that drove him from his earliest days.

By widening the lens to include Lincoln’s colleagues and their families, my story benefited from a treasure trove of primary sources that have not generally been sued in Lincoln biographies. The correspondence of the Seward family contains nearly five thousand letters, including an eight-hundred-page diary that Seward’s daughter Fanny kept from her fifteenth year until two weeks before her death at the age of twenty-one."

In my opinion, both the feminists and the male biographers of some of our most famous Americans have ignored or scorned the roles women played in their lives. Mary Lincoln comes out of this looking better than most portrayals, simply by using original sources, rather than Lincoln's enemies as the source. This has been an excellent review of the issues of slavery (which I think strongly resemble many of the immigration issues of the 21st century), and also the power and education levels of women "who also served." Also, Lincoln's nature and bouts with depression make a lot more sense when viewed through the sufferings of some of the other men around him, like Edwin Stanton, who nearly went insane after the death of his wife and daughter. According to his sister, at night he would lay out her bed clothes and walk through the house crying and calling out her name.

"In addition to the voluminous journals in which Salmon Chase recorded the events of four decades, he wrote thousands of personal letters. A revealing section of his daughter Kate’s diary also survives, along with dozens of letters from her husband, William Sprague. The unpublished section of the diary that Bates began in 1846 provides a more intimate glimpse of the man than the published diary that starts in 1859. Letters to his wife, Julia, during his years in Congress expose the warmth beneath his stolid exterior. Stanton’s emotional letters to his family and his sister’s unpublished memoir reveal the devotion and idealism that connected the passionate, hard-driving war secretary to his president. The correspondence of Montgomery Blaire’s sister, Elizabeth Blaire Lee, and her husband, Captain Samuel Phillips Lee, leaves a memorable picture of a daily life in wartime Washington. The diary of Gideon Welles, of course, has long been recognized for its penetrating insights into the workings of the Lincoln administration." From the author’s introduction

In this age of e-mails, text-messaging, and blogs, I do wonder what historians will have to work with when they write about our current crop of 20-somethings who will someday be in the halls of Congres.

2642 Pity the American Canadian

If you studied American History a few decades ago, back when the 17th through early 19th century mattered in our school curricula, you may remember that many citizens of the U.S. emigrated and went to Canada after the Revolution and after the War of 1812 (unlike certain movie stars of the 21st century who have only threatened).

Read about Margaret Wente's sad fate of demanding reparations from herself at my Illegals Now blog. Since the "mass migrations" in this country happened after slavery, I've often wondered if the Czechs and Poles and Russian Jews were going to buy into it.

2641 La Raza hosts Rove

Here's a stunning line up that is one-upmanship for librarians, who only secured Laura Bush to inflame its membership. KKKarl Rove will be speaking to La Raza (i.e., the only race that matters is these guys).

"The National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S., announced today that former President Bill Clinton, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are among the confirmed speakers for the upcoming NCLR Annual Conference which will be held July 8-11 at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, CA.

“We are deeply honored that President Clinton has accepted our invitation to address more than 2,000 community leaders from across the nation, and we are also excited by the wide array of speakers from the worlds of business, labor, government, nonprofits, and politics who will be joining us at this year’s Conference,” stated Janet Murguía, NCLR President and CEO." But it's just for lunch. News release

2640 The best fashion advice

is right here at Coffee Spills.

2639 Marxism may be dying out in the former USSR

but it is alive and well in the history and sociology departments of American colleges and universities. One of the eye-opening experiences of reading Companion to American Immigration (Blackwell, 2006) is its foundational assumptions based solidly on Marxist thought and scholarship. Not that I was naive about the Marxists in our universities, but reading essay after essay--about food, education, demography, social customs, microeconomics, politics, and law--all rooted in and rooting for Marxism is quite an eye opener as I read along at the Lakeside coffee shop, a vacation spot more like the 1950s than a TV "Happy Days" recreation.

If you've ever wondered what became of the "tenured radicals" who went from sit-ins in the presidents' offices in the Halls of Ivy in the 1970s to populating them, read this book! They are indeed the adopted intellectual grandchildren of the 1930s faculties and labor activists who were pacifists until Germany invaded Russia and then had to go underground when the Gulags were being revealed after WWII. When the Berlin Wall fell, they used chunks of scholarly concrete to rebuild their fables.

I've learned a lot of new words and phrases for us and U.S. reading this book:

marriageways
nuptiality
marital endogamy

draconian reductions in immigration [during the Depression, duh!]
recovery from the Depression "eroded ethnic differences"

boutique farms
foodways
culinary nationalists
women as cultural conservators

aping the life of gentry
Anglo-Saxonism
Germano-Celtic
nativist sentiment
dominant society
host society
core culture

institutionalized nationhood
individualizing destiny
assimilationists
pluralist vision
voluntary pluralism
vocabularies of public life
civic homogenization

language shift
language loss
home language

schools as labor pools for industry
cauldron (instead of "melting pot")
well-socialized labor force
enforced schooling to empower the government

And academic gibberish even worse than library jargon:
gendered dimensions of transnational ties (I have no idea what this is!)
major shareholders of identity
ethno-cultural, creedal, and individualistic pluralistic models
contingent contagionists
immigrant transnationals

Incidentally, if there was a lynching, a killing, a riot, or a law about ethnicity, these are liberally interspersed at every opportunity to demonstrate the shallowness of the minority "dominant Anglo-Saxon culture." The chapter on religion isn't about religion at all--it is about the anti's--anti-Semitism, KuKluxKlan, anti-Catholicism, anti-muslim, etc.

2638 My office nook at the Lakehouse

The cottage is tiny, but I have a small corner, and use the coffee shop as my annex. We need to unplug that phone--we don't have a land line anymore, and I could use the space! Before that I used a pay phone at the hotel. In the 80s, there would be a long line of teen-agers waiting (including my own), but now they all have cell phones.