Gathering Goat Eggs

James Lileks can't find his favorite ice cream. He should have visited the frozen aisle at Curt Jester, where the new line of Haugen-Haas confections has been rolled out. Hilarious. Although I think to really attract his target demographic, he needs at least one Atkins-friendly flavor.

I have previously mentioned that I despise the song Lord of the Dance. I stumbled across the perfect antidote last Sunday. I bought a new Pyrates Royale CD, and during the first listen was convulsed by their reworking of this dreadful piece of dreck, in which I am the Lord of the Dance, said he is replaced with We are drunk and disorderly. I'm singing it that way they next time the youth band tries to put this one over on me.

I have, up until now, said absolutely zip about Michael Schiavo in public. Sure, I had my intuitions about what he was up to and what he was like, but I readily admitted to myself that they were based solely on public reports that could have been spun and filtered by any number of people subject to bias, emotional involvement, financial interest, or just plain old human muddle-headedness. And I thought that Mr. Schiavo's personal motivations were, frankly, irrelevant. What he was requesting was wrong, whether he was malicious or merely misguided. Terri's life had to be defended on its own terms, not because her husband was or wasn't a colossal jerk.

That was before I saw the gravestone.

This monument is his handiwork alone. It's unspinnable. Here is the concrete proof that I was in fact right about this man but wasn't sure enough to say so: he is a Nietzschian narcissist for whom everything in the past fifteen years has been solely about him.

I recognized this early on, because the first time I saw Michael Schiavo, I saw the double of someone who once had great power over me, and from whom I am now free. I know the type inside and out, and it explains everything about him that other people found so puzzling and contradictory: If he's after the money, why did he turn down the million dollars? If he just wanted to be rid of her, why did he fight so hard for her rehabilitation for the first few years? Why can't he just divorce her and let her parents take care of her? You can't understand his actions unless you understand that there are people who are only happy when they are controlling everything around them that they possibly can, bending the actions and outcomes of other people according their own wills, and in accordance only with their own desires, because they are incapable of empathy. Thus in the first years after Terri's collapse, Michael tried to cure her by the force of his own will, hounding doctors and nurses, trying every possible therapy, suing for malpractice to finance her treatment. But then, he decided for whatever reason that she would never get well, so his will is bent to having her die on his terms. The parents, the siblings, they don't matter. He's not after the money, he is after the dominance of what he wants. After he got his way with her life, now he has his way with her death: he cremates her against everyone else's wishes, and then, presumably in the last vicious act he will be permitted to perpetrate against the Schindlers, he sets this abomination on top of Terri's mortal remains, a testament about himself on top of the ash of someone else's bones.

Terri's legacy must be that we continue to fight for the rights of all those who are profoundly disabled. This was never about the "right to die" or the privacy of family decisionmaking. It was about the right to kill people who are too inconvenient, too needy, too disturbing to see. That doesn't become right even if everyone in the family agrees to it. If I had collapsed and gone into a persistent vegetative state in 1991, I would be dead now and it would not have caused a ripple, because my own Michael Schiavo would have arranged it according to the laws of the state and no one would have intervened. We must, must keep our eyes on the ball and never let the other side frame this debate as one of privacy or letting go or mercy or natural death. The disability-rights groups have the high ground here, and our common cause must be with them.

If the sight of Terri's grave makes you as sad and disgusted as it does me, go look at the pictures John took in the churchyard of St. Ignatius, Port Tobacco. They might cleanse your mental palate. These are monuments set by people who cherished life, and I hope they would be pleased and proud that we still admire them 200 years later.

....the absolute best search engine referral has to be from my new Canadian friend who recently found his/her way to Goat Eggs by searching for:

varnished hoosier antique OR old -new -tire -euro -forest -lottery -insurance -indiana -car -bicycle -ebay

I am a Hoosier, but I vigorously dispute the "antique OR old" part, and I'm more usually described as "unvarnished," I believe.

For those who are completely confused now, a "hoosier" is (in addition to a person who finds this sort of thing funny) a piece of kitchen furniture, kind of like a hutch but they had highly specialized storage cabinets, like a flour bin with a built-in sifter. They were built by a company in New Castle at the turn of the 20th century, and I think Martha Stewart must have yakked about them at some point because you used to be able to buy them at flea markets for next to nothing, but now they're all trendy and spendy.

.....is embedded in the Google search box.

You know how Google will present you with a list of previous phrases you entered? Do you ever just scroll through them, trying to figure out what the heck you were after when you typed that? Some I remember being interested in; others must be the product of extraterrestrial aliens using my computer while I'm out running errands:

"Derek Smith" death basketball
Not a clue. I mean, I love college basketball, but not U of L. I'm a Hurryin' Hoosier born and bred.

"first species counterpoint" rules
I remember wanting to know this. I don't remember why I thought you could learn to write first species counterpoint from a web page.

"hermaphrodite brig"
That was probably John's search. At least I hope it was, and didn't have anything to do with

"Johns Hopkins" psychiatry sex-reassignment

Dark cloud two "time coin"
Here I suspect one of my two Playstation-addled daughters. Unless John is a covert agent of a renegade group of insurgent antitrust attorneys, and this is some sort of code.

"gold derivatives" trading strategy
I must have been channeling Father McCloskey.

Pedal-Free Bird Peters
I know this sounds vaguely dirty, but I think it had something to do with harps. I just don't remember what.

"shit or wind his watch"
Absolutely no comment.

Barbara Nicolosi discusses one British journalist's list of the saddest songs ever.

I find it hard to believe that neither Nicolosi nor any of her commenters, while discussing a list of depressing pop songs, quoted John Cusack's character Rob Gordon from the opening scene of High Fidelity, a movie about both the interplay of pop music and life, and the obsessive making of lists:

What came first....the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos — some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs, about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery, and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

He then snaps his headphones back on and resumes listening to 13th Floor Elevators's You're Gonna Miss Me, a song which is not on Tom Reynolds's list.

I don't think it is a list of the saddest songs, or the worst sad songs, or anything like that. It's a list of the 25 best vehicles for launching his (admittedly very very funny) snarky comments. One item he could have mentioned, if he had only known: in addition to being one of the most cretinous combinations of sappy lyrics and tune ever penned, Bobby Goldsboro's Sunny spawned a wickedly hilarous spoof when Sonny Bono died in a skiing accident. See the tree, how big it's grown......[bonk] [sound of snow falling].

I also have a little trouble crediting Barbara's statement that in her household only happy music was allowed -- Sinatra, musicals, Cole Porter, the Gershwins. What, was only the happy High Hopes Sinatra let in, but not the one who sang One for my Baby, In the Wee Small Hours, or the most beautiful pop song ever written, Hoagy Carmichael's heartbreaking Stardust? I suppose Cole Porter mostly succeeded at keeping his mental and physical pain out of his music, but the Gershwins are responsible for sigh-inducers like Someone to Watch Over Me. Musicals? Has she ever really listened to the lyrics to most of the songs from Carousel? And I sure hope they kept opera out of the classical stack, particularly Don Giovanni and La Boheme.

I also disagree with the Nicolosi philosophy that only happy tunes are fit for family listening. That trivializes music, both popular and classical. It's far fairer to recognize that there is "good sad" and "bad sad" -- songs about loss and pain and regret that convey something worth knowing about the human condition, vs. those that are just pointless masochism or maudlin tripe. I think I probably need a couple of separate subcategories for (a) songs dealing with the worst habits of my generation -- addiction and other methods of compulsive self-destruction; a song lyric has to be truly poetic to overcome the inherent liabilities of this genre and (b) songs where I can't get past the awfulness of the music to even attempt an appreciation of the lyrics.

I would populate the categories with Reynolds's songs as follows:

Maudlin Tripe

My Immortal
Did you know there's a Kidz Bop version?
You Don't Bring Me Flowers
You could put the whole Streisand oeuvre in here as far as I'm concerned.
All By Myself
Ditto Celine Dion. Why isn't Canada more embarrassed by this woman?
The Rose
The only time I have ever questioned my harp teacher's judgement is when she tried to persuade me to add this to my repertoire.
Seasons in the Sun
I did not know before that this is a remake of a French song. Priceless.
Total Eclipse of the Heart
Total Infarct of the Brain, more like it.
Honey
Perhaps the Platonic solid of tripe, although....
The Christmas Shoes
might possibly surpass it, I just haven't heard it as many times.

Pointless Masochism

Tell Laura I Love Her
Brick
I've always been ambivalent about this song. It would be nice if there was a song lamenting the pain of abortion that spoke to young people. This one isn't it, though, I don't think.
Ruby Don't Take Your Love To Town
Would have been maudlin tripe, but making the despondent husband a paraplegic just puts it over the top.
People Who Died
The Shortest Story

Too Much Addiction, Too Little Poetry

Sister Morphine
I have never believed this song was really about a hospital patient. It's Marianne Faithfull and Keith Richards, for crying out loud.

Awful, Awful Musicianship

D.O.A.
Prayers for Rain

Good Sad

The River
The Freshmen
Comfortably Numb
Hurt (Johnny Cash version)
Strange Fruit
I do not understand Reynolds's view of either this song or of Billie Holiday's unsuitability as a torch singer. It's perverse. Strange Fruit, God Bless the Child, Love the Man....these are some of Holiday's most enduring work.

Don't Know the Song

Women's Prison
Maggie's Dream
One
Hurt (Nine Inch Nails version)

Wow, what a blast! Anne and I took the first half of a two-session workshop on bodhran drumming at House of Musical Traditions yesterday. I was only in the class because the teacher and I weren't sure Anne could keep up (everyone else was an adult, and some of them had been drumming for years) and I wanted to keep an eye on her. But I think I had just as much fun as she did. Afterwards we bought her a smallish bodhran so she can practice for next week — 12 inches, I think, where a standard is more like 18 — but it's got a real goatskin head and sounds pretty good. She's also going to take standard drumming lessons from this teacher for the rest of the summer, and go back to school band transformed, we hope, from a dissatisfied flutist to a happy percussionist. I fought this for a year, thinking she should learn to read music now while it will still be easy for her. Oh well.

Takoma Park always delights me with its earnest flakiness. We walked past a pet store, which announced the availability of Essentials for the Socially Conscious Pet. I started giggling and said to Rachel: That's the definition of Takoma Park. She thought -- she insisted -- that the sign was a joke. We assured her it was not, John adding it couldn't be because no one in Takoma Park has a sense of humor. That may be overstating it, but he's mostly right.

Light blogging for a couple of days. We have to go to Richmond to replace Rachel's birth certificate — the one I was absolutely sure I had put in the right folder when I reorganzied the filing cabinet, so I suppose the vital document pixies have been here again — so she can get her driving learner's permit tomorrow. The cascade of apprehension set in motion just by typing those three words is beyond description. It was so easy when I was learning to drive — there was nothing to run into except trees, and every other driver on the road was some solid middle--aged farmer doing 45 in a pickup or his wife in a Chevy Impala. There have been at least ten fatal accidents on the Charles Co. section of 301 since we moved here, for no reason I can fathom. It's a straight, well-marked, well-maintained divided road of at least four and often six lanes. Accident rates like that ought to be reserved for treacherous passes over landslde-prone mountains or something. It frightens me that Rachel's going to learn to drive in a landscape where death gathers a bumper crop because it's peopled by a race of maroons who forget to check their blind spots before they change lanes.

Since the brutal heat wave of the past week has just departed DC, and I am consequently about a week behind in my outdoor chores, I doubt I'll be seeing any of these this weekend. But just in case the rest of you have some spare time, here are the opinions of some of my favorite movie reviewers.

The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3D

S.T. Karnick of Reform Club serves up a characteristically idiosyncratic review on NRO. Just a tidbit to give you the flavor:

Shark Boy and Lava Girl turn out really to be composed of water and light, respectively....This is significant because the first of these is a biblical symbol of the Holy Spirit, and the second a biblical name for Jesus Christ. In addition, Lava Girl is, of course, made of rock, another name by which Jesus Christ is known. Also, fire is a traditional symbol of manifestations of the Holy Spirit.

Sam's a Lutheran and I'm a Catholic, and we've had this argument about Tu es Petrus several dozen times. I'll have to see the movie before I decide if Lava Girl symbolizes the Papacy or not.

Howl's Moving Castle

I am a huge fan of Hayao Miyazaki's animation. I admire the art and epic narrative of films like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, but the Miyazaki films that captured my heart are the gentler, more innocent fare like My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service. The reviews on Howl are all over the place. Thomas Hibbs was disappointed. Frederica Mathewes-Green is of two minds, mostly positive but not rating Howl with Miyazaki's best. Roger Ebert hated it, but I disagree with him so often that it's hardly worth linking to his review.

The reviews aren't bad enough to keep me from seeing the movie, but I may wait until it's on DVD, because I've found Miyazaki is much better in Japanese with English subtitles than dubbed into English. (In fact, even a lot of the stupid crud my daughters watch, like Cardcaptor Sakura and Ah! My Goddess doesn't seem quite so stupid in the subtitled version.)

Batman Begins

I should state right off that I'm not a huge Batman fan, either in the comic book, TV show, or previous film incarnations. My childhood comic book hero was Spiderman, and I also have a soft spot for the Fantastic Four. (And even if I did not I would certainly see that movie when it comes out later this summer, because of my unrequited crush on this fellow and his heroically curly hair.)

Karnick weighs in, without invoking the Gospel of St. Matthew. Thomas Hibbs is pretty enthusiastic. I suppose I'll take the girls to see it one of these weekday afternoons when it's too hot to do anything else.

Update: Barbara Nicolosi also reviews Batman Begins. I think I understand what she means about a movie needing "mystery" but I also think a movie can have too much mystery. For instance, I've see The Big Sleep at least ten times and I still don't understand what the &%@# is going on in some places.

Four men arrested in failed bid to exchange stolen goat meat for crack cocaine.

What am I missing here? Wouldn't it be as easy to steal money as to steal and butcher a goat? Maybe what I'm missing is that a great many criminals are very stupid indeed.

Wilsonesque economics of crime aside, Goat Eggs is very sad that an innocent goat died in the commission of a crime. We demand justice for all goats. Even the silly pet pygmy ones.

Denizens of some of the other online neighborhoods I frequent have lately been in a tizzy over James Fallows's recent cover article in Atlantic Monthly, Countdown to a Meltdown. I gave up expecting sense from Fallows years ago; I believe he has written exactly one article with which I wholeheartedly agreed. (It was a paean to Tom Mischke, a unique and indescribable radio personality on the Twin Cities AM talk station KSTP whom I discovered by accident the day I moved to Minneapolis. I was in fact a little irked that Fallows had exposed Mischke to wider acclaim; Mischke enthusiasm was a guilty pleasure best indulged on the sly, in the company of a very few fellow addicts. There was nothing more irritating than to hear Mischke approval from someone who couldn't tell that Garrison Keillor was a fatuous baboon.)

I'm not going to fisk Fallows, although the article struck me as utter piffle. No, it's worse than that. I'm going to tell you why I hate macroeconomics. That means I'm going to talk about macroeconomics. If anyone reads past this paragraph, you deserve a gold medal in masochism.

I suspect that were I a graduate student now, instead of 20 years ago, I might not hate macroeconomics so much. In the 1980s, the typical introductory year to macro theory (at least at my school, and I heard similar tales from grad students at other schools) involved slogging through some textbook like Dornbusch and Fischer and a literature review of topics that extended the simple closed economy models to include movable factors, exchange rates, etc. Human capital, public finance, and technology transfer were, to my recollection, addressed in separate classes and not at all integrated into the macro curriculum per se, which was mostly intended, along with the price theory classes, to get us through our comp exams. I remember that I was first introduced to a lot of concepts in a seminar on economic development that I thought really should have been part of general macro. Maybe I just went to a crummy school; I checked out the macroeconomics curriculum at MIT Open Courseware and it looks interesting and far more comprehensive than the courses I remember. But I knew students at respectable schools like Harvard, Berkeley, Chicago and UCLA from summer seminars run by Cato and IHS, so I don't think my experience was unique.

On the other hand, I loved price theory, game theory, demography, human capital, and cost-benefit analysis. I loved all these topics because they were grounded in what attracted me to the study of economics in the first place: what makes people do what they do? What motivates them to plan, to save, to invent, to take risks? How do people compare risks and rewards across time? How do these individual actions aggregate into market or society-wide movements? What happens when a government makes an action more costly, or its payoffs less or more predictable? I was interested in people, not in gross domestic product, or trade account balances, or the aggregate number of jobs. And nothing in macroeconomic theory seemed to connect the motivations and actions of individuals to the grand overarching macroeconomic scheme. It was all about vast movements of composites and aggregates, ascending and descending like the pistons and pumps and hydraulic tubes of some immense mindless machine. It was more like mechanical engineering than like social science.

For a long time, I thought I was just missing something. It was certainly true that my economics education had not prepared me for a successful career as an economist, or at least the opportunity cost of working as an economist was high. It turned out that the incidental skills I picked up while pursuing a PhD — research design, data analysis, computer programming, technical writing (especially grant proposals!) — were far more marketable. Except for a couple of years at the Hudson Institute, I have not been employed as an economist since I left the university in 1987.

But now I see that academic macroeconomics has moved on, and were I to study it today I might well find pleasure in considering the theories of asset pricing, the development of risk-reducing institutions, life cycle decisions, and so forth. The thing is, macroeconomics in popular journalism and political policy discussion still uses that old vocabulary of neoKeynesian blather. In fact, I've decided that it is precisely that blather that attracts certain types. They are persuaded that when they launch some grandiloquent essay linking trade deficits, the value of the dollar, the aggregate change in jobs in the manufacturing sector, interest rates, and tax rate reductions, that they are saying something profound. They are hypnotized by the mere sound of the words, and the subliminal images of great waves crashing and mountains crumbling that lie beneath. When I hear some economic dilettante or United States Senator (not that the categories are mutually exclusive of course) gas on in this vein, it reminds me of The Sorcerer's Apprentice segment in Fantasia.

John Maynard Keynes was to economics what Sigmund Freud was to psychiatry. Both men produced grand theories that purported to explain a great range of phenomena by recourse to essentially non-empiric and untestable propositions. They were not science in any modern understanding because their hypotheses were largely non-falsifiable. But both men captured the public imagination, inserting their jargon into common language, and shaping the discussion and thought of people who do not know from whence their vocabularies came. In the end, the theories of both men were shown to be either seriously incomplete or downright false, yet they continue to influence the popular mind and irritate the rest of us.

So, Michael Jackson beat it. The verdict started me down a path of thought I had last trod when Kobe Bryant was still in big trouble in Colorado. Modern pedagogues have an earnest desire to instruct the young in all the proper technical methods of achieving "safe sex" — condoms on cucumbers, playlets about dental dams, instructional pamphlets about emergency contraception. As if taking off all your clothes and putting yourself in the most vulnerable position possible — both physically and emotionally — with a complete stranger is an activity which can possibly be made "safe."

But in the spirit of modern sexology, here's Auntie Goat Eggs's Safe Sex Tip of the Day.

If you find yourself in the unchaperoned company of a rich, famous person, and you get roughed up in a way that you weren't expecting, and in which you feel the criminal justice system should take an interest, here is what will happen. The rich famous person will have, sitting at his table, three extremely expensive lawyers. They will be wearing suits which cost more than your parents' automobiles. They have earned these suits by keeping rich famous men from facing the consequences of their own saturnine impulses. They accomplish this in part by using the legitimate tools of criminal defense to discover and publicize every crackpot statement and unwise act you have committed since you attained the age of reason. No Rape Shield Law or other supposed guarantee of victim privacy will protect you because what they are doing is a legitimate protection of their client's rights. You, after all, have accused someone of committing a serious crime, and there are no witnesses other than you and he, and so your own motivations, mental state, and prior history, including the most intimate details of all the other times you made yourself available to hungry young men, are potential witnesses for the defense.

At your table will be an underpaid lawyer whom your neighbors have elected to be the prosecutor of whatever fumbuck county you live in. He or she makes less in a year than the lead defense attorney bills in a week, is overworked, and his underlings are civil servants. And although I called it "your table" it's really not. The prosecutor is not there to represent your interests, but the state's interest, which might not completely coincide with yours and which might in some cases even be in complete conflict. You certainly cannot order the prosecutor around in the way the defendant can order his legal team around. You cannot fire him. If you tire of this mess, or despair of the way the state is handling it, you have no recourse really but to drop the charges.

So Auntie Goat Eggs's advice to you, young starstruck buffoon who thinks it would be so utterly cool to visit, alone, the hotel room of a big celebrity and flirt with him a little or even go a little farther, and then tell all your friends about it — stay in the hotel lobby, keep your panties on, and grow up.

This obviously needs a little tweaking when we're talking about the parents of vulnerable boys who manage to suppress the danger alerts usually set off when creepy androgynes start taking an interest in offspring. In these cases, Auntie Goat Eggs will remind you that serial pedophiles who successfully stay out of legal trouble did not accomplish that by targeting children in families whose behavior will stand up to scrutiny when push comes to shove. They may be sick and crawling with sin but they're usually not stupid. They're counting on you to bring that into the mix.

....since I was seventeen, and in all the time you've known me, you've been disputing it.

Well, dispute this, you skeptical universe, you. (via: Curt Jester)

Your IQ Is 140

Your Logical Intelligence is Genius Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius Your General Knowledge is Genius

The interesting thing about IQ tests is how insensitive most of them are. No, I don't mean they don't care how awful you feel when you do badly on them. (Although they don't, in fact, care at all how awful you feel.) I mean that general IQ tests cannot accurately measure differences at the tails of the distribution. If you know you are testing a population of highly intelligent people, for instance, and it's important to accurately distinguish between an IQ of say 156 and 162, you have to make the test so hard that most people will suffer a mental breakdown when they try to take it. Once, on a lark, I took what is called a four-sigma test. This is designed to accurately measure the IQs of people in the range around four standard deviations above the mean, which on the Stanford-Binet scale is above 164. Just thinking about it now, my head hurts. Most of the math questions involved mental manipulations of complicated three-dimensional objects. Some of the logic questions were written in artificial languages. Or maybe it was Klingon -- does that count as a natural language or not? Probably it does to the people who write four-sigma tests.

Wow, Barbara Nicolosi cheesed some folks over at Curt Jester with the comments she gave to Ignatius Insight. They would do better to read the best bloggers struck me as a little snooty too, but maybe I've just got a chip on my shoulder since I'm still a Crawly Amphibian.

Snooty or no, her remark did make me think for a bit about why I do blog. I hadn't realized it before, but the tag line in the header is quite literally true. I am writing letters home — letters to my mother, the letters I would really write to her had she not been dead for fifteen years. The things I write about, the language I use, the pictures I include, are exactly what I would email to her every couple of days, were circumstances different. I'm sure she'd have email, she was one of the first people in her office to learn how to use computers.

It is even possible that Mom would have had her own blog. She wrote well, had a wickedly twisted sense of humor that never descended into malice, and was well-read and bitingly intelligent. She was curious about all sorts of things, thought and talked about serious topics, but never took herself seriously and never let us do it either. She would have loved digital cameras. Yes, all things considered, she might have had a blog. It would have been full of puns and obscure quotes from Jean Shepherd and pictures of her granddaughters.

She wouldn't, I think, have confined herself to comment boxes. Even on the advice of one of the "best bloggers."

Today, Anne's next to last day of school, was Classroom Clean Up Day. This isn't a public school with armies of unionized Maintenance Engineers, it's a chronically down-at-heel parochial grade school and almost everything other than the actual instruction is done by volunteer effort. Plus we force the kids to perform menial labor once in awhile. So, I get a note to send in a bucket, a sponge, and a roll of paper towels on Thursday morning.

I had a bucket. I had several buckets. But we're refinishing an old boat right now, so on Wednesday all the buckets were filled with varieties of unspeakable crud: some of it poisonous, all of it smelly. I thought I'd take the easy way out and just buy yet another cheap plastic bucket at Giant on the way home.

Giant did not have any plastic buckets in stock. They had brooms, mops, wastebaskets, toilet brushes, dishracks, plastic boxes for storing sweaters under the bed, and a large selection of foam coolers. But no buckets. "OK," I thought to myself, "they're just out of buckets. There's a Safeway right by the fencing club, I'll stop there while Anne's having her lesson."

Safeway did not have any plastic buckets in stock. They had brooms, mops, toilet brushes, entire matching sets of patio furniture, and (since this one was in Virginia instead of Maryland) beer. And pineapple peelers. And charcoal grills. But no buckets. I can understand a gasoline shortage, a produce shortage, a shortage of some trendy electronic toy which Sony failed to ship in sufficient quantity to satisfy the lunatic American market. I do not understand a region-wide shortage of plastic buckets. OK, there's a big Rite-Aid in the same strip mall. I'll walk up there.

Rite-Aid did not have any plastic buckets in stock. They had brooms, mops, toilet brushes, patio furniture, shoes, televisions, and compilations of country music on CD. Actually I lie. They did have plastic buckets, but they were decorated with starfish, filled with beach toys, and priced at $24.99. And upon further inspection it proved to be some sort of sand sieve rather than a bucket, since it had holes in the bottom.

I was frustrated and tired and hot by now, so I bought a bottle of orange juice and, as I was paying for it, asked the cashier where one could obtain a plastic bucket. She stared blankly for fifteen seconds over my left shoulder and then mumbled around her chewing gum. "I dunno. Try Walmart?" In a triumph of hope over experience, I further enquired for the location of the nearest Walmart. She named a location that, adjusting for suburban Virginia traffic and my propensity to get lost in it, lay approximately 36 hours away.

What do people in Montgomery County do when they want buckets? Do they have to order hand-hewn cedar buckets with antiqued copper fittings from Restoration Hardware? Weave their own out of rubber they recycled from their bicycle tires? Have the domestic engineers from all those places that have shut out Walmart descended on Maryland and bought up all the buckets? There is a mystery here crying out for a solution.

The least nasty bucket turned out to contain nothing more noxious than a pair of work gloves left on my lawn by one of my neighbor's crew of illegal immigrant lightly documented Salvadoran gardeners, marinated in rainwater and 30 weight motor oil. Cleaned up just fine. But let this be a warning to you, Cleveland and Kensington and Inglewood:

When Walmart is outlawed, only outlaws will have buckets!!

(The bird, not the bourbon.)

I was unloading some lumber from the back of the Jeep this morning, when I heard an unusual kind of churring noise from the glade down toward the road. There were two wild turkey hens down there under the persimmon trees, feeding on something -- it couldn't have been last fall's persimmons, could it? But I can't think of anything else on the ground down there, other than those spiny balls from the gum trees, and I don't think anything can eat those. Maybe they were going through the clover finding some sort of insects, I'm not sure.

Anyway, I quietly edged myself behind a clump of sprouts under a maple tree to watch them. I watched for a long time -- it was very bright, but dark and shady down where they were, so my eyes could not adjust to see them very clearly, and there was no way I could get inside to fetch a camera or the binoculars without scaring them off, so I just watched as closely as I could. And then I noticed something small moving around the hens. Oh my word, they had poults with them. Lots of poults; eight at least. They seemed completely unconcerned until a big noisy landscaper's truck drove by on the public road about 300 yards away, and then they ran into the woods across the private road that connects the four houses back here to the public road. It's so cool living out here.

The story of the Marion County (Indiana) Superior Court Judge who imposed a ban on Wiccan parents in re: their nine-year-old son has been bubbling for a week or so; I first saw it on Open Book and now Dale Price is linking to Get Religion's discussion of this latest example of trial court level judicial flatlining.

This is personal in a lot of ways.

1. It really hurts when your childhood home makes an ass of itself so publicly.



2. My grandmother is a Christian Scientist (and not just a believer -- she made a good living for years as a practitioner, and even worked for the Mother Church in Boston, in a rather high position) and that's a sect that has seen its share of government persecution.



3. I endured a supersize portion of religiously motivated harassment from my ex-husband regarding Rachel's moral education and parochial school attendance, although the effect was mitigated by the fact he never had enough money to hire a lawyer; all he could do was yell at me on the phone.

I don't have any use for a cretinous pseudo-religion like Wicca, but I feel for these parents and I am both intellectually and emotionally outraged on their behalf. But I'm not sure this is solely a religious rights case, is it? The sad fact is, once you've put yourself in a position where a trial judge has some authority over you -- whether it be child custody, medical decisions, conditions of probation, what have you -- that judge has a terrifying grant of power to impose conditions upon you that would be completely out of the question under other circumstances. "Best interests of the child" has already been interpreted so expansively that custodial parents are ordered to stop smoking in their own homes; court orders on proper diets, exercise regimens, and appropriate video game protocols will be here before you know it. Yes, people of faith should be horrified at this infringement, but so should anyone who values freedom and responsibility and the primacy of the family as a bulwark against the intrusiveness of the state.

Just a couple of other points:

In Indiana, Superior Court judges are elected, not appointed. I have no doubt that this case is reversed on appeal, but there is a more permanent solution to this particular problem, voters of Marion Co.

The social worker's concern about the dissonance of the Wiccan homelife and the Catholic school is just -- weird. If that's the issue, why isn't it resolved by putting the boy in the Indianapolis Public School District? (Although there are plenty of purely secular reasons why this might compromise his safety and the quality of the education. The article just says they live on the northside, which is the most affluent and safest part of the city, but there are northside neighborhoods where the public schools are both shitty and scary.) I wonder what this county busybody thinks of all the non-Catholic families that send their kids to Brebeuf? (Yes, yes, they're Jesuits. If the judge doesn't know the difference between Wiccans and Satanists I doubt he knows the difference between Jesuits and Catholics.) When I was in high school, at least a third of the Brebeuf student body was Jewish.

This is the funniest site I have seen in months. People post the strange things they believed when they were children.

I've been racking my brains for one to add, but the only complete disconnect between my brain and reality that I can recall doesn't seem to fit the site's parameters. I thought that the word "misled" was pronounced "MYE - zeld" and used it freely in conversation, never noticing any confusion or mirth on others' part. The reason it doesn't fit is that the person who finally clued me in was John, so I was well into my thirties before I figured it out. And yes, the irony of being misled about the word misled escaped neither of us.

And you know, part of my brain still thinks that MYEzeld sounds more like what's going on when you're misled.

Update: I knew there was a reason I hated that song. "Steph" contributes the following:

There used to be a hymn we sang in church when I was young. The hymn used to terrify me and I was scared to go to church every Sunday. Now I know that the words are "Dance, dance, where ever you may be, for I am the Lord of the Dance, said he and I'll meet you all where ever you may be and I'll meet you all at the dance, said he" (or something very close to this). When I was young, however, I thought it went "Dance, dance, where ever you may be, for I am the Lord of the dance settee and I'll eat you all where ever you may be and I'll eat you all on the dance settee"

Several other contributors confirm that they too were quite familiar with the hymn about the dance settee, although "Danny Kendall from Grange Hill" reports disappointment when, at age 22, he learned it was not I am the Lord of the Dancing Bee: "Bang went my vision of a giant yellow and black striped being with a halo and beard."

Eat your heart out, Zorak. This one's all mine.

I.
An underfed aardvark in France
Fell into a starvation trance.
Il a fait une erreur
et a mangé Monsieur.
"Sacre bleu! There are pants in my ants!"

II.
There was an old Weiner named Freud
Whose treatments a harpist enjoyed.
He cured her neurosis
With prompt diagnosis.
"High-strung" was the term he employed.

The Jelly-Pinched Wolf offers some amusing collective nouns. Some of these I'd heard before, others are new to me. And several have personal significance.

a melody of harpers
I like this one extremely. Especially the use of the folksy "harper" instead of the snooty "harpist" (they are the ones who use their feet, as if they were driving an automobile instead of playing the instrument of the angels.)

a poverty of pipers
[Snicker.] I wonder what a group of accordion players is called? No, never mind, it's a family blog.

Q: What's the definition of perfect pitch?
A: When you heave an accordion in the dumpster and it lands on top of the bagpipes. (You can insert other instruments here: banjo, viola, etc. But it's always an accordion on top.)

This caught my eye:

of animals when they retired to rest, a hart was said to be harbored
because just yesterday Anne found another unusual use of harbored. Her religion assignment was to make an illustrated booklet of the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy. She left her book at school, and between us we could only name six of the seven from memory. So her dad Googled it, of course, and found we had forgotton Shelter the Homeless, except the online encyclopedia at New Advent rendered it Harbor the Harborless. It looks like this comes from the English Dominican translation of the Summa. To me, it sounded like a Catholic benefactor handing out free boat slips.

But some seem to make no sense at all:

a mute of hounds
A mute of hounds? Look, even one hound is seldom mute. If you've got two, they can either harmonize or take turns; more than two, and they're barking in shifts around the clock.

Our trips out to the Eastern Shore aren't usually quite so exciting as Monday's turned out to be. Because frankly, life is slow on the Eastern Shore, even in touristy little towns like St. Michaels (The Town That Fooled the British!! as they advertise on every town sign). But it's an amusing place to spend a day; we are members of the little maritime museum and always spend a couple of hours poking about the crab skiffs and oyster dredgers and the restored screwpile lighthouse. And we usually have dinner at the Crab Claw, one of the many many Maryland crab shacks where they dump a cafeteria tray full of steamed blues onto a sheet of butchers' paper on your table and you make an unholy mess of yourself and your immediate surroundings while you coax the meat out of the stubborn crustaceans. Anne just loves this whole ritual. And she's becoming more adept at it: I only got one eyeful of pulverized crab shell this time.

St. Michaels lies on the Miles River, which flows somewhat languorously west-south-west into the Chesapeake Bay. (The river was also originally called St. Michaels. This area, and most of colonial Maryland, was originally settled by holders of land grants from the Calvert family, Lords Baltimore, who held the original patent. The grants were leases subject to a nominal ground rent, which was due on Michaelmas each year. St. Michael was therefore considered the patron of Maryland. The Calverts were Catholic and wanted Maryland to be a haven for persecuted co-religionists, but realizing that there weren't enough English Catholics to populate a colony the size of Maryland, they adopted a stance of liberal religious tolerance and welcomed pretty much anyone. Talbot County was consequently settled by a large number of Quakers who had no use for saints of any name; they insisted on dropping the Saint and called the river simply "Michaels" River which was eventually corrupted to "Miles" River. OK, end of the history lesson.)

The Crab Claw is built right on the waterfront; if your boat is in the water instead of in the barn you can sail right up to it and moor at the town dock. And of course, since there's food all over the place, there are lots of ducks hanging about. On Monday, a mother duck brought out her eight adorable ducklings who were already adept at both swimming and looking cute in order to get fed. Moments after this picture was taken, Anne grabbed some crackers out of the basket, started flinging them to the ducklings, flung too hard, overbalanced, shrieked, and plunged face first into the Miles River.

It is at moments like these that gender differences manifest themselves most clearly. Every woman on the dock, myself included, gasped audibly and did the cover-your-mouth-with-your-hand manuver, but remained seated. Every adult male on the dock was on his feet, and two, my husband and the fellow from the next table, were already at the pilings and ready to jump in. Anne did resurface at this moment, and so the two fellows were able to fish her out by the arms without taking the plunge themselves. The Crab Claw staff were generous and kind beyond the call, showering Anne with an armful of towels and a free dry t-shirt. Several of the previously gasping women came to the ladies' room to comfort, commiserate, and let me know that their own chidren had been within millimeters of doing the same just minutes before. Anne did have to go home without her flip-flops; we spotted one of them floating underneath the dock but there was no way to reach it and no sign of the other one anyway.